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A lot of people rightly saying there can be no national unity without justice and accountability, and that the premature push for unity after the Civil War enabled this. Music played a role in all that. Much of what follows is based on the work of Jim Davis at SUNY Fredonia 1/8
After 1877 and the failure of reconstruction, many Civil War songs became simply "American" songs. They were stripped of their factional identities, no longer "Union" or "Confederate" songs, and started to be known as "songs of war" 2/8
Think of how Maryland's state song is a former Confederate song, for example. In his 2020 @SocAmMusic paper, Davis showed how anthologies gradually intermingled northern and southern songs as nostalgic Civil War songs, without regional affiliations 3/8
National unity was allegorized in the most popular of genres, the sentimental parlor love song. A great example is Hoier and Morgan's "When Northern Eyes of Blue (Surrendered to Southern Gray)," published in Chicago by Rossiter in 1915 4/8
The lyrics draw a direct connection between the lovers' eye color and the color of soldier uniforms (blue = Union, gray = Confed) and nostalgically reimagines the "battle" of these two eyes meeting "like their grandads used to do." 5/8
The horror and violence of war is ameliorated into the "battle" of eyes falling in love. But significantly, the woman's Northern blues *surrender* to Southern grays. The song inverts history and here, the South wins 6/8
This has the effect of downplaying the severity and reality of the South's treason, and instead re-projects the conflict into a more trivial matter of this love game, one whose stakes are far lower. If he'd fallen for her (South surrendering to North), the outcome is the same 7/8
50 years removed from the conflict, this story is meant to remind us that it doesn't matter if we defended the country or rebelled against it, because ultimately our victory lies in our ability to come together. It's a dangerous allegory that prioritizes unity over justice 8/8
Side note: "he fought her with love and kisses til at last her poor heart gave way" doesn't sound like a great example of consent...the horrors of war conflated with patriarchal control and entitlement of women
