Upon the Altar of the Nation (22 page)

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Authors: Harry S. Stout

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These popular standards betrayed all the same preoccupation with patriotism and glory seen in popular literature and the press. Nowhere to be found are the issues of war, the mystery of death, or conduct unbecoming a true soldier. Rather, the horror of war was subsumed under romantic themes of nostalgia, sentiment, bravery, and noble death. With music such as this, inspired soldiers could ride full fury into the fray in ever greater numbers, certain that family members at home revered their bravery and honored their memory.
The band of the Eighth New York State Militia, 1861. Military bands played indispensable roles in inculcating the patriotism that fueled soldiers’ and civilians’ participation in and support of the war.
Soldiers carried military tunes into the field and paraded to the airs of regimental bands. By 1861 military brass bands had become prevalent and displaced the earlier drum and fife corps. Wherever the military went, from recruiters to warriors, the bands followed. On November 20, 1861, a great mass of people converged at Bailey’s Cross Roads, near Fairfax, Virginia, to hear fifty regimental bands perform patriotic music. Of the one hundred thousand present, fifty to seventy thousand were soldiers ready to march with the regimental bands to such classics as “The Standard Bearer Quickstep,” or George F. Root’s “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching.”
The large-scale review was a spectacular and inspiring sight to soldier and citizen alike. Thousands of soldiers marching with military precision, hundreds of artillery pieces drawn by horses, and bands by the dozens appeared in order that the commanders and the public might view the immense military machine rendered even more dramatic by the stirring music. The massive procession stretched on for over a mile. As commanders rode by in review, a particular unit with attached musical organizations would proudly render their best selection from such national airs as “America,” “The Marseillaise,” or “Red, White, and Blue.”
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In the parade at Bailey’s Cross Roads, emotions peaked as General McClellan appeared with a cavalry escort. Soon he was joined by President Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Reporting on the regiments marching in review, a writer for the
New York Times
commented: “What strength was slumbering in that mighty host, and what death and carnage lay before it, when it should move on the foe. When the question of union and disunion was so glibly discussed by politicians on the stump, who ever dreamed he should live to behold such a sight as this?”
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On the home front, local and military bands provided public concerts that attracted enthusiastic audiences. Although the vast majority of Northern songs identified the preservation of the Union as the cause of war and ignored emancipation, one abolitionist songbook was put together by John Hutchinson of New Hampshire. Hutchinson built on abolitionist songs like Whittier’s “Hymn of Liberty” to equate the war with emancipation. One, entitled “Coming Right Along,” closed with the triumphant theme:
No longer shall the bondman sigh beneath the galling fetters—
He sees the dawn of freedom nigh, and reads the golden letters.
Coming right along,
Coming right along,
Behold the day of freedom is coming right along!
Not to be outdone, the New York abolitionist James S. Gibbons wrote “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”—a tribute to Lincoln with strong abolitionist sentiments.
While popular with abolitionists, such music was not preferred in the North, where slavery was subordinated to patriotic love of Union. At one concert in Fairfax, Virginia, soldiers from New Jersey incited a riot when Hutchinson’s band played “Hymn of Liberty.” Only the intervention of two chaplains prevented the destruction of the band’s equipment.
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As with jeremiads, identical themes embodied the music of the Union and the Confederacy, revealing how much common ground they continued to share. Two songs’ sheet music sold by the millions in the North: “Yes, We’ll Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys” (“The Battle Cry of Freedom”) and “We Are Coming, Father Abraham.” Such was the popularity of “Rally’Round the Flag, Boys” that the Confederacy sang the same song with their own lyrics.
Much Union sheet music written before emancipation ignored slavery and concentrated on patriotism and loves left behind. In the North and the South, in music and art, the flag was ubiquitous. As national totem, the flag would also serve as a fierce catalyst for triumph. The flag song was a fight song:
We’re in the right, and will prevail, the Stars and Stripes must fly;
The “Bonnie Blue Flag” will be hauled down and every traitor die,
Freedom and Peace enjoyed by all, as ne’er was known before,
Our Spangled Banner wave on high, with stars just Thirty Four.
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The theme of “Thirty-four Stars” became the subject of a song praising Union commanders and set in opposition to the Confederate “Bonnie Blue Flag”:
The Rebels sing the “Bonnie Blue Flag” but we the “Stripes and Stars,”
Our Union Flag we love so true,
Will conquer their Stars and Bars;
Their Seceshairs, their Marylands,
Are contraband of war;
Our cause is right and the Flag for the fight,
Is one with thirty-four stars.
 
Chorus:
Hurrah! Hurrah! For equal rights Hurrah! Hurrah!
For the dear old Flag, with ev’ry Stripe and Star.
Another common song set to different lyrics by the North and the South was the anthem “Battle Cry of Freedom.” The Union chorus refrain, written by George F. Root, focused on Union and the flag:
The Union forever, Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star; While we rally ’round the flag, boys
Rally once again, Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
The Confederate lyrics written by W. H. Barnes adapted it to an idea of freedom that emphasized “Dixie” and Christian faith:
Our Dixie forever, she’s never at a loss
Down with the eagle, up with the cross, We’ll rally ’round the bonnie flag
We’ll rally once again, Shout, shout the battle cry of Freedom.
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Of course, the mounting killing could not be ignored. But rendered in song, death like war became either sentimental or glorious. One of the most popular songs, also sung on both sides of the conflict, was “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight.” In the North it was published as “The Picket’s Last Watch.” Its closing chorus told the story of a picket’s love and death at the hands of a sniper:
Hark! was it the night wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it the moonlight so wond’rously flashing?
It looked like a rifle! “Ha! Mary, good-bye!”
And his life-blood is ebbing and splashing.
 
All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river,
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
“The Picket’s” off duty forever.
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Cowardice was every soldier’s greatest fear and a theme in many a letter, as well as in much of the music.
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In this citizens’ war, no one wanted to retreat or be shot in the back. In “Let Me Die Face to the Foe,” the last words of Brigadier General James C. Rice, Army of the Potomac, signaled the theme of bravery transcending death:
I am wounded, soldiers, dying,
Send this word unto my wife
“I’ve been true unto my country
In her cause I yield my life. ”
Hark! the drums beat—victr‘ys ours!
Let me ask you ere I go
Comrades “turn me t’wards the traitors!
Let me die face to the foe!”
Even more than Northern music, Confederate songs offered no sense of moral ambiguity or irony, but instead celebrated the war without restraint. With the homeland under attack, the identification of war and the land assumed greater emphasis than in Northern music. In “The War Song of Dixie,” the theme of country, flag, and arms reaches a stirring crescendo:
Southrons, hear your country call you,
Victory soon shall bring them gladness,
To arms! To arms! To arms! In Dixie!
Exultant pride soon banish sorrow;
Smiles chase tears away tomorrow,
To arms! to arms! To arms! In Dixie!
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The one prominent exception that proves the general rule of musical mediocrity appeared first as a poem in the February 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The poem was composed by Massachusetts abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In fact, the poem had been written three months earlier on a sleepless night in Washington, D.C.
Howe visited the capital as part of a group that included her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, together with Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts and the Reverend James Freeman Clarke. The party had been granted a personal visit with President Lincoln at the White House, and later observed hundreds of soldiers in their lighted campground singing “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave.” Clarke asked Howe if she could write a poem with some more appropriate, uplifting words.
Later, Howe recalled that night in the Old Willard Hotel, when her sleep was interrupted:
I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight, and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” So with a sudden effort I sprang out of bed and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me.... At this time, having completed my writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, “I like this better than most things that I have written.”
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Howe’s modesty produced an understatement. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became widely sung in Union armies, especially after Gettysburg, and eventually enjoyed unrivaled status. During the war, Howe’s hymn never displaced “John Brown’s Body” as the soldiers’ favorite song. But in American memory, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” better served America’s future by linking the war less to patriotism than to abolition, in part reflecting the fact that Howe and her husband were abolitionists.
The early verses of the “Battle Hymn” bask in a martial glory common to many songs of the time. But in her triumphant conclusion, Howe reaches a transcendent identification of Christ’s sacrifice with emancipation: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” As with the words of other abolitionists, Howe’s anthem helped transform the war’s meaning into a moral crusade of freedom that would outlive its creator. In American memory, the hymn would virtually define the war’s final meaning. For Lydia Maria Child, the “Battle Hymn” was an answer to her abolitionist prayer: “If the soldiers only had a Song, to some spirit-stirring tune, proclaiming what they went to fight for ... and indignantly announcing that they did not go to hunt slaves.”
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Precisely because of her transcendent moral gravitas and abolitionist subtheme, Howe’s “hymn” to America has remained the American song to emerge from the Civil War. More than any other song, it turned the war into something holy, hence beyond moral critique. In this regard, her earlier stanzas stand as more representative of the norm:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

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