Opus 1861, our Civil War show for this season, has had two weeks of music rehearsals now and the list of songs seems to be final, though the order is still in question:
For Bales! (We All Went Down to New Orleans)
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel
John Brown's Body
Give Us a Flag
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
Just Before the Battle, Mother
Shule Agrah (Johnny Is Gone for a Soldier)
When This Cruel War Is Over (Weeping Sad and Lonely)
The show is being built from these songs and about six letters from modern-day U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. From time to time between now and when the show opens in April, I'll post some information about at least some of the songs, including videos if I find worthwhile versions. Above is a 1912 Edison cylinder recording of "Just Before the Battle, Mother" sung by Will Oakland: a 100-year-old singing of a 148-year-old song.
Oakland is a footnote to a footnote. To the small degree he's remembered at all today, it's not for his own work but for having supposedly discovered Al Jolson--a singer who is himself more and more forgotten as decades vanish behind us. Oakland had a substantial career during the days of acoustic (pre-electric microphone) recording. He recorded from 1908 until at least 1914, as a solo act as well as a duet partner with Billy Murray and as counter-tenor with the Heidelberg Quintet. He had a #1 record in 1910, "I Love the Name of Mary."
"Just Before the Battle, Mother" was written in Chicago in 1864 by George F. Root, perhaps the greatest of all writers of Civil War songs. Certainly he was the promptest, composing the very first popular song about the war, "The First Shot Is Fired: May God Protect the Right," the day after Fort Sumter was surrendered; the publisher had it in print and on sale the day after that. He wrote "The Battle Cry of Freedom," also included in Opus 1861, as well as "The Vacant Chair," "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and over two dozen other Civil War songs, more than any other songwriter. After the war, some of his tunes were used by others to provide settings for other lyrics, making him the unwitting composer of "Jesus Loves the Little Children," "Hobo's Lullaby," "God Save Ireland," and "Life's Railway to Heaven."
One of the four people lined up against the wall in this photograph is actually a drinking fountain. Can you tell which one?
Lincoln in the news on his birthday:
Today Ford's Theatre held an open house for its new $25 million Lincoln Museum. From the New York Times article: "Lincoln has long been at the heart of the capital city: the National Mall is an affirmation of the Union he championed, the Lincoln Memorial on one end, and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the other. But there was, until recently, no extensive exhibition here about Lincoln and his times. Ford’s Theater, Mr. Tetreault explained, used to be a brief stopping point. Now, with these exhibitions, Lincoln has found a home in a place best known for his death."
A famous portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, and the tearjerker story behind it, have both been revealed as frauds concocted in the 1920s to cheat the Lincoln family out of a few thousand dollars. Via the Boston Globe: "The Lincolns were not the only ones fooled. Ever since The New York Times announced the portrait’s discovery in 1929, on Feb. 12, Lincoln’s birthday, historians and the public have assumed it depicted Mary Todd Lincoln. It was reproduced in The Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, and versions of it still illustrate at least two biographies, including the latest paperback edition of Carl Sandburg’s 1932 Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which Lincoln created in 1862, is celebrating this week in Springfield by giving away free seeds for the Lincoln Tomato. The Springfield State Journal-Register has the details.
Lech Walesa was in Springfield Friday, two days too soon to get free Lincoln Tomato seeds, touring the Lincoln Museum there, which has an exhibit on Walesa running through March 5. Here's the Rockford Register-Star.
People like to argue over whom Lincoln would agree with today. Here's Jackie Hogan in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claiming today's Republican Party would have nothing to do with Abe: "He was the first American president to sign federal income tax into law. And not only that, but it was a progressive income tax, with the wealthiest Americans paying a higher rate."
On the other hand, Joseph A. Kohm Jr., blogging for The American Thinker, believes that if Lincoln were alive today, he's be part of the anti-abortion rights movement: "Historians tell us the deaths of his mother, sister, first love, and second child, each took a heavy emotional toll on his psyche. The well-chronicled depth of Lincoln's despair as he mourned those mentioned above was so profound that it is impossible to conclude that he did not contemplate and examine the very quintessence of life, including its significance, origin, cessation, and most importantly for the unborn, qualification."
The best news of all: At an Anaheim (California) City Council meeting on Tuesday, Patsy Bauman's kindergarten class, dressed in homemade stovepipe hats and fake beards, recited the Gettysburg Address, which they had spent two months learning by heart. They repeated the performance for their whole school on Friday. The Orange County Register has the scoop, and a video of all 19 of them going at it in what passes for unison.
For Lincoln's birthday this Sunday--203 years old and still lookin' good--here is a one-minute clip from a recently rediscovered 1913 silent film called When Lincoln Paid. It had gone missing for 90-some years until a print was discovered in 2006 in a barn in New Hampshire. It stars and was directed by Francis Ford, the older brother and professional mentor of the great American film director John Ford. I learn from Wikipedia that Francis Ford played Lincoln in at least seven silent films--all of them lost, until this one was found. Francis was a big name in silent movies, but his career declined thereafter. His last directing credit was in 1928, though he worked as a character actor into the 1940s. His younger brother John, who learned much about film-making from him, consistently cast him in small, relatively unimportant, roles in his films, including an uncredited bit part in 1939's Young Mr. Lincoln, which starred Henry Fonda.
If the US Postal Service stays in business long enough, it will issue a pair of Civil War commemorative stamps for each year of the sesquicentennial. The two 2011 stamps (the firing on Fort Sumter, and First Bull Run) commemorating 1861 were gorgeous, and the USPS has just announced the 2012 stamps commemorating 1862, which become available in April (after the first class letter rate goes up a penny).
As you can see above, they commemorate the capture of New Orleans and the battle of Antietam. The New Orleans stamp uses as its illustration a detail from this Currier and Ives lithograph alternately titled "The Splendid Naval Triumph on the Mississippi, April 24th, 1862" and "Farragut's Naval Triumph on the Mississippi, 24th April, 1862," published shortly after the event. Farragut's splendid triumph on this day was that he made it past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, both of which guarded New Orleans, thus making its surrender to Union forces inevitable.
The Antietam stamp's illustration is a powerful choice. It's an 1887 painting called "Battle of Antietam" by Thure de Thulstrup, the Stockholm immigrant who also painted "Sheridan's Ride." It shows the charge of the Iron Brigade of the West early in the morning on the day of the twelve-hour battle, the bloodiest day in the history of American combat and without a doubt the most important military event of 1862. According to the authoritativeFox's Regimental Losses, the Iron Brigade of the West, composed of five regiments from Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, suffered in proportion to its numbers the heaviest losses of any Union brigade in the war.
Look closely at the white building behind the fighting. It's Dunker Church, house of worship for a pacifist anti-slavery sect of full-immersion Baptists (hence "dunkers") that lay in the midst of the battlefield. Over 12,000 men would die that morning in the immediate vicinity of this building. Here it is in an Alexander Gardner photograph taken two days after the battle, a photograph that Thulstrup may well have studied when making his painting 25 years later.
The Dunker Church that is today part of Antietam National Park is a reproduction; the original was destroyed by a storm in 1921.
Discussing some upcoming Civil War plays around the country last week, I digressed briefly to complain about the currently stylish perception of Lincoln as having needed to evolve toward accepting the moral necessity of emancipation. Today Richard Striner has a piece in the New York Times's Disunion blog making the same point better and at greater length. The Constitution, as we all know, constrained the federal government from outlawing slavery in the states. The territories were a different story, and as the war progressed, Lincoln felt obliged to take the constitutionally questionable step of using his war powers to make the rebel states a different story too. It's become conventional among people who aren't up on their history to conclude that the time it took Lincoln to take that step was the result of his lack of commitment to opposing slavery.
Libertarians like Ron Paul have a different wrong point to make: intent on denying the federal government legitimate authority to act against the Confederacy, Paul says that the Civil War was "senseless" and that the federal government should have simply purchased all the slaves from their owners and set them free. Any good follower of Ayn Rand should realize that a transaction requires both a purchaser and a seller; if Paul thinks the South was full of slaveholders willing to sell all their slaves to the Lincoln administration, he may wish to pick up a history book sometime.
Striner's piece rebuts both these errors by describing Lincoln's attempt in 1861-'62 to get Delaware to pass legislation enabling the federal government to, yes, buy all its slaves and set them free. He hoped a successful transaction in Delaware would provide opportunities to do likewise in other loyal slave states and thereby serve to weaken the Confederacy, perhaps even tempting some Confederate states back into the Union and ending the war in a matter of months. It didn't work, because Delaware wouldn't agree to it.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a chunk of it:
In November 1861 he drafted legislation that he hoped would be introduced in the legislature of Delaware, the smallest of the slave states — and a slave state loyal to the Union. “Be it enacted by the State of Delaware,” Lincoln’s draft began, “that on condition the United States of America will, at the present session of Congress, engage by law to pay . . . in the six per cent bonds of the said United States, the sum of seven hundred and nineteen thousand and two hundred dollars, in five equal annual installments, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, at any time after the first day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven, within the said State of Delaware.” An alternative version of Lincoln’s text would have extended the phase-out of slavery in Delaware over 30 years.
The plan might sound outlandish, but it was wholly within Lincoln’s often misunderstood anti-slavery position. The conventional view today holds that Lincoln’s abolitionist sympathies evolved over time. But the real evolution wasn’t in his opposition to slavery per se, but in his thinking on how to bring about its end. Unlike some of his firebrand anti-slavery colleagues, he understood that any plan for blanket abolition would tear the country apart; indeed, he was proven right when the mere fear of such a plan drove 11 Southern states to secede.
The Delaware legislature voted Lincoln's plan down, and Delaware voters turned their congressman George P. Fisher--Lincoln's ally in the proposed legislation--out of office. On July 1, 1862, Lincoln met with congressmen from other border slave states to push his idea of state-authorized federally-compensated emancipation, and found insufficient support among them to keep the idea alive. Three weeks to the day later, he presented the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet.
Happy New Year. Here's the best song about the American Civil War ever written by a Canadian.
In searching for this video, I learn that Levon Helm--for whom, of course, the song was written--has refused to sing it in the 35 years since this performance was filmed for The Last Waltz. Apparently he feels a farewell performance should be a farewell performance.
Our own Opus 1861: the Civil War in Symphony, a world premiere music theatre piece we're building from about 20 Civil War songs, goes up in April. There are other Civil War shows going up around the country next year as well--I haven't done an actual count, but it seems like there will be more in 2012 than there were in 2011.
The Washington Stage Guild in downtown Washington DC is producing the world premiere of Amelia: a Story of Abiding Loveby Alex Webb from January 5-29. It's a two-person show starring the playwright and his wife about a woman trying to free her husband from the Andersonville Confederate prison camp. It's inspired by one sentence in a journal kept by someone at Andersonville: "Rumor has it that a woman has come in here after her man."
Half a mile away, Ford's Theatre, itself of course a piece of Civil War history, stages the world premiere of Necessary Sacrifices by Richard Hellesen from January 20 through February 12. Hellesen has written three other Civil War plays for Ford's; this one is about the relationship between President Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. You would expect the people at Ford's, which besides being a working theatre is a national museum dedicated to Lincoln's legacy, to have its facts straight, but here's how they describe the play in their season guide:
Richard Hellesen’s new play Necessary Sacrifices imagines the real-life meetings between abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. In the midst of the Civil War, the president responds to Douglass’s passionate arguments for allowing African Americans the opportunity to be represented in the Union Army, thereby fighting for their own freedom.
The problem with this is that Douglass visited Lincoln at the White House for the first time in the summer of 1863, whereas the federal government had begun recruiting African American enlistments in 1862. By the time they met, Douglass was already the most prominent recruiter of black soldiers for the Union army, and both his sons had enlisted. So had thousands of other African American men, so many that in May '63 the government had set up the Bureau of Colored Troops to handle the high volume of enlistments. They met to discuss the unequal treatment of black soldiers which had caused black enlistment to slow down; once Lincoln heard Douglass's bill of particulars, he agreed with him and took steps to remedy matters.
So what gives? Let's hope that the mistake in Ford's season guide is simply that, a mistake in the season guide. But I fear that it might accurately reflect the play itself, which would indicate that Ford's has bought into the currently fashionable opinion that Lincoln had to be convinced of the morality of things like emancipation and civil rights. Lincoln's well-known slowness to adopt emancipation and related issues like black enlistment as his administration's policies was essentially political, in the best sense of the word--to lose support for the war in the tentatively still loyal slave-holding border states would be to lose the war, which would doom any federal effort to do anything at all about slavery in what would then be a foreign country. It can be argued, though I think not successfully, that his caution was bad political strategy. But there is nothing in the historical record to support the idea that Lincoln disagreed with the moral rightness of what people like Douglass and Charles Sumner were urging him to do faster.
But I digress. Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has a really interesting show coming up for a short run in April (the 13th through the 15th only, the same weekend we preview Opus 1861). It's a community-based play called A Resting Place, about the lives of area residents during the Civil War. The playwright is Alison Carey. Here's a plot summary: "A loving mother decides to break ground for a memorial to the long-dead of our nation’s bloodiest conflict. But when she digs up more than she expects, Bethlehem present comes face to face with Bethlehem past." Assuming it doesn't involve zombies, this sounds great to me.
By the way, the Touchstone website says this: "Produced in conjunction with Moravian College, Touchstone concludes the Historic Bethlehem Partnership’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War . . ." Really, Historic Bethlehem Partnership? You're concluding your commemoration in 2012, three years before the anniversary period ends? C'mon guys, step up to the plate.
Finally, for now, the Masquerade Theatre in Houston, which does musicals, is putting together a show they're calling simply The Civil War. Period songs, diary entries and so on, plus text from Lincoln, Douglass, and Whitman. It runs May 18-27, and the Masquerade website says it'll be both "gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring." My goodness.
Guts and awe aside, one cool thing about the graphic Masquerade is using for the show is that the tattered flag it shows is apparently a photo of the actual flag that flew over Fort Sumter. Nice touch.
Civil War-era slave spirituals "Rise Up Shepherd and Follow" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" sung by Kathleen Battle and the Harlem Boys Choir with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta:
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group behind the ongoing attempt to get the Confederate battle flag displayed on specialty license plates in Texas, is one of the groups responsible for desecrating the grave of Silas Chandler, a former slave, with Confederate paraphernalia. The group also figures in Confederates in the Attic, one of our Civil War Project shows, and is one of the prime movers behind the Big Lie about the war: that the Confederacy was not a deeply racist slavocracy which went to war to protect its financial interest in human chattel.
To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we submit
the vindication of the Cause for which we fought;
to your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier's good name,
the guardianship of his history,
the emulation of his virtues,
the perpetuation of those principles he loved
and which made him glorious
and which you also cherish.
Remember, it is your duty to see that the true history of the South is presented to future generations.
Lt. General Stephen Dill Lee, C.S.A.
April 25, 1906
The Sons date from 1896 and is one of several organizations of the period founded for the perfectly respectable reason of honoring the group's actual fathers who had served valiantly in the Confederate army, risking (and many of them giving) their lives. Even today much of their work involves the upkeep of gravesites and assistance with genealogy research and so on. The more visible part of their work, however, is insidious: to bring into the mainstream and make respectable the false idea that the Confederacy itself deserves to be honored.
Much of this work depends on minimizing the Confederacy's commitment to slavery as a foundation of its existence. So we are told that Robert E. Lee hated slavery: he didn't; he saw it as a necessary evil that the white race had to bear in order to do God's work benefiting the black race. We are told that thousands of blacks enlisted in and fought for the Confederate Army: of course they didn't; not only did Confederate law prohibit this until the CSA was gasping its last, the Confederate army refused to recognize even captured black Union troops as legitimate POWs but instead executed some of them as rebellious slaves. The fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, as a product of Lincoln's war powers, could only free slaves where the rebellion existed, while emancipation in the loyal states had to wait for the Thirteenth Amendment, is twisted so that we can be told, hey, slavery was abolished in the South before it was in the North!--as if emancipation at the point of a Union bayonet is a credit to the Confederate slaveowner.
The license plate controversy represents another aspect of their work: to (1) get the Confederate flag displayed in official auspices of any sort, and (2) equate Confederate soldiers in the general mind with the soldiers who fought at Normandy and Khe Sanh and Lexington, as well as with the soldiers they fired upon at Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg. "These veterans need to be honored too," a Sons spokesman testified to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board before the Board voted 8-0 against allowing specialty plates displaying the Sons logo, which features the Confederate battle flag. The Sons have said they plan to appeal, and in fact have won such appeals in a number of other states.
A number of years ago the Civil War documentarian Ken Burns, himself descended from Confederate veterans, caused a furor in neo-Confederate circles when he discussed the eternal Civil War paradox of American respect and affection--North and South--for the valiant men who tried to destroy the country. ''I said it was interesting to note that a man held responsible for more loyal American deaths than Tojo or Hitler became our most cherished general,'' Burns recounted later. For this statement of verifiable fact concerning Robert E. Lee, he ended up stripped of the CSV membership the organization had bestowed on him. Verifiable facts are not the friends of neo-Confederates.
Alexander Stephens T-shirt, available in four styles
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea;
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 normal condition.
This, our new government,
is the first in the history of the world
based upon this great
physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Alexander Stephens
Vice-President, Confederate States of America
March 21, 1861
"I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people," Lincoln said in 1854. "They are just what we would be in their situation." True enough now as then, and if our beloved ancestors had been on the wrong side of the two great moral questions of the age, slavery and treason, we would not be eager to acknowledge the fact either.
That said, a tribute built on lies is no tribute at all, and the neo-Confederate disinformation campaign does the Confederate dead no honor. Most Southerners might not choose U.S. Grant as the eulogist for the Confederate army, but his recollection of Lee and his men at Appomattox Court House has more truth, and more tribute, in it than any part of the tissue of lies put forth by neo-Confederates:
Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.
The last word here goes to Rev. George V. Clark, testifying before the Texas DMV Board on November 10:
I should pay closer attention. Here at City Lit we have closed our Hallowe'en show, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and our next production, a world premiere adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, doesn't open until late February. In the meantime, we have booked the stage out to a series of itinerant companies for their productions. First up is a company we like a lot, Project 891. But I hadn't even noticed that the show they're producing here is a Civil War-related play!
It's Our Leading Lady by noted high-camp farceur Charles Busch, about Laura Keene, the producer and star of the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. I'm not familiar with it, except by reputation, but I'm told that the first act is a backstage comedy showing us Keene's company in rehearsal for that performance, focusing on Keene as larger-than-life diva; Busch's play turns more serious in Act Two after John Wilkes Booth has interrupted the performance.
Laura Keene, circa 1856
Comedically seems like the right way to approach Laura Keene. Though she is a genuinely important figure in 19th Century theatre--she was the first female actor-manager in America, she helped establish New York City as a commercial theatre center,and she came up with the idea of Saturday matinees so women could attend the theatre unescorted--there is a certain amount of dark farce to her cameo role in the Lincoln assassination. She was backstage waiting to make an entrance when the shot was fired, and is credited with doing much to calm the crowd in the immediate chaos that followed. But then she seems to strive to make the evening's big event about her: she commandeered a jug of water, which she used as her ticket past the throng of excited rubber-neckers into the presidential box where Lincoln and Major Rathbone were being treated by doctors who had been in the audience. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but the most reliable witness seems to be Dr. Charles Leale, who had just performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Lincoln and was the doctor who pronounced Lincoln's wound to be fatal: "Laura Keene appealed to me to allow her to hold the president's head. I granted the request, and she sat on the floor of the box and held his head in her lap." This was within five minutes or so of the shot.
You've got to give Charles Busch credit for recognizing the self-serving grande dame at the bottom of Keene's remarkable presence of mind that night, and for being brave enough to make it the subject of a comedy. It's hard to see how shifting Lincoln's wounded head could have provided the president with either comfort or medical benefit. But it did put Laura Keene back at center stage where she was used to being, and there's certainly something darkly comic about her drive to do that.
Our Leading Lady runs November 4 through December 4. Don't call City Lit for tickets; it's not our show. Project 891's box office number is 773-853-3210.
