It Happened Here -- Yankee Doodle came to Grenen Bos

  

The substantial brick house on the shore of the Hudson River, across from Albany in the little Dutch town of Grenen Bos (Greenbush) was packed with “guests,” the officers of his majesty's regiments 

preparing for an expedition against the French forts in northern New York during what was the last of the colonial wars with the French¹ .  Nearby were hundreds of tents of the King's soldiers and a motley assortment of tents and improvised bark shelters of New England militiamen, growing in number every day as colonial militia companies straggled in from Connecticut and other parts of New England.

The house was the home of the Van Rensselaer family and stood on the foundation of an earlier house built in 1642. The current house was built about 1704 with defensive features designed to thwart Indian attacks. Stone loopholes were incorporated into the brickwork that allowed muskets to be fired from it. The entrances had heavy reinforced wooden doors and the downstairs windows had heavy wooden shutters, that could be drawn shut.  The house, named Crailo, (Crow's Wood) after the Van Rensselaer estate in Holland, became known as Fort Crailo.

Fort Crailo, today serves as a museum of Colonial Dutch life, instead of simply, a furnished historic house. The role
of Crailo in the creation of Yankee Doodle is somewhat down-played today because, in fact, the story is based on a family legend, with virtually no historical documentation to corroborate it.

Among the billeted “guests” was likely the regimental surgeon Richard Shuckburgh. Shuckburgh, originally from a Warwickshire English gentry family had bought his commission and come to America around 1737. Though officially the surgeon to the four independent companies in New York, he appears to have spent much of his time speculating in land, drinking, carousing and building friendships in the Albany area and the Mohawk valley. He counted William Johnson among his friends and sometime-business associates, and he often attended negotiations between Johnson and the Iroquois. In 1744 while a dinner guest of the Van Rensselaer's, he met Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a Scots physicians traveling in the northern colonies. Hamilton wrote of him, “by his conversation he seems to have as little of the quack of him as any half-hewn doctors ever I had met with”, unlike most of the “empirics” of Albany—a recommendation—of sorts! But if “doctoring” was his vocation, partying, seems to have been his passion. Reflecting on a failed venture, he wrote “I endeavour to forget that and every Disappointment, being as merry as I can make myself and those about me, and I am apt to say...that I have made more people laugh in my Lifetime in the World of America than will cry at my departure out of it.”²

The Well-reconstructed to enhance the legend

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So, when an idle afternoon found Shuckburgh with nothing better to do, sitting on the edge of the well, out in back of Fort Crailo, he decided to compose a few lines of verse to amuse his fellow officers and the Van Rensselaers that evening after dinner.³ He probably didn't have long to think about a fitting subject for his few lines of doggrel. Though in the coming years the Dutch inhabitants of Crailo and the officers of His majesties' regiments would find fewer and fewer things they could agree upon, an obvious subject now was the pretensions, clumsy amateurism and anticipated cowardliness of the citizen-soldiers flooding in from the small towns of New England. The professional English soldiers found it easy to find fault with the efforts of these New Englanders and the burghers of Greenbush, who had a long simmering dislike of the English colonists who seemed forever trying to encroach on Dutch held lands, were more than ready to join in the fun.

“Yankee Doodle” most likely derived from the Dutch “Janke” or little Johnnie, referring to the common nickname for New Englanders, “Brother Jonathan” and Doodle was a common synonym for a fool. Mispronounced “Janker” it could also mean a “howling cur “or complainer. Jan doedel was also slang for a glass of gin or a town drunk.  (Throughout the 19^th century and into the 20^th musicologists and folklorist developed numerous other theories for the origins of Yankee Doodle and its music but these are the most likely.) The tune seems to have come from a children's rhyme “Lucy Locket” that had been around for centuries. It had gained more recent popularity when it was featured in the immensely popular Beggar's Opera that satirized British society and government corruption, first staged in 1728.   While performed by professional and amateur companies in both Great Britain and America, New Englanders were less likely to know it, theater being forbidden in Puritan New England.

Shuckburgh had delighted his dinner companions with his song. Now he compounded the hilarity, by convincing New England fifers that it's melody was the newest military aire and teaching it to them.

Soon New England Companies were clomping about, in formation, on the grounds of Van Rensellaer's estate to the tune of Yankee Doodle, re-living for anyone who had heard its words the satire.

                                                                    

One of several signs, all with the same message located at various distances from Ft. Crailo

 

A decade later relations between Great Britain and its colonies had deteriorated and Yankee Doodle continued as a vehicle for making fun of, and, now, heaping insult on the New England militias who now seemed a potent threat to British rule and order. The occupation of Boston by thousands of British redcoats led to scores of new verses being created by dozens of wags in the British army, and among the Loyalist population.

On April 19, 1775 units of the British army marched out of Boston to snap up stores of gunpowder held by the miltias in Concord and hopefully capture rebel leaders Adams and Hancock rumored to be in Lexington. Once out of Boston their musicians struck up the “Yankee Song” and the troops joined in with some of the many verses that had been created. At Concord Bridge the unimaginable happened.  The British vanguard was thrown back precipitating a long bloody retreat back to Boston as they were ambushed form all sides by groups of militiamen. Adding to their misery they heard strains of “Yankee Doodle” coming from the rebel fifers who were turning the song against them. They would hear it again months later from rebel lines when they marched up Breed's Hill into the onslaught of rebel fire at the battle of Bunker Hill, and again two years later when they stacked arms to surrender at the battle of Saratoga. By the end of the war this doggrel-parody of New England militiamen had become something of an unofficial national anthem for the new United States.

Marker of the Week

 The road to Saratoga was paved with good intentions!

(Rte 443, Dormansville/Westerlo)

1There is some dispute whether the events to unfold here occurred in encampments in 1755 or 1758, before the Johnson-Lyman expedition that resulted in the Battle of Lake George victory, or the later Abercromby expedition against 
Ft. Carillon (Ticonderoga) that was a major English/American defeat.

2Quoted from Stuart Murray. America's Song, The Story of ' Yankee Doodle' p, 78, 60-61.

3Recollections of this incident were kept alive and handed down through generations of the Van Rensselaer and Schuyler families.