Come up from the fields, father (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Drum Taps, 1865)
Category: quotes
Just Before the Battle, Mother (Root, 1863)
“At my request they sat down and sang, and when about half through, as I stepped to the door, a shell exploded within fifty yards…”
Southern Girl with the Homespun Dress
“Many a woman who never before held a plow, is now seen in the corn-field…”
Uncle Sam’s Farm: “One grand, ocean-bound republic”
Stephen A. Douglas (1858): “This Union will not only live forever, but it will extend and expand until it covers the whole continent, and makes this confederacy one grand, ocean-bound Republic…”
Home, Sweet Home: “Had we not had the river between us”
One private’s account of the power & presence of music after a terrible battle:
Dixie: “One of the best songs I have ever heard…” (1865)
Abraham Lincoln (April 10, 1865): “Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it.”
Ring, Ring De Banjo (Foster, 1851)
Frederick Douglass (1845) ~ “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears…”
Kingdom Coming: “It was a proud moment for Robert” (1863)
Esther Hill Hawks ~ Diary (February 1863) ~ “It was a proud moment for Robert when he placed a guard of colored soldiers around the house of his former owner…”
Angelina Baker (Foster, 1850)
Stephen C. Foster ~ Letter to E. P. Christy (May 25, 1852) ~ “As I once intimated to you, I had the intention of omitting my name* on my Ethiopian songs, owing to the prejudice against them by some, which might injure my reputation as a writer of another style of music…”
Kingdom Coming (Work, 1862)
Popular in both the North and the South, perhaps because of his ambiguous treatment of the plight of “contraband” (liberated slaves) …
Battle Hymn of the Republic (Howe, 1861)
Written in November 1861 by abolitionist poet Julia Ward Howe, this song seems to glimpse the fiery trial ahead:
Music in General Stuart’s Camp
Here’s a striking passage about music and war in General Stuart’s Confederate camp, 1862, from John Esten Cooke’s Wearing of the Grey… III. Behold the scene now, reader, as I looked at it, on that evening of December in 1861. We are in a bleak room, with no furniture but a desk, a chair, and a camp…
The Hardtacks 