In presenting the ballads and lyrics of the civil war, it has been thought best not to give those from the North and those from the South in separate groups. There are several objections to such an arrangement, of which it is perhaps sufficient to mention a single one, namely, that by the separation of poems relating to the same events or the same aspects of the struggle, much of their historical significance is lost, and the comparison which the reflective reader naturally wishes to make between the moods, impulses, aspirations, and points of view of the poets on opposite sides is rendered much more difficult and less satisfactory.
It would be a special pity, for example, not to place in juxtaposition Bryant's "Our Country's Call" and Timrod's "A Cry to Arms." An essay of no little value to the student of the inner springs of history might be written upon these two poems with their strange similarities and their still stranger contrasts. Indeed a critic of creative ability might almost reconstruct the history of the events which produced the war, and discover the characters and circumstances and, above all, the points of view of the people on either side of the contest, by a study of these two appeals, even if all other sources of information were lost. For this and other reasons it has been thought best to make but a single group of the poems of the civil war, bringing together all those that relate to the same or to like subjects, and indicating the origin of the southern pieces by printing the word "Southern" at the end of each.
In the South during the civil war, almost all the adult males, with some who were rather adolescent than adult, were under arms. As a consequence, the men who wrote the poetry of the Southern side were necessarily soldiers. But in less peculiar circumstances the men who write the poetry of war, the men who make the songs that soldiers love to sing, the men who irresistibly stir patriotism in the blood of youth, the men who embalm heroic deeds in thrilling verse, and touch all hearts to pity and all eyes to tears by the tender pathos of their chronicles of suffering, are not the men who do the fighting. It was not a soldier who wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and it was the gentle master of Abbotsford that interpreted the daring deeds of knightly times in song and story. So in our civil war the most and the best of the poems, except as the matter was determined at the South by peculiar circumstances, were the work of men who were not themselves combatants. Cynical reflections have sometimes been indulged in on this score, but they are unjust and shallow, as cynical reflections are apt to be. The qualities that make one a poet are not those that make one a soldier. Sometimes the two characters are united in one person, but that is rare; and the man who has the gift to write the poetry of a war which involves human liberty as its issue, best serves the cause by writing it. His part is as important as that of the soldier who bears arms, and his influence upon the result is quite as great. The patriotism and the courage of the Greeks owed more to Homer than to the warriors whose deeds he chronicled, and Paul Revere did far less for his country by what was after all a commonplace horseback journey, than Longfellow long afterward did by telling the story of that ride in quite other than commonplace poetry.
Of the extent to which the war songs and ballads of a people influence the character and destiny of that people, much has been written, and the truth is not yet half told. Our present concern with this literature, however, has less regard to its influence than to its value as historical material. History records the events in a nation's life; poetry, and especially ballad poetry, reflects the character, the aspirations, the passions, and the purposes of a people; and viewed in this light a study of the war ballads and lyrics of our country must fill every reader's mind with hope and courage. Many of the poems presented in these little volumes are rude, some of them being scarcely better than doggerel, while much of the material is poetry of a very high order; but there are certain characteristics common to all the poems, and these are the characteristics that distinguish a virile race which encounters difficulty with stalwart courage and confronts danger with an unruffled mind. It is the poetry of strength and manly self-reliance. There is not a plaint of weakness anywhere in it. It is inspired from beginning to end by a high and unfaltering faith in the truth of the doctrines of human liberty that underlie our entire history and constitute the vital principle of our institutions.
The ruder poems are a trifle truculent now and then perhaps, but some little truculence may be allowed as a poetic license to the poet who sings of his countrymen's prowess in just wars. In preparing this little collection the editor has had occasion to read anew the entire body of American war poetry of the ballad and lyric class, and he ends the examination with a feeling of intense satisfaction in the knowledge that there is not an unmanly or a cowardly line in it and scarcely an ungenerous one.
