Music along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters, Virginia by James A. Davis (review)

James Davis uses music to examine the ways various communities expressed and imagined new identities during the Civil War. His premises are that music is a social process and that communities were central to the worldview of nineteenth-century Americans. Davis elides long-running historiographical emphases on nationalism and considers ethnic, class, racial, and gendered interests that both competed and cooperated in an environment marked by emotional dislocation. “Musical performances,” he writes, “mirrored … conflict in the material world” (17), and for communities in formation consisting of displaced civilians, professional officers, rustic enlisted men, emancipated African Americans, and religious people, that conflict manifested on the banks of the Rapidan River in 1863–64.

The author chooses as his “laboratory” the winter quarters of the Union’s Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia from November 1863 through April 1864 (3). The two armies, poised in unusually compact postures and proximities in Orange and Culpepper Counties, matured into formidable forces that winter: the Confederates confident but lean and aware of their fragility, and the Federals finally enjoying self-assured unity. Yet in the anxious repose—away from active operations—soldiers and civilians fell victim to pressing senses of demoralization, deprivation, and ennui. Here, in the boredom of camp life, music offered orientation. Regimental field music shrilled fife and drum calls that regulated the soldiers’ days and provided sensory reinforcement to “rituals” of guard mounts, parades, and reviews (76). Soldiers played casual music on fiddles and banjos in the evenings, and Union soldiers loved minstrel shows. Bands performed dance music at grand balls while congregations swelled with sacred hymns. Civilians heard these sounds and called back with their own versions.

Davis uses music to identify a transition from past communities that consisted of family, local networks, and senses of comfort and domesticity before the war to lived communities shaped by wartime experience. Lived communities consisted of enlisted soldiers, military professionals, civilians, Confederates, Federals, and African Americans. That transition was not a simple one, however, as Davis identifies ways that lived communities absorbed elements of past communities while defining themselves through both inclusion and exclusion of outsiders. Soldiers, for instance, learned to find comfort in the sounds of control and discipline offered by military music. Synchronicity of movement directed by fifes and drums made new communities of soldiers tangible and felt. That feeling overcame latent ethnic divisions of past antebellum communities by creating a military professional identity that may, interestingly, have transcended Union and Confederate soldiers. Balls and dance music, on the other hand, heightened class distinctions from past communities as Union officers folded the moral refinement of middle-class striving into the moral justification for war. The “stag dances” of enlisted men similarly reinforced their allegedly rural and rustic past communities and served to define them against the officers’ middle-class refinement. Civilians employed songs as weapons against occupying forces, yet both Union and Confederate soldiers relied on songs to ease tension between occupiers and occupied. Finally, white soldiers embraced the faux authenticity of minstrel shows as a way to burlesque middle-class pretensions of officers, but they remained intently ignorant of the African American music in their midst. On this sensory battlefield in a dislocated environment as new occupational and institutional identities formed, the act of “musicking,” then, served to divide as much as unify (15).

Music along the Rapidan is best when describing how past and lived communities overlapped in contradictory and incomplete ways. Brass bands, for instance, performed both military and social functions. They might play a civilian parlor song one evening and evoke the comforts of past communities for melancholy soldiers, yet the next day play the same tune recast as a military march and further cement the soldiers in a military identity. This disjuncture alienated soldiers from home. Only religious music had a transcendent...