A Song, composed on the evacuation of Boston by the British troops, commanded by General Howe : who were panic struck, and thrown into the utmost confusion, at the appearrance of General Washington, with a detachment of the American army, who in one night, (unexpectedly to the Britons,) erected strong breast-works, with heavy cannon pointed at the Men of War, then lying in the harbour

This is an ingenuous folk narrative that purports to have been written by an American shortly after March 17, 1776, when the British troops evacuated Boston, boarding their ships in the Nantasket anchorage. The fleet finally sailed ten days later. After a prose introduction setting the scene, the text describes the surprise of the British at dawn “on March the eleventh, the time was prefix’d” (line 2; actually it was March 5). They awoke to see fortifications on Dorchester Heights that Washington’s troops had secretly built during the night before, incorporating cannons that General Henry Knox had laboriously transported from Fort Ticonderoga. General William Howe prepared for an assault on the position but a fortuitous storm made military operation impossible. In this text the failure of the assault is wrongly blamed on a fire in Cambridge. The British had planned to abandon Boston in the spring, but were wrestling with logistical problems. This event seems to have sped up their departure.

The narrative was probably written somewhat later when information about Howe’s reaction to the Dorchester fortifications became public (see verse 2), weeks after the British had left the harbor. A longer version of this text appeared on three other broadsides of the same time: Two Favorite Songs, Two New Songs, and On the Evacuation of Boston. The second of these has a burden of “fa, la” in the first stanza that should suggest a tune but no obvious match has been located.