This broadside is a pointed satire against two lawyers in the area of Windham, now Willimantic, Connecticut, that took advantage of a natural phenomenon. On a dark summer night in 1754, a group of bullfrogs were croaking more loudly than usual and awoke the populace.[1] Fearing a supernatural attack, leading citizens rushed out to crush the supposed approaching foe. Eliphalet Dyer and Jedidiah Elderkin, who were already at the center of a controversy regarding their high fees as lawyers, led the charge. The following morning the disturbance was found to be simply the noise of frogs, many of which now lay dead of an unknown cause (Larned 1:560-63, 2:592-93). The village quieted down but this lyric was soon composed to take advantage of the event for didactic satire. The tale soon took on the quality of a myth and was retold with much embellishment.
The first description was in a letter written from Woodstock, Connecticut, dated July 9, 1754. The Reverend Abel Stiles (1708/9-83) wrote to his nephew Ezra Stiles (1727-95), later president of Yale College, who was practicing law in New Haven.[2] He prefaced his note with a Latin quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses referring to the section in which the peasants of Lycia are transformed into frogs (6:381). He then goes on to give the reason for the quotation:
If the late tragical tidings from Windham deserve credits, as doubtless it doth, it will then concern the gentlemen of your jurisperitian order to be fortified against the dreadfull croaks of the Tauranaon Legions . . . but pray whence it is that the croaking of a Bull Frogg should so Balshazzarise a Lawyer?—& how Dyarful ye alarm made by these audacious longwinded Croakers!
—Things unattempted yet, in prose or rhime,
Tauranaon terrors & Chimeras Dyar.
I hope Sr yt from the Dyarful reports from the Frog pond, youl gain some instruction. . .
From Stiles’s letter the date of the event is certain—shortly before July 9, 1754—and the accusations against Dyer and Elderkin are already in place. Judging from Stiles’s own literary style and the rhymed lines in his letter, it may have been he who penned the original lyric. However, cataloging records at the Connecticut State Library suggest that the author of the original text may have been Stephen Tilden (1690-1766) of neighboring Lebanon. An early issue recorded by Worthington Ford is titled “A [Ba]ttle, between Some Lawyers and Bullfrogs, Set Forth in a New Song, Written by a Jolly Farmer, of New-England” (Broadsides #2966).
The most fanciful and detailed version of the story was that of the Anglican clergyman from nearby Hebron, the Reverend Samuel Peters (1735-1826). Peters’s General History of Connecticut was published in London in 1781. This fanciful history made many statements that by modern standards and the historical record, are obvious fictions or twisted or warped versions of the truth. When the book reached Connecticut it was called “The Lying History,” yet once Peters’s stories reached the public, they were believed. As a historian, Peters was highly unreliable. He was a loyalist and his writings were filled with inaccuracies and exaggerations, colored by his bitterness against the Connecticut patriots who forced him to flee from Connecticut in 1774. He invented the “blue laws of Connecticut” as well as many other fictions. His stories remained alive in the public mind for years. A poem published in the Hudson (NY) Balance on August 30, 1803, referred to the “noise as once was heard at Windham town, when bull-frogs, . . . put all to flight.” The Middlebury (VT) Mercury of July 30, 1806, prefaced a poem with a few comments on Connecticut: “Suffield, in Connecticut, is as remarkable for the wooden dishes manufactured there, as Windham, for bull-frogs, or Wethersfield for onions.” By 1824 the Peters version of the history and the 1754 event was reconfigured into “The Frogs of Windham, An Old Colony Tale Founded on Fact.”
It was Peters’s amplification of the story that was repeated most often (Scholes 13-32, 366-79; Peters 129-31). The Coverly lyric uses Peters’s details. The song was reissued on two later nineteenth-century broadsides with additional verses (22-28, 36) with even more details about the personalities involved.[3] An amusing takeoff on the song, a strident satire on dueling, was issued by Thomas Flang in Providence, on a broadside entitled The Duel: An Affair of Honor . . . Alias—the Battle of the Frogs!
