NATIONAL hymn is one of the things which cannot be made to order. No man has ever yet sat him down and taken up his pen and said, "I will write a national hymn," and composed either words or music which the nation was willing to take for its own. The making of the song of a people is a happy accident, not to be accomplished by taking thought. It must be the result of fiery feeling long confined, and suddenly finding vent in burning words or moving strains. Sometimes the heat and the pressure of emotion have been fierce enough and intense enough to call forth at once both words and music, and to weld them together indissolubly once and for all. Almost always the maker of the song does not suspect the abiding value of his work; he has wrought unconsciously, moved by a power within; he has written for immediate relief to himself, and with no thought of fame or the future; he has builded better than he knew. The great national lyric is the result of the conjunction of the hour and the man. Monarchs cannot command it, and even poets are often powerless to achieve it. No one of the great national hymns has been written by a great poet. But for his one immortal lyric, neither the author of the " Marseillaise nor the author of the "Wacht am Rhein " would have his line in the biographical dictionaries. But when a song has once taken root in the hearts of a people, time itself is powerless against it. The flat and feeble "Partant pour la Syrie," which a filial fiat made the hymn of imperial France, had to give way to the strong and virile notes of the "Marseillaise," when there was need to arouse the martial spirit of the French in 1870. The noble measures of "God Save the King," as simple and dignified a national hymn as any country can boast, lift up the hearts of the English people; and the brisk tune of the "British Grenadiers" has swept away many a man into the ranks of the recruiting regiment. The English are rich in war tunes; and the pathetic "Girl I left behind me" encourages and sustains both those who go to the front and those who remain at home. Here in the United States we have no "Marseillaise," no "God Save the King," no "Wacht am Rhein"; we have but "Yankee Doodle" and the "Star-spangled Banner." More than one enterprising poet,

and more than one aspiring musician, has volunteered to take the contract to supply the deficiency; as yet no one has succeeded. "Yankee Doodle" we got during the Revolution, and the " Star-spangled Banner" was the gift of the war of 1812; from the Civil War we have received at least two war songs which, as war songs simply, are finer than either of these,—"John Brown's Body" and "Marching through Georgia."

Of the purely lyrical outburst which the war called forth, but little trace is now to be detected in literature except by special students.* In most cases neither words nor music have had vitality enough to survive a quarter of a century. Really, indeed, two things only survive, one Southern and the other Northern, one a war-cry in verse, the other a martial tune: one is the lyric "My Maryland," and the other is the marching song "John Brown's Body." The origin and development of the latter, the rude chant to which a million of the soldiers of the Union kept time, is uncertain and involved in dispute. The history of the former may be declared exactly; and by the courtesy of those who did the deed — for the making of a war song is of a truth a deed at arms — I am enabled to state fully the circumstances under which it was written, set to music, and first sung before the soldiers of the South.

MY MARYLAND.

classics in Poydras College at Pointe Coupée, on the Fausse Rivière, in Louisiana, about seven miles from the Mississippi; and there in April, 1861, he read in the New Orleans "Delta" the news of the attack on the Massachusetts troops as they passed through Baltimore.

"This account excited me greatly," Mr. Randall writes in answer to my request for information; "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 rose, 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 first take shape as music in the brain some wild air that I cannot now recall. The whole poem was dashed off rapidly when once begun. It was not composed in cold blood, but under what may be called a conflagration of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect. I was stirred to a desire for some way linking my name with that of my native State, if not 'with my land's language.' But I never expected to do this with one single, supreme effort, and no one was more surprised than I was at the widespread and instantaneous popularity of the lyric I had been so strangely stimulated to write." Mr. Randall read the poem the next morning to the college boys, and at their suggestion sent it to the "Delta," in which it was first printed, and from which it was copied into nearly every Southern journal. "I did not concern myself much about it," Mr. Randall adds, "but very soon, from all parts of the country, there was borne to me, in my remote place of residence, evidence that I had made a great hit, and that, whatever might be the fate of the Confederacy, the song would survive it."

Published in the last days of April, 1861, when every eye was fixed on the border States, the stirring stanzas of the Tyrtæan bard appeared in the very nick of time. 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 Mr. Randall's good fortune to be the instrument through which the South spoke. By a natural reaction his burning lines helped "to fire the Southern heart." To do their work well, his words needed to be wedded to music. Unlike the authors of the VOL. XXXIV. -86.

"Star-spangled Banner" and the "Marseillaise," the author of "My Maryland" had not written it to fit a tune already familiar. It was left for a lady of Baltimore to lend the lyric the musical wings it needed to enable it to reach every camp-fire of the Southern armies. To the courtesy of this lady, then Miss Hetty Cary, and now the wife of Professor H. Newell Martin, of Johns Hopkins University, I am indebted for a picturesque description of the marriage of the words to the music, and of the first singing of the song before the Southern troops.

The house of Mrs. Martin's father was the headquarters for the Southern sympathizers of Baltimore. Correspondence, money, clothing, supplies of all kinds went thence through the lines to the young men of the city who had joined the Confederate army.

"The enthusiasm of the girls who worked and of the 'boys' who watched for their chance to slip through the lines to Dixie's land found vent and inspiration in such patriotic songs as could be made or adapted to suit our needs. The glee club was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June, and my sister, Miss Jennie Cary, being the only musical member of the family, had charge of the programme on the occasion. With a schoolgirl's eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and ardent expression of feelings that by this time were 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 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 present without pause or preparation; and the enthusiasm communicated itself with such effect to a crowd assembled beneath our open windows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party."

"Lauriger Horatius" has long been a favorite college song, and it had been introduced into the Cary household by Mr. Burton N. Harrison, then a Yale student. The air to which it is sung is used also for a lovely German lyric, "Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum," which Longfellow has translated "O Hemlock Tree." The transmigration of tunes is too large and fertile a subject for me

to do more here than refer to it. The taking of the air of a jovial college song to use as the setting of a fiery war-lyric may seem strange and curious, but only to those who are not familiar with the adventures and transformations a tune is often made to undergo.

Hopkinson's "Hail Columbia!" for example, was written to the tune of the "President's March," just as Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was written to "John Brown's Body." The "Wearing of the Green," of the Irishman, is sung to the same air as the "Benny Havens, O!" of the West-Pointer. The "Starspangled Banner" has to make shift with the second-hand music of " Anacreon in Heaven"; while our other national air, "Yankee Doodle," uses over the notes of an old English nursery rhyme, "Lucy Locket," once a personal lampoon in the days of the " Beggars' Opera," and now surviving in the "Baby's Opera" of Mr. Walter Crane. "My Country, 'tis of Thee," is set to the truly British tune of "God Save the King," the origin of which is doubtful, as it is claimed by the French and the Germans as well as the English. In the hour of battle a war-tune is subject to the right of capture, and, like the cannon taken from the enemy, it is turned against its maker.

To return to "My Maryland": a few weeks after the welding of the words and the music, Mrs. Martin with her brother and sister went through the lines, convoying several trunks full of military clothing, and wearing concealed about her person a flag bearing the arms of Maryland, a gift from the ladies of Baltimore to the Maryland troops in the Confederate army. In consequence of reports which were borne back to the Union authorities, the ladies were forbidden to return. "We were living," so Mrs. Martin writes me, "in Virginia in exile, when, shortly after the battle of Manassas, General Beauregard, hearing of our labors and sufferings in behalf of the Marylanders who had already done such gallant service in his command, invited us to visit them at his headquarters near Fairfax Court House, sending a pass and an escort for us, and the friends by whom we should be accompanied. Our party encamped the first night in tents prepared for us at Manassas, with my kinsman, Captain Sterrell, who was in charge of the fortifications there. We were serenaded by the famous Washington Artillery of New Orleans, aided by all the fine voices within reach. Captain Sterrell expressed our thanks, and asked if there were any service we might render in return. 'Let us hear a woman's voice,' was the cry which arose in response. And, standing in the tent-door, under cover of the darkness, my sister sang

'My Maryland!' This, I believe, was the birth of the song in the army. The refrain was speedily caught up and tossed back to us from hundreds of rebel throats. As the last notes died away, there surged forth from the gathering throng a wild shout-'We will break her chains! She shall be free! She shall be free! Three cheers and a tiger for Maryland!' And they were given with a will. There was not a dry eye in the tent, and, we were told the next day, not a cap with a rim on it in camp. Nothing could have kept Mr. Randall's verses from living and growing into a power. To us fell the happy chance of first giving them voice. In a few weeks My Maryland!' had found its way to the heart of our whole people, and become a great national song."

I wish I could call as charming and as striking a witness to set forth the origin of "John Brown's Body." The genesis of both words and music is obscure and involved. The raw facts of historical criticism - names, places, dates are deficient. The martial hymn has been called a spontaneous generation of the uprising of the North- a self-made song, which sang itself into being of its own accord. Some have treated it as a sudden evolution from the inner consciousness of the early soldiers all aglow with free-soil enthusiasm; and these speak of it as springing, like Minerva from the head of Jove, full-armed and mature. Others have more happily likened it to Topsy, in that it never was born, it growed; and this latter theory has the support of the facts as far as they can be disentangled from a maze of fiction and legend. A tentative and conjectural reconstruction of the story of the song is all I dare venture upon; and I stand corrected in anticipation.

In 1856 Mr. William Steffe, of Philadelphia, was requested by a fire-company of Charleston, South Carolina, to write an air to a series of verses, the chorus of which began,

"Say, bummers, will you meet us?" After the air had served its purpose, a new set of words was fitted to it, and it went on its way as a camp-meeting hymn,

"Say, brothers, will you meet us ?"

In the four years between the composing of the tune and the outbreak of the war, the camp-meeting hymn had time to become popular throughout the North. Probably-although I have not been able to verify the supposition "Say, brothers, will you meet us? "(like " Dixie," from which it was soon to part company) served as an air for Lincolnand-Hamlin campaign songs in the canvass of 1860. Certainly the tune was familiar enough

in New England by the time Lincoln was inaugurated.

John Brown had been hanged in December, 1859. The feeling which that execution called forth in Massachusetts found relief in a meeting at Faneuil Hall. A recent writer has recorded his recollection of that evening, and of the crowd of boys and youths parading the streets of Boston and singing to a familiar air a monotonous lament of which the burden was

"Tell John Andrew, Tell John Andrew, Tell John Andrew

John Brown's dead!"

A little more than a year later came the news of the shot against the flag at Sumter. Some memory of this street song seems to have survived, and to have combined chemically with the tune of " Say, brothers, will you meet us?" the time of which was modified to a march; and in this way "John Brown's Body" came into being. It was the song of the hour. There was a special taunt to the South in the use of the name of the martyr of abolition, while to the North that name was as a slogan. As the poet a prophet again, for once had written when John Brown was yet alive, though condemned to

death:

If one may rely fully on Major Bosbyshell, to whose interesting paper in the "Grand Army Scout" I am indebted for much valuable suggestion, the song was put together by a quartet of men in the Second Battalion (“Tigers ”), a Massachusetts command quartered at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, in April, 1861,- just at the time when" My Maryland" was getting itself sung at the South. This quartet, with many others of the "Tigers," enlisted in the Twelfth Massachusetts Volunteers, commanded by Colonel Fletcher Webster. Beyond all question it was the Webster regiment which first adopted "John Brown's Body" as a marching song. The soldiers of this regiment sang it as they marched down Broadway in New York, July 24th, 1861, on their way from Boston to the front. They sang it incessantly until August, 1862, when Colonel Webster died, and when the tune had *Stedman in "John Brown of Osawatomie."

been taken up by the nation at large, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were marching forward to the fight with the name of John Brown on their lips.

There was a majestic simplicity in the rhythm like the beating of mighty hammers. In the beginning the words were bare to the verge of barrenness. There was no lack of poets to fill them out. Henry Howard Brownell, the singer of the "Bay Fight" and the "River Fight," skillfully utilized the accepted lines, which he enriched with a deeper meaning. Then Mrs. Howe wrote her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," perhaps the most resonant and elevated of the poems of American patriotism. † Of late the air has been taken again by Mr. William Morris, poet and socialist, decorator and reformer, as the one to which shall be sung his eloquent and stirring "March of the Workers."

Curiously enough, the history of "Dixie" is not at all unlike the history of "John Brown's Body." "Dixie" was composed in 1859, by Mr. Dan D. Emmett, as a “walkaround" for Bryant's minstrels, then performing at Mechanics' Hall in New York. Mr.

Emmett had traveled with circuses, and had heard the performers refer to the States south of Mason and Dixon's line as " Dixie's land," wishing themselves there as soon as the Northern climate began to be too severe for those who live in tents like the Arabs. It was on this expression of Northern circus performers,

"I wish I was in Dixie,"

that Mr. Emmett constructed his song. The "walk-around" hit the taste of the New York play-going public, and it was adopted at once by various bands of wandering minstrels, who sang and danced it in all parts of the Union. In the fall of 1860 Mrs. John Wood sang it in New Orleans in John Brougham's burlesque of "Pocahontas," and in New Orleans it took root. Without any authority from the composer, a New Orleans publisher had the air harmonized and arranged, and he issued it with words embodying the strong Southern feeling of the chief city of Louisiana. As from Boston "John Brown's Body" spread through the North, so from New Orleans “Dixie” spread through the South; and as Northern poets strove to find fit words for the one, so Southern poets wrote fiery lines to fill the measures of the other. Of the sets of verses written to "Dixie," the best, perhaps, is that by General Albert Pike, of Arkansas, who happens, by a fortuitous chance, to have been a native of Vermont. With Republican words "Dixie "had been used as a campaign song + See page 629.