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Reading 2.2

Colonial Era to 1900

Ronald D. Cohen and Will Kaufman

Most wars fought by the United States, until the early twenty-first century, have been accompanied by music for those who are the supporters, either on the battlefield or the home front. But there have always been those who have expressed their opposition to the fighting with their own tunes and songs—again, from both the battlefield and the home front. Such songs in fact pre-date the establishment of the United States; for instance, we can go back to the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 (also called the French and Indian War) for the lament of a poor Irish dragoon, “Felix the Soldier,” who loses his leg in the service of an imperial war that he does not understand. His livelihood as a peat harvester destroyed forever, he will return home to a life of dissolution and destitution similar to that faced by the maimed veterans of many subsequent wars:

I will bid my spade adieu,

For I cannot dig the bog,

But I still can play a fiddle

And I still can drink my grog.

Songs such as “Felix the Soldier” also establish the abiding class struggle encapsulated in the phrase, “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Such musical protests are admittedly swamped by the outpouring of jingoistic and patriotic tub-thumpers that normally accompany military conflicts. Such was the case with the Seven Years’ War in America, in which songs glorifying the British general James Wolfe far outnumber those of any other subjects.^[1]

The War of Independence (1775–83) also prompted depictions of the poor soldier whose lower-class status is rubbed into his nose and for whom the glory of war quickly tarnishes—especially here, in “The Yankee’s Return from Camp,” when the narrator measures his condition against that of his commander, George Washington:

And there was Captain Washington,

And gentle folks about him;

They say he’s grown so tarnal proud

He will not ride without them.

For the unnamed Yankee, enough becomes enough when he confronts a vision of his own likely destination:

I see another snarl of men,

A-digging graves they told me,

So tarnal long, so tarnal deep,

They ’tended they should hold me.

It scared me so I hooked it off,

Nor stopped as I remember,

Nor turned about till I got home,

Locked up in mother’s chamber.

This song had a Loyalist counterpart, which, though written from the perspective of a British regular, proved popular with the American troops who shared his war-weariness and his recollections of comradeship during the Seven Years’ War:

I am a jolly soldier,

Enlisted years ago,

To serve my king and country

Against the common foe.

But when across th’ Atlantic

My orders were to go,

I grieved to think that English hearts

Should draw their swords on those

Who fought and conquered by their side

When Frenchmen were their foes.

Did they who bloody measures crave,

Our toil and danger share,

Not one to face the rifle-men,

A second time would dare.

Ye Britons who your country love,

Be this your ardent prayer:

To Britain and her colonies,

May peace be soon restored,

And knaves of high and low degree,

Be destined to the cord.^[2]

Colonial songwriters frequently employed parody in order to drive home a message that might avert further bloodshed. Thus, one Oliver Arnold of Norwich, Connecticut, chose in 1775 to adapt a familiar ballad, “The Banks of the Dee,” in an argument both for peace and for fair taxation by Great Britain—on Scotland, rather than on the struggling American colonies at the mercy of invading Scottish regiments:

Be quiet and sober, secure and contented:

Upon your own land, be valiant and free;

Bless God, that the war is so nicely prevented,

And till the green fields on the banks of the Dee.

The Dee then will flow, all its beauty displaying,

The lads on its banks will again be seen playing,

And England thus honestly taxes defraying,

With natural drafts from the banks of the Dee.^[3]

Peace songs could of course be used for propaganda purposes by factions actually committed to military action. Such was the case with a highly popular ballad, “The Dying Redcoat” (sometimes titled “The British Lamentation”), supposedly penned by a British sergeant suffering from a mortal wound incurred in the Battle for New York in September 1776:

A garden place it was indeed,

And in it grew many a bitter weed,

Which will pull down our highest hopes

And sorely wound our British troops.

’Tis now September the seventeenth day,

I wish I’d never come to America;

Full fifteen thousand has been slain,

Bold British heroes every one.

Now I’ve received my mortal wound,

I bid farewell to Old England’s ground;

My wife and children will mourn for me,

Whilst I lie cold in America.

As Irwin Silber noted, the song’s final stanza suggests that rebel propagandists may have appropriated this song and added a final, highly improbable verse:

Fight on, America’s noble sons,

Fear not Britannia’s thundering guns.

Maintain your rights from year to year,

God’s on your side, you need not fear.

Other songs utilized the imagery of wartime destruction in an ambiguous manner, as likely to encourage further military action as lobbying for peace. Thus, the celebrated composer, William Billings—whose anthem, “Chester,” was second only to “Yankee Doodle” in contemporary popularity—adapted the 137th Psalm for his “Lamentation over Boston,” a city bombarded by both the British and the American troops during the siege of 1776:

By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down and wept,

We wept, we wept, we wept

When we remembered thee, O Boston;

As for our Friends, Lord God of Heaven,

Preserve them, defend them, deliver them

And restore them unto us;

Preserve them, defend them and restore them to us again.

For they that held them in Bondage

Required of them to take up arms against their brethren.

Forbid it, Lord God, forbid!

Forbid it, Lord God that those who have sucked Bostonian Breasts

Should thirst for American Blood!^[4]

Inevitably, perhaps, the majority of peace songs came from the pens of Loyalists, for whom independence would mean the upset of an established and familiar way of life. Some, like the anonymous composer of “A Prayer/Common Prayer for the Times” (1776), called for the restoration of peace at any cost, even though he or she could acknowledge that “Britannia’s sins” were at the root of the conflict:

Since we are taught in Scripture word

To pray for friends and foes;

Then let us pray for George the Third,

Who must be one of those.

Heaven bless America, and Britain,

May folly past suffice,

Wherein they have each other smitten,

Who ought to harmonize.

Allied by blood, and interest too,

Soon let them re-unite,

May Heaven tyrannic minds subdue,

Haste, haste the pleasing sight.

In contrast, the Loyalist newspaper, the Pennsylvania Ledger, printed “An Irregular Ode to Peace” that squarely lay the blame for the strife at the rebels’ door:

But now we see the proud Usurpers’ aim:

Tho’ Liberty’s dear name is heard each hour,

The poor man’s property and good man’s fame

Alike are victims to their lawless pow’r.

However, for an anonymous “Daughter of Liberty, living in Massachusetts,” what mattered most was an end to “the Distressing Situation of Every Sea-Port Town” where women and children were as much the victims as were the soldiers in the field:

We can’t get fire nor yet food,

Takes 20 weight of sugar for two foot of wood,

We cannot get bread nor yet meat,

We see the world is nought but cheat.

For sin is all the cause of this,

We must not take it then amiss,

Wan’t it for our polluted tongues

This cruel war would ne’er begun.

We should hear no fife nor drum,

Nor training bands would never come:

Should we go on our sinful course,

Times will brow on us worse and worse.

The gracious GOD now cause to cease,

This bloody war and give us peace!

And down our streets send plenty then

With hearts as one we’ll say Amen.^[5]

The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 formally ended the American War of Independence. The first president, George Washington, strove to keep the new nation out of any foreign conflicts, resolutely abjuring the “entangling alliances” that would lead to war. However, even during Washington’s first term, nervous critics eyed the new ambassador to Great Britain, John Adams, in fear of the latter’s supposed “monarchical” tendencies, which might upset the fledgling peace. Hence “A New Song” as it was published in the Pennsylvania Packet of August 20, 1787:

But let us no longer to Adams attend,

But ’gainst his king projects our country defend;

Let’s support our Congress with might and with main,

And treaties observe with France, Holland and Spain.

Adams in fact proved skillful in averting American conflicts with the European powers, especially during his presidency of 1797–1801, when he succeeded in avoiding all-out war with Napoleonic France (against the clamor of hawks within his own Federalist party). A celebratory ode, “Adams and Liberty,” written by Thomas Paine (not the same Paine who authored Common Sense and the Rights of Man), paints Adams as the savior of the peace:

While France her huge limbs bathes recumbent in blood,

And society’s base threats with wide dissolution;

May Peace, like the dove who returned from the flood,

Find an ark of abode in our mild Constitution.^[6]

As the nineteenth century got under way, American merchant ships were caught between the warring navies of France and Britain, mounting a grave threat to American neutrality. Each power attempted to blockade American ships to disrupt US trade with the other; in addition, British naval officers would order the capture and impressment of US sailors into the Royal Navy. American hawks clamoring for war were handed a gift in June of 1807 when the British vessel Leopard attacked the American Chesapeake in US waters and hauled four suspected British deserters off the ship. That year, President Thomas Jefferson recommended an embargo on all US merchant shipping in a bid to avoid military entanglement; Congress enacted the embargo that year (against the objections of merchants and manufacturers across the country). Jefferson’s supporters sang, in “Embargo and Peace,”

From the deep we withdraw till the tempest be past,

Till our flag can protect each American cargo;

While British ambition’s dominion shall last,

Let us join, heart and hand, to support the embargo:

For embargo and peace

Will promote our increase;

Then embargoed we’ll live, till injustice shall cease:

For ne’er, till old Ocean retires from his bed,

Will Columbia by Europe’s proud tyrants be led.

In spite of such acts and sentiments, at the urging of Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, Congress declared war on Great Britain in June of 1812. Peace songs appear to have been in the minority; rather, “Farewell, Peace” was sung with jingoistic fervor in what came to be known in some quarters as “the Second War of Independence”:

FAREWELL, Peace! another crisis

Calls us to “the last appeal,”

Made when monarchs and their vices

Leave no argument but steel.

When injustice and oppression

Dare avow the tyrant’s plea,

Who would recommend submission?

Virtue bids us to be free.

But though barely heard, voices for peace were not entirely absent. Five months before the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” emerged from the pen of Francis Scott Key aboard a British ship in the Chesapeake Bay, ten-year-old Esther Talbot of Stoughton, Massachusetts, wrote her two-stanza poem, “Peace,” which remained virtually unknown until 1981, when it was put to music by choral composer Roger Lee Hall:

Come, gentle Peace, with smiling ray,

Beam on our land a cloudless day;

Beneath thy influence serene

The olive wears immortal green.

Come, gentle Peace, resume thy reign,

With all thy virtues in thy train;

And then Columbia’s soil shall grow,

As verdant Paradise below.

The war continued for thirty-two months. One of American history’s great ironies lies in the fact that the most famous battle of the war—the Battle of New Orleans, which catapulted Andrew Jackson to national glory—was fought fifteen days after the peace with Britain had been signed in the Treaty of Ghent. The irony was not lost on one anonymous songwriter:

White-winged Peace, the dove from heaven’s portal,

Brought with its olive-branch a song immortal,

That filled all hearts with melody supernal,

While yet was heard the battle din infernal.^[7]

While the conflicts thus far addressed produced a relatively small handful of antiwar songs, it was the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 that produced the first major body of peace songs. This is unsurprising, given that it was deemed by many observers to be America’s first major war of territorial conquest (outside, arguably, of the Seminole Wars of 1814–58), with only the barest pretexts given for a defensive claim. The war earned the opposition of the young congressman Abraham Lincoln (who nevertheless voted to fund it), the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau, and the abiding shame of Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it and who recalled it as “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Given that the war was considered by many to be a thinly disguised bid for the aggressive expansion of slave territory, opposition was particularly strong in New England abolitionist circles. Thus, the Hutchinson Family Singers, celebrated for their antislavery songs, also damned congressional warmongering (as well as greed) in their scathing “Eight Dollars a Day”:

And the next in the order of the day comes the mad cry of war,

While very few of the longest heads can tell what it is for,

But “War Exists” all parties cry and th’ enemy we must slay.

So Congress backs the President,—at Eight dollars a day.^[8]

William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, published a number of songs against the war, including “Mexico: An American National Song,” which employs bitter sarcasm to the effect that Mexico’s abolition of slavery in 1820 was “a hateful example annoying their betters.” A second song, “Battle Hymn,” continues the sarcastic attack on President Polk and his War Department:

This is the way,

Our rulers say,

That the rule of the free,

From sea to sea,

Shall ever increase,

In kindness and peace!

And it concludes with a grim word for both the American maimed and the Mexicans habitually slandered by the hawkish press as cowards:

By and by, when the fight is ended,

We, who are left, will straggle back:—

See how the soldier will be befriended,

When health and fortune are both a wreck.

Plenty of shot, and plenty of powder,

This is the soldier’s principle pay;

Publish the faster and brag the louder,

Mexicans always run away!

The Liberator’s third offering, “The Volunteer’s Song,” declares that America’s manifest destiny will be best served when the soldiers learn to drink the blood of Mexicans, in order to establish before the world that

We are freemen by our birth;

Free for madness or for mirth,

Free to conquer all the earth—after Mexico.

Nonetheless, as had occurred with the previous wars, such musical voices of peace were drowned out by the jingoistic writers who filled cheap songbooks like the Rough and Ready Songster with scores of vile, racist songs praising the President, his general Zachary Taylor, the defenders of the Alamo, and the Anglo-Saxon race at large—all at the expense of the Mexicans with their mongrel blood, their greasy hair, their “yellow skins,” and their “foul tyranny.”^[9]

In the traumatic aftermath of the Mexican-American War, the feminist reformer, Frances Gage, ventured a desperate and hopeful projection of American life in the next century. In a poem written to the music of John Hutchinson, from the vantage point of the 1850s, Gage pictured the landscape of “A Hundred Years Hence,” when drastic changes will have been made in the arenas of “politics, morals, religion and trade”:

Oppression and war will be heard of no more,

Nor the blood of a slave have its print on our shore;

Conventions will then be a needless expense,

The world will be thinking a hundred years hence.

The next decade, of course, would put paid to any similar hopes for the immediate future. The same expansionist tendencies that gave birth to the Mexican-American War led directly to the sectional crises that in turn would erupt into civil war before the nation’s centennial arrived. It would be an exaggeration to claim, as does music historian Christian McWhirter, that “the Civil War was the first American war fought to music”; but it is true to say that no American war prior to the Civil War had generated such an extensive body of music. Music indeed filled the air during the Civil War, mostly designed to encourage patriotism on both sides, as bands followed the soldiers onto the battlefields, entertained them around the campfires, and welcomed them home. “Patriotic songs publicized chivalric imagery alongside ideological propaganda, and the brass bands scattered across battlefields visually and aurally symbolized the nobility that so many citizen-soldiers esteemed,” the historian James Davis has explained. “The use of music during combat … exposed the underlying gallantry that drove scores of Civil War soldiers into hopeless situations and established a standard of courage for future generations of American soldiers.”^[10]

Civil war songs were vital in encouraging the soldiers, white and black (the latter basically on the northern side), to continue fighting. “Singing was for black servicemen not only a recreational activity, but a release from the predictable tensions involved in fighting a war, particularly one in which the problem of the freedom of the race was to be settled,” Eileen Southern explains. “Black soldiers sang, along with their own folksongs, the war songs of white composers that were popular with all servicemen.” (These songs included “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Just before the Battle Mother,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” and particularly “John Brown’s Body.”)^[11]

Daniel Kingman has deftly summarized the various functions of music during the war: “There are patriotic rallying songs, sung by both North and South—often to the same tune. More poignant personal expressions are the plaintive songs of soldiers in the field, thinking of home, and at home those of wives, mothers, and families, waiting, hoping and praying for the safe return of, or grieving for the loss of, their fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands away at war. These songs grew in numbers and importance as the war … dragged on.”^[12]

Lamentations about the bloodshed and wishing the fighting would end became a common theme during this and subsequent wars. While written and published by professionals, this latter group can be categorized as peace songs, not because the songs called for surrender, but because they questioned whether the fighting was worth it. Peace songs were not particularly popular, but there were a few exceptions, for various reasons. There were groups in the North who opposed Lincoln and the war, not only peace churches, such as the Quakers and Mennonites—who refused on principle to support any military conflict—but also southern sympathizers (commonly called “Copperheads”), who issued such campaign songs as “Johnny, Fill Up the Bowl”:

Abram Lincoln, what yer ’bout?

Hurrah! hurrah!

Stop this war: for it’s all played out—Hurrah! hurrah!

Abram Lincoln, what yer ’bout?

Stop this war: it’s all played out!

We’ll all drink stone blind—

Johnny, fill up the bowl.^[13]

More numerous were the songs that expressed war weariness, always common during a war, as the slaughter escalated and there were increasing numbers of empty chairs by the fireplaces. “Weeping, Sad and Lonely: or, When This Cruel War Is Over” (1863) was particularly popular, so much so that its morbid tone led the northern officers to try to restrict their men from singing it (just as the southern officers attempted to ban the singing of sentimental home-front songs like “Lorena”):

Weeping, sad and lonely,

Hopes and fears how vain:

Yet praying, when this cruel war is over,

Praying: that we meet again!

H. De Marsan, a broadside publisher in New York, seemed to specialize in such sentimental tunes, probably after 1863. They lacked much, if any, of the martial spirit that had marked the war’s beginning. For example, “The Soldier’s Child” lamented the father’s loss:

The soldiers pass by the open door,

Rattles the drum so wild …

And the mother kneels on her cottage-floor,

Clasping her orphan child …

But her lips and her heart must both be dumb;

For she knows that the father will never come!

Similarly, there was the chorus to “Dear Mother, I’ve Come Home to Die”:

Call sister … brother … to my side,

And take your Soldier’s last Good-bye, Good-bye;

Oh! Mother dear, draw near to me,

Dear Mother, I’ve come home to die.

While the popularity of such songs cannot be accurately gauged, it was surely not on the same scale of such patriotic tunes as George F. Root’s “The Battle Cry of Freedom” or “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” Dan Emmett’s “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or Harry Macarthy’s “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”^[14]

Among the stirring northern peace songs, perhaps “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” was the most well-known, both during and after the war. Written by Walter Kittredge (1834–1905), a New Hampshire musician known as the “Minstrel of the Merrimac,” the song first appeared in Kittredge’s Union Songbook in 1861 and was subsequently popularized by the Hutchinson Family Singers. The night before he left to serve in the Union army in 1863, Kittredge composed his sad lyrics:

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight

Wishing for the war to cease

Many are the hearts looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace.^[15]

The implementation of the draft in 1863 led to the violent New York “draft riots” in which many blacks were attacked as scapegoats, mostly by the largely working-class Irish males who could not afford to pay the $300 substitution fee to buy themselves out of conscription, as the sons of the wealthy might do. Henry Clay Work, a composer otherwise supportive of the Union cause (being the writer of such martial airs as “Kingdom Coming” and “Marching through Georgia”), registered his protest against the draft with his “Grafted into the Army”:

Oh, Jimmy farewell! Your brothers fell

Way down in Alabarmy:

I thought they would spare a lone widder’s heir,

But they grafted him into the army.

As for the Irish conscripts, the anonymously written “Paddy’s Lament” (or “Paddy’s Lamentation”) served as one of the war’s most heartfelt expressions of the poor immigrant’s desolation in the midst of the carnage:

So me and a hundred more

To Americay sailed o’er,

Our fortunes to be makin’ we were thinkin’.

But when we got to Yankee land,

They stuck a musket in me hands,

Sayin’, “Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln.”

And hear you boys, do take my advice:

To Americay I’ll have you not be comin’

For there’s nothin’ here but war,

Where the murderin’ cannons roar,

And I wish I was back home

In dear old Ireland.

General Meagher to us said,

“If you get shot, or you lose your head,

Every mother’s son of you will get a pension.”

Well, myself I lost me leg, All I got’s a wooden peg.

Oh, me boys, it is the truth to you I mention.^[16]

Many songs of the Civil War were so resonant with longings for peace and the end of bloodshed that they endured well into the twentieth century to be adopted and adapted as protests against subsequent wars (hence, Pete Seeger’s singing of “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” in the 1960s and Ry Cooder’s ironic use of “Battle Cry of Freedom” in the 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War). Otherwise, few noteworthy American peace songs emerged until the Spanish-American War of 1898 and its aftermath—the bloody struggle to defeat the nationalist uprising in the Philippines. These conflicts generated numerous martial airs, including “Brave Dewey and His Men,” “The Charge of the Roosevelt Riders,” and the many songs memorializing the 1898 sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor, such as “The Wreck of the Maine,” “My Sweetheart Went Down with the Maine,” and “The Pride of Our Nation.” Amidst the current of jingoistic muscle-flexing and the calls for vigorous action against the perfidious Spaniards and Filipinos, a few musical expressions emerged against the tide. “El Soldado Americano” appears to have been adapted from the sea chantey, “Home, Boys, Home,” to reflect the lowly soldier’s lot in the early days of the US occupation of the Philippines:

Man born of woman was a soldier for to be,

Born to degradation in every degree;

Of guard mounts and dress parades he never gets his ease;

He has so many masters he don’t know whom to please.

Chorus:

Home, boys, home! It’s home I want to be!

Home, boys, home! In God’s countree!

The ash, and the oak, and the weeping willow tree,

And the grass grow green back in North Amerikee.

More familiar—thanks to a resuscitation in the 1960s by the New Lost City Ramblers—is “The Battleship of Maine,” composed nearly thirty years after the sinking. As first recorded by Red Patterson’s Piedmont Log Rollers for Victor in 1927, and subsequently by the Ramblers, the words included,

Why are you running,

Are you afraid to die?

The reason that I’m running

Is because I cannot fly.^[17]

These and other songs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show that, in spite of the overwhelming body of military odes and celebrations in music, there have always been American voices calling for an end to war and alternative means of political and diplomatic engagement. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as American wars proliferated, so too would the sparks and flames of musical resistance.