Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter (review)

When used strategically in times of war, music—with its entraining rhythms, tonal codes, and animating lyrics—is capable of rallying consensus or seeding dissention, of inspiring courage or instilling fear. Music is used to celebrate the victorious; it may also be used to comfort or denigrate the vanquished. In battles of blood and battles for minds, music is a powerful tool indeed.

In Battle Hymns, a richly documented overview of Civil War–era musical culture, Christian McWhirter proposes “to push beyond lyrical and musical analysis and move music out from the periphery of Civil War history” (1). This is an important goal. Much will be learned from a richer social analysis of the era’s music. Yet, while the author successfully demonstrates music’s wartime ubiquity and political nature, because he emphasizes breadth over depth, the potential to use music to understand the era itself is only partially realized.

In fact, scholars have rarely engaged with the sorts of studies McWhirter looks to move beyond. As for song texts (to which I assume the author refers by his use of the word “lyrical”) there has been little analysis. Most scholars expect the texts to speak for themselves, but a detailed investigation of lyrics might reveal new insights as to the target audience’s social aspirations and politics. Regarding musical structure, musicologists have not offered detailed analyses of the period’s regional and ethnic styles and how those differences may have been amalgamated within the popular song industry. Should one hope to reveal musical culture as experienced, this may be a fertile line of inquiry. After all, it was because both sides generally employed the same musical language that songs could cross enemy lines and quickly be refurbished for new political ends.

McWhirter has assembled an impressive array of data regarding wartime musical life. What to do with the material he has uncovered? Subject it to detailed analysis as much still requires unpacking. We hear the period’s voices but do not necessarily understand the speakers’ minds and goals. What, for example, is the reader to make of a newspaper inclusion of Union bands in Richmond performing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a “scene of such grandeur and magnificence never to be effaced from memory”? (166). We cannot accept such prose as if it presented simple truth. What is the “grandeur and magnificence”? Is it the catharsis concomitant with the long-awaited breakthrough, or the power of industrialized war? Or was it describing the flag song’s generative power? Might have the writer invoked music to better sell newspapers? If we are to move music in from the periphery, we need to weave the actors’ musical strategies through the full warp and woof of Civil War life.

Battle Hymns is divided into eight chapters, beginning with an overview of American musical commerce, tastes, and presentation. Chapters 2 and 3 present the central nationalist songs of the North and South, respectively. The discussion of strategies undertaken by both sides in their search for representational music is engaging and convincing. McWhirter follows a similar organizational strategy in pairing chapters 4 and 5, which investigate opposite sides of the often porous musical boundaries separating civilian and army life.

The book’s least satisfying chapter presents an overview of African American music and how the race’s “choked” voices were freed with emancipation and the North’s eventual victory. Curiously, however, much of the chapter is focused not on African American music traditions but instead on white conceptions of blackness as embodied in blackface minstrelsy. There is almost no mention of African musical elements and only inference of the power of white hegemony on African American repertoire. McWhirter understands African American incorporation of Caucasian musical style and values as socially freeing. Perhaps it was, but at what cost?

The final chapter opens with, then revolves around, a discussion of...