The orphan boy; The galley slave, and the Sailor's return

Like “The Beggar Girl” (see Truxton’s Victory), the type of song typified by “The Orphan Boy” is rare before this period. The text was copied “from a (late) London paper” in at least seven newspapers in August and September 1800 (Readex: Archive of Americana, “Early American Newspapers, 1690-1865). The version in the New York Weekly Museum on August 23 followed an extended poem beseeching those “who fill the throne of Power” to stop the wars that killed and maimed.

This song is a sentimental narrative in which a sailor’s son tells the tale of losing his father in battle, his mother’s heartbroken death, and his appeal to a gentlewoman for help but not charity. In the last verse he is offered a job, clothing, and food. The lyrics are by Amelia Alderson Opie (1769-1853), who was born in Norwich, England. Her writing often emphasized the importance of individual morality as a social duty rather than as part of a political system (Shaver 2). Benjamin Carr (1768-1831), a British organist, music teacher, composer, and publisher who immigrated to Philadelphia in 1793, set the lyric to music and published it in Philadelphia in his Musical Journal for the Piano Forte. The text enjoyed some currency in the early nineteenth century, appearing in forty-five songsters between 1801 and 1819 (Roud; R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources).

According to the song, the boy’s father was lost in the battle between Admiral Horatio Nelson and the French fleet in the harbor of Abukir, east of Alexandria, on August 1, 1798, hence the subtitle of “Nelson’s Victory” (see Lord Nelson’s Battle of the Nile). An entirely different tune titled “Nelson’s Victory” was also circulating among instrumentalists of the day (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

“The Galley Slave” is described on the broadside, The Dying Soldier.

“The Sailor’s Return” is described on the broadside, The Sailor’s Farewell.