Sweet Freedom's Song by Branham Robert James;Hartnett Stephen J.;

Author:Branham, Robert James;Hartnett, Stephen J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Mission of the War: “Cursed Be the Slaver’s Might”

While each of the Civil War’s combatants believed their cause was righteous, supporters of both the Union and the Confederacy disagreed about what had caused the war and about its desired outcomes. While these rhetorical struggles for interpretation have long outlived the physical conflict, they were also heated during the war, notably in the Union’s slow and painfully contested embrace of emancipation. Given the arguments offered thus far regarding the relationships among song and politics, music and consciousness, it is no surprise to learn that music was an important medium for expressing the varied views of both soldiers and civilians regarding the mission of the war. Indeed, while Northerners sang of preserving the Union and fighting for freedom, Confederates sang of themselves as fighting for liberty, rebelling against an oppressive, machine-infested, money-grubbing, heartless Union. Emily Washington’s “Confederate Song of Freedom,” for example, urged soldiers to “Strike home for Liberty,” while a song dedicated to “The Confederate Flag,” performed in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1861, pronounced the banner an “Emblem of liberty—symbol of truth.”30

Nonetheless, despite such tributes to Liberty and truth, the southern version of these terms was ultimately rooted in the right to hold others in slavery. In fact, the Confederate constitution required that all states permit and protect slavery. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens made clear how fundamental slavery was to the construction of Southern national identity in his 21 March 1861 speech in Savannah’s Athenaeum, where he observed that slavery was the “rock” on which Jefferson had correctly predicted that “the old Union would split.” But whereas some of the drafters of the U.S. Constitution had believed that slavery was an evil that should pass away, “our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Stephens’s emphatic explanation was applauded by his immediate audience and widely reprinted in Union and Confederate newspapers. Most northern abolitionists agreed with Stephens’s assessment of the essential issue; African American abolitionists in particular had argued from the outset of the war that its stakes were inevitably slavery and freedom. “A blind man can see,” John S. Rock told his audience at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on 23 January 1862, “that the present war is an effort to nationalize, perpetuate, and extend slavery in this country.”31

Despite such proclamations, most Union political and military leaders initially resisted the idea that the war had anything to do with slavery. Slavery, after all, existed in several states fighting for the Union, and in those where it was prohibited, abolition and abolitionists were unpopular. Boston mayor Joseph M. Wightman cautioned President Lincoln that in his city “and I believe in a large majority of the other cities and towns … the mingling of questions in relation to slavery with the crushing out of the present rebellion is viewed with the strongest feelings of disapprobation.

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