from M’Fingal (1782), Canto First, or The Town Meeting
by John Trumbull
John Trumbull (1750-1831), a child prodigy born to the Watertown, Connecticut branch of the Trumbull family, entered Yale in 1763 at the age of 13. John’s father, the Reverend John Trumbull (1715-1787), was the pastor of the Watertown Congregational Church. His mother, Sarah Whitman, was the daughter of a Farmington minister. Historical evidence indicates that the family enslaved at least six people. Reverend John Trumbull’s cousin, Jonathan Trumbull (1710-1785), would become Connecticut’s governor in 1769, serving through the Revolutionary War until 1784. One of Jonathan’s sons, also named John Trumbull (1756-1843), was the famous American artist, “the painter of the American Revolution.”
In 1800, Trumbull became a judge and stopped writing political poetry, citing that he refused “any interference in the politics of the state…being of the opinion that the character of a partisan and political writer was inconsistent with the station of the judge.” He served as a judge of the Connecticut Superior Court and Supreme Court of Errors for the next twenty years.
John Trumbull began this mock epic poem in 1776 as an expression of his observations of the tumultuous period when the Colonies decided to unite and wage war against Great Britain. The poem is told from a Patriot or “Whig” (as Trumbull himself would have termed it) point of view. It lays blame for the conflict on the actions of King George III, Parliament, and Great Britain as a whole and pokes fun at Americans who do not agree with the Patriot cause, particularly a fictitious Loyalist by the name of “M’Fingal.” M’Fingal represents the typical Loyalist, who in the opinion of Trumbull, is too blinded by his self-interest and stupidity to understand the loftier goals of American independence.