Immortal Songs of Camp and Field

‘The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!’

The voice was a mezzo-soprano, full, round, and clear, and the charming melody was sung with infinite tenderness and delicacy of shading. I listened almost breathlessly, for it was the first time I had heard the song, and as it was ended, I arose for the purpose of ascertaining who it was that sang so sweetly. I found her in the person of a plump negro girl of about sixteen years, with a face blacker than the smoke in Vulcan’s smithy.”

A delightful contrast to the attack of the mob on the Massachusetts Sixth, in Baltimore, in 1861, was furnished recently when the historic Sixth from Boston passed through Baltimore on their way to the South to take part in the invasion of Cuba. Baltimore gave herself up to seeing how splendidly she could receive the regiment that had once been mobbed in her streets. They were received at the station by the Mayor, the school-children were drawn up in line along the route of march, and the soldiers from Massachusetts were pelted with flowers instead of stones and bullets. Each soldier was given a little box containing cake and fruit, and a love letter, while a great motto met their eyes which said: “Let the welcome of ‘98 efface the memory of ‘61.”

ALL QUIET ALONG THE POTOMAC

“All quiet along the Potomac,” they say,
“Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
’Tis nothing: a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men
Moaning out all alone the death-rattle.”

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
Or the light of the watchfires, are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping:
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes,
Keep guard, – for the army is sleeping.

There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread,
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, his face, dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep;
For their mother – may heaven defend her!

The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken
Leaped up to his lips, when low, murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken;
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to his side,
As if to keep down the heart swelling.

He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary,
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light,
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves,
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle – “Ha! Mary, good-bye,”
And the lifeblood is ebbing and plashing.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The picket’s off duty forever.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves,
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle – “Ha! Mary, good-bye,”
And the lifeblood is ebbing and plashing.

    – Ethel Lynn Beers.
Mrs. Beers’s right to the authorship of this famous song has been very severely contested, but there seems to be no reason now to doubt that the really fine poem is hers. Though there have been numerous claimants for its authorship, the one who has come nearest to carrying the day is, strange to say, a Southerner. It is curious indeed that a war song should be claimed by both sides, but that has been the story of this song. This Southerner is Lamar Fontaine. Mr. Fontaine was born at Gay Hill, Texas. Twenty years before the war his father moved to Austin, Texas, and was secretary to General Lamar, for whom the son was named. When the war broke out this young Lamar Fontaine became a major in the Confederate Army. Some time in 1862, when the poem All Quiet Along the Potomac appeared in a Southern newspaper, Lamar Fontaine’s name was attached to it. Davidson, the author of Living Writers of the South, wrote to Fontaine in regard to the authorship of this hymn, and in replying Fontaine said: “The poem in question was written by me while our army lay at Fairfax Courthouse, or rather the greater portion, in and around that place. On the second day of August, 1861, I first read it to a few of my messmates in Company I, Second Virginia Cavalry. During the month of August I gave away many manuscript copies to soldiers, and some few to ladies in and about Leesburg, Loudon County, Virginia. In fact, I think that most of the men belonging to the Second Virginia, then commanded by Colonel Radford, were aware of the fact that I was the author of it. I never saw the piece in print until just before the battle of Leesburg (October 21, 1861), and then it was in a Northern paper with the notice that it had been found on the dead body of a picket. I hope the controversy between myself and others in regard to All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night, will soon be forever settled. I wrote it, and the world knows it; and they may howl over it, and give it to as many authors as they please. I wrote it, and I am a Southern man, and I am proud of the title, and am glad that my children will know that the South was the birthplace of their fathers, from their generation back to the seventh.”

Another Southern man, however, and a distinguished one, puts a very different look on the case. Mr. Chandler Harris of Georgia writes a letter for insertion in Mr. Davidson’s volume in the course of which he says: “After a careful and impartial investigation of all the facts in my reach, I have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Beers, and not Mr. Fontaine, wrote the poem in question. My reasons for believing that Mr. Fontaine is not the author of All Quiet, are several:

“1. The poem appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861, as The Picket Guard, over the initials of Mrs. Ethel Beers of New York.

“2. It did not make its appearance in any Southern paper until about April or May, 1862.

“3. It was published as having been found in the pocket of a dead soldier on the battlefield. It is more than probable that the dead soldier was a Federal, and that the poem had been clipped from Harper’s.

“4. I have compared the poem in Harper’s with the same as it first appeared in the Southern papers, and find the punctuation to be precisely the same.

“5. Mr. Fontaine, so far as I have seen, has given elsewhere no evidence of the powers displayed in that poem. I, however, remember noticing in the Charleston Courier, in 1863, or 1864, a ‘Parodie’ (as Mr. L. F. had it) on Mrs. Norton’s Bingen on the Rhine, which was positively the poorest affair I ever saw. Mr. Fontaine had just come out of a Federal prison, and some irresponsible editor, in speaking of this ‘Parodie’ remarked that the poet’s Pegasus had probably worn his wings out against the walls of his Northern dungeon.

“You probably know me well enough to acquit me, in this instance at least, of the charge of prejudice. I am jealous of Southern literature, and if I have any partiality in the matter at all, it is in favor of Major Lamar Fontaine’s claim. I should like to claim this poem for that gentleman; I should be glad to claim it as a specimen of Southern literature, but the facts in the case do not warrant it.”

Mr. Alfred H. Guernsey, for many years editor of Harper’s Magazine, bears testimony that the poem, bearing the title The Picket Guard, appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861. He further declares that it was furnished by Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers, whom he describes as “a lady whom I think incapable of palming off as her own any production of another.”

Mrs. Beers was born in Goshen, New York, and her maiden name was Ethelinda Eliot. She was a direct descendant of John Eliot, the heroic apostle to the Indians. When she began to write for the newspapers she signed her contributions “Ethel Lynn,” a nom de plume very naturally suggested by her Christian name. After her marriage, she added her husband’s name, and over the signature of Ethel Lynn Beers published many poems. In her later years Mrs. Beers resided in Orange, New Jersey, where she died October 10, 1879, on the very day on which her poems, among them All Quiet Along the Potomac, were issued in book form.

There has never been any contest as to the music of the song, which was composed by J. Dayton, the leader of the band of the First Connecticut Artillery.

THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

Way down upon de Suwanee ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere’s wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere’s wha de old folks stay.
All up and down de whole creation,
Sadly I roam,
Still longin’ for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb’rywhere I roam.
Oh! darkies, how my heart grows weary,