CHAPTER VIII. THE FATHERLESS SONG OF JOHN BROWN'S BODY. HEN the flag was shot down at Sumter the whole country quivered with new emotion. As I have already said, the feeling of great numbers always tends to utterance in song. The people of the North wanted to sing, but there was no national anthem which seemed to fit the occasion. The great theme of the war called for a new song, one which would strike a chord that had not yet been touched. The time had come for fresh lyrics, for a new generation of men-some outburst of a fiery, patriotic sentiment which would quickly take deep root in the hearts of the people. No sooner, therefore, had the belching guns at Sumter proclaimed that civil war was our misfortune, than there came into being, as if by magic and inspiration, a new, strange song, with its weird but enchanting chorus, an outburst of the genius of the nation—the song that kept in unison with the steady tramp of the armies on their way to fields of battle. The John Brown song has been called a "spontaneous generation of the uprising of the North," the refrain of which became the marching song of the Union in the very earliest months of the war. When the war cloud had overshadowed the loyal states, there was started in Boston harbor, as if it were a bold and defiant reply to the Confederate guns at Charleston, the song of "John Brown's Body;" and the almost religious enthusiasm of the words so blended with the exciting tread of the music as to make it an irresistible force in arousing a spirit of patriotism among the soldiers. It has a grim, uncouth melody, and a commanding refrain created, somehow, to enshrine the faith of the loyal states and the beneficence to humanity of the great civil war. The late Richard Henry Dana, Jr., author of that famous little book, "Two Years Before the Mast;" writing of this nondescript, fatherless song, said: "It would have been past belief had we been told that the almost undistinguishable name of John Brown should be whispered among four million of slaves and sung wherever the English language is spoken, and incorporated into an anthem to whose solemn cadences men would march to battle by tens of thousands." It is a curious fact that a war song so gifted with power for victory as that of "John Brown's Body," should have an origin so disputed and involved. Its beginning may not extend into dim antiquity, like the story of "Yankee Doodle," but there is so much of the unknown about both words and music, that historians have been extremely perplexed in the effort to give the public facts, rather than legend and fiction, as to the origin of the song. Some writers-and there are no visible. reasons why their story is not as believable as that of anybody else claim that the music was adapted and the words paraphrased from an old Methodist camp-meeting hymn, which drew its form and tune in turn from a domestic ballad of a thousand years ago, just as Luther, or, more properly, William Franck, found "Old Hundred" in the ancient and simple home music of the peasantry. Some twenty-five years ago there was a long discussion in the New York and Boston papers as to who should be credited with the authorship of this famous song of the Rebellion. But the voluminous correspondence did not disentangle history from theory and speculation. |