‘Sweet Land of Liberty’
One of my great-great-greats was Benedict Arnold, which always made me feel a little sheepish about the quality of my inherited family patriotism. But my father’s family was longtime Yankee stock that had infested Western Massachusetts back to the early 1700s — slate headstones carved with the names of various Peases abound in Berkshire cemeteries — so I think my credentials as a son of the Revolution are pretty good.
I was born in New Hampshire (“The Granite State”) and grew up outside of Boston. So much of my childhood psyche was steeped in the Bunker Hill, the Boston Tea Party, Minutemen, Concord and Lexington, Old Ironsides, Paul Revere, “One if by land and two if by sea” and the Freedom Trail. It’s heady stuff for a little kid.
When I was a tiny Pease, my family lived in a big old barn of a house built in 1825 at 147 Main St. in Andover, Mass., a town founded on Algonquin land in 1636. Known as America House, it’s still a dormitory at a fancy prep school that dates to 1777, the year after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The rousing patriotic anthem “America” (“My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing …”) was written in what became my parents’ bedroom in the late 1950s. The song’s author was a 24-year-old seminary student, Samuel Frances Smith, who “on a gloomy day in February 1832” wrote new lyrics to the tune of “God Save the King.” His song, “America,” was so catchy that it served as the unofficial U.S. national anthem until Congress adopted “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1931.
Maybe everyone from New England has special feelings for the birth of our nation. We grew up surrounded by colonial history. You couldn’t swing a tri-corner hat in the land of my birth without whacking some revolutionary artifact.
On this 250th anniversary of the creation of these United States, I feel a certain sense of ownership of America the beautiful, this sweet land of freedom and liberty. Some reference works call my old town the “Home of America” — the heck with Philadelphia! — because of Smith’s anthem, written in my house.
As we celebrate America’s semiquincentennial birthday this month, sing along with me: “Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring!”
Ted Pease is, needless to say, a Red Sox fan.
