IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

John Brown Marches On (BENJAMIN SOSKIS and JOHN STAUFFER, 7/17/11, NY Times)

The song, adapted from a Methodist camp meeting hymn, had emerged from the improvisations of earlier volunteer militiamen at Fort Warren, the Second Battalion, Light Infantry. When the 12th moved in, they inherited the song and embraced it as their own. “John Brown’s Body” quickly made its way outside the fort’s walls. A month after the ceremony on the Common, a Boston publisher released sheet music for a version of the song, announcing, “[a]t this time one can hardly walk on the streets for five minutes without hearing it whistled or hummed.”

After the 12th introduced the song to the residents of New York as it marched down Broadway, the New York Tribune, one of the nation’s largest circulating papers, republished the lyrics. The song’s popularity continued to mount as the 12th made its way to the front, intermingling with other regiments. It soon spread to the entire Army of the Potomac, becoming the Union’s most beloved anthem. With its steady, determined cadence, “John Brown’s Body” seemed to steel men for battle. “The leaders of the Union army acknowledge its superhuman power for inspiring the ranks,” wrote one journalist. But what did Union soldiers mean by singing it?

The song clearly conjured up the memory of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who in October 1859 led a small band of men on a doomed raid on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Va. Brown was captured and hung after spending six weeks in jail, impressing even his captors with his stoicism and Puritanical resolve. At memorial services across the North, pulpits rang out with declarations that John Brown would live on.

To some extent, the Civil War’s most popular song guaranteed this fate. For a dedicated core of abolitionists, and for those enlistees in the Union army who were impelled by antislavery ardor, “John Brown’s Body” served as a rallying cry. “I want to sing ‘John Brown’ in the streets of Charleston,” announced one Massachusetts infantry captain to his mother, “and ram red-hot abolition down their unwilling throats at the point of the bayonet.” As the song spread through the Union ranks, these abolitionists regarded its popularity as portending the incorporation of Brown’s antislavery zeal into the North’s war effort, which would ultimately culminate in the emancipation of the slaves.

Perhaps no group appreciated the song’s emancipationist associations more clearly than African Americans. “John Brown’s Body” assumed a prominent place in both spontaneous and planned celebrations of emancipation. Indeed, for bondsmen and women who intuited that freedom was no longer a distant, millennial vision, but an imminent actuality, the song clearly held a subversive attraction: when a visitor to Virginia expressed surprise in hearing slaves singing “John Brown’s Body” while laboring in the fields, he asked their master why he allowed them to do so. He was powerless to stop them, the master replied.

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