Marching Through Georgia

• 1. Introduction

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  "Marching Through Georgia" was heard at William T. Sherman's own funeral. The general had spent the last years of his life vowing never again to attend a public gathering where bands might play it. He had even demanded a signed agreement from every band in the country. None of it worked. The tune followed him everywhere he went, right up to the grave. How did a marching song written by a printer from Chicago become so inescapable that the very man it celebrated came to despise it? And why, more than a century and a half after its release, does it still carry such charged weight on both sides of the old Mason-Dixon Line? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Henry Clay Work, Printer

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  Henry Clay Work was born in 1832 and died in 1884, and for most of his adult life he earned his keep setting type. He published his first song in 1853, and when the Civil War broke out eight years later, he walked into the Chicago offices of Root and Cady and handed publishing director George F. Root a manuscript called "Kingdom Coming". Root was impressed enough to give him a staff position. Work penned 29 songs between 1861 and 1865, a body of work that the music reference source The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians credited with communicating the feelings of Union civilians more fully than perhaps any other songwriter of the era. Some of those compositions also carried anti-slavery arguments, which is not surprising given that Work had grown up on the Underground Railroad. Root himself, writing in an autobiography published 26 years after Work drafted "Marching Through Georgia", identified the song's staying power as coming from its retrospective quality: it was not a battle cry meant to send men into combat, but a glorious remembrance of coming triumphantly out.

• 3. Sherman's March to the Sea

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  By September 1864, Sherman had just taken Atlanta and turned his attention south and east toward Savannah. He assembled 62,000 troops and on the 15th of November they left Atlanta, beginning the March to the Sea. The campaign involved only two notable engagements, at Griswoldville and Fort McAllister, and the army entered Savannah on the 21st of December. The human cost fell hardest on Southern civilians. Sherman's troops scavenged the land for food and resources, wrecking public buildings and infrastructure as part of a deliberate strategy to persuade Southerners the war was no longer worth fighting. The march also accelerated emancipation in a concrete way: over 14,000 enslaved people joined the Union column as it passed near their plantations. The historian Richard D. Goff put the economic damage at approximately $100 million, describing the campaign as knocking the Confederate war effort to pieces.

• 4. The Song Itself

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  Work released "Marching Through Georgia" around the 9th of January 1865, just weeks after the march had concluded. The song is in the key of B-flat major and common time, opening with a four-bar introduction built on a chord progression of B-flat, E-flat, B-flat, F7, and back to B-flat. Each verse and chorus runs eight bars. A soloist carries the individual stanzas while a choir joins for the chorus, and a piano accompaniment is written into the original sheet music. Work marks no expression or dynamics anywhere in the score except a single fortissimo at the start of the chorus. The five stanzas move from a rallying cry for Sherman's troops to a comedic jab at Confederates who had dismissed the campaign, and finally to the declaration that "treason fled before the Union troops for resistance was in vain." The historian David J. Eicher noted that the opening stanza underrepresents the army's size, listing 50,000 soldiers when more than 60,000 actually took part. The historian Christian McWhirter observed that Work's lyrical framing transformed the burning of Confederate civilian property into a narrative of unionism and emancipation, casting Union soldiers not as destroyers but as deliverers.

• 5. Sherman's Seven-Hour Torment

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  Selling 500,000 copies of sheet music within 12 years of its release, "Marching Through Georgia" became Work's most profitable song and one of the most commercially successful wartime compositions. The writer David Ewen called it the greatest of Work's war songs; Carl S. Lowden went further and called it Work's finest work, citing its soul-stirring production and longevity. Work himself, writing to his long-time correspondent Susie Mitchell from an encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, expressed surprise at the curiosity and interest his connection to the song had generated across all classes. But no reaction to the song was more extreme than Sherman's. When the general reviewed the national encampment of the GAR in 1890, every one of the hundreds of bands present played the tune each time it passed him, for seven unbroken hours. Eyewitnesses reported that his patience finally broke and he declared he would never attend another encampment until every band in the United States had signed a pledge not to play it in his presence. He kept that vow for the rest of his life. The song was played at his funeral.

• 6. Contempt in the South

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  The musicologist Irwin Silber identified "Marching Through Georgia" as the single most despised Unionist song in the South, and the musicologist Sigmund Spaeth went so far as to explicitly advise readers never to perform it in the presence of a Southerner. Two incidents at Democratic National Conventions illustrate how raw that wound remained. At the 1908 convention, when Georgia failed to send its delegates to eventual victor William Jennings Bryan, the band played Work's song to express the convention's displeasure. In 1924 the same scene repeated: a bandleader assigned to play something appropriate for the Georgia delegation launched into "Marching Through Georgia". The historian John Tasker Howard recorded the response: the music was met first with silence, and then with hisses and boos louder than anything the bandleader had heard all day.

• 7. A Tune Without Borders

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  Japanese troops sang "Marching Through Georgia" as they entered Port Arthur at the start of the Russo-Japanese War. British soldiers stationed in India took it up as well. The Princeton football fight song "Nassau! Nassau!" borrowed Work's melody. So did the pro-Ulster hymn "Billy Boys". In American politics, both William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan used songs set to its tune during the 1896 presidential campaign. The melody also powered "Paint 'Er Red", a pro-labor anthem of the Industrial Workers of the World, and in the United Kingdom it became the basis for future prime minister David Lloyd George's campaign song "George and Gladstone" as well as "The Land", a Georgist protest song calling for the fair distribution of land. On screen, carpetbaggers in the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind chant its chorus while trying to seize Tara from Scarlett O'Hara. Charles Ives wove the melody into his orchestral suite Three Places in New England, and Ken Burns included it in his 1990 documentary The Civil War. Work's composition, released in January 1865 as a tribute to a single campaign, had become something far larger than any tribute.