Harmonizing Hegemony: How Music Helped Turn American Civil War Era Individuals into Collective Fighting Forces

Abstract

Music was “a quintessential part of soldier life” during the American Civil War, namely because music impacted almost every American’s life in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Christian McWhirter argued that nearly every Civil War era primary source—from diaries to widespread publications—mentioned music to some extent and that the thoughts and feelings of everyday Americans were expressed daily through their interactions with music. Utilizing a new and immense wealth of digitized letters and diaries, this thesis tests previous historiographical conclusions about music’s place in American Civil War Era study. The letters and diaries studied were collected from across the conflict illustrating a candid and universal passion for music as a strong cultural force in the war extending music beyond soundtrack into a position of vital study. Not tangential to the war, music provides a lens to view soldiering in all its aspects and answer questions about the common citizen-soldier. This thesis argues that military music of the fife, drum, bugle, and brass band was vital for control over soldiers and contenting their soldiering life. However, folk music and camp music was necessary to counterbalance military music alleviating the suffering of soldiering. This thesis highlights the importance of musicology for Civil War era historians, the vitality of digital public history, from source gathering to public interpretation, as well as add to that growing dialog with a public history component that features this research in an online format. We will never hear the drums tambour, the fifes flouting, or the bugles blast the way Civil War soldiers did, but with this project we will better understand what that music meant to those citizen-soldiers.