The volume contains approximately 750 examples of poems and song lyrics written during the Civil War by well-known poets and the general public, which were clipped from serials in Philadelphia, New York, and other cities such as Boston, Hartford, and Louisville. The themes are overtly patriotic and primarily war-related, with many verses devoted to the flag and the Union. The works were pasted into a folio scrapbook made for the Library Company in the 1890s. They are randomly arranged, with between five and fifteen examples on a page. Most of the clipped pieces do not have citations though many were annotated in pencil with a date, often just the year, mostly 1861 and 1862. The earliest dated work in the compilation is a poem dedicated to Charles Sumner, "The Fourth of July," by Ann L. Rogers, published in The Sun in 1856. The volume contains two series of long poems: sixteen numbered "Ballads of the War," written for the New York Mercury by Edward Willett, and eleven "Spicy Letters to Distinguished and Extinguished Statesmen," by "Anna Konda," with each devoted to a particular leader. The latter group does not have citations, though another long poem by "Konda" in the volume, "The Apotheosis of Shoddy," was published in the Mercury. Other noted poets included in the compilation are Park Benjamin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lucy Larcom, John G. Saxe, Lydia Sigourney, T. Buchanan Read, William Ross Wallace, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Among the serials credited are the Philadelphia papers Daily News, Evening Bulletin, Evening Journal, Gazette and Republican, Inquirer, Sunday Dispatch, as well as Harpers New Monthly Magazine, and Charivari. In addition to the poems and songs, there are a few examples of dry good marketing disguised in war-themed verses, where the poems actually promote Philadelphia merchants Bennett & Co. and John Wanamaker, and two Christmas acrostics (1860 and 1861) advertising a store in Elizabeth, NJ.
