Occasional Nuggets

of the
Providence Public Library
Volume 5, Issue 1

Curious Ephemera from the

Harris Collection on the
Civil War and Slavery
By Micah Salkind

Introduction
Comprehending the magnitude of The Civil War is a bit like trying to
count raindrops during a heavy storm; 620,000 thousand dead, mostly
young men cut down in their prime is, quite simply, unfathomable. How
does one archive and memorialize tragedy on such a massive scale in
ways that dont trivialize it? Paging through the hundreds of song sheets
in the Providence Public Librarys Caleb Fiske Harris Collection provides some clues.
The Harris Collection was the first special collection purchased by The
Providence Public Library in 1884 and its nearly 700 song sheets are
just a small percentage of the 10,000 artifacts held therein. The PPLs
cache is complemented by a huge collection of American poetry and
plays held at Brown Universitys John Hay Library, much of which was
purchased by Fiske Harris during an estate auction in 1868 following its
original owners death.
The PPLs wonderful digital exhibition curated by Eric R. Boutin and
Richard Ring provides useful interpretive categories that can help novice and veteran researchers alike break down the Fiske Harris song sheet
collection into easily digestible chunks related to lyrical content and taxonomic categories like patriotism, memory and mortality. Not being particularly well versed in the popular culture of the 1860s, I deliberately
came into the Fiske Harris archive without having reviewed the large
corpus of secondary literature in the field of Civil War studies. By sitting down with the song sheets, and letting my curiosity guide me, I have
come up with what I hope are some novel ways of thinking about the
song sheets in context as pieces of Civil War era visual culture, rather
than merely the material evidence of the popular music cultures of the
1860s.

Henry Marsan Publishers Iconographic

Woodblocks: Minstrel Types

As I started perusing PPLs song sheet archive, I was struck by how

many publishers in the North used figurative, wood-block print borders
to convey information about cultural difference and social hierarchies.
Song sheets with large sales, such as The Battle Cry of Freedom and

Marching Through Georgia, which each sold more than 500,000 copies by the end of the 19th century, traveled, and changed, on the air more
than via printed ephemera (McWhirter 17). If most of the songs of the
Civil War circulated with marching regiments, not printed paper, what
purpose did these figurative depictions serve?
In his landmark study of minstrelsy in the Jacksonian era, historian Eric
Lott argues that both performances and graphic depictions of non-white
types can be thought of as moments of interclass recognition in the cultural arena, eruptions experienced through the visual language of race.
(Lott 87) As an aside, Im being careful not to superimpose contemporary notions of ethnicity on the ante-bellum era considering that the
term came into its contemporary use in the first half of the 20th century.
Race, as an early modern category, is a better fit for analyzing portrayals
of, and ideas about, Blacks, American Indians, half-breed trappers, and
other marginal whites, such as dispossessed southerners and Irish immigrants.
While it is difficult to discern whether and how figurative graphic depictions communicated any specific ideas about the connections between
race and performance, Publishers like New Yorks Henry De Marsan,
seem to have used them because they did some type of work in the
song sheet market. As Lott reminds us, minstrel images cant be read as
though they are likenesses of real people since they would have likely
been extrapolated from the artists distanced observations of nonwhite
revelry, perhaps at events like public John Canoe, Pinkster and Voting
Day celebrations (46-48).
Edwin Wolf 2nds American Song Sheets collection lists and categorizes
many of the graphic borders used by different publishers during the war
years. Answer To Mother Is The Battle Over? Yes my boy, the battles
over, was printed four times with at least as many distinct graphic

Figure 1.1


frames (Wolf 2nd 4). The Marsan version in PPLs

Fiske Harris collection appears to be that with the
Ethiopian border. Marsan also published a version with kissing cupids, but the PPL copys black
cupids are clearly separated by a rippling sash reading in all capital letters; ETHIOPIAN. (Fig. 1.1)
Minstrel performers in the ante-bellum period used
the appellation Ethiopian to frame their blackface
performances for their audiences; the term would
have been understood by an American song sheet
buying public to mean that Answer was a minstrel tune, even though it wasnt written in the exaggerated dialect that often served to separate blacks,
and those who performed in blackface, from mainstream American culture (Cornelius xiv).
I am at once delighted and confused by Answers
tiny black angels. It is difficult to discern much
about their facial expressions, in part because the
song sheet has become somewhat opaque over time.
What is clear, however, is that they are both playing instruments: the one on the right, a hand drum
(and perhaps a second drum to be played with its
feet) and the one on the left, two pairs of spoons,
household objects used in American folk music and
minstrelsy to add rhythmic accompaniment to song
and dance.

Figure 1.2


My first association with the black baby angels was

of the all-too-familiar pickaninny adorning the coverlets of minstrel song sheets from the early 20th
century. Cultural historian Jayna Brown says that
pickaninnies served to infantilize blacks of all ages,
while lampooning black childhood itself (Brown
55). Answers angelitos negros dont seem to conform to the grotesque decadence of the archetypical
pickaninnies Brown analyzes, such as Topsy from
Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin, but

their innocence still seems to be tempered by their

roles as laboring musicians in the mise en scene of the
border.
The angels fly above a six-string banjo-playing black
man on the song sheets left side. He is bedecked in
what appear to be a classical European jester costume, complete with striped tights, diamond-patterned bloomers, a fancy dicky and an idiosyncratic
floppy farm hat with a tuft of grass protruding from
its band (Fig 1.2). The clown, or fool type, endemic
to late 19th and early 20th century black face minstrel
shows, and sometimes called the Sambo or Coon,
may have been a trans-Atlantic re-versioning of a
blackened devil/fool character that historian Robert
Hornback traces to Anglophone theater produced in
1460 (Hornback 28). Hornbacks innovative work revising assumptions about the sui generis minstrel type
is compelling. It helps explain anachronistic representations of wartime banjo-wielding minstrel types
by tracing them to antecedents in European popular
culture.
To the fools right, across the expanse of the songs
text, is a female type who looks far more phenotypically American Indian than her male counterpart.
She has straight hair cascading behind her shoulders,
door-knocker earrings, bangles on her wrists, and a
white, hoop skirt. She doesnt easily fit with familiar
feminized, black minstrel types, like the Jezebel or
the Mammy, in part because the Jezebels aggressive sexuality is often set against racialized tableaus in
the urbane north, as opposed to the bucolic south, and
Mammy typically relies on her proximity to and care
of others (in particular white children) to signify. The
feminine figure represented here is a folksier type,
perhaps a rural version of the Jezebel. The dark hue of
her skin, and the artists exaggerated rendering of her

Figure 1.3


broad facial features, remind consumers that she is, indeed, excessively
black. The hand across her bust, reaching to either hold up her descending dress, or to pull it off her, renders her sexually available.
With its sentimental lyrics about a slain male soldier, it seems strange
that De Marsan would have used the Ethiopian border to sell Answer. The border makes more sense as a frame for Kingdom Coming,
a minstrel song referencing the Christian concept of the world to come.
Originally published by Root & Cady, the wars most prolific purveyor
of ballad song sheets, Kingdom is comprised of four verses in affected,
mock-plantation dialect (Fig. 2.1). The song sold 20,000 copies in 1862,
making it an immensely popular hit for the Chicago publishing house.
Such high demand helps explain why Henry De Marsan would have
purchased the rights to reprint the minstrel ballad in New York (McWhirter 16).
According to archivist Christian McWhirter, George Frederick Root
saw music and its commercial distribution as a political project connected to his abolitionism; if he couldnt fight, he could at least spread
sentiment with song (20). Knitting together a sonorous national polity
required writing repetitive, memorable lyrics and music that was malleable, or that could at least be adapted to a variety of local contexts across
the country. A catchy tune and a marching rhythm, in particular, helped
a song spread, but so did lyrical content that obliquely spoke to social
inequalities and political unrest. Indeed, as one northern critic noted,
men will sing what theyd be shame-faced to say (12). As with the lyrics of Kingdom Coming, the unspeakable in Civil War era popular
culture often operated in the register of interracial class critique.

In his path-breaking study of trans-Atlantic popular culture of the antebellum era, Jump Jim Crow, W.T. Lhamon traces the development of a
prototypical minstrel figure that, in his earliest incarnation represented
the runaway slave mingling with the poor white. Lhamon argues that
Jim Crow, and the minstrel performances that his character influenced,
helped foment a very real cross-racial energy and recalcitrant alliance
between blacks and lower-class whites (Lhamon viii). Hyperbolic, minstrel images and parodic lyrics work together in Kingdom Coming to
disguise a story of slaves enjoying the fruits of their labor. There was, perhaps, nothing scarier to elites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Figure 2.1

Irish Types
The figurative borders used by Henry De Marsan represent many facets of Americas 19th century racial regimes beyond those refracted through complex black,
minstrel types. The publishing houses second printing of The Irish Brigade, which Wolf 2nd describes as
having a military cupid border, features Irish figures
that give insight into the development of non-black, racial difference prior to and during the Civil War years
(Wolf 2nd 72).
During the 19th century, the Irish were often compared
to simians in the popular British press, the missing link
between apes and humans. This comparison became
Figure 3.1
most prevalent during the rise of the Fenian movement
for Irish liberation during the mid-19th century (Dyer 52). Much in the
same way that slave-owners and pro-slavery ideologues compared enslaved Africans to animals, simian comparisons served to de-humanize
the Irish, and thus delegitimize their claims for sovereignty and political
autonomy.
American notions of Irish racial otherness often fed off, and expanded
upon, these British constructions of Irish animality. The
feminized Irish figure on the left of Brigades text (Fig
3.1), for example, has a large, upturned nose and a rounded
skull; she is hunched over and her hair is piled awkwardly
in a bound-up Victorian pompadour. This Irish female
type is almost cartoon-like, and clearly distinct from more
genteel, Anglo-Saxon figures, such as that depicted on the
border of the kissing cupids (Wolf 2nd 85) edition of Let
Me Kiss Him For His Mother (Fig 4.1). With her narrow
head shape, small, delicate hands, and graceful little nose,
De Marsans Anglo female type reads as the standard for
white, feminine beauty from which other wood block iconography, both that depicting Irish and black women, deviates.
Figure 3.2


The depiction of the male Irish type to the right of the

text on Brigade complements that of his female countrywoman (Fig 3.2). His unkempt hair and knocked
knees speak to his low-born status, as do his straw bucket
hat, rumpled coat tails and corn-cob pipe. Much like his
female counterpart, this masculine caricature is especially meaningful when contrasted with an Anglo type,
such as that depicted in Let Me Kiss Him (Fig 4.2).
With his clean-shaven face, patrician nose, and lithe
lute-playing fingers, De Marsans gentlemanly figure
cuts a clear contrast with the stereotypical paddy depicted in Brigade.
Without first hand accounts from song sheet consumers, it is hard to know for sure how these Irish caricaFigure 4.1
tures would have been recognized in the 1860s were they to have been
printed onto song sheets with no mention of the Irish-American regiments. However, this particular printed border accompanied a song with
explicit references to Erin and the Island that gave such aid to the
Union, meaning that literate consumers would have had plenty of supporting evidence for reading the border figures as Irish, even if other visual cues went over their heads.

The Brave Zouaves

Irish Americans were not the only non-Anglos to serve
bravely in the Union forces. 180,000 African Americans
and 20,000 Native Americans fought as well, sometimes
together, as was the case for those conscripted into the 31st
Colored Infantry (Cornelius 12-13). Other American fighting regiments took on sartorial expressions of nonwhites,
even though they were mostly comprised of phenotypically
white soldiers. The 164th and 165th New York regiments,
and the 33rd and 35th New Jersey regiments, for example,
adopted visual markers of the French light infantry who
fought in French North Africa beginning in the mid-19th
century. These American Zouaves, with their distinctive
Figure 4.2 open-fronted jackets, baggy, sirwal trousers, as well as sashes


and tasseled turbans, fought bravely throughout the entirety of the war,
despite the challenges they faced keeping their ostentatious orientalist
uniforms in good condition (McAfee 34).
The PPL Fiske Harris collection contains a remarkable copy of The
New--York Zouaves, or Fire-Brigade by Archibald Scott. Published
in 1860, this particular edition of the sheet, with its trapper border,
shows that iconographic representations of nonwhites, as well as marginal whites, literally framed textual exhortations of union patriotism
during the Civil War (Fig 5.1)
The black, southern slave figure in the bottom left corner, barefoot and
open-shirted, strums on a banjo, not unlike the black, minstrel figure depicted in De Marsans Ethiopian border. Unlike his minstrel counterpart, he is dressed more simply, his features are less exaggerated and he
has facial hair. His bare feet indicate that he is likely a slave absconding
to the field and stealing away his labor, as opposed to a free black in the
north.
Border artist E. A. Sparks, whose name is included to the bottom left of
the Zouaves song sheet, carved and printed this black, male bard such
that he was in conversation with three other figures. The meaning he
would have made for song sheet consumers was, as a result, contingent
on not only his depiction, but also on the ways the three other border
figures were able to signify in conversation with him and each other.
To the bottom right of the trapper border, an American Indian figure
sits in repose, his lips pursed around the tip of a long pipe. As I type these
words, Im struck by the fact that I cannot definitively say that its a pipe,
but that the idea of the Indian peace pipe preconditions me to perceive
it as such, even though it could just as easily be a spear that has just been
used to strike a small animal. Hair and noses are often the best clues to
decoding the racial types depicted in graphic borders, and the aquiline
nose of the native trapper helps construct him as non-black and American Indian, as does his minimal attire.
Sparks might have been situating his American Indian figure within
a visual repertoire of 19th century noble savages, a genre which had,
by 1860, already been constructed through an iconic array of visual
10

Figure 5.1

languages and philosophical ideologies valorizing indigenous peoples

of the US, as well as those of Africa (Steeves 96-97). These Mid-19th
century illustrations of Native Americans often depicted them as
inherently capable of living simple, unfettered lives, uncomplicated by
the drama of modern technologies and civilization their knowledge
systems and ways of life seemed to reside in the nebulous realm of the
inborn (and later biological) as opposed to the cultural or learned.
On the one hand, iconographic representations of the noble savage
might have been a step up from older painterly and pictorial representations created in a land where Native Americans were often seen as ignoble savages impeding the westward expansion of righteous American
settlers. On the other hand, stock images, however noble, froze Native
Americans in time, keeping them non-agential objects, rather than acknowledging them as fully humanized subjects.
White figures in Sparks trapper engraving are notable for approximating certain characteristics of their non-white counterparts, while
still maintaining positions of relative power in the visual field. The upper-left-most, white figure in the borders composition takes on many of
the sartorial trappings of the Native American in the bottom right: he is
covered in buckskins, wearing a coon hat and is holding a rifle. He appears ready and able to catch and prepare his meal; perhaps he is even
eyeing the rabbits that punctuate the song sheets border at its vertical
midpoints.
Like the Irish paddy, the half-breed trapper was a racialized type
familiar to ante-bellum consumers of popular music. Described in an
1874 issue of Appletons Journal as uniformly mediocre, he was both
admired for his tenacity and rugged character and derided for his social and physical proximity to Native Americans (Appletons 375). The
trapper indexes a curious liminal position that remains difficult to comprehend in our contemporary bi-racial US culture. Since the early 20th
century American racial ideologies have become increasingly characterized by a black/white binary. For a long period in American history, race
was understood along a more complex spectrum influenced by nation of
origin, urban/rural distinctions, and class.
12

Much in the same way that the white trapper is juxtaposed across
Zouaves horizontal axis with his Native American counterpart, the
white southerner is positioned kitty-corner from the slave signifying
not only with his longer hair, straw derby hat and high shirt collar, but
also through his relative position of power on the sheet with respect to
his primary historical foil. Indeed, stereotypes in popular culture signify
most clearly when put in conversation with each other; by mapping a
cartography of power within the frame of the song sheet, Sparks signals
to De Marsans consuming public that they can possess and master the
slave, the trapper, the noble savage and the planter as they raise their
voices in solidarity with the New York Zouaves.

Conclusion
Elaborate, iconic borders were the exception rather than the rule in the
fast-paced, world of Civil War song sheet publishing. Indeed, elite critics of the mid-19th century lamented the cheapness in music that they
represented as being second only to cheapness in literature for its detrimental effect on American culture (McWhirter 16). While the mark of
cheapness was as much, if not more, about the complexity of the musical
forms of the songs published as it was about the printing processes and
materiality of the song sheets themselves, elaborate borders helped add
value by increasing the visual appeal to the song sheets, and much like
the hand inking, or other graphic elements, would perhaps entice consumers to spend their hard-earned greenbacks.
The beauty of curious ephemera is that as we re-discover it anew, in the
archive or on the web, our new eyes can frame it as part of an ongoing arc
rather than merely the material evidence of the past. Investigating the
materiality of Civil War song sheets helps pull them into new contexts
with deep roots, roots that give us a better sense of where our popular
culture came from and where it is going. That destination will undoubtedly be shaped by the visual culture of race-making as much as our nations bloodiest war was, a visual culture that continues to evolve even as
it stays very much the same.

13

Bibliography
Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping
Of the Modern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Cornelius, Steven. Music of the Civil War Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Dyer, Richard. White. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Hornback, Robert. The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages
to Shakespeare. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2009.
Lhamon, W. T, ed. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of
the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
McAfee, Michael J. Zouaves of 64. Military Images 32, no. 2 (Spring
2014): 3437.
McWhirter, Christian. Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2012.
Steeves, Edna L. Negritude and the Noble Savage. The Journal of
Modern African Studies 11, no. 1 (March 1, 1973): 91104.
Wolf 2nd, Edwin. American Song Sheets, Slip Ballads, and Poetical
Broadsides, 1850-1870: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Library
Company of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company
of Philadelphia, 1963.

Ballads Depicted
All ballads are found in the Harris Collection on the
Civil War & Slavery, arranged by title.

14

Title Page: Detail of a military cupid from The Irish-Brigade

Figure 1: Answer to Mother Is the Battle Over?
Figure 2: Kingdom Coming
Figure 3: The Irish Brigade
Figure 4: Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother
Figure 5: The New--York Zouaves, Or Fire-Brigade

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15

This edition is limited to two hundred copies,

of which this is copy number

Published in June of 2015 by the

Providence Public Library Special Collections.
Cover template design by Delia Kovac.

Printing and binding by Neil J. Salkind and Leni Salkind at

big boy press in Lawrence KS on a Vandercook Universal
One during the spring of 2015.
~
Learn more about Occasional Nuggets and PPL Special Collections at
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