¹ While the dying soldier mentions both of his parents in the full text of this scene, his emphasis, emotionally, is on his mother. This trope of laments focused on the mother–son relationship would be a common feature of music during the Civil War and in conflicts that followed, and it echoes psychoanalytic theories focused on the mother–son relationship in early childhood. For references to the mother–son bond in repertoire written in response to other wars, see Leppert, Richard, ‘Civil War Imagery, Song, and Poetics: The Aesthetics of Sentiment, Grief, and Remembrance’, 19^th-Century Music, 40/1 (2016): 20–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On relationships between mothers and sons in wartime see Roper, Michael, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009): 45–118Google Scholar. See Appendix 1 for the complete text to Whittlesey's song.

² Archives of sheet music related to the Mexican–American War include those at the American Sheet Music collection at the Library of Congress; Beinecke Library Western Americana Collection at Yale University; Jenkins Carrett Library at the University of Texas at Arlington; Keffer Collection at the University of Pennsylvania; Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection at Johns Hopkins University; and Lilly Library at Indiana University. Studies of music related to the Mexican–American War include Belohlavek, John M., Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies: Women and the Mexican–American War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017): 214–21Google Scholar; Kirk, Elisa K. ‘Sheet Music Related to the United States War with Mexico (1846–1848) in the Jenkins Garrett Library, University of Texas Arlington’, Notes, Second Series, 37/1 (1980): 14–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Elizabeth Morgan, ‘The Mexican American War’, in Music and War in the United States, ed. Sarah Mahler Kraaz (New York: Routledge, 2019): 41–53.

³ See Ruth A. Solie ‘“Girling” at the Parlor Piano’, in Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 85–117.

⁴ This is made plain by a cursory glance at publication dates. For instance, a work commemorating the Battle of Contreras, which took place in late August of 1847, entitled Col. Riley's Brigade March at the Battle of Contreras, was published before the year ended. Repertoire about the Civil War illustrates well how composers sometimes used formulas and appropriated well-known tunes in their works written in response to the conflict, elements that may have helped them to turn out works with particular speed. See Morgan, Elizabeth, ‘War on the Home Front: Battle Pieces for the Piano from the American Civil War’, Journal of the Society for American Music 9/4 (2015): 385–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 [1946]). For discussions of the role of conjecture in telling the history of domestic music-making, see Bashford, Christina, ‘Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 63/2 (Summer 2010): 291–360CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Solie ‘“Girling” at the Parlor Piano’, 85–117.

⁶ See, for instance, Leppert, ‘Civil War Imagery, Song, and Poetics’; Rogers, Jillian, ‘Mourning at the Piano: Marguerite Long, Maurice Ravel, and the Performance of Grief in Interwar France’, Transposition: Musique et Sciences Sociales 4 (2014)Google Scholar; Jillian Rogers, Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); David B. Thompson, ‘Confederates at the Keyboard: Southern Piano Music During the Civil War’, in Bugle Resomding Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era, ed. Bruce C. Kelley and Mark A. Snell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Ann Wallace, ‘The Effect of War on the Lives and Work of Piano Composers and the Evolution of Compositional Technique in War-Related Piano Pieces from 1849 through the Second World War’ (PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 1990).

⁷ In particular, I have found it useful to consult the work of scholars using trauma theory in the study of literary texts about traumas other than the Holocaust. Katherine Astbury's work is a particularly useful model for transferring twentieth-century conceptions of trauma to other eras. In her scholarship on literature of the French Revolution, Astbury adapts ideas about the relationship between trauma and narrative from Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman to her analysis of novels written in response to the Revolution. Astbury identifies the pervasive, although at times covert, presence of trauma and the struggle to process traumatic events in literature written during the Revolution. She accounts for the seemingly apolitical nature of many of the novels of the Revolutionary decade as a manifestation of cultural trauma. See Katherine Astbury, Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2012). Another example of scholarship which skilfully applies theories developed in response to the Holocaust to another historical time is Kathryn Robson, Writing Words: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women's Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).

⁸ For a list of musical works mentioned in this article that relate to the Mexican–American War, see Appendix 2.

⁹ See Hahn, Steven, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and its World in An Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking, 2016): 132Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): 210.

¹¹ Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): 177–99.

¹² Greenberg, A Wicked War, 192–99.

¹³ Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 32.

¹⁴ See Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

¹⁵ This includes the Republic of Texas which had joined the Union in 1845; Mexico did not formally accept its annexation. By the end of the war, Mexico's territory (as determined in its 1821 independence from Spain) would have decreased by about a third, with Alta California and Santa Fe du Nuevo México now part of the United States.

¹⁶ Hine and Faragher, The American West, 210–11.

¹⁷ Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 39–41.

¹⁸ Greenberg, A Wicked War, 193–5. See also Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican–American War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002): 113–38.

¹⁹ Quoted in Mark E. Neely Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007): 9. See also Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017): 294–300.

²⁰ Greenberg, A Wicked War, 132.

²¹ Quoted in Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 116.

²² Winston Groom, Kearny's March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846–1847 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011): 135.

²³ Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 21–33.

²⁴ Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 25.

²⁵ Peggy Mallarkey Cashion, ‘Women and the Mexican War, 1846–1848’ (MA Thesis, The University of Texas at Arlington, 1990): 82.

²⁶ Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 42

²⁷ Lawrence Delbert Cress, ‘Introduction’ from Dispatches from the Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999): 8.

²⁸ Phillips, Ronnie J., ‘Digital Technology and Institutional Change from the Gilded Age to Modern Times: The Impact of the Telegraph and the Internet’, Journal of Economic Issues, 34/2 (2000): 274–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ For information on how the telegraph influenced war news and its connections to musical works about the Civil War, see Morgan, ‘War on the Home Front’, 389–90. See also Hine and Faragher, The American West, 210.

³⁰ Guardino, The Dead March, 205.

³¹ Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 143.

³² Ronald Cedric White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Random House, 2017): 96.

³³ White, American Ulysses, 96.

³⁴ Guardino, The Dead March, 1.

³⁵ Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 32.

³⁶ John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2005): 211.

³⁷ See Jaime Javier Rodriguez, Literatures of the U.S.–Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010): 17–109.

³⁸ Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 56–67.

³⁹ Rodriguez, Literatures of the U.S.–Mexican War, 29–30.

⁴⁰ Rodriguez, Literatures of the U.S.–Mexican War, 29–36.

⁴¹ Works include ‘The Mexican Volunteers Quick Step’, by Augusta Browne; ‘Santa Anna's Retreat from Buena Vista Quick Step’, by Stephen Foster; and ‘Battle of Buena Vista’ and ‘The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma’, by Charles Grobe.

⁴² Examples include Foster's ‘Santa Anna's Retreat from Buena Vista Quick Step’, which features the subtitle ‘As performed by the military bands’, and William Clifton, ‘The Banner of the Free: A Duet as Sung by the Alleganians. Written by an officer of the United States Army who fell in the battle of Churubusco near Mexico’.

⁴³ See Sarah Gerk's essay in this issue.

⁴⁴ This work differs from many laments in that it was composed in four-part harmony.

⁴⁵ Leppert, ‘Civil War Imagery, Song, and Poetics’, 42.

⁴⁶ See Gibbons, William, ‘Yankee Doodle and Nationalism, 1780–1920’, American Music 26/2 (2008): 246–74Google Scholar; Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover Publications, 1990 [1954]): 244; Morgan, ‘War on the Homefront’, 381–408; and Thompson, ‘Confederates at the Keyboard’, 106–18.

⁴⁷ Examples of earlier battle pieces composed by American composers and/or published in the United States include Francis Kotzwara's ‘The Battle of Prague’ (1788); James Hewitt's ‘Battle of Trenton’ (1797); Bernard Viguerie's ‘Bataille de Maringo’ (1805); Peter Weldon's ‘Battle of Baylen’ (c. 1808); and C. Oglivy's ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ (c. 1818).

⁴⁸ See Morgan, ‘War on the Home Front’, 390–95.

⁴⁹ Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016 [1996]); Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Book, 2015 [1992]); Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

⁵⁰ Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5.

⁵¹ These include collections of oral histories, like the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as countless exhibitions, pieces of non-fiction writing and television programmes centred on survivor testimony.

⁵² Similar responses exist in response to other wars and traumatic experiences. The collection Modernism and Mourning contains essays focused primarily on literary responses to the First World War. See Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Mae (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011). See also the essays in this issue by Erin Brooks, Sarah Gerk, Michelle Meinhart and Jill Rogers, which discuss responses to large-scale traumas other than the Second World War and the Holocaust.

⁵³ Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991): xiv–xv.

⁵⁴ Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Wlodarski, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation, 2. Wlodarski's definition of secondary witness relies on the work of Ernst van Alphen and Geoffrey Hartman. See Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Hartmann, Geoffrey, ‘The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction’, Poetics Today 27/2 (2006): 249–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 61. Also quoted in Wlodarski, Musical Witness, 3.

⁵⁷ Wlodarski, Musical Witness, 3.

⁵⁸ James Hewitt's son, John Hill Hewitt, was also a composer. His compositions include ‘The Maid of Monterey’ from 1851, which depicts María Josefa Zozaya, a Mexican woman who tended to the wounded at the Battle of Monterrey. In the coming pages of this article, I discuss another musical work depicting her courage at the battle.

⁵⁹ For more information on the frequent use of Yankee Doodle in American patriotic music of the nineteenth century see Gibbons, ‘Yankee Doodle and Nationalism, 1780–1920’, 246–74.

⁶⁰ See, for instance, the text to James Polk's first inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1845. (Accessed 1 April 2019), https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-4-1845-inaugural-address.

⁶¹ I am grateful to an undergraduate student at the University of Richmond, Emma Riggs, who suggested to me that battle pieces might be designed in part to appeal to children.

⁶² Although the title spells the town ‘Monterey’, the work is about the Battle of Monterrey in Nuevo León, not the Battle of Monterey in California. The latter was not actually a battle; the US forces took the town of Monterey unopposed.

⁶³ This depiction of María Josefa Zozaya is similar to many depictions of Mexican women in other American works of art crafted in response to the war. See Belohlavek, Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, 194–231.

⁶⁴ The keyboard introduction and interludes also feature an odd predominance of extended passages with crossed hands, which may simply be a result of the composer's unfamiliarity with piano writing.

⁶⁵ Pieces that flaunt their physicality were not an anomaly in the parlour by the mid nineteenth century, despite the fact that women had traditionally been encouraged to perform works that were not too taxing physically. Bravura works popular in the domestic sphere were often programmatic, such as opera fantasies and battle pieces. See Bailey, Candace, Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010): 111Google Scholar. See, also, Bailey's discussion of athletic and bravura works including A. Cardona's ‘Fantaisie pour le piano sure le ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’’ and Theodore con La Hache's ‘Freedom's Tear Reverie’ and their place in parlour performance. Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle, 101–2.

⁶⁶ Morgan, ‘War on the Home Front’, 399.

⁶⁷ Cizmic, Maria, Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 86Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Cizmic, Performing Pain, 90.

⁶⁹ Cizmic, Performing Pain, 94.

⁷⁰ Cizmic, Performing Pain, 91.

⁷¹ See Rogers, ‘Mourning at the Piano’, 37–8 and Rogers, Resonant Recoveries, 136–97.

⁷² Quoted in Groom, Kearny's March, 275.