“Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic

Abstract

In the streets and squares of the newly created American republic, citizens sang political songs such as “Hail Columbia” and “Jefferson and Liberty” to express fierce political hostility and to suggest the possibility of reconciliation. Most familiar to historians are the occasions when they sang to proclaim their partisan political identity and vex the opposition. Across the country, Americans joined popular songs with rough music—a “rude cacophony,” in E. P. Thompson's words—to make partisanship noisy and intimidating. During the tense summer of 1798, for example, just after the Federalist-dominated Congress authorized the small U.S. Navy to attack French warships, New Jersey Federalists greeted Matthew Lyon, a congressman of the opposing Republican Party, with “hisses and hootings,” “The Rogue's March,” and “the spirit-stirring sound of sundry rattling drums.”1 Elsewhere in the same year, Federalists mocked another Republican congressman with “The Rogue's March” and the new Federalist song “Hail Columbia,” while his supporters sounded a bell and prepared a cannon salute to welcome their “champion.” These practices suggest some of the ways that song and sound worked to reinforce partisanship and even disunion.2

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