It ofttimes has been told
That the British sailors bold
Could flog the tars of France so neat and handy, O.
And they never found their match
Till the Yankees did them catch.
Oh, the Yankee boys for fighting are the dandy, O.
The Guerriere, a frigate bold,
On the foaming ocean rolled,
Commanded by proud Dacres, the grandee, O.
With choice of British crew,
As ever rammer drew,
They could flog the Frenchmen two to one so handy, O.
When this frigate hove in view,
Says proud Dacres to his crew,
"Come, clear the ship for action, and be handy, O.
To the weather-gage, boys, get her,"
And to make his men fight better
Gave them to drink gunpowder in their brandy, O.
Then Dacres loudly cries,
"Make this Yankee ship your prize!
You can in thirty minutes, neat and handy, O.
Thirty-five's enough, I'm sure;
And if you 'll do it in a score,
I'll give you a double dose of brandy, O."
The British shot flew hot,
Which the Yankee answered not,
Till they got within the distance they called handy, O.
Now says Hull unto his crew,
"Boys, let's see what we can do.
If we take this boasting Briton, we 're the dandy, O."
The first broadside we poured
Carried their mainmast by the board,
Which made the lofty frigate look abandoned, O.
Then Dacres shook his head,
And to his officers he said,
"Lord! I did n't think these Yankees were so handy, O."
Our second told so well
That their fore and mizzen fell,
Which doused the royal ensign so handy, O.
"By George," says he, "we 're done!"
And he fired a lee gun,
While the Yankees struck up Yankee doodle dandy, O.
Then Dacres came on board
To deliver up his sword.
Loath was he to part with it, it was so handy, O.
"O, keep your sword," says Hull,
"For it only makes you dull.
So cheer up; let us take a little brandy, O."
Come, fill your glasses full,
And we 'll drink to Captain Hull,
And so merrily will push about the brandy, O.
John Bull may toast his fill,
Let the world say what it will,
But the Yankee boys for fighting are the dandy, O.
The English celebrated their one signal victory of the war—the capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon, off Boston Light, a year later—by a parody of this song, of a decidedly inferior quality.
One of the most notable events of the war was the cruise of the Essex, Captain David Porter, in the South Pacific, in 1813 and 1814. She did an immense amount of damage to the British whalemen, and the British ships Cherub and Phoebe were sent to capture her. After a rencontre in the harbor of Valparaiso, in which the captain of the Phoebe, taken at a disadvantage, protested his purpose to respect the neutrality of the port, and a challenge from which the British ships ran away, the Essex was caught disabled by a squall, chased into a harbor near Valparaiso, and captured after a tremendous engagement, in which the calibre of the British guns gave them every advantage, and in which the neutrality of the port was not taken into account. There was a poet on board the Essex, and he produced a long ballad describing the cruise and the retreat of the British ships after the challenge; but whether he perished in the later fight, or had no heart to add it to his verses, is not known. Among the crew of the Essex who did survive the fight was Midshipman David G. Farragut, who lived to achieve the greatest naval renown since that of Nelson, and be the theme of The Bay Fight, the noblest sea poem yet written.
The ballad of the Essex is entitled "A Pleasant New Song. Chanted by Nathan Whiting (through his nose) for the amusement of the galley slaves on board the Phoebe, who are allowed to sing nothing but psalms." After describing the beginning of the trouble caused by "John Bull's taking our ships and kidnaping our true sailors," and the capture of British vessels in the first year of the war, the ballad takes up the cruise of the Essex.
The saucy Essex, she sailed out
To see what she could do.
Her captain is from Yankee land,
And so are all her crew.
Away she sailed, so gay and trim,
Down to the Galapagos,
And toted all the terrapins,
And nabbed the slippery whalers.
And where d' ye think we next did go?
Why, down to the Marquesas.
And there we buried underground
Some thousand golden pieces.
Then sailed about the ocean wide,
Sinking, burning, taking,
Filling pockets, spilling oil,
While Johnny's heart was aching.
The ballad then describes the arrival of the Phoebe and Cherub and the rencontre in Valparaiso Bay, the challenge and the flight of the Phoebe, in verses which have a great deal of rude vigor.
At last John Bull quite sulky grew,
And called us traitors all,
And swore he'd fight our gallant crew,
Paddies and Scots and all.
Then out he went in desperate rage,
Swearing, as sure as day,
He'd starve us all or dare us out
Of Valparaiso Bay.
Then out he sailed in gallant trim,
As if he thought to fright us,
Run up his flag and fired a gun
To say that he would fight us.
Our cables cut, we put to sea,
And ran down on his quarter,
And Johnny clapped his helm hard up,
And we went following after.
In haste to join the Cherub he
Soon bent his scurvy way,
While we returned in merry glee
To Yalaparaiso Bay.
And let them go. To meet the foe
We 'll take no farther trouble,
Since all the world must fairly know
They 'll only fight us double.
Ne'er mind, my lads, let's drink and sing,
"Free trade and sailors' rights."
May liquor never fail the lad
Who for his country fights.
Huzza, my lads, let's drink and sing,
And toast them as they run:
"Here's to the sailors and their king
Who 'll fight us two to one."
There were other exploits of American ships told in verse, among them the gallant repulse, by the crew of the privateer General Armstrong, Captain Samuel C. Reid, in the Harbor of Fayal, of the boats of three British men-of-war, which was the subject of a forecastle ballad, but none of this memorial verse reached the level of poetry. The battles of Lake Erie and Lake Champlain also had their numerous laureates; and the raid of Admiral Cockburn and the troops upon Baltimore was the subject of a song, the opening lines of which have a vigor and strong rhythm not maintained throughout.
Old Ross, Cochrane, and Cockburn too,
And many a bloody villain more,
Swore with their bloody, savage crew
That they would plunder Baltimore.
The naval service during the civil war did not produce any songs that achieved popularity in comparison with that won by the songs of land service, like John Brown's Body, The Year of Jubilo, and Marching through Georgia, and in fact was singularly deficient in poetry, with the remarkable exception of the productions of Mr. Henry Howard Brownell. There were few singleship engagements except the fight between the Monitor and the Merrimac, and the Kearsarge and the Alabama, and the blockading service was not calculated to inspire the martial muse.
The two great naval achievements of the war were the capture of New Orleans and of the forts in Mobile Bay by the fleets under Farragut; and these were celebrated in poetry worthy of them—and no more can be said—by Henry Howard Brownell, who witnessed the second from the deck of Admiral Farragut's flagship. The fire, spirit, and grand fightingelanof The Bay Fight have never been surpassed in English poetry, and the accuracy of its pictures is as notable as their vigor. But these are poems, and not songs, and there is nothing in the naval songs of the civil war which will compare with those of the war of 1812. It was rather past the time for the genuine forecastle ballad, and none of the land poets hit the true vein, as Buchanan Read, Stedman, and others did when commemorating military exploits.
There was one other field of American seamanship, full of romance and excitement, which should have produced some worthy poetry and song, and that was the whaling service before the days of iron steamers and bomb lances. The chase of the gigantic cetacean in the lonely solitude of the Arctic and Indian oceans, the fights in frail boats with the maddened monster and all the perils of sea and storm, the visits to the palmy islands in the Southern Sea and the frozen solitude of the Arctic, were full of the materials of poetry. The long watches of the monotonous cruising during the four years' voyage gave plenty of time for any occupation, whether it was carving whales' teeth or making verses; and there were many bright spirits, attracted by the adventure of whaling, who could have made a literary use of their opportunity. The novels of Herman Melville, some of the strongest and most original in our literature, have given the romance of the South Sea islands as they appeared to the adventurer of that day; and in Moby Dick, or The White Whale, he has shown both the prose and the poetry of a whaling cruise with singular power, although with some touch of extravagance at the end. The whaling songs are, however, not very abundant, nor, it must be confessed, of a high standard of quality. To this there is one remarkable exception, which appears to be wholly unknown in American literature, although it has been in print. It is entitled a "Brand Fire New Whaling Song Right from the Pacific Ocean. Tune, Maggy Lander. By a Foremast Hand," and was printed in a little five-cent pamphlet, by E. B. Miller, in New Bedford, in 1831. It does not seem to have come under the eye of any critic who could appreciate its spirit and faithfulness, and no mention is made of it in any of the collections of American poetry. It is extremely doubtful if the author received enough from its sale to repay him for the investment of a portion of his "lay" in printing it, and his name is utterly lost in his modest pseudonym of "Foremast Hand;" so that he obtained neither fame nor fortune from his epic. The poem, which is too long for entire quotation, was unquestionably the work of a sailor on a whaling ship, and probably, as he says, of a foremast hand. It lacks some of the finish of professional literature, as shown in the ruggedness of some of its rhymes, and the vigorous compulsion of the rules of grammar and syntax, when necessary, although the author was evidently of higher education than would belong to one in his position, and its jigging measure becomes tiresome; but it is of very great spirit and vigor, as well as fidelity to its theme, and by no means deserves to have fallen so entirely into oblivion. Indeed, it seems to me to be quite as good as, and a great deal more original than, any American poetry which had appeared up to that time. The song has for its subject the chase and capture of a whale in the North Pacific, and relates the course of events from the time of the first sighting of "white water" on the horizon by the lookouts to that when the monster, stabbed to death by the keen lances, rolls "fins out" in the bloody water, amid the hurrahs of the excited boats' crews. All the details of thisgrande chasseare given with wonderful vigor, as well as faithfulness, and the historian of the whale fishery will find it as accurate as a log-book. Perhaps the account of the chase by the boats and the harpooning will give as good an idea of the force and spirit of the poem as any part of it; and, in reference to the emphasis of the language, it may be remembered that mates of whaling ships in pursuit of an eight-hundred-barrel whale had a good deal of energy and excitement to relieve. The boats have been lowered, and are darting toward the unsuspecting whale with all the speed of ashen oars and vigorous muscle, while their commanders objurgate and stimulate the crews, as the poet says, "judiciously."
"Pull, men, for, lo, see there they blow!
They 're going slow as night, too.
Pull, pull, you dogs! they lie like logs,—
Thank Heaven they 're headed right, too."
"The chance is ours!" the mate now roars.
"Spring, spring, nor have it said, men,
That we could miss a chance like this
To take them head and head, men.
There's that old sog, he's like a log.
Spring, lads, and show your mettle;
Strain every oar; let's strike before
He's- gallied, mill-, or-settle-."
And so it is, the chance is his.
The others peak their oars now.
From his strained eyes the lightning flies,
And lion-like he roars now.
"Pull, pull, my lads! why don't you pull?
For God's sake, pull away, men!
Hell's blazes! pull but three strokes more,
And we have won the day, men!
"Stand up there, forward—pull the rest—
Hold water—give it to her!
Stern all, stern all—God damn it, heave
Your other iron through her!
We 're fast, we 're fast—stern out her way!
Here, let me come ahead, men.
There, peak your oars—wet—line—wet—line—
Why, bloody zounds, you 're dead, men!"
The rush of the whale towing the boat, his sounding to the uttermost length of the line, his reappearance, the lancing, the mad dash at the boats, and the death flurry are all described with great vividness, but there is room only for the verses in which the monster comes up from his long dive, and obliges the poet to appeal to the enemy of sea songs, the steam boiler:—
Till from the deep, with mighty leap,
Full length the monster breaches,—
So strongly sped, his scarred gray head
High as our topmast reaches;
And, like a rock, with startling shock,
From mountain height descending,
Down thunders he upon the sea,
Ocean with ether blending.
And, hark! once more that lengthened roar,
As from his spout-hole gushing,
His breath, long spent, now finds a vent,
Like steam from boiler rushing.
It does not seem that a poet who could write so vividly and forcefully as this ought to be without a place in American literature, even if there were no other interest in his work.
There is another whaling song, entitled The Coast of Peru, and undoubtedly the work of a forecastle poet, which is worth preserving, despite its homeliness, for its genuine flavor, and as a relic of the old days before steam whalers and bomb lances took so much of the romance out of the fishery.
Come, all ye bold sailors,
Who sail 'round Cape Horn,
Come, all the bold whalers,
Who cruise 'round for sperm.
The Captain has told us,
And I hope't will prove true
That there's plenty of sperm whales
Off the coast of Peru.
The first whale we saw
Near the close of the day.
Our Captain came on deck,
And thus he did say:
"Now all my bold sailors,
Pray be of good glee,
For we 'll see him in the morning,
P'raps mider our lee."
It was early next morning,
Just as the sun rose,
The man at the mast-head
Called out, "There she blows!"
"Whereaway?" cried our Captain,
As he sprang up aloft.
"Three points on our lee bow,
And scarce two miles off."
"Now trace up your yards, boys,
We 'll fasten anear.
Get your lines in your boats,
See your box lines all clear;
Haul back the main yard, boys,
Stand by, each boat's crew,
Lower away, lower away,
My brave fellows, do."
"Now, bend to your oars, boys,
Just make the boat fly,
But whatever you do, boys,
Keep clear from his eye."
The first mate soon struck,
And the whale he went down,
While the old man pulled up,
And stood by to bend on.
But the whale soon arose;
To the windward he lay.
We hauled up 'longside,
And he showed us fair play.
We caused him to vomit,
Thick blood for to spout,
And in less than ten minutes
We rolled him "fin out."
We towed him alongside
With many a shout,
That day cut him in,
And began to boil out.
Oh, now he's all boiled out
And stowed down below,
We 're waiting to hear 'em,
Sing out, "There she blows!"
It is extremely doubtful if the Dago sailors and foreign 'longshoremen, who now make such a large portion of the crews of the Arctic steam whalers, are capable of even such rude verse as this, and the poetry of the whale fishery is now as extinct as the glory of Nantucket and the sea flavor of New Bedford. Like some greater things it may be regretted, but cannot be recovered.
Of collections and criticisms of the songs and poetry of the civil war in this country there is no lack. Newspaper files and popular song-books have been ransacked, as well as more pretentious volumes, and whatever possessed a modicum of what is termed "poetic merit" has been gathered with pious care. The standard in most cases has, naturally enough, been that of "polite literature," that of which the writers were persons of education, and who endeavored to express with more or less force a dominant sentiment in logical as well as grammatical form, and to embody their meaning in intelligent words. If popular songs, which did not fulfil these conditions, have been included, it has usually been with an apology for their uncouthness, or a contemptuous reference to their banality, and an intimation that they were forced into the pages of the collection, or upon the attention of the critic, because they could not be ignored in any representative collection of the poetry of the war. Nevertheless, it may be doubted if these uncouth rhymes, without sense or consecutive meaning, like Dixie's Land and John Brown's Body, or the cheap sentimentality of Just before the Battle, Mother, and When this Cruel War is over, do not have something of the indefinable fascination on the printed page which they had to the ears of the men who sung them, and do not take a stronger hold upon the mind than the much more elegant and refined verses by which they are surrounded. Something of this may be due to the memory of those who heard them, and in whose minds they were the voice of the war, as the flags, the arms, and the uniforms were its visible insignia, but this does not entirely account for their fascination and permanence. There was something about them which endowed them with vital life, which gave them a hold upon every tongue and upon every heart, a quality distinct from obvious meaning, to say nothing of literary excellence, and which can only be described as the singing element. It was to accomplish this purpose, to relieve the heart through the lungs, without reference to the mind, to emphasize and lighten the buoyant or weary march, and give voice to the pervading impulse, which kept these songs alive and made them a practical part of the war, as the sailor's "shanties" were a part of the life of the sea, and the negro choruses of the life of the plantation. This fascination may fade when the civil war becomes a matter of distant history, and John Brown's Body be no more than a set of unmeaning jingles to future generations, as Lillibullero, which "sung King James out of three kingdoms," is to our own; but with their death will come a loss of a vital element of the war, as representing its living and human sentiment, and history will miss its function if it exclude them. How vital they were at the time may be seen from the fact that the attempts to supersede the unmeaning rhymes by words of substance and definite poetry had no effect, so far as their popular use was concerned, even when this was done with such magnificent success as in Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, or General Albert Pike's powerful lines to Dixie. The people and the soldiers clung to the old choruses, and passed by with cold respect or indifference the deliberate and purely literary appeals to their feelings. There is, perhaps, a reason for this, which may be accounted for under the canons of literary criticism. A song is something different from a poem, and includes a dominant appeal to the ear, which may be even obstructed by elaborate meaning, and the simple and taking air is the essential thing. It is not always the case that a popular or national song is meaningless, as is shown in the Marseillaise and Der Wacht am Rhein; and, in our own war, Mr. James R. Randall's My Maryland was as popular in the Southern army as a song as it is vigorous and spirited as a piece of pure literature. But as a whole, songs which have been sung by large bodies of men, under stress of high excitement, have depended more upon their sound than their meaning for their vogue, and this would doubtless apply to the chants of the Crusaders as to the choruses of the Northern and Southern soldiers during the civil war. God save the King does not compare with Ye Mariners of England in any element of poetry, yet the one is always sung and the latter never; and Marching through Georgia depends upon its air rather than its commonplace words for its hold upon the martial heart. There was some good poetry written during the late civil war, although not much; and in the collections, as I have said, it is doubtful if the respectable verses, in which the incidents and feelings of the war were expressed with deliberate art, have the vitality, as they have not now the effect, of the rude rhymes and commonplace sentimentality of those songs which took hold of the hearts of the people, and were the living voices of the war. Too often they had the contortions of patriotism without its inspiration, and were forcible-feeble in appeal, or, when they attempted to interpret the spirit of battle, rang false to the real feeling and knowledge of the soldier. To this there were brilliant exceptions, like Mr. Gibbons's We are coming, Father Abraham, Mr. Henry Howard Brownell's naval poems, and Read's Sheridan's Ride, but as a whole it must be confessed that the polite poetry of the civil war is rather dreary reading.
There was an immense amount of song-writing as well as of song-singing during the war, and under the stress of excitement and the gathering together of immense bodies of young and exuberant spirits the enthusiasm inevitably found a vent through the lungs. The illiterate poets were as busy as those of higher education; and those who did not seek their public through the pages of the fashionable magazine, or even the poet's corner of the country newspaper, but through the badly printed sheet of the penny street ballad, or through the mouth of the negro minstrel, contributed almost as largely to the poetry of the war as their brothers. Dime song-books containing a curious admixture of the common and the polite, the appropriate and the incongruous, were innumerable, and the poetry which is below literary criticism was equal in bulk to that which is within its scope. Actual soldiers and sailors also sometimes wrote of their battles and experiences, or expressed their feelings in more or less finished verse, and these found their way into print either in the ballad sheet or the newspaper. Most of those which were good in themselves, from their native force and vigor or from their power as songs, have been preserved, but there is an immense amount of this uncollected and unedited verse which has a very great value as illustrating the sentiments and condition of the people, the waves of popular feeling during various phases of the war, the impressions of notable incidents and the estimates of prominent personages, and which tell, oftentimes more than the leading articles in the newspapers, how the common people were affected by the tremendous struggle. They have the interest, if no other, of the relics of arms and uniforms, and the tokens of the familiar life of a bygone age, and will one day be as valuable to the historian as the ballads of the civil war in England, which have been collected with so much care. In modern times and in civilized societies, the newspaper has taken the place of the street ballad as the record of historical events and the expression of political feeling, and Ireland is almost the only country where it now lingers in any quantity and force; but during such times of popular excitement, and the occurrence of great events involving the most intimate interests of the people, as during the civil war, the popular ballads resumed something of their former value as the expressions of popular feeling. It would be a mistake to omit from consideration even those which were provided as a matter of professional business by the minstrels of the popular stage, who reflected the pervading sentiments of the time, and colored their rude comedy and cheap pathos with the thoughts and feelings aroused by the war.
Thousands of these street songs were issued, to have their temporary vogue and disappear. The principal publisher of the penny sheets was H. de Marsan, 34 Chatham Street, New York, and he appears to have had almost a monopoly of the trade. They were printed on coarse paper, with an emblematic border in colors representing the American flag, and with a soldier and sailor under arms. Some of the more successful songs were copyrighted and published with their music, but this appears to have made little difference to the enterprising Chatham Street publisher, for he included almost everything that was singable, old Revolutionary ballads, English naval songs, and some of the more finished American poems of the war, as well as Ethiopian melodies, and ballads obviously of original contribution. It would be interesting to know whether he kept a staff of poets, like Jemmy Catnach of Seven Dials, or whether, as is most probable, he simply took what he could find, and conferred the honors of print, without remuneration, upon voluntary contributors. The most numerous contributors who bear the stamp of originality naturally came from the Irish element in New York, who were familiar with the street ballad at home, and reproduced its form and sentiment for a similar audience. There are dozens of ballads relating to the exploits of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, an Irish organization in the New York State Guard, of which Michael Corcoran, an ex-member of the Irish constabulary, was colonel, and Thomas Francis Meagher, the Irish revolutionist, and afterward a brigadier-general of volunteers, a captain. The regiment took part in the battle of Bull Run, during which Colonel Corcoran was taken prisoner and carried South. The bards were instantly inspired to sing the praises of the regiment and its commander, and ballads were written exactly reproducing the style and language of the Irish "Come, all yez," as thus:—
Come, all ye Gallant Heroes, along with me combine;
I 'll sing to you a ditty about the Glorious Sixty-Ninth.
They are a band of Brothers, from Ireland they came;
They had a bold Commander, Michael Corcoran was his
name.
In one or two of them there is an improvement on this very primitive verse, gleams of humor and ebullitions of vigorous spirit. A song entitled The Jolly Sixty-Ninth has a rollicking rhythm and rude humor, of which the following is a specimen:—
It happened one fine day,
Down by the rajin say,
Quite convenient to the boilin' Gulf of Mexico,
That some chaps hauled down our flag,
And it through the dust did drag,
Swearin' it should never float on Fort Sumpter, O.
The author of a song entitled Freedom's Guide had a force and vigor which, with a little more polish and form, would have entitled him to a place in polite literature, and the real singable quality, which was, perhaps, of more importance:—
Our country now is great and free,
And this forever it shall be.
We know the way—we know the way.
Though Southern foes may gather here,
We will protect what we hold dear.
We know the way.
Chorus. We know the way—we know the way.
Through Baltimore, hooray.
For our guide is Freedom's banner.
Hooray, hooray.
The way is through Baltimore.
The South shall see that we are true,
And that we know a thing or two.
We know the way—we know the way.
As Yankee boys we are at hand,
Our countless throngs shall fill the land.
We know the way.
From east to west, from south to north,
We 'll send our mighty legions forth.
We know the way—we know the way.
The freedom that our fathers won
Shall be defended by each son.
We know the way.
Then shout, then shout o'er hill and plain,
We will our country's rights maintain.
We know the way—we know the way.
We will always guard it with our might,
And keep steadfast in the right.
We know the way.
Old Jeff has now begun to lag,
He knows that we 'll stand by the flag.
We know the way—we know the way.
With Scott to guide us in the right,
We 'll show them how the Sixty-Ninth can fight.
We know the way.
An organization almost equally popular with the New York ballad singers, in the early days of the war, was the "Fire Zouaves," recruited among the firemen of the metropolis, and which was expected to perform wonderful feats of daring and energy, from the character of its material. Its leader, Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, was killed by the landlord of a hotel in Alexandria, Va., while hauling down the rebel flag from the roof, and his death created a deep sensation from its dramatic character, and from the fact that it was among the earliest in the war. The elegies upon his death were numerous, as well as those in praise of the regiment itself. One of the latter, by Archibald Scott, whose name, contrary to the usual custom, was prefixed to the ballad, had a good deal of rude vigor, of which the following is a specimen:—
Shall ugly plugs of Baltimore,
Who come out with stones and staves,
Get leave our patriots' blood to pour,
And drive our soldiers from their shore?
No, no! by Hell, in flames shall roar
Their city first by York Zouaves!
Another phase of life in the cities, from that of the enthusiasm of the young men in marching to the war and the fervent appeals for enlistment, was that of the feelings of the women whose sons and husbands left their workshops to join the army. The grief was as bitter and the patriotism as sincere among the inmates of the crowded tenement houses and the narrow and barren homes of the families of the workingmen of New York as among their sisters in the farmhouses in the country, whose surroundings better lent themselves to the illumination of poetry, and it cost as much to put down the tin pail of the city laborer as for the farmer to
Lay down the axe, fling by the spade,
and even more in pinching poverty and lack of resource. But the griefs and sacrifices of these women of the city tenement and noisome alley have found no place in the genteel poetry of the war, and have only been expressed in the rude verse of the street ballad. Says one of them:—
It was in the month of April,
As I walked out one day,
I met a woman weeping
As I walked down Broadway.
She was weeping for her Johnny,
Her dear and only son,
Who joined the Northern army
To fight in Washington.
O Johnny! I gave you a schoolin',
I gave you a trade likewise,
And when you joined the Volunteers,
You know't was my advice."
The New York ballad writers were not entirely confined to the English language, the large foreign population furnishing recruits of all nations. There is not, so far as I have seen, any original German song devoted to the Union cause, but The Red, White, and Blue, and other patriotic songs, were published in German text; and of Germanized English songs, most if not all the product of variety theatre performers, there were a great many, including the extremely popular I'm going to fight mit Siegel.
Ven I comes from de Deutsche Countree,
I vorks somedimes at baking.
Den I keeps a lager bier saloon,
And den I goes shoemaking.
But now I vas a sojer man
To save the Yankee eagle,
To Schlauch dem dam Southern folks,
I'm going to fight mit Siegel.
But this was no more representative of German sentiments than the "Whack-row-de-dow" Pats of the stage were of the Irish; and the German soldiers, when they sang in the vernacular, enlivened their foreign patriotism with the songs of the Fatherland. There was at least one French poet who appealed to his countrymen in their own language to rally to the cause of the Union. His production was as follows:—