Civil War Folklore
Folklorists have given rather little attention to the folklore of the Civil War, probably because the paradigms underlying the study of folklore in the United States generally have been ahistorical ones, with emphasis placed on collecting contemporary folklore and upon emphasizing the folklore of contemporary groups such as ethnic groups. Of course folklore collecting projects sometimes have garnered oral traditions relating to the War (for example, legends recounting events during or stemming from the conflict), but these seldom if ever have been singled out for special attention. Even Richard M. Dorson, the scholar who in some ways dominated American folklore studies in the 1960s and who was by academic training a historian and much interested in the relationship between folklore and history, had little to say about the Civil War. Indeed, in his "A Theory for American Folklore" (Journal of American Folklore 72 [1959]: 197-215) , in which he attempts to set out the great historical forces that have shaped American folklore, he does not list any American wars as having been of significance in this regard (though he mentions the many anecdotes and legends about Abraham Lincoln as indicative of the importance of "Patriotism and Democracy" in influencing American folklore).
This is not to say that folklorists have published nothing about the folklore of the War, and one can refer to studies and collections that do relate to it. For example, G. Malcolm Laws provides notable information on the ballads (narrative folksongs) that tell the stories of various Civil War battles, such as "The Battle of Shiloh" and "The Cumberland," in his index to American ballads, Native American Balladry (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: American Folklore Society Publications, Bibliographical and Special Series, No. 1, 1964). The recently-published Encyclopedia of American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996) includes a "Civil War" entry (by Rory P. B. Turner, pp. 145-147), which discusses in rather general terms the musical traditions generated by the War, oral narratives, the African-American Juneteenth celebrations that stem from the end of the War, and Civil War reunions and reenactments. An article on "The Civil War Songster of a Monroe County Farmer" (New York Folklore Quarterly 27 [1971]: 163-230) provides a personal collection of songs recorded 1862-64 including some Civil War songs but also suggesting the knowledge of songs had by a typical individual in this period. Irwin Silber's Songs of the Civil War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960) of course provides a wide selection of texts, though of many different kinds of songs, not only folksongs. (There are other collections of Civil War songs, but this is the most scholarly.)
One folklore journal, the New York Folklore Quarterly, did publish two issues with special sections devoted to "Civil War Lore" (vol. 17, nos. 1 & 2 [1961]). These sections include an article on folksongs ("Three Civil War Songs," by Frank Warner, pp. 90-95; Warner also produced an LP, Songs of the Civil War, Prestige-International 13012), and one recounting two legends relating to the War ("Two Tales from the Hudson Valley," by Pauline Hammell, pp. 32-36), one a family narrative about a premonition, the other concerning events at the Battle of Gettysburg. Unfortunately some of the articles in these issues are problematic from the perspective of folklore scholars because the New York Folklore Quarterly construed the subject matter of "folklore" very, very broadly, including under the heading articles on what most folklorists today would consider not folklore at all but other aspects of social and local history and description. For example, the "Civil War Lore" issues include an article based on the Civil War naval exploits of one author's ancestor based on his diary.
There is also Benjamin Botkin's book, A Civil War Treasury of Tales, Legends and Folklore (New York: Random House, 1960). Botkin, however, has been a difficult figure for other folklorists to come to terms with, so that his work has been widely ignored. Originally an academic, Botkin became a highly successful anthologist whose Treasury of American Folklore (New York: Crown Publishers, 1944) was in particular widely sold and read, going through a number of printings and editions. The book was, however, strongly criticized by Richard Dorson, who accused Botkin of producing not a collection of folklore texts but a mishmash of literary and historical texts whose relationship to folklore varied considerably and included the most superficial and sentimental possibilities. Whatever the justice of Dorson's criticism, professional folklorists, who increasingly emphasized the primacy of field-collected folklore texts and ethnographic approaches, increasingly distanced themselves from Botkin and have generally paid little attention to most of his books as source material.
The Civil War Treasury is similar to his other anthologies in consisting of excerpts from a wide variety of mostly published material written by both obscure figures and well known (among the latter, Benjamin Butler, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Ambrose Bierce). Some of the excerpts clearly report folklore texts (such as a song sung by liberated slaves about how their masters were now the runaways; pp. 56-57), stories that obviously were making the rounds of the camps (Bierce reports one about a soldier killed by cannon-shot that literally had his name on it; pp. 50-51), and customs (such as a system of ritualized forfeits when officers in camp inadvertently mentioned some unobtainable luxury; pp. 67-68). Many others, however, are more accounts of historical sidelights, such as an account of how General McClellan respected a property once owned by George Washington (pp. 81-82). Indeed, Botkin seems to have intended compiling a sort of documentary social history of the War which included folklore texts and observations of customary folklore but much else as well. But the book is worth further attention from folklorists who certainly could examine the excerpts for a more unified conception of the oral traditions and folk customs of the War context. (Obviously, there were no folklorists or anthropologists collecting folklore during the War, so that any knowledge of what folklore was being transmitted must be drawn from written sources. Botkin's book could be a useful starting point for any survey of what the letters and journals and diaries and memoirs of the War period suggest were the tales and songs and rituals of the time. Indeed, Dorson undertook just such a survey of colonial America in his book American Folklore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959].) Contemporary folklorists are interested in matters of identity and how folklore supports ethnic or national or regional senses of personal identity. The importance of the War and the folklore of the War in shaping Southern identity is certainly an issue folklorists might pursue.
Of course if one includes the existence and history of slavery as integral to a consideration of the Civil War, there is a large body of African-American folklore which has been published and is of relevance. Most of it was collected after the War (indeed, the first significant collection was one of slave songs made by Northerners who had come south to educate the freedmen; this was William Francis Allen, Francis Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867), but much of it nonetheless reflects a vision of ante-bellum slave life. One could argue that this folklore is very important historical documentation of slavery, given that the slaves did not generally record their own reactions to their experiences in writing, having to resort to oral means of expression. The John and Old Master stories, for example, which feature the attempts of a slave and his master to outwit each other, clearly are indicative of plantation social relations and slave attitudes. Miles Mark Fisher argued in Negro Slave Songs in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953) that slave songs very precisely track changes in slavery, likely an overstatement of the case but one which did call the attention of historians to folk materials. More recent historians looking at slave life have seen the value of folklore as a source--Lawrence Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), and Sterling Stuckey, in "Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery," Massachusetts Review 9 (1968): 417-437 for example.
The American Folklore Society web site includes links to numerous other folklore-related web sites.
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