The Civil War in Song
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Introduction: The Civil War in Song
Only Vietnam had a greater impact on American music than did the Civil War. Hundreds of songs came out of the 1860s: marching songs, camp songs, patriotic songs, parade songs, sentimental ballads, spirituals. Many of these musical pieces have faded from the national memory, but together they would permanently reshape the American musical tradition.
Two related factors underlay the flourishing of Civil War music. First, in keeping with American publishing generally, the sheet music industry had come of age in the 1830s and 1840s. The cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia dominated the scene, but other cities in the Midwest and South, including New Orleans, Chicago, and Baltimore, also supported music publishers. By the early 1850s, according to Richard Crawford, American sheet music firms were printing on the order of 5,000 pieces a year, or about three times more than they had a decade earlier.[i] Second, what helped drive that rate of publishing was the increasing demand for music on the part of the American middle class. In the antebellum years, rising standards of living gave more Americans greater access to musical instruments, particularly the piano, which became a fixture in many parlors and a focal point of communal entertainment. In a way that is less familiar to us today, social singing was a central form of cultural experience in nineteenth-century America, and publishers rushed to provide the sheet music that made it possible.
During the Civil War itself, music did much to shape perceptions of the conflict, to sustain soldiers in the fighting of it, and to help Americans cope with its horrific toll. For both soldiers and civilians, music provided a measure of social cohesion and emotional comfort in the midst of chaos. For soldiers, singing was a way of wiling away the time, boosting morale, relieving the grind of marching or the monotony of camp, feeling reconnected to home and, to some extent, resisting the ideological pressure under which they were expected to fight for a cause. For civilians, music could salve the pain of separation, anxiety, and loss, and it could define the war in terms that made sense to those far removed from the front lines and from the centers of power. For military authorities, we might note, music occasionally represented subversion, and at least two composers – William Hays Shakespeare and Septimus Winner – were arrested because of their “seditious” songs.
The lyrics of Civil War songs tended to focus on a few recurrent themes: the cause that people fought for, the realities of military life and death, the feelings of those left at home, the meaning of emancipation. Like much popular literature of the day, these songs were meant to be accessible to a broad public, and the lyrics tend to reflect the digestible poetics that the ninteenth century preferred. In musical terms, most of the songs are fairly simple, with formulaic structures, regular eight-bar phrases, predictable refrains and rhythms, unchallenging melodies and harmonies.
Many Civil War songs have a murky textual and musical history. A number of these songs emerged from folk tradition, with unclear origins. Often a song would generate lyrical variants, involving contributions by different people, and often the music would go through a series of changes. In these cases, the process of publication involved setting down one version of the lyrics and one version of the music, in effect authorizing that rendition, and then printing it on broadsheets for distribution to local booksellers.
The relation between folk tradition and published music becomes particularly complicated when we consider the spirituals and slave songs of the era. African Americans, particularly in the South, had already developed a rich musical tradition by the nineteenth century, one which drew on both European and African influences. Yet antebellum blacks had little or no access to the tools of literacy, let alone the publishing industry, and African American music thus existed almost entirely beyond the awareness of white America. This would change during the Civil War.
On the Union-occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina, federal troops and white Northern activists were exposed, in a sustained fashion, to the singing of freedmen and runaway slaves. Some of these Northerners, notably Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Lucy McKim, recognized the musical value in what they heard, and began writing it down. Higginson’s resulting essay, “Negro Spritiuals,” is included here. In 1867, Lucy McKim Garrison (now married) joined William Francis Allen and Charles Pickard Ware in publishing Slave Songs of the United States, a seminal work in what we would today call ethnomusicology (and one which incorporated Higginson’s material). Both texts raise difficult questions regarding the problem of white interference in or appropriation of African American cultural expression. But they nonetheless gave white America its first serious introduction to the music performed by black America.
Out of the trials of civil war, then, two major musical legacies emerged. First, the war bequeathed to American music dozens of songs that, beyond simply commemorating the conflict, have transcended their historical origins to become touchstones of a shared cultural identity. In that sense, the Civil War accelerated the development of a truly indigenous musical tradition, helping to liberate American music from its European past, especially when it came to lyrics. Yet the rhythmic, melodic, and tonal norms of European music still held sway.
So the Civil War’s second, less remarked, legacy for American music may be the more significant. The intercultural contact the war occasioned, however limited, began a gradual process of listening and exchanging that would have profound implications for the later evolution of American music. The spirituals and slave songs told a tale of woe and triumph that touched a deep cultural nerve, and they did so through music that, drawing on African as well as European musical practices, contributed several vital musical elements to the American palette: syncopation, the shout, the blue note. It would take decades of experimentation and resistance, a perpetual dance of give and take, of musical homogenization and dissent, but the signs were there. Although Dena Epstein has observed that the country “did not seem to be ready for the music of the slaves, unrefined by genteel adaptors,” at least one contemporary reviewer of Slave Songs of the United States recognized that “whatever of nationality there is in the music of America she owes to her dusky children.”[ii] This truth would need much repeating, but already the note had sounded.
Notes
i Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life (New York: Norton, 2001) p. 32.
ii Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War, p. 340. “Slave Songs of the United States,” [unsigned review] The Nation 5 (November 21, 1867): 411, quoted in Epstein, p. 337.
Original Sheet Music
The sheet music for the following songs are available to download below. The pages can also be downloaded as individual images.
“All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight”
John Hill Hewitt (composer)
Baltimore: Miller & Beacham, 1863
“When Johnny Comes Marching Home”
Louis Lambert (pseud.)
Boston: Henry Tolman & Co., 1863
“Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Mrs. Dr. S. G. Ward Howe (Julia Ward Howe)
Boston Oliver Ditson & Co., 1862
“Tenting on the Old Camp Ground”
Walter Kittredge
Boston: Oliver Ditson & Co., 1864
Song Lyrics
Daniel Emmett, “Dixie’s Land” (1859, 1860)
Anonymous, “John Brown’s Body” (1859?)
Septimus Winner, “Abraham’s Daughter (Raw Recruits)” (1861)
A. E. Blackmar, “Allons Enfans (The Southern Marseillaise)” (1861)
William B. Bradbury, “Marching Along” (1861)
Ethel Lynn Beers, “All Quiet Along the Potomac” (1861)
Harry McCarthy, “The Bonnie Blue Flag” (1861)
Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)
Walter Kittredge, “Tenting on the Old Campground” (1862)
Charles Carroll Sawyer, “Weeping, Sad and Lonely” (1862)
Anonymous, “Parody on When this Cruel War is Over” (n.d.)
A. E. Blackmar, “Goober Peas” (1866)
M. B. Smith, “The Battle of Shiloh Hill” (1863)
Patrick S. Gilmore, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1863)
George F. Root, “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)” (1863)
George F. Root, “Just Before the Battle, Mother”
Henry C. Work, “Marching through Georgia” (1865)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals” (1867)
Author Biographies
Selected Bibliography
Cornelius, Steven H. Music of the Civil War Era. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Crawford, Richard. America’s Musical Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Currie, Stephen. Music in the Civil War. Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1992.
Eaklor, Vicki. American Antislavery Songs: A Collection and Analysis. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Glass, Paul and Louis C. Singer. Singing Soldiers: A History of the Civil War in Song. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.
Harwell, Richard. Confederate Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950.
Heaps, Willard A. and Porter W. Heaps. The Singing Sixties: The Spirit of Civil War Days Drawn from the Music of the Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.
Loesser, Arthur. Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
Olson, Kenneth E. Music and Musket: Bands and Bandsmen of the American Civil War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Sanjek, Russell. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Vol. II: From 1790 to 1909. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.