CIVIL WAR ANTHEMS AND TUNES

 Civil War Confederate songs help to understand why Southern men enlisted to fight the North. The 1860 census reveals that a mere 4.8% of Southern whites owned slaves. Many were yeomen farmers without slaves. Only in Mississippi and South Carolina did the percentage of slaves in the overall population exceed 50%. Historian James McPherson’s book, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, analyzes letters, diaries, and other written documents and concludes that many men joined the Cause as a nationalistic endeavor rather than fighting strictly for slavery. The songs of the Confederate South corroborate this theory.

 

Confederate Anthems

 

“We are a band of brothers, And native to the soil; Fighting for our liberty, With Treasure blood and toil…” So begins Harry McCarthy’s stirring 1861 tune, Bonnie Blue Flag, destined to become the second anthem of the Confederate States, behind the popular Dixie. Song lyrics reveal the mindset of average soldiers as they marched or spent days encamped, awaiting battle. Historian Richard Hartwell refers to them as, “tuneful symbols of Southern nationalism.” David Eicher writes that, “among the most significant ways in which soldiers expressed….feelings of unity, especially while on the march, was in song.”

 

Harry McCarthy came to New Orleans from Great Britain as an entertainer. Bonnie Blue Flag begins with a reference to Henry V and Shakespeare’s “band of brothers” battle speech. The analogy was obvious. Like Henry V, facing a vastly superior French army at Agincourt in 1415, the South was poised to defend its sovereignty against a foe that outnumbered them by thirteen million people. McCarthy’s “band of brothers” was a celebration of unity as well as an assurance of victory.

 

William Barnes’ 1864 Battle Cry of Freedom champions the idea of freedom and independence: “Their motto is resistance – ‘To tyrants we’ll not yield…” “Our Southern sky is brightening and soon we will be free…” Maryland, My Maryland begins by referring to the Northern “despot,” while The Flag of Secession, sung to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner, concludes the first stanza with, “Now the flag of secession in triumph cloth wave; O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  Confederate lyrics reinforced the imagery of a tyrannical North that paralleled the despot George III in 1776. Like the Founding Fathers, Southerners were fighting for the right to be free.

 

Dixie, the most popular Southern tune and the song most associated with the South, was written in 1859 by Daniel Decatur Emmett to be used in a variety show. It was rapidly adopted by both North and South and Abraham Lincoln counted it as his favorite tune. It came to be viewed at the Confederate national anthem after it was used to open Jefferson Davis’ inaugural ball. In July 1861 General Irvin McDowell’s men were singing Dixie as they advanced toward Bull Run. Repulsed by P.T. Beauregard and Joseph Johnston, Southern soldiers adopted the song as their own.

 

Revenge and Eulogies

 

Written after the end of the Civil War, James Randolph’s Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier declares, “…We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.” The South I Love Thee More, also written after the war, is a eulogy that compares the defeated South to the coming of winter.

 

Southern Civil War songs speak of independence and freedom, of repulsing a conqueror and defending the home. The Flag of Secession predicts that, “the Northmen shall shrink from our warriors’ might….O’er the land of the freed and the home of the brave.”

Summary

The tunes of the Civil War reflected ideologies as well as a sense of comradery. Many of these tunes have endured. Despite the fact that Lincoln's favorite tune was Dixie, the very name of the highly popular Civil War tune is, in contemporary America, anathema and associated with the time of slavery. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other Southern tunes such as Good Ol' Rebel Soldier. 

American culture will have to make peace at some point with the past, separating history from on-going emotional responses tied to anachronistic ideologies. We are one people and need to work toward the reality of e pluribus unum. 

Originally published November 19, 2008 in Suite101 by M.Streich and is under copyright. Summary was updated November 18, 2020.