A history of two songs
Even a socially distanced holiday cannot silence the omnipresent Christmas songs that form the season’s soundtrack. As part of our collective subconscious, these tunes may even serve to distract us from this year’s tragic hardships.
Two of our most playful holiday songs—“Jingle Bells” and “Up on the Housetop”—are products of an even more profound national crisis, the Civil War. While the songs carry little of that era’s fraught politics, their authors were deeply embedded in the causes of both sides and used their songwriting talents to try to shape the conflict raging around them. In that way, they show the potential power of songs not just to spark our emotions, but also to shape our ideas.
The seemingly innocuous and beloved song “Jingle Bells” was written by James Pierpont, a mildly successful songwriter living in Savannah. Like many of America’s earliest commercial songsmiths, Pierpont hailed from an evangelical New England family. Aside from his songwriting, he had found work in Savannah as a clerk and the organist in his brother’s Unitarian church. His brother and father were ardent anti-slavery ministers and would continue to champion the cause during the war.
James took a different path. As he sat to write this enduring song, the politics of slavery were wrenching the nation apart. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision had been announced that same year, potentially nationalizing the institution and stating that Black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Pierpont swept into the pro-slavery secessionist ranks despite his family’s ideals. He served for about two years in what eventually became the Confederacy’s Fifth Georgia Cavalry Regiment, and his politics were even more evident in his songwriting.
He penned pro-Confederate songs urging the White South to defend itself against Yankee “invaders” as in “Our Battle Flag!” (“It stands to guide us to success/or to the hero’s grave”) and “Strike for the South” (“Strike for the South! for Liberty’s sun/in darkness and gloom has not set”). His most popular anthem was the boldly titled “We Conquer or Die,” which equated Union victory (and presumably the end of slavery) with physical and cultural death—a far cry from the jaunty tone of “Jingle Bells.”
“Up on the Housetop” provides an interesting counterpoint. Unlike “Jingle Bells,” it is a product of the war itself, written in 1864 by Benjamin Hanby. Though like Pierpont he was not a New Englander, he did have a similarly abolitionist background. Growing up in Ohio, Hanby’s family reportedly worked on the Underground Railroad.
It’s difficult to fit “Up on the Housetop” into the political activism of Hanby’s other songs. Essentially it shows how 19th-century songwriters often worked in various genres, searching for that elusive hit wherever they could find it.
In its immediate context, the most noteworthy element of Hanby’s carol was not his politics but its focus on the emerging figure of Santa Claus, setting the events of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” (originally published in 1823) to a jaunty holiday tune.
During the Civil War, music operated in a highly politicized environment. Pierpont and Hanby were two of many songwriters trying to make a living by engaging with the war, but much of their energy also went into trying to shape its outcome.
How ironic then, that we mostly remember them (if we remember them at all) as the authors of two holiday larks. Repetition and celebration have rubbed their songs clean of any political context, showing how often an individual piece of culture can live a life far removed from its author’s intent or context.
Whether revealing that missing context changes how we hear such songs is ultimately up to each listener.