A HAP-HAZARD SONG FOR THE Peo-Ple

Newport, Rhode Island: N.p., 1855. Broadside measuring 21 ¾ x 10 inches, folded with some damage to edges, with two holes in the center intersecting with text. Very good to excellent.. A HAP-HAZARD SONG was written around 1855 by an author using the pseudonym “Miss Terious Devil-up-ments”. It concerns the legal cases of Ives vs. Hazard and Ives vs. Armstrong, which involved a dispute over the sale of a farm belonging to Charles T. Hazard, a less well-off cousin in the prominent Hazard family. Hazard, assisted by his better-known cousin Thomas R. Hazard, wanted to back out of the sale of his farm to wealthy Providence merchant Robert H. Ives, claiming that his wife had not agreed to it. In 1855 the court decided against Hazard. The broadside mocks the Hazards’ efforts; it opens by telling the story of an “insane jackass” (later “Assard”, i.e., Hazard) who is stung to death by bees and has its hide used to bind Thomas Hazard’s 1857 book concerning the case, An Appeal to the People of the State of Rhode Island in Behalf of the Constitution and Laws. It then launches into a parodical song, which seems to allege that it was Thomas Hazard, not Mrs. Charles Hazard, who wanted to keep the farm, and that Hazard’s book accused Ives of greed when it was really the Hazards who were greedy; and mocks the opposition to farmland being sold off to the wealthy merchant class:

“Then they made tremendous speeches, / All about ‘the rights of man’, / Which literally translated, means, / ‘Each one get all you can!’”

The chorus, which is “to be sung ironically”, reads:

“Ho! Yeomen of Rhode Island, / Wherever you may stand, / The farms belong to all of us, / It is our Native Land.”

We find nine copies of A HAP-HAZARD SONG on OCLC.