Jonathan Mitchel Sewall was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and educated at Boston Public Latin School. When he came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as a young lawyer at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he wrote the words to a song that was sung in all the American camps, taverns, homes, and on the march. He also wrote the NH Bill of Rights, contributed songs and poetry to every civic celebration, and probably presented the Black Petition to the General Assembly of the state. If there had been a Poet Laureate of Portsmouth at that time it would have been Jonathan Mitchel Sewall.