Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War by James A. Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War by James A. Davis Stephanie Dunson Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War. By James A. Davis. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. xxviii, 358. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-1072-2.) America in the nineteenth century was a particularly musical place. From folk songs and slave songs to parlor tunes, hymns, and aspiring anthems, the music of the era reflected a range of social attitudes, emerging cultural standards, and political divides. Accordingly, thoughtful analysis of music of the age is a boon to scholars with the requisite skills to effectively leverage the material for the analysis of the historical moment. James A. Davis is a scholar of that rank, as evidenced in his previous scholarship and further demonstrated in this thoroughly researched and deeply satisfying book. Here his sole focus is the titular song “Maryland, My Maryland.” Ubiquitous immediately before and throughout the Civil War, the melody provides a surprisingly effective platform, through Davis’s capable analysis, for observing shifting attitudes about national identity, regionalism, class, and fealty. In spite of the book’s large and lofty themes, an absorbing feature is that the details are commonly presented at a human scale. Davis has lavished attention on selecting excerpts from letters, journals, newspaper accounts, and memoirs to form what he describes as “a musical microhistory”: “a study of those accidents, the seemingly random and trivial events that by themselves seem inconsequential, but when taken as a whole are seen to have shaped the future character, meaning, and function of one of the most prominent songs in American history” (pp. xviii, xxvi). The song at the heart of Davis’s book was inspired by a poem written by Marylander James Ryder Randall after the Pratt Street Riot, a melee in Baltimore that occurred the week after the battle of Fort Sumter. While transferring trains in the city, a troop of Union soldiers was attacked by a group of pro-Confederacy civilians. Cornered by the mob, the soldiers fired at the crowd. Four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed in the violent encounter, sparking outrage across the South. Randall’s poem challenged Marylanders to join the Confederacy and “[a]venge the patriotic gore” of the pro-South citizens who died in the bloody exchange. It was quickly published in newspapers throughout the South to popular acclaim. So taken by the poem were the [End Page 484] Maryland sisters Jennie and Hetty Cary that they cast it as the lyric to a popular college glee (the melody was later popularized as the tune of the holiday song “O Tannenbaum”). “Maryland, My Maryland” was then printed and distributed by a local Baltimore music publisher. For reasons and in ways that Davis recounts, the song was immediately popular, particularly in the southern states. Davis writes that the song “was adopted as one of a handful of Southern anthems, even though it celebrated a state that never joined the Confederacy” (p. xvii). Indeed, the fact that a song so central to the Confederacy was in fact a rallying cry to a state that failed to formally ally itself with the rebel cause is the central paradox of the book. Geography, demographics, and dual political alliances kept Maryland in the Union. And yet, as Davis effectively argues, in lieu of involvement of the actual state, the Maryland of the song became the symbol of an imaginary, idealized South—even as it became something of a point of parody for those supporting the Union. The song’s resulting fluidity is charted throughout the book’s chapters, as the song and its namesake state serve as metaphor and microcosm of the tragically contradictory ideas and attitudes that nearly destroyed the nation. Moving chronologically through the Civil War years, Davis’s book meticulously explores the song’s origins, reception, use, and reuse, detailing the tension between the nation’s love of a good melody and its conflicting ideas of what constitutes a good cause. Stephanie Dunson Williams College Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association