Hearing of the Surrender at Yorktown

A Poem, Spoken Extempore, by a Young Lady… Broadside. Boston: Ezekiel Russell, 1781.

Boston printers circulated this broadside containing two poems after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. An unknown “young lady” wrote the patriotic poem at the left after she heard cannons firing and bells ringing in celebration of the end of the fighting of the Revolutionary War. The poem “His Lordship Humbled, or Cornwallis’s Lamentation” printed on the right, mocks the British general’s pride and mismanagement of his troops, while praising the successes of the “Great Washington.”