Singing for Peace
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Singing for Peace

Antiwar Songs in American History

Ronald D Cohen, Will Kaufman

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eBook - ePub

Singing for Peace

Antiwar Songs in American History

Ronald D Cohen, Will Kaufman

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About This Book

Wars have dominated the history of the United States since its founding, but there has also been a long history of antiwar activity. Peace songs have emerged out of every military conflict involving the United States. "Singing for Peace" vividly portrays this rich antiwar history, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first.Most of the twentieth-century output was dominated by folk groups and acoustic singer-songwriters. The Vietnam War saw the increased dovetailing of folk and rock music, so that rock and folk-rock took on an ever-larger share of protest activity, then punk, metal, hip-hop, and rap. The authors draw upon a wide range of primary and secondary sources, while quoting many popular and lesser-known song lyrics, and including a range of photos and illustrations. These songs have long served to both shape and reveal the feelings of citizens opposed to America s wars."

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317252085
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1

1
From the Colonial Era to 1900

Most wars fought by the United States, until the early twenty-first century, have been accompanied by music for those who are the supporters, either on the battlefield or the home front. But there have always been those who have expressed their opposition to the fighting with their own tunes and songs—again, from both the battlefield and the home front. Such songs in fact pre-date the establishment of the United States; for instance, we can go back to the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 (also called the French and Indian War) for the lament of a poor Irish dragoon, “Felix the Soldier,” who loses his leg in the service of an imperial war that he does not understand. His livelihood as a peat harvester destroyed forever, he will return home to a life of dissolution and destitution similar to that faced by the maimed veterans of many subsequent wars:
I will bid my spade adieu,
For I cannot dig the bog,
But I still can play a fiddle
And I still can drink my grog.
Songs such as “Felix the Soldier” also establish the abiding class struggle encapsulated in the phrase, “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Such musical protests are admittedly swamped by the out-pouring of jingoistic and patriotic tub-thumpers that normally accompany military conflicts. Such was the case with the Seven Years’ War in America, in which songs glorifying the British general James Wolfe far outnumber those of any other subjects.1
The War of Independence (1775–83) also prompted depictions of the poor soldier whose lower-class status is rubbed into his nose and for whom the glory of war quickly tarnishes—especially here, in “The Yankee’s Return from Camp,” when the narrator measures his condition against that of his commander, George Washington:
And there was Captain Washington,
And gentle folks about him;
They say he’s grown so tarnal proud
He will not ride without them.
For the unnamed Yankee, enough becomes enough when he confronts a vision of his own likely destination:
I see another snarl of men,
A-digging graves they told me,
So tarnal long, so tarnal deep,
They ’tended they should hold me.

It scared me so I hooked it off,
Nor stopped as I remember,
Nor turned about till I got home,
Locked up in mother’s chamber.
This song had a Loyalist counterpart, which, though written from the perspective of a British regular, proved popular with the American troops who shared his war-weariness and his recollections of comradeship during the Seven Years’ War:
I am a jolly soldier,
Enlisted years ago,
To serve my king and country
Against the common foe.
But when across th’ Atlantic
My orders were to go,
I grieved to think that English hearts
Should draw their swords on those
Who fought and conquered by their side When
Frenchmen were their foes.

Did they who bloody measures crave,
Our toil and danger share,
Not one to face the rifle-men,
A second time would dare.
Ye Britons who your country love,
Be this your ardent prayer:
To Britain and her colonies,
May peace be soon restored,
And knaves of high and low degree,
Be destined to the cord.2
Colonial songwriters frequently employed parody in order to drive home a message that might avert further bloodshed. Thus, one Oliver Arnold of Norwich, Connecticut, chose in 1775 to adapt a familiar ballad, “The Banks of the Dee,” in an argument both for peace and for fair taxation by Great Britain—on Scotland, rather than on the struggling American colonies at the mercy of invading Scottish regiments:
Be quiet and sober, secure and contented:
Upon your own land, be valiant and free;
Bless God, that the war is so nicely prevented,
And till the green fields on the banks of the Dee.

The Dee then will flow, all its beauty displaying,
The lads on its banks will again be seen playing,
And England thus honestly taxes defraying,
With natural drafts from the banks of the Dee.3
Peace songs could of course be used for propaganda purposes by factions actually committed to military action. Such was the case with a highly popular ballad, “The Dying Redcoat” (sometimes titled “The British Lamentation”), supposedly penned by a British sergeant suffering from a mortal wound incurred in the Battle for New York in September 1776:
A garden place it was indeed,
And in it grew many a bitter weed,
Which will pull down our highest hopes
And sorely wound our British troops.

’Tis now September the seventeenth day,
I wish I’d never come to America;
Full fifteen thousand has been slain,
Bold British heroes every one.

Now I’ve received my mortal wound,
I bid farewell to Old England’s ground;
My wife and children will mourn for me,
Whilst I lie cold in America.
As Irwin Silber noted, the song’s final stanza suggests that rebel propagandists may have appropriated this song and added a final, highly improbable verse:
Fight on, America’s noble sons,
Fear not Britannia’s thundering guns.
Maintain your rights from year to year,
God’s on your side, you need not fear.
Other songs utilized the imagery of wartime destruction in an ambiguous manner, as likely to encourage further military action as lobbying for peace. Thus, the celebrated composer, William Billings—whose anthem, “Chester,” was second only to “Yankee Doodle” in contemporary popularity—adapted the 137th Psalm for his “Lamentation over Boston,” a city bombarded by both the British and the American troops during the siege of 1776:
By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down and wept,
We wept, we wept, we wept
When we remembered thee, O Boston;
As for our Friends, Lord God of Heaven,
Preserve them, defend them, deliver them
And restore them unto us;
Preserve them, defend them and restore them to us again.
For they that held them in Bondage
Required of them to take up arms against their brethren.
Forbid it, Lord God, forbid!
Forbid it, Lord God that those who have sucked Bostonian Breasts
Should thirst for American Blood!4
Inevitably, perhaps, the majority of peace songs came from the pens of Loyalists, for whom independence would mean the upset of an established and familiar way of life. Some, like the anonymous composer of “A Prayer/Common Prayer for the Times” (1776), called for the restoration of peace at any cost, even though he or she could acknowledge that “Britannia’s sins” were at the root of the conflict:
Since we are taught in Scripture word
To pray for friends and foes;
Then let us pray for George the Third,
Who must be one of those.

Heaven bless America, and Britain,
May folly past suffice,
Wherein they have each other smitten,
Who ought to harmonize.

Allied by blood, and interest too,
Soon let them re-unite,
May Heaven tyrannic minds subdue,
Haste, haste the pleasing sight.
In contrast, the Loyalist newspaper, the Pennsylvania Ledger, printed “An Irregular Ode to Peace” that squarely lay the blame for the strife at the rebels’ door:
But now we see the proud Usurpers’ aim:
Tho’ Liberty’s dear name is heard each hour,
The poor man’s property and good man’s fame
Alike are victims to their lawless pow’r.
However, for an anonymous “Daughter of Liberty, living in Massachusetts,” what mattered most was an end to “the Distressing Situation of Every Sea-Port Town” where women and children were as much the victims as were the soldiers in the field:
We can’t get fire nor yet food,
Takes 20 weight of sugar for two foot of wood,
We cannot get bread nor yet meat,
We see the world is nought but cheat.

For sin is all the cause of this,
We must not take it then amiss,
Wan’t it for our polluted tongues
This cruel war would ne’er begun.

We should hear no fife nor drum,
Nor training bands would never come:
Should we go on our sinful course,
Times will brow on us worse and worse.

The gracious GOD now cause to cease,
This bloody war and give us peace!
And down our streets send plenty then
With hearts as one we’ll say Amen.5
The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 formally ended the American War of Independence. The first president, George Washington, strove to keep the new nation out of any foreign conflicts, resolutely abjuring the “entangling alliances” that would lead to war. However, even during Washington’s first term, nervous critics eyed the new ambassador to Great Britain, John Adams, in fear of the latter’s supposed “monarchical” tendencies, which might upset the fledgling peace. Hence “A New Song” as it was published in the Pennsylvania Packet of August 20, 1787:
But let us no longer to Adams attend,
But ’gainst his king projects our country defend;
Let’s support our Congress with might and with main,
And treaties observe with France, Holland and Spain.
Adams in fact proved skillful in averting American conflicts with the European powers, especially during his presidency of 1797–1801, when he succeeded in avoiding all-out war with Napoleonic France (against the clamor of hawks within his own Federalist party). A celebratory ode, “Adams and Liberty,” written by Thomas Paine (not the same Paine who authored Common Sense and the Rights of Man), paints Adams as the savior of the peace:
While France her huge limbs bathes recumbent in blood,
And society’s base threats with wide dissolution;
May Peace, like the dove who returned from the flood,
Find an ark of abode in our mild Constitution.6
As the nineteenth century got under way, American merchant ships were caught between the warring navies of France and Britain, mounting a grave threat to American neutrality. Each power attempted to blockade American ships to disrupt US trade with the other; in addition, British naval officers would order the capture and impressment of US sailors into the Royal Navy. American hawks clamoring for war were handed a gift in June of 1807 when the British vessel Leopard attacked the American Chesapeake in US waters and hauled four suspected British deserters off the ship. That year, President Thomas Jefferson recommended an embargo on all US merchant shipping in a bid to avoid military entanglement; Congress enacted the embargo that year (against the objections of merchants and manufacturers across the country). Jefferson’s supporters sang, in “Embargo and Peace,”
From the deep we withdraw till the tempest be past,
Till our flag can protect each American cargo;
While British ambition’s dominion shall last,
Let us join, heart and hand, to support the embargo:
For embargo and peace
Will promote our increase;
Then embargoed we’l...

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