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  • Locating Patriotism in Civil War Songs
  • James A. Davis (bio)

Following the Union seizure and occupation of New Orleans in May 1862, Pvt. Frank Harding joined members of the Twenty-sixth Massachusetts Infantry band as they formed outside the Charles Hotel to entertain—or perhaps to taunt—the local civilians. According to Harding, the musical offering met with mixed results: "Our band went into the House and played our national airs. While they played The Red White & blue and the Star Spangled banner the crowd was very quiet[,] but when they struck up Yankey Doodly there was a great commotion in the crowd[.] I heard one man say that he had rather given one thousand dollars than to had that d—d tune played in the city."1

Three years later, in March 1865, at the Battle of Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, Col. Stephen Clark of the Thirteenth Ohio Cavalry vividly described the first clash of the Union and Confederate lines: "Our boys cheered and our band in the rear began to play 'The Star Spangled Banner,' and almost at the same time a band on the other side began playing 'Dixie'; they cheered and began to fire which we promptly answered and the fight was on in earnest."2

Fifty years after the last shots had been fired, one old Confederate met with his Yankee counterpart at a veterans' reunion, where the topic of music came up. [End Page 380] While the Northern gentleman proudly recalled such warhorses as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom," his Southern companion countered by mentioning "Maryland, My Maryland" along with "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag."3

These three stories place Civil War songs in predictable settings with predictable results. Taken individually, within the contexts described, each of these pieces appears to have served as what would best be described as an inspirational patriotic anthem. But when gathered together, they seem to have little in common; indeed, anomalies emerge that make it unclear what constituted musical patriotism during the Civil War. In the first example, two seemingly blatantly patriotic songs—"The Star-Spangled Banner" and the equally transparent "Red, White and Blue" (another name for "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean")—elicited no response from a hostile Southern crowd. "Yankee Doodle," however, brought forth a vitriolic reaction. In the second story, the unofficial Union national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," galvanized the Northern troops while their Confederate opponents answered with a popular minstrel tune. In the last example, the Union veteran resurrected predictable Northern chestnuts like "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and the inescapable "Battle Hymn of the Republic" while the Confederate veteran answered with "The Star-Spangled Banner's" alter ego "The Bonnie Blue Flag" alongside "Maryland, My Maryland"—a song celebrating a state that never joined the Confederacy.

Today it is taken for granted that pieces like "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Dixie" generated and maintained commitment to the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Such pieces are summarily defined as "patriotic songs" and assigned to their respective nations without any consideration of how these songs connected with the countries they supposedly supported. Patriotism requires a locus of identity, something toward which a community's loyalty can be directed and sustained. This is often a specific place, but it can also be a significant icon or a mythologized person or event. Identifying a suitable patriotic target was no easy task for songwriters during the American Civil War. Tenacious regional loyalties and blurry political and geographic borders made locating patriotism an ongoing trial for both the Union and the Confederacy.

To overcome these challenges, many Civil War songs constructed multivalent patriotic spaces instead of referencing determinate geopolitical places.4 Combining [End Page 381] locationally suggestive yet indistinct lyrics with likeable melodies, certain notable pieces generated ambiguous but substantive emotional and conceptual focal points—the Dixie of "Dixie's Land" or the republic of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." These patriotic spaces had to be locatable and definable to be effective even as they occupied a gray area around the tangible places and explicit ideas encountered in daily life.5 Some of these musical...

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