I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The “Old Line’s” bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb;
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum—
She breathes, she burns! She’ll come!
She’ll come!
Maryland, my Maryland!
—James Ryder Randall.
My Maryland, one of the most popular songs of the Confederacy, was written by James Ryder Randall, in 1861. Randall was at that time professor of English literature at Poydras College, upon the Fausse Rivière, of Louisiana. He was very young, and had but recently come from college in Maryland. He was full of poetry and romance, and when one day in April, 1861, he read in the New Orleans Delta the news of the attack on the Massachusetts Sixth as they passed through Baltimore, it fired his blood. “This account excited me greatly,” Mr. Randall writes. “I had long been absent from my native city, and the startling event there inflamed my mind. That night I could not sleep, for my nerves were all unstrung, and I could not dismiss what I had read in the paper from my mind. About midnight I arose, lit a candle, and went to my desk. Some powerful spirit appeared to possess me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of My Maryland. I remember that the idea appeared to take shape first as music in the brain—some wild air that I cannot now recall. The whole poem of nine stanzas, as originally written, was dashed off rapidly when once begun.”
THE INVASION OF MARYLAND
(View from Maryland Heights)
As Doctor Matthews well says, there is often a feeling afloat in the minds of men, undefined and vague for want of one to give it form, and held in solution, as it were, until a chance word dropped in the ear of a poet suddenly crystallizes this feeling into song, in which all may see clearly and sharply reflected what in their own thought was shapeless and hazy. It was young Randall’s fortune to be the instrument through which the South spoke, and, by a natural reaction, his burning lines helped “fire the Southern heart.”
The form of the poem was suggested by Mangan’s Karamanian Exile,—
“I see thee ever in my dreams,
Karaman!
Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams,
Karaman, O Karaman!
As when thy gold-bright morning gleams,
As when the deepening sunset seams
With lines of light thy hills and streams,
Karaman!
So now thou loomest on my dreams,
Karaman, O Karaman!”
The previous use of this form, which is perhaps the most effective possible for a battle hymn, by no means detracts from Randall’s stirring poem.
The poem would never have had great effect, however, if it had not been fortunate in drafting to its service a splendid piece of music. Miss Hattie Cary, of Baltimore, afterward the wife of Professor H. M. Martin, of Johns-Hopkins University, brought about the wedding which enabled Randall’s song to reach every camp-fire of the Southern armies. “The Glee Club was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June,” she writes, “and my sister Jennie, being the only musical member of the family, had charge of the program on the occasion. With a schoolgirl’s eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and ardent expression of feelings that were by this time wrought up to the point of explosion. In vain she searched through her stock of songs and airs—nothing seemed intense enough to suit her. Aroused by her tone of despair, I came to the rescue with the suggestion that she should adapt the words of Maryland, my Maryland, which had been constantly on my lips since the appearance of the lyric a few days before in the South. I produced the paper and began declaiming the verses. ‘Lauriger Horatius,’ she exclaimed, and in a flash the immortal song found a voice in the stirring air so perfectly adapted to it. That night when her contralto voice rang out the stanzas, the refrain rolled forth from every throat without pause or preparation; and the enthusiasm communicated itself with such effect to the crowd assembled beneath our windows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party.”