The Songs of War

Music played a critical role in war, from signaling the daily routine in camp to directing soldiers during battle. In the same issue as this double page of musical vignettes, Harper's reported on "War Songs and Hymns," asserting that the former "have the power to fire a man's heart, brace his nerves, and make the timid courageous." Over a year before the Emancipation Proclamation, Winslow Homer illustrated the rebel song 'Dixie'� and shows an African American man sitting on a barrel labeled "contraband," a term that refers to the Union army policy that declared enslaved people who reached Union lines were free.