This highly impressive and delightful book is the most comprehensive study of the place of music in the Civil War since Willard and Porter Heaps's The Singing Sixties (1960), upon which it greatly improves. It shares the analytical and historical rigour of Mark M. Smith's Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (2001) and admirably contextualizes the body of songs that have, for the most part, been limited to collections by Irwin Silber (Songs of the the Civil War, 1960) and Richard Crawford (The Civil War Songbook, 1977) as well as the multi-volume CD series of Confederate and Union songs recorded by Bobby Horton. One of the most impressive aspects of McWhirter's study is the range of obscure and ephemeral sources upon which he has drawn: his sleuth work has uncovered a wealth of sheet music, archival collections of family papers, diaries, memoirs, letters, periodical notices and concert reviews. Such dedication to his primary material is what one would expect from a scholar who is otherwise engaged as an assistant editor for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln at the US National Archives.

I must confess to initial reservations over the categorical declaration that opens the book: “The Civil War was the first American war fought to music” (1). Without having exhaustively studied the music of previous American wars, one makes oneself a hostage to fortune with such claims; but having said this, McWhirter is on more secure ground as he explains – and goes on to illustrate – how “the war catapulted music to a new level of cultural significance” (1). He manages the sprawling material by organizing his study into reasonable categories or themes of discussion: popular music and the Civil War, patriotic songs of the Union, Confederate anthems, music of the home front, battlefield music, African Americans and Civil War music, the end of the war, and the relation of music to Civil War revivalism and legacy.

In the arena of popular music, McWhirter takes in the patriotic, minstrel, sentimental and religious genres, arguing that the lyrical and ideological flexibility of many songs ensured a popular dominance over other forms of public expression such as oratory and newspaper editorials. Hence there was an unsurprising degree of official censorship of performance on both sides of the Mason–Dixon Line, including the notorious expulsion of the abolitionist Hutchinson singers from the camps of the Army of the Potomac, which prompted one Northern Congressman to quip that “although McClellan could drive the Hutchinsons out of Virginia, he could not drive out the Confederates” (11). The cultural need for patriotic union songs not only led to the wartime eclipse of Stephen Foster by such composers as George Frederick Root and Henry Clay Work, but it also prompted the bizarre formation of a Committee for a New National Hymn (one of whose members was the acerbic diarist George Templeton Strong, who sneered, “Wanted, by the American Nation, a Marseillaise. Any poet having one to dispose of will please apply to, etc” (37)).

McWhirter offers a thorough study of the origins and reception of the major sectional anthems: for the North, “John Brown's Body,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 More,” and for the South, “Dixie,” “Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” Home front music is discussed in terms of its attempts to define women's roles (particularly in the South) as well as influencing public opinion of immigrant groups such as the Irish and the Germans. McWhirter also examines the manner in which the conquering northern armies used music both to serenade and to infuriate southern women, sometimes by adapting and playing popular southern songs as they marched. (“Thieves!” one woman scribbled in her diary, “they come to steal our liberty, steal our property, our slaves, and, not satisfied with this robbery, actually steal our National Music” (108)).

One of the book's most thoughtful considerations is the impact of emancipation and Confederate defeat upon the spiritual genre. As McWhirter rightly argues,

Yet, whilst McWhirter covers the place of Civil War music in neo-Confederate revivalism and the white southern backlash against the civil rights movement, he oddly neglects to examine the central place of the spiritual in that very movement – a musical revival crucially documented in Guy and Candie Carawan's Sing for Freedom (2007), among other texts. Nor, in his otherwise comprehensive treatment of “Dixie,” does McWhirter even acknowledge the debate over the song's contested authorship – was it indeed written by Daniel Decatur Emmett or by the African American singers Ben and Lew Snowden? (This issue is the subject of Howard and Judith Rose Sacks's Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem (2003), which does not appear in McWhirter's bibliography.)

These reservations aside, no student or scholar engaging with the place of music in the Civil War can afford to ignore this overwhelmingly authoritative study.