Existing comment:
Our Generals
Joseph Eggleston Johnston 1807-1891
A. P. Hill 1825-1865
William Joseph Hardee 1815-1873
Braxton Bragg 1817-1876
Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson 1824-1863
Sterling Price 1809-1867
P. G. T. Beauregard 1818-1893
James Longstreet 1821-1904
Robert E. Lee 1807-1870
Music profoundly influenced the Civil War. Martial tunes rallied troops and galvanized the home front. Sentimental ballads expressed the yearning of separated loved ones. Spirituals promised freedom to the enslaved. Confederates found their theme song in "Dixie," while the North embraced "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," with lyrics by Julia Ward Howe, whose portrait hangs nearby.
After the war, music helped promote the myth of the "Lost Cause" by memorializing Confederate military leaders as valiant heroes, rather than defenders of slavery. This lithograph-advertised as "certainly the best and most expensive music frontispiece published"-covered piano compositions such as the "Gen R. E. Lee Polka," dedicated to the Confederate States Army commander, shown in the centrally placed portrait, and each of the prominent generals whose portraits encircle his. The music was written by Charlie L. Ward of the Fourth Kentucky Regiment, the so-called "balladeer of the Lost Cause."
Major & Knapp Lithography Company (active 1864-c.1881)
Lithograph with tintstone, 1866
NPG.84.364 |