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6 Music and Memory in the Civil War Era War showed all its many dreadful faces. . . . It spread over all regions of Missouri and wrought every variety of hardship and suffering. Each level of society and every niche and corner of the beleaguered state experienced the escalating harshness of the war. Unfortunately, much of the conflict pitted Missourians against Missourians. —James Denny and John Bradbury, The Civil War’s First Blood: Missouri, 1854–1861 The Civil War was a long and harsh time that continues to shape the collective memory of Americans, and this is certainly true in the reluctant battleground state of Missouri.1 Missouri was a key border state between North and South as well as East and West; many say the war really began in the 1850s with the bloody border war between people in Missouri and Kansas over issues of states’ rights and slavery in the 1850s, as Kansas became a state and a wall against the spread of slavery westward. Once the war started in April 1861, Missouri played its role. Officially and fitfully still part of the Union throughout the conflict, only Missouri saw fewer battles and skirmishes than Virginia and Tennessee. Both sides thought the war would be brief. The New York Times thought it would be over in a month; the Chicago Tribune predicted two months.2 The carnage lasted four years, the bloodiest war in US history up to that time, and is still considered to be one of the nation’s turning points. As James Denny writes, “From all the strands of this event has emerged a tapestry of complex, often contradictory, memories and emotions: daring and glory, meanness and murder, long suffering and endurance for a cause held sacred. . . . Missouri’s war . . . bared its dread face, not on a few great fields, but a thousand small ones. War never slept in Missouri; it was everywhere; abroad on a thousand back roads, fought in countless barnlots, or behind stone cemetery walls or any spare tree.”3 Some parts of Missouri fared better than others, their geographical locations or lack of strategic value helping keep armies and battles at a distance. But no section was free of rivalry, occasional guerrilla trouble, and lasting 163 164 Play Me Something Quick and Devilish bitterness between pro-Unionist and pro-Secessionist sides once the war commenced. The war touched everyone. Even in locations with little military importance, problems could become serious between early settlers with slaves and immigrant groups such as German-speaking Europeans who, as a rule, disavowed slavery. One among numerous examples was the town of Iberia in Miller County, as recalled in a Civil War memoir: “Iberia was jolted by Civil War. Many inhabitants in the Big Richwoods were slave owners, especially loyal to Governor Jackson , and in sympathy with the southern cause. However, the Pennsylvania Dutch, having emigrated to the Big Richwoods in the 1850s, were loyal to the Union. The inhabitants, bitterly clashing, suffered.”4 A fiddler named Stingley was among the earliest settlers in extreme northwestern Missouri. Born in Henry County, Virginia, in 1819, and son of a proud veteran of the Revolutionary War, Stingley came to Missouri in 1844 and settled in the sparsely populated wilderness along the Platte River in Nodaway County, in what would become a Unionist area bordering Iowa and Nebraska. Stingley wisecracked, well after the war was over in 1882, “‘When I came here, we had neither the law, gospel or the itch—as to the latter there were not enough persons to communicate it to each other.’ . . . So few and far between were ‘Uncle Mose’s’ neighbors that he related that, one day, a Yankee chanced to be going by his place and exclaimed to him: ‘You have a beautiful country here, but where are your neighbors?’ ‘Mose’ told him the he didn’t’ have but one neighbor and that ‘he was a d___d Yankee who lived about twenty miles away,’ and that if another attempted to settle about him that he would shoot him.”5 Music: The Soldier’s Steam Valve I don’t believe we can have an army without music. —Robert E. Lee, 1864, quoted in Maureen Manjerovic and Michael J. Budds, “More than a Drummer Boy’s War: A Historical View of Musicians in the American Civil War” Music, singing, and dancing in camp have always given soldiers a vital chance to relax, offering a “much-needed reprieve from the horrors of war, both in the field and...

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