The music of Opus 1861

Opus 1861 has had a weekend of previews, and I never got around to incremental posting of background material on its songs.  So here, in one fell swoop, are the program notes on the songs.  This kind of information fascinates me.  I love knowing there's a German disco version of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," for instance, or that "We Shall Overcome" and "Blowin' in the Wind" are derived from the same Civil War-era song.

Anyway, here are the notes, with a few videos of other people's versions of some of the songs:

The Battle Cry of Freedom was written in Chicago in July 1862 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.  He wrote “Battle Cry” on July 23, 1862, inspired by Lincoln’s call for 300,000 volunteers.  It premiered the next evening at an outdoor recruitment rally at Chicago’s Court House Square, on the present site of City Hall, and became an important Union army recruiting tool.  In 1864 it served as the campaign song for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket.  With revised lyrics, it was equally popular in the Confederacy.

Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel? is an African American spiritual made famous in the 1870s by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, students at Fisk University founded in 1866 to provide education to emancipated slaves.  Organized in 1871 as a fundraising activity for the University, the Jubilee Singers became one of the most famous vocal groups of the century.  Their repertoire featured songs associated with slavery, what Fisk today calls “the secret music African Americans sang in the fields and behind closed doors for generations.”  The most influential 20^th Century recording was Paul Robeson’s in 1936.  In 2001 the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers recorded the song as a B-side on their CD single “Let Robeson Sing.”

The roots of Follow the Drinking Gourd are obscure.  Versions of it were collected by folklorist H. B. Parks in North Carolina in 1912, Kentucky in 1913, and Texas in 1918.  He published it in 1928 as “Foller de Drinkin’ Gou’d,” and wrote that it describes an Underground Railroad escape route from Alabama to Kentucky.  The drinking gourd to be followed is the Big Dipper, which always points north.  The version of the song most familiar today was put into finished form in 1947 by Lee Hays of The Weavers, the group who made the song’s first recording in 1951.  It has since been recorded by Richie Havens and by Taj Mahal.  It is open to speculation how much of the song as we know it was actually sung by enslaved African Americans.

Give Us a Flag is one of the great “answer songs.”  Written as a marching song by an unknown member of the all-black (though led by a white officer) 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the song is a response to—and uses the same melody as—a run-of-the-mill recruitment song called “Hoist Up the Flag.”  At the war’s outset, the Union Army had refused to allow black enlistment at all, and even after this policy was reversed, there was widespread doubt that blacks could be effective soldiers.  Black soldiers also faced execution rather than POW status if captured by Confederates.  The 54^th spearheaded an assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina on July 18, 1863 and performed with such heroism while suffering horrible losses that it turned the country around on the question of black soldiers.  During the battle Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to earn the Medal of Honor.  The song was published in 1867 in William Wells Brown’s book The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity.  It seems to have been commercially recorded only once, by Richie Havens for the Ken Burns PBS Civil War documentary.

Hard Times Come Again No More was written by Stephen Foster in 1854 and opened Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s encore set every night on their 2009 tour.  In between, it has been consistently popular.  A much-loved parlor song through the 19^th Century, it was first recorded in 1905 by the Edison Quartet.  Recent versions have been by Kate and Ann McGarrigle, Bob Dylan, Mary K. Blige, Jennifer Warnes, and many others.

Home! Sweet Home! was the most popular song of the 19^th Century.  Written in 1823 by John Howard Payne and Henry Bishop for their opera Clari, Maid of Milan, it attained  universal popularity during the Civil War, the first time that large numbers of Americans had spent extended periods of time far from their homes.   In 1862, during a period of low morale, the Army of the Potomac banned the song from being sung in camps for fear it would encourage desertions.   The melody has remained instantly recognizable, and has been used—sometimes ironically—in many films, including The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Arsenic and Old Lace. Amityville II: The Possession, and Hot Tub Time Machine.

The melody for John Brown’s Body is taken from “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us,” a hymn from the camp meeting movement that was part of the Second Great Awakening in early nineteenth-century frontier America.  An early version of the John Brown lyrics were sung for the first time in Boston in May 1861.  Different versions followed quickly as the song became a popular marching tune, and countless individuals across the North contributed to the lyrics.  Not everyone was comfortable with the song’s imagery of a body “mouldering,” or with the glorification of John Brown’s violent raid on a federal armory; Julia Ward Howe wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic in October 1861 when a friend asked her, “Why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?”

Just before the Battle, Mother was written by Chicago songwriter George F. Root, writer of "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "The Vacant Chair," "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and over thirty 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 such diverse later songs as "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and "God Save Ireland."  Depression-era folksinger Goebel Reeves used the melody of “Just before the Battle, Mother” for his “Hobo’s Lullaby,” said to be Woody Guthrie’s favorite song.

The lyrics to Lorena were written in 1856 by Rev. Henry D. L. Webster, and the music a year later by his non-relative Joseph Philbrick Webster, composer of “In the Sweet By and By.”   Henry had written it as a poem about a woman named Ella, who had jilted him.  He had changed her name in the poem to Bertha, but changed it again to Lorena (a name he apparently invented) when Joseph’s melody required a three-syllable name.  The tune has been used as underscoring in two John Ford westerns, The Searchers and The Horse Soldiers.  Both songwriters were Northerners, but the song has become so identified with the South that in the novel Gone with the Wind, one of Scarlett O’Hara’s daughters is named Ella Lorena Kennedy.

Many Thousand Gone (No More Auction Block) originated among African Americans who had escaped slavery and made it to Canada.  It was first published in 1867 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a white abolitionist who had helped finance John Brown’s raid.  It became more widely known during the 1870s due to performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.  During the early part of the twentieth century the song’s tune combined with a 1901 hymn “I’ll Overcome Someday” and emerged by 1947 as “We Will Overcome.”   Pete Seeger added some verses and changed the title to “We Shall Overcome.”  In 1962 Bob Dylan adapted “Many Thousand Gone” into the melody for “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Michael, Row the Boat Ashore is an African American folk song, sung as a rowing song by slaves held on the Georgia Sea Islands.  First written down in 1863, it is certainly much older than that.  Michael is apparently the archangel Michael, bringing souls to heaven across the proverbial River Jordan.  During the folk music boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, it was much recorded:  Pete Seeger, Bob Gibson, The Weavers, and Harry Belafonte all did versions, and for two weeks in September 1961 The Highwaymen had it at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.  Since then there have been hit pop recordings of it by Lonnie Donegan, Trini Lopez, and the German disco group Dschingis Khan.

Shule Agrah (Johnny’s Gone for a Soldier) was brought to America by immigrants from Ireland, where versions of the song have been traced back to 1691, when thousands of Irish fled the country to fight in foreign armies following the Treaty of Limerick.  It was popular here during the American Revolution, and after being published in New York City in 1860 became so again during the Civil War.  The title derives from the Gaelic “Suile a ghra,” meaning “Come to me, my love.”  A striking version of the song was recorded as “Gone the Rainbow” by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1962.

The title of Taps derives from a Dutch expression taptoe, meaning that it’s time to close the beer taps and therefore the day is ended.  The tune, based on an earlier bugle call used in the Army, was composed by Union General Daniel Butterfield for use as a lights-out call.  Its use at military funerals was begun in July 1862 by Union Captain John Tidball, when a corporal’s burial was held too close to Confederate lines to risk firing guns in salute.  “Taps” was recognized as an official bugle call by the U. S. Army in 1874 and has been sounded at all U.S. military funerals since 1891.  It is played at ceremonies held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery 2,500 times every year.

The lyrics to The Vacant Chair were written in 1861 as a poem by Henry S. Washburn to commemorate the death of 18-year-old Second Lt. John William Grout of the 15th Massachusetts Infantry, who was killed at the Battle of Ball's Bluff.  The melody, composed by the mighty George F. Root, was lifted in 1890 by another composer and used as the tune for “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” which went on to become a country music standard in the 20^th Century, with recordings by The Carter Family, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and many others.  The original song has been memorably recorded by Kathy Mattea.

Was My Brother in the Battle? is a Stephen Foster song, written in response to the July 1862 Battle of Malvern Hill, the final engagement of incompetent Union General George B. McClellan’s failed Peninsula Campaign (McClellan won the battle, then retreated anyway).  Casualties were so heavy that one officer reported that the wounded strewn across Malvern Hill “give the field a singular crawling effect."

When Johnny Comes Marching Home was written in 1863 by Patrick Gilmore while he was serving as the Union Army’s bandmaster general.  An Irishman from County Galway, he took the melody from an early 19^th Century Irish anti-war song, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, written to protest Irish being forced to fight in the British Army during three consecutive colonial wars in what is now Sri Lanka.  Johnny Fill up the Bowl is one of countless variant versions written to the melody during and after the Civil War.  Gilmore went on to become the nation’s leading bandleader.  He conducted the orchestra at the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia and at the Statue of Liberty dedication in 1886.  He set up a concert venue in New York City that evolved into Madison Square Garden, and originated the tradition of welcoming the New Year in Times Square. 

When This Cruel War Is Over (Weeping Sad and Lonely), written in 1863 by Henry Tucker and Charles Carroll Sawyer, sold over a million copies of sheet music.  It makes appearances in both the novel and film of Gone with the Wind.  In the novel, it is the song to which Rhett and Scarlett waltz (not actually possible, as it is in 4/4 time) after he bids $150 in gold to dance with her; he even sings the first verse to her.  The same scene in the film replaced the song with a Virginia reel.  Film composer Max Steiner used the song’s melody as underscoring in the scene outside the newspaper office as families get news of war casualties.

Trampling out the vintage

In 1860 there were a mere 16,000 soldiers in the U.S. Army--and, of course, no Confederate Army at all.  By 1865, three million men had served in one army or the other.  Given that staggering increase in such a short time, it's no surprise that whatever systems there might have been for keeping track of numbers of casualties would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of death and injury.  As a result, nobody really knows how many men were killed in the Civil War.  The textbook answer up to now--618,222--comes from an estimate made in 1900 and was based on fairly primitive statistical methods.

The New York Times reports that a demographic historian, J. David Hacker from Binghamton University, has combed through 19th Century census data and come up with a number that's more than 20% higher.   His estimate seems reliable to credible Civil War authorities; if he's right, 750,000 soldiers (and maybe, he allows, as many as 850,000) died during the war from wounds, infection and disease inflicted by the war.  "Wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” the Times quotes Hacker as saying. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”

The Times article, from which the graphic above is taken, is fascinating.  Go read it.

Just Before the Battle, Mother

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)

Lorena

Follow the Drinking Gourd

Was My Brother in the Battle?

All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight

The Battle Cry of Freedom

Home! Sweet Home!

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

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."

Opus 1861 begins performances on April 13.

203-year-old man in the news

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.

And then there's this.

When Lincoln Paid

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.

New Civil War stamps! Wonderful pictures for 45¢ apiece.

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 authoritative Fox'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.

The Great Emancipator

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.

Music for New Year's Eve

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.



Civil War plays for 2012

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 Love by 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.

Music for Christmas

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: