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MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
Bring the good old bugle, boys, we’ll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it as we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! hurrah! We bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! hurrah! The flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound!
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found!
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Yes, and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years,
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.
“Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!”
So the saucy rebels said, and ’twas a handsome boast,
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the host,
While we were marching through Georgia.
So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train,
Sixty miles in latitude; three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain,
While we were marching through Georgia.
– Henry Clay Work.
Among Mr. Work’s famous war songs, none have captured so wide an audience, or held their own so well since the war, as Marching through Georgia. I think it is the foraging idea, so happily expressed, that, more than anything else except the contagious music which starts the most rheumatic foot to keeping time, has given this song its popular sway. There was something so reckless and romantic in Sherman’s cutting loose from his base of supplies and depending on the country through which he marched for food for his army, that the song which expressed this seized the imagination of the people.
General Sherman in his Memoirs says: “The skill and success of the men in collecting forage was one of the features of this march. Each brigade commander had authority to detail a company of foragers, usually about fifty men with one or two commissioned officers, selected for their boldness and enterprise. This party would be despatched before daylight with a knowledge of the intended day’s march and camp, would proceed on foot five or six miles from the route traveled by their brigade, and then visit every plantation and farm within range. They would usually procure a wagon, or family carriage, load it with bacon, cornmeal, turkeys, chickens, ducks, and everything that could be used as food or forage, and would then regain the main road, usually in advance of their train. When this came up, they would deliver to the brigade commissary the supplies thus gathered by the way. Often would I pass these foraging parties at the roadside, waiting for their wagons to come up, and was amused at their strange collections – mules, horses, even cattle, packed with old saddles and loaded with hams, bacon, bags of cornmeal, and poultry of every character and description. Although this foraging was attended with great danger and hard work, there seemed to be a charm about it that attracted the soldiers, and it was a privilege to be detailed on such a party. Daily they returned mounted on all sorts of beasts, which were at once taken from them and appropriated to the general use; but the next day they would start out again on foot, only to repeat the experience of the day before.”
Bishop Ames, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, used to greatly enjoy relating how he was invited to share the carriage of a German Baron on the occasion of the great military review in Washington at the close of the war. They had a favorable position for viewing the procession. Hour after hour the soldiers marched by. There rumbled the field artillery; there crowded by, with dripping sides and champing mouths, the cavalry, and after them tramped the unwearying infantry. At one time there passed a brigade clothed in brand-new uniforms, specially brought out for the occasion. Every uniform was clean and beautiful, every bayonet and sword polished and gleaming. The drill was perfect. The men were at the highest point of condition. Every motion and look bespoke the well-drilled soldier. As they marched by the Baron turned around excitedly to Bishop Ames and said, “Pishop, those men can whip the world.”
Immediately following them, purposely to bring out the strong contrast, was a brigade of old veterans, just as they came from their long campaign in the South. They were some of the men who had marched with Sherman to the sea – the men who had picked up the ducks and the cornmeal by the wayside. They were soiled and ragged. One man had one leg of his trousers patched out by strange cloth; another had no coat; another had a teakettle swung on his gun over his shoulder; another had part of a ham on his bayonet. So they represented the march through Georgia. They rolled along with an easy, swinging gait, chatting, laughing, occasionally imitating some animal, giving a bark, or a howl, or a screech, yet every man a soldier and keeping step to the music and in line. As these men with their tattered uniforms and torn and stained flags went by, the Baron sprang up, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, threw his arms around Bishop Ames and cried: “Mein Gott! Pishop, these men could whip the devil!”
General Sherman himself was never enthusiastic over the song that has immortalized his famous march. I have been unable to find in his Memoirs a single reference to it; but he quotes there in full a fine song by Adjutant S. H. M. Byers which he evidently would have been very glad to have had replace the simpler lines of Mr. Work. But Work had the key to the people’s heart, and his song will live as long as the American flag. Mr. Byers’ song, however, is a splendid piece of work and well worth repeating here. General Sherman says that on the afternoon of February 17, 1865, on overhauling his pockets, according to custom, to read more carefully the various notes and memoranda received during the day, he found a paper which had been given him by a Union prisoner who had escaped from Columbia. “It proved,” writes the General, “to be the song of Sherman’s March to the Sea, which had been composed by Adjutant S. H. M. Byers, of the Fifth Iowa Infantry, when a prisoner in the asylum at Columbia, which had been beautifully written off by a fellow-prisoner, and handed to me in person. This appeared to me so good that I at once sent for Byers, attached him to my staff, provided him with horse and equipment, and took him as far as Fayetteville, North Carolina, whence he was sent to Washington as bearer of despatches.”
The writing of this song was a good thing for Byers, as it secured him the lifelong friendship of General Sherman, and through his kindly support he was afterward made consul at Zurich, Switzerland. Adjutant Byers said that there was among the prisoners at Columbia an excellent glee club who used to sing it well, with an audience, often, of rebel ladies. It is truly a fine poem: —
“Our camp-fires shone bright on the mountain
That frowned on the river below,
As we stood by our guns in the morning,
And eagerly watched for the foe;
When a rider came out of the darkness
That hung over mountain and tree,
And shouted, ‘Boys, up and be ready!
For Sherman will march to the sea!’
Then sang we the song of our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars in our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea!
“Then cheer upon cheer for bold Sherman
Went up from each valley and glen,
And the bugles reëchoed the music
That came from the lips of the men;
For we knew that the stars in our banner
More bright in their splendor would be,
And that blessings from Northland would greet us,
When Sherman marched down to the sea!
“Then forward, boys! forward to battle!
We marched on our wearisome way,
We stormed the wild hills of Resaca —
God bless those who fell on that day!
Then Kenesaw frowned in its glory,
Frowned down on the flag of the free;
But the East and the West bore our standard,
And Sherman marched on to the sea!
“Still onward we pressed, till our banners
Swept out from Atlanta’s grim walls,
And the blood of the patriot dampened
The soil where the traitor-flag falls;
But we paused not to weep for the fallen,
Who slept by each river and tree,
Yet we twined a wreath of the laurel
As Sherman marched down to the sea!
“Oh, proud was our army that morning,
That stood where the pine darkly towers,
When Sherman said, ‘Boys, you are weary,
But to-day fair Savannah is ours!’
Then sang we the song of our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars in our banner shone brighter
When Sherman camped down by the sea!”
MY MARYLAND
The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Hark to an exiled son’s appeal,
Maryland!
My mother State, to thee I kneel,
Maryland!
For life or death, for woe or weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Thou wilt not cower in the dust,
Maryland!
Thy beaming sword shall never rust,
Maryland!
Remember Carroll’s sacred trust,
Remember Howard’s warlike thrust,
And all thy slumberers with the just,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Come! ’Tis the red dawn of the day,
Maryland!
Come with thy panoplied array,
Maryland!
With Ringgold’s spirit for the fray,
With Watson’s blood at Monterey,
With fearless Lowe and dashing May,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Dear mother, burst the tyrant’s chain,
Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain,
“Sic semper!” ’tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back amain,
Maryland!
Arise in majesty again,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Come! for thy shield is bright and strong,
Maryland!
Come! for thy dalliance does thee wrong,
Maryland!
Come to thine own heroic throng
Stalking with liberty along,
And chant thy dauntless slogan-song,
Maryland, my Maryland!
I see the blush upon thy cheek,
Maryland!
But thou wast ever bravely meek,
Maryland!
But lo! There surges forth a shriek,
From hill to hill, from creek to creek,
Potomac calls to Chesapeake,
Maryland, my Maryland!
Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll,
Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control,
Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll,
Better the shot, the blade, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,
Maryland, my Maryland!
I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The “Old Line’s” bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb;
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum —
She breathes, she burns! She’ll come!
She’ll come!
Maryland, my Maryland!
– James Ryder Randall.
My Maryland, one of the most popular songs of the Confederacy, was written by James Ryder Randall, in 1861. Randall was at that time professor of English literature at Poydras College, upon the Fausse Rivière, of Louisiana. He was very young, and had but recently come from college in Maryland. He was full of poetry and romance, and when one day in April, 1861, he read in the New Orleans Delta the news of the attack on the Massachusetts Sixth as they passed through Baltimore, it fired his blood. “This account excited me greatly,” Mr. Randall writes. “I had long been absent from my native city, and the startling event there inflamed my mind. That night I could not sleep, for my nerves were all unstrung, and I could not dismiss what I had read in the paper from my mind. About midnight I arose, lit a candle, and went to my desk. Some powerful spirit appeared to possess me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of My Maryland. I remember that the idea appeared to take shape first as music in the brain – some wild air that I cannot now recall. The whole poem of nine stanzas, as originally written, was dashed off rapidly when once begun.”
As Doctor Matthews well says, there is often a feeling afloat in the minds of men, undefined and vague for want of one to give it form, and held in solution, as it were, until a chance word dropped in the ear of a poet suddenly crystallizes this feeling into song, in which all may see clearly and sharply reflected what in their own thought was shapeless and hazy. It was young Randall’s fortune to be the instrument through which the South spoke, and, by a natural reaction, his burning lines helped “fire the Southern heart.”
The form of the poem was suggested by Mangan’s Karamanian Exile, —
“I see thee ever in my dreams,
Karaman!
Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams,
Karaman, O Karaman!
As when thy gold-bright morning gleams,
As when the deepening sunset seams
With lines of light thy hills and streams,
Karaman!
So now thou loomest on my dreams,
Karaman, O Karaman!”
The previous use of this form, which is perhaps the most effective possible for a battle hymn, by no means detracts from Randall’s stirring poem.
The poem would never have had great effect, however, if it had not been fortunate in drafting to its service a splendid piece of music. Miss Hattie Cary, of Baltimore, afterward the wife of Professor H. M. Martin, of Johns-Hopkins University, brought about the wedding which enabled Randall’s song to reach every camp-fire of the Southern armies. “The Glee Club was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June,” she writes, “and my sister Jennie, being the only musical member of the family, had charge of the program on the occasion. With a schoolgirl’s eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and ardent expression of feelings that were by this time wrought up to the point of explosion. In vain she searched through her stock of songs and airs – nothing seemed intense enough to suit her. Aroused by her tone of despair, I came to the rescue with the suggestion that she should adapt the words of Maryland, my Maryland, which had been constantly on my lips since the appearance of the lyric a few days before in the South. I produced the paper and began declaiming the verses. ‘Lauriger Horatius,’ she exclaimed, and in a flash the immortal song found a voice in the stirring air so perfectly adapted to it. That night when her contralto voice rang out the stanzas, the refrain rolled forth from every throat without pause or preparation; and the enthusiasm communicated itself with such effect to the crowd assembled beneath our windows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party.”
This air was originally an old German student melody used for a lovely German lyric, Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, which Longfellow has numbered among his translations. The first verse is as follows, —
“O hemlock tree! O hemlock tree! how faithful are thy branches!
Green not only in summer time,
But in the winter’s frost and rime!
O hemlock tree! O hemlock tree! how faithful are thy branches!”
Some one has well said that the transmigration of tunes is a large and fertile subject. The capturing of the air of a jolly college song and harnessing it to the service of a fiery battle hymn may seem very strange, but not so to those who are familiar with the adventures which a tune has often undergone.
This song was not only popular through the South, but so stately and pleasing was the melody that it was often sung in the North. A soldier relates: “I remember hearing it sung under circumstances that for the time made me fancy it was the sweetest song I ever listened to. Our command had just reached Frederick City, Maryland, after a distressing forced march, and going into bivouac, the staff to which I was attached took up their quarters on the piazza of a lonely mansion, and there, wrapping themselves in their blankets, with their saddles for pillows, sought needed repose. Sleep would not come to my eyelids. The night was a delicious one; it was warm, but a slight breeze was stirring, and the sky was clear, and the stars shone brilliantly. The stillness was profound, every one around me was asleep, when suddenly there fell upon my ears the song: —
‘The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!’
The voice was a mezzo-soprano, full, round, and clear, and the charming melody was sung with infinite tenderness and delicacy of shading. I listened almost breathlessly, for it was the first time I had heard the song, and as it was ended, I arose for the purpose of ascertaining who it was that sang so sweetly. I found her in the person of a plump negro girl of about sixteen years, with a face blacker than the smoke in Vulcan’s smithy.”
A delightful contrast to the attack of the mob on the Massachusetts Sixth, in Baltimore, in 1861, was furnished recently when the historic Sixth from Boston passed through Baltimore on their way to the South to take part in the invasion of Cuba. Baltimore gave herself up to seeing how splendidly she could receive the regiment that had once been mobbed in her streets. They were received at the station by the Mayor, the school-children were drawn up in line along the route of march, and the soldiers from Massachusetts were pelted with flowers instead of stones and bullets. Each soldier was given a little box containing cake and fruit, and a love letter, while a great motto met their eyes which said: “Let the welcome of ‘98 efface the memory of ‘61.”
ALL QUIET ALONG THE POTOMAC
“All quiet along the Potomac,” they say,
“Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
’Tis nothing: a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men
Moaning out all alone the death-rattle.”
All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
Or the light of the watchfires, are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping:
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes,
Keep guard, – for the army is sleeping.
There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread,
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, his face, dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep;
For their mother – may heaven defend her!
The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken
Leaped up to his lips, when low, murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken;
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to his side,
As if to keep down the heart swelling.
He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary,
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light,
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves,
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle – “Ha! Mary, good-bye,”
And the lifeblood is ebbing and plashing.
All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The picket’s off duty forever.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves,
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle – “Ha! Mary, good-bye,”
And the lifeblood is ebbing and plashing.
– Ethel Lynn Beers.
Mrs. Beers’s right to the authorship of this famous song has been very severely contested, but there seems to be no reason now to doubt that the really fine poem is hers. Though there have been numerous claimants for its authorship, the one who has come nearest to carrying the day is, strange to say, a Southerner. It is curious indeed that a war song should be claimed by both sides, but that has been the story of this song. This Southerner is Lamar Fontaine. Mr. Fontaine was born at Gay Hill, Texas. Twenty years before the war his father moved to Austin, Texas, and was secretary to General Lamar, for whom the son was named. When the war broke out this young Lamar Fontaine became a major in the Confederate Army. Some time in 1862, when the poem All Quiet Along the Potomac appeared in a Southern newspaper, Lamar Fontaine’s name was attached to it. Davidson, the author of Living Writers of the South, wrote to Fontaine in regard to the authorship of this hymn, and in replying Fontaine said: “The poem in question was written by me while our army lay at Fairfax Courthouse, or rather the greater portion, in and around that place. On the second day of August, 1861, I first read it to a few of my messmates in Company I, Second Virginia Cavalry. During the month of August I gave away many manuscript copies to soldiers, and some few to ladies in and about Leesburg, Loudon County, Virginia. In fact, I think that most of the men belonging to the Second Virginia, then commanded by Colonel Radford, were aware of the fact that I was the author of it. I never saw the piece in print until just before the battle of Leesburg (October 21, 1861), and then it was in a Northern paper with the notice that it had been found on the dead body of a picket. I hope the controversy between myself and others in regard to All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night, will soon be forever settled. I wrote it, and the world knows it; and they may howl over it, and give it to as many authors as they please. I wrote it, and I am a Southern man, and I am proud of the title, and am glad that my children will know that the South was the birthplace of their fathers, from their generation back to the seventh.”
Another Southern man, however, and a distinguished one, puts a very different look on the case. Mr. Chandler Harris of Georgia writes a letter for insertion in Mr. Davidson’s volume in the course of which he says: “After a careful and impartial investigation of all the facts in my reach, I have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Beers, and not Mr. Fontaine, wrote the poem in question. My reasons for believing that Mr. Fontaine is not the author of All Quiet, are several:
“1. The poem appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861, as The Picket Guard, over the initials of Mrs. Ethel Beers of New York.
“2. It did not make its appearance in any Southern paper until about April or May, 1862.
“3. It was published as having been found in the pocket of a dead soldier on the battlefield. It is more than probable that the dead soldier was a Federal, and that the poem had been clipped from Harper’s.
“4. I have compared the poem in Harper’s with the same as it first appeared in the Southern papers, and find the punctuation to be precisely the same.
“5. Mr. Fontaine, so far as I have seen, has given elsewhere no evidence of the powers displayed in that poem. I, however, remember noticing in the Charleston Courier, in 1863, or 1864, a ‘Parodie’ (as Mr. L. F. had it) on Mrs. Norton’s Bingen on the Rhine, which was positively the poorest affair I ever saw. Mr. Fontaine had just come out of a Federal prison, and some irresponsible editor, in speaking of this ‘Parodie’ remarked that the poet’s Pegasus had probably worn his wings out against the walls of his Northern dungeon.
“You probably know me well enough to acquit me, in this instance at least, of the charge of prejudice. I am jealous of Southern literature, and if I have any partiality in the matter at all, it is in favor of Major Lamar Fontaine’s claim. I should like to claim this poem for that gentleman; I should be glad to claim it as a specimen of Southern literature, but the facts in the case do not warrant it.”
Mr. Alfred H. Guernsey, for many years editor of Harper’s Magazine, bears testimony that the poem, bearing the title The Picket Guard, appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861. He further declares that it was furnished by Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers, whom he describes as “a lady whom I think incapable of palming off as her own any production of another.”
Mrs. Beers was born in Goshen, New York, and her maiden name was Ethelinda Eliot. She was a direct descendant of John Eliot, the heroic apostle to the Indians. When she began to write for the newspapers she signed her contributions “Ethel Lynn,” a nom de plume very naturally suggested by her Christian name. After her marriage, she added her husband’s name, and over the signature of Ethel Lynn Beers published many poems. In her later years Mrs. Beers resided in Orange, New Jersey, where she died October 10, 1879, on the very day on which her poems, among them All Quiet Along the Potomac, were issued in book form.
There has never been any contest as to the music of the song, which was composed by J. Dayton, the leader of the band of the First Connecticut Artillery.
