Notes
[ 151 ] Notes Introduction 1. In truth, though, the Union blockade of the Confederacy had long put materials of all kinds in short supply. “Toward the end of the war,” Willard A. and Porter W. Heaps write, “paper of Confederate imprints was so thin that printing on the reverse side made reading difficult, and copies could no longer be stood upright on the piano music rack without support.” Willard A. Heaps and Porter W. Heaps, The Singing Sixties: The Spirit of Civil War Days Drawn from the Music of the Times (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 9. 2. The single best source of information on humor periodicals is David E. E. Sloane, ed., American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals (New York: Greenwood, 1987). ChapterOne 1. Highly scurrilous material of all kinds circulated in handwritten form. A version of the 1863 published broadside “Jeff Davis’ Dream” is a sexual and scatological account of the president and his wife in bed. See Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell; Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1994), 49–50. 2. A good account of the affair is “The Belle of Richmond” in Mark E. Neely Jr., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate Image, Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 79–96. 3. Paul M. Zall, ed., Abe Lincoln’s Legacy of Laughter (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2007), cites the Salem, Illinois, Advertiser (19 November 1863) as an earlier source, but I have not been able to verify that. 4. In Kenneth A. Bernard, Lincoln and the Music of the Civil War (Caldwell, IN: Caxton, 1966), 260. 5. Ibid., 243–276; Bernard documents in detail what he calls the “Antietam Incident.” 6. Quoted in Bernard, Lincoln and the Music of the Civil War, 259. 7. For the many and diverse opinions of Lincoln in the decades following the war, see the last two chapters of Michael Davis’s The Image of Lincoln in the South. For some in the South, enmity has continued into the twenty-first century. In Richmond, Virginia, in April 2003, at the unveiling of the first statue of Lincoln [ 152 ] Notes below the Mason Dixon Line, protestors booed and hissed while a plane flew over the ceremony displaying a banner reading “Sic Temper Tyrannis!” the words attributed to John Wilkes Booth upon shooting the president. ChapterTwo 1. Songs of Humor and Sentiment (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1863), 6–7. 2. Taylor M. Camberlin, Bronwen C. Souders, and John M. Souders, eds., The Waterford News (Waterford, VA: Waterford Foundation, 1999). All quotations of the Waterford News are from this facsimile publication. ChapterThree 1. J. P. Robens, preface, The Old Flag, First Published by Union Prisoners at Camp Ford, Tyler, Texas (New York: n.p., 1864). 2. William Howard Merrell, Five Months in Rebeldom (Rochester, NY: Adams and Dabney, 1862), 26–29. Merrell, in Libby Prison after the first battle at Bull Run, attributes the poem to “Sergeant Solomon Wood, of the 27th Regiment.” It was also published as a broadside, probably in Richmond, as “Prison Bill of Fare. By a Prisoner of War. Composed, Written and Spoken at the Exhibition of the Prisoners of War Dramatic Association, Richmond, Va., Nov. 8th, 1861.” 3. George Root followed up his success with two sequels in 1863, “On the Field of Battle, Mother” and “Just After the Battle, Mother.” A World War I parody was titled “Just Behind the Battle, Mother.” 4. See W. W. Carnes, “Here’s Your Mule,” in Bromfield L. Ridley, Battles and Sketches of the Army of Tennessee (Mexico, MO: Missouri Printing and Publishing, 1906), 633–634; and William Shepard Walsh, Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1892), 753. 5. Richard Harwell, Songs of the Confederacy (New York: Broadcast Music, 1951), 92, says, “The phrase probably had its origin in the disappearance of stock at the approach” of the famous Confederate raider John Morgan and his men, but we know the phrase was “popular” in October 1861, several months before Morgan and his raids became famous. Frank W. Hoogerwerf, Confederate Sheet-Music Imprints (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1984), 53, notes that a stanza referring to Morgan was pasted in copies sold to Confederates who bought C. D. Benson’s 1862 “Here’s Your Mule.” In 1864 C. D. Benson capitalized on Morgan’s fame with the sheet “How Are You? John Morgan,” “a sequel to ‘Here’s Your Mule’” that featured...
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