from preface
THIS volume presents a selection from the numerous productions in verse, which appeared during the war of the American Revolution. Many of them are taken from the newspapers and periodical issues of the time; others from original balladsheets and broadsides; while some have been received from the recollections of a few surviving soldiers, who heard and sang them amid the trials of the camp and field.

Nearly every company had its "smart one" or poet, who beguiled the weariness of the march or the encampment by his minstrelsy, grave or gay; and the imperfect fragments which survive to us, provoke our regret that so few of them have been preserved.