This online tour is excerpted from a lecture delivered by Lester S. Levy to The Maryland Historical Society on October 21, 1974. |
“Some ten thousand songs were published about the Civil War. The bulk of these were published in the North, and comparatively few in the South. Bear in mind that there was a much larger number of trained musicians residing in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago than those in New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond. Secondly, the terrible scarcity of paper and printing equipment with which the South was constantly faced was not a problem in the North. “So when a southern composer managed to get a song published it was usually on flimsy paper and in a quantity far too small for general distribution. Still, there were some pieces which were appealing enough to make a profound impression on Confederate soldiers and Confederate sympathizers,” and those are the songs featured in this online tour. | “The Civil War was a singing war, and the men in the trenches were singing soldiers. Many a time, on a clear night, during a lull in the firing, the boys facing each other would lift their voices together in one of the songs that might have been a favorite on both sides, Aura Lea or Lorena, the two best-known sweetheart songs, or The Vacant Chair a tribute to the soldiers missing from the family circle. |
|  |  | |  |  |  | | In the fall of 1861, many of the war dispatches lulled the public into a sense of false security with the heading "All quiet along the Potomac." Despite such headlines, men doing lone sentry duty at night were fired on by snipers and often killed. In November 1861, Ethel Beers, from Massachusetts, wrote a poem entitled All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight and sent it to Harper’s Weekly magazine, where it was published. Considered one of the finest and most sensitive wartime poems, its authorship was claimed, erroneously, by several southerners. Marylander John Hill Hewitt set the poem to music, and the popular and tender song was adopted by both sets of forces. | One of the most bitter and vigorous challenges to northern supremacy came from a spirited southern gentlewoman named Catherine Anne Warfield, a native of Mississippi who moved to Kentucky and there wrote and published poetry. When the war broke out, she was inspired to write a set of verses that she called The Southrons’ Chaunt of Defiance. It was set to music by Armand E. Blackmar in New Orleans and later by composer J. E. Smith of Virginia. In each edition the author of the words preferred to remain anonymous, described merely as “a lady of Kentucky.” | Northern songwriters tried to counteract the impact of the exciting songs enjoyed by the South by writing for northern consumption new verses to the popular southern melodies. One Union sympathizer named M. H. Frank, irked by the wave of emotion engendered by The Bonnie Blue Flag, used the same melody for a northern version of the song, which he called A Reply to the Bonnie Blue Flag. | |
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