“Tonight, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory Square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward ... The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by the lady-nurses of other wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, with books in their hands, singing.” — Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

When soldiers went to the battlefront in the 1860s, they brought a startling number of instruments: banjos, fiddles, tin whistles, mandolins, and guitars. As Civil War historian Bell Irvin Wiley writes, “The men who wore the blue, and the butternut Rebs who opposed them, more than American fighters of any period, deserve to be called singing soldiers.” At the front, soldiers learned many new songs to supplement the traditional hymns, drinking songs, and Christmas carols they had known at home.

Songs written in the Civil War era often told the stories of major battles and historic events with newspaper-like immediacy. When Major General Sherman gave Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift, songwriter Henry Clay Work commemorated the campaign within months with “[While We Were] Marching Through Georgia.” Ballads like “Dixie” and “The Liberty Ball” spread ideology and fed nationalism on both sides. Drums created the rhythm of battle and the beat for a march; most units had an infantry band, leading General Robert E. Lee to claim, “You cannot have an army without music.”

African-American spirituals also became a widespread musical tradition during the Civil War and the years that followed. As newly-freed or fugitive men and women made their way North, they carried with them songs they had learned orally on plantations. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is believed to have begun as a way to memorize the map of the Underground Railroad.

While the history of many songs from the era is well documented, the original authors of many spirituals like “Children Go Where I Send Thee” and “Rise Up Shepherd and Follow” remain unknown. Soldiers and civilians alike greeted Christmas reluctantly during the war, reminded of the conflict’s bleak insanity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the sentiment, writing how “the cannon thundered in the South / and with the sound the carols drowned / of peace on earth, good will to men.”

But historian James McIvor shares a brighter anecdote in his book God Rest Ye Merry Soldiers; on Christmas Eve 1862 in Tennessee, Union and Confederate troops camped in close proximity near enough to hear each other’s bands. At first, they played nationalist songs back and forth, but when the Union army played the ballad “Home, Sweet Home,” the Confederates joined with them. All the men could hear the other camp sing, and there was no attack that night. One of those soldiers, Samuel Seay, wrote, “And, after our bands had ceased playing, we could hear the sweet refrain as it died away on the cool frosty air.”

—Charles Haugland

Listen to the music of A Civil War Christmas