A Song, written on a Virginia cotton and tobacco merchant. Together with the Female drummer

The philosophical Song, Written on a Virginia Cotton and Tobacco Merchant was written during the 1801 presidential campaign, probably by a well-set Virginia merchant who was enjoying good sales without much government interference.

Let Adams or Jefferson ride on the car,
Its [sic] equal with me so I’ll smoke my cigar.

The brotherhood references of verse 5 and the general anti‑moralistic tenor of the whole echoes masonic sentiments. Ishmael Spicer included the song among a number of masonic texts in his manuscript begun in Bozrah, Connecticut, in 1797. While Spicer’s version is the same basic text, set to the tune of “My Dog and My Gun,” he includes an additional verse rejecting political action or even concern.

Let federals and republicans make good law or none,
Let justices and Jurymen do justice on the throne.
Let Sheriffs and Constables do justice on the Car,
I care not for neither so I’ll smoke my Segar.

In Spicer’s version a number of phrases are different, and he spells cigar as “segar,” a spelling echoed in Daniel Huntington’s manuscript tune collection where he transcribed the same tune as “The Dog and Gun; or, Segar” (3:47). This tune was best known as “My Dog and Gun” but also as “The Benefit of Saying Yes” (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources).

While cotton was used for hundreds of years, its cultivation in America was long limited by British prohibitions on purchasing or copying their spinning and weaving machines. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 increased production enormously and by 1800 significant cotton was exported. Thus this merchant is celebrating a fairly new line of goods added to the old standby, tobacco.

The second text on this broadside appears as the lead text on The Female Drummer.