Whistling "Dixie" for the Union (Nation, Anthem, Revision)

In Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley, former slave and modiste to Mary Todd Lincoln, shares a provocative anecdote about President Lincoln and the Confederate anthem "Dixie". Writing of Robert E. Lee's imminent surrender, Keckley records an exhausted Lincoln's speech from early April 1865: "'And now, by way of parting from the brave soldiers of our gallant army, I call upon the band to play Dixie. It has always been a favorite of mine, and since we have captured it, we have a perfect right to enjoy it.' On taking his seat the band at once struck up with 'Dixie,' that sweet, inspiring air" (172).¹ Here Dixie denotes both a musical interlude and the Confederate South as a whole. In a scene to be repeated with absurd regularity, Dixie-as-locution comes to signify Dixie-as-location.

Latent in such a confusion of Dixie's is the commodification of both: Dixie is an object ("it") that can be physically taken and occupied ("captured"). Like all commodities, Dixie demands an almost juridical discourse to tie up its ownership and possession ("a perfect right"). And, as with any "favorite," Dixie elicits great feeling from both Abraham Lincoln ("a favorite of mine") and his interlocutor, Elizabeth Keckley ("that sweet and inspiring air"). Given the various "manifestations of applause" the song provokes, these reactions betray how the strains of a purportedly southern song can elicit emotion from a northern audience.

Taking Keckley's anecdote as a departure point, this essay considers the status of Dixie as mid-nineteenth-century cultural and ideological production. What cultural and nationalistic work is Dixie doing here? What boundaries are being crossed in such a capture and through such a cathexis of northern feeling? In posing such questions, I argue that the play between these two Dixie's, between the anthem and the nation, the local and the global, and, crucially, the northern and the southern, reveals the multiplicity of Dixie as cultural artifact. By re-presenting the complex revisionary history of the song, I show that, from the moment of its composition, Dixie was constantly crossing boundaries of nation, allegiance, politics, race, and class. Neither a strictly southern nor a strictly northern cultural property, Dixie was given to various local appropriations and rewritings and engendered a series of hotly contested proprietary claims. By exploring Dixie as a malleable, even promiscuous cultural object, this essay underscores the instability of the song's circulation and identifies a process of revision that enabled Dixie to fit local, regional, and national agendas.

Throughout, I see revision as a social practice in which agents re- and un-write texts in relation to their social worlds. While recent work in bibliographical and editorial theory has yielded a more nuanced understanding of revision as a compositional practice, contemporary criticism has yet to consider fully the cultural work of revision.² Therefore, I pursue a reading practice that takes seriously textual differences—an omitted verse here, a shift in pronoun there—and then place such differences in relation to US social and political history. This shuttling between the "micro" level of the text and the "macro" level of society allows me to contend with the broader culture of revisionism that, for instance, found the US radically revising its Constitution during and immediately after the Civil War.³ Arguing that processes of complex social and political change find expression in seemingly subtle differences between revised versions of texts—between, for instance, "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land" and "Dixie for the Union"—I read the many nationalistic revisions of Keckley's "sweet and inspiring air" in full view of the transnational nature of this harrowing conflict. In so doing, I want to show how the people of both the United and Confederate States of America used revision to manage the existence of competing nationalisms.

1. Locating Dixie

Dixie's ubiquity in and importance to the nineteenth-century US cultural imaginary are extraordinary. Particularly during the war years, Dixie enjoyed a fervid, even unparalleled popularity in...