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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2022
This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.
1 See, for instance, James A. Davis, Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019); Bruce C. Kelly and Mark A. Snell, eds, Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2 Kathleen Mavourneen, or St. Patrick's Eve: A Domestic Irish Drama in Four Acts (Clyde, OH: Ames’ Publishing Co, [1867?]).
3 For ambiguity or polysemy in art song around the period, see Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman, Poetry into Song: The Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 10–11; Kristina Muxfelt, ‘Happy and Sad: Robert Schumann's Art of Ambiguity’, in Word, Image, and Song: Essays on Musical Voices, ed. Rebecca Cypress, Beth Lise Glixon, and Nathan Link (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013): vol. 2, 145–67.
4 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For assault victims, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
5 Brown, Laura S., ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, American Imago 48/1 (1991): 119–33; 121Google Scholar.
6 Brown, ‘Not Outside the Range’, 122; Maria P.P. Root, ‘Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality’, in Theories of Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, ed. Laura S. Brown and Mary Ballou (New York: Guilford Press, 1994): 229–65.
7 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2012): 2.
8 Alexander, Trauma, 6.
9 See for instance, Peter Gray, ‘Memory and the Commemoration of the Great Irish Famine’, in The Memory of Catastrophe, ed. Kendrick Oliver and Peter Gray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004): 46–64; Oona Frawley, ‘Introduction: Cruxes in Irish Cultural Memory: The Famine and the Troubles’, in Memory Ireland, vol. 3: The Famine and the Troubles, ed. Oona Frawley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014): 1–14; Melania Gallego, ed., Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2020).
10 Kirby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
11 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 305.
12 Irish historians who use the word ‘nadir’ to describe the famine: Thomas Gallagher, Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846–1847: Prelude to Hatred (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982): xiv; Peter Gray, ‘Irish Social Thought and the Relief of Poverty’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010): 141; William Vincent Shannon, The American Irish (New York: Collier, 1974): 2.
13 For all population statistics see Guinnane, Timothy W., ‘The Great Irish Famine and Population: The Long View’, The American Economic Review 84/2 (1994): 303–6Google Scholar.
14 I acknowledge others who have pushed back against the notion that no one discussed the famine during its aftermath. While their work clearly shows cultural practices that memorialize the famine among subsequent generations, such practices were also often limited in number and frequency. Overall, historians and popular culture alike omitted protracted contemplation of the famine for decades after the event. See for instance: Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Was There “Silence” about the Famine?’ Irish Studies Review 4/13 (1995): 7–10; Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997); Recollecting Hunger: Cultural Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and British Fiction, 1847–1920, ed. Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012); Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013): 13. Others have examined references to the famine in traditional balladry. See for instance Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 66–70; Sally K. Sommers Smith considers broad musical responses to the famine's social and economic impact in ‘The Origin of Style: The Famine and Irish Traditional Music’, Éire/Ireland 32/1 (1997): 121–59.
15 The first monograph-length study of the famine that relies on extensive archival research was Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). The book broke new ground in exploring the exploitative political relationship between England and Ireland that greatly contributed to the death toll of the famine.
16 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 26.
17 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001): 87–8.
18 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 196.
19 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 205–6.
20 Van der Kolk addresses music sporadically throughout his book, considering it in turns to be helpful as a method of connecting with community, of shifting attentions and of recall. Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2014).
21 Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 414–23.
22 Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score; Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017).
23 Colm Tóibín and Diarmad Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001): 6.
24 Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘Famine, Trauma, and Memory’, Béaloideas 69 (2001):121–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Maura Cronin, ‘Oral History, Oral Tradition, and the Great Famine’, in Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories, and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland, ed. Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen and Vincent Comerford (London: Anthem Press, 2012): 233.
26 Joseph G.C. Kennedy, Population of the US in 1860: Compiled from Original Returns of 8th Census, Under Direction of Secretary of Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864): xxviii.
27 I deduced the population figure myself from census data, cited above.
28 I tabulated these statistics myself using the 1855 Massachusetts State Census, cited in William E. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton, Boston's Back Bay: The Story of America's Greatest Nineteenth-Century Landfill Project (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006): 44.
29 In 1850, the population of Chicago was 29,963, of which 6,093 had been born in Ireland. Irving Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th edn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, under the auspices of the Geographic Society of Chicago, 2006): 58. Regarding the population of New York City, one commonly cited US Census statistic from the time is around 200,000 Irish-born residents in Manhattan. See, for instance, Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972): 41. Census data also reports 813,669 residents of New York City (Manhattan) in 1860, meaning that the Irish-born constituted a quarter of the population. United States Census, www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt, accessed 24 June 2019. Tyler Anbinder reminds us that the German immigrant population was larger at the time, and that the Irish population of New York City was concentrated in several places. In 15 of the 22 wards, the Irish outnumbered the native-born. Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016): 149.
30 See, for instance, Niall O'Dowd, Lincoln and the Irish: The Untold Story of How the Irish Helped Abraham Lincoln Save the Union (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018); Susannah J. Ural, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
31 For the Union statistic, see Ural, The Harp and the Eagle, 232; for the Confederacy, see David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 60.
32 Christian Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009): 172.
33 Others note that, as the war dragged on, resentment of continued nativism and the draft system that conscripted disproportionate numbers of Irish Americans diminished support for the war among Irish-American communities. Patrick Steward and Bryan P. McGovern, The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013): 49–51.
34 Ural, The Harp and the Eagle, 15.
35 When the famine ended is up for debate. Scholars differ on whether to mark the end of the agricultural blight, the end of mass starvation, regional differences, and many other factors. Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 41–3.
36 Melanie P. Duckworth and Victoria M. Follette, Retraumatization: Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention (New York: Routledge, 2012): 2.
37 Duckworth and Follette, Retraumatization, 2.
38 For more on Corcoran's work in the US, see Ural, The Harp and the Eagle.
39 Michael Corcoran, The Captivity of General Corcoran (Philadelphia: Barclay, 1862): 22.
40 For Meagher, see Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016): 500; for Cleburne, see Craig L. Symonds, Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997): 22–4.
41 Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000): 115.
42 Cipolla, Frank J., ‘Patrick S. Gilmore: The Boston Years’, American Music 6/3 (1988): 281–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 I have not encountered any scholars of Gilmore who ponder the famine. One source suggests it arose in preliminary research, but that the famine history was not eventually included in published work. In correspondence between Jon Nicholson, who wrote a dissertation on Gilmore's Peace Jubilees in Boston, and Michael Cummings, a prominent Irish American who himself had immigrated from Ballygar and who championed Patrick Gilmore, Cummings responded to a question about the famine in Gilmore's life. Cummings expressed doubts because he did not believe the famine affected Gilmore's area much, writing: ‘despite the many thousands who died at this time there were very few deaths due to malnutrition in and around Athlone or Ballygar and the high point of the famine (1847) had passed when Gilmore decided to emigrate’. Cummings's response reflects some historical misconceptions about the famine: 1) it was common for people to believe that their own personal area was spared the worst of the famine when in fact a significant portion of the local population was affected; and 2) some have misunderstood how famine-related emigration and mortality rates lasted for years after the potato blight subsided. For the Cummings letter see Michael Cummings, letter to Jon Nicholson, 29 January 1971, Michael Cummings Collection of P.S. Gilmore Materials 1850–2004, Irish Music Center, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, Box 1, Folder 17. For work on inaccuracies about death tolls in one's own area Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond, 203; Carmel Quinlan, ‘“A Punishment from God”: The Famine in the Centenary Folklore Questionnaire’, The Irish Review 19 (1996): 68–86, here 81–3. For work on misunderstandings of the drawn-out, lingering impact of the famine on public health and mortality rates in Ireland, see Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 107–8. See also Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Approaching a Folklore Archive: The Irish Folklore Commission and the Memory of the Great Famine’, Folklore 115/2 (2004): 222–32.
44 Dr French, quoted in ‘Report on the Epidemic Fever in Ireland’, Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science 7 (1847): 386.
45 J.N. Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005): 240.
46 Leslie Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, eds, Famine and Disease in Ireland, vol. 1 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005): 297.
47 Just when Gilmore moved to Athlone is unclear. His obituary in the New York Times reports that at 13 he apprenticed at a ‘counting room of a mercantile house’ in Athlone. That would suggest he left Ballygar around 1842, before the famine. However, few records have emerged to confirm the precise timeline. ‘A Noted Bandmaster Gone: Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore Dies in St. Louis’, New York Times, 25 September 1892, 1. Brendan O'Brien, Athlone Workhouse and the Famine, ed. Gearoid O'Brien (Athlone: Old Athlone Society, 1995).
48 For the workhouse statistic see Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command, vol. 58 (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1854): 75. 6,852 people lived in Athlone, not counting workhouse inmates. See The Census of Ireland for the Year 1851, Part 1, County of Westmeath (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1852): 285.
49 John O'Connor, The Workhouses of Ireland: The Fate of Ireland's Poor (Dublin: Anvil Books, 1995): 81–4.
50 Ó Gráda estimates that about 200,000 of the 1,000,000 people who died during the Irish famine perished in workhouses. Ó Gráda, ‘Mortality and the Great Famine’, in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, ed. John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012): 170–79. For a more detailed account of disease, starvation, and mortality in workhouses, see Jonny Geber, Victims of Ireland's Great Famine: The Bioarchaeology of Mass Burials at Kilkenny Union Workhouse (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015): 115–78.
51 Despite refusing to discuss his youth in Ireland at length, Gilmore's Irish heritage was a celebrated part of his public identity.
52 St. Louis Post Dispatch, 14 September 1890.
53 See, for instance, Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001): 323–6; Ural, The Harp and the Eagle; David A. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
54 Kirk Schneider, The Paradoxical Self: Toward an Understanding of Our Contradictory Nature (New York: Insight Books, 1990): 78.
55 DeTemple, Jill, ‘Singing the Maine: The Popular Image of Cuba in Sheet Music of the Spanish–American War’, The Historian 63/4 (2001): 715–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 718.
56 William R. Dempster, music, and Lady Dufferin, words, ‘Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ (Boston: William H. Oakes, 1840).
57 William R. Dempster, music, and poetry by Mrs. Price Blackwood (Lady Dufferin), ‘Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ (Boston: George P. Reed, 1843). The Lester Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins University owns a sixth edition.
58 Russell Sanjek claims that Reed owned a music store in the 1840s, and he expanded to a printing business until 1850. Many of his editions, however, bear stamps from the 1840s. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and its Business: The First Four Hundred Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 119.
59 William R. Dempster, music, and poetry by Mrs. Price Blackwood (Lady Dufferin), ‘Lament of the Irish Emigrant’ (Boston: Henry Tolman, 1863).
60 David Atkinson and Steve Roud, eds, Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions (New York: Routledge, 2016); Paul Watt, Derek B. Scott and Patrick Spedding, eds, Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
61 John Dyer, ‘Soldier's Sister’ (Philadelphia: J.H. Johnson's Card and Job Printing Office, 1862); John Dyer, ‘To the Soldier's Sister’ (Philadelphia: A.W. Auner, 1864); John Dyer, ‘Soldier's Sister’ (Nashville: R.H. Singleton, n.d.).
62 Frank Moore, arr. and ed. Songs of the Soldiers (New York: George P. Putnam, 1864): 90.
63 Frank W. Hoogerwerf, Confederate Sheet-Music Imprints (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1984); Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and its Business: The First Four Hundred Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 225.
64 I have not found any original editions from 1837, but for a later edition of the collection by D'Almaine see Frederick Nicolls Crouch, music, and Mrs. Crawford, words, Echoes of the Lakes, 20th edn (London: D'Almaine, 1840).
65 Crouch himself moved to the US in 1849, likely because he struggled financially in England. Songwriters at the time were paid a set amount per song, forgoing royalties. Though ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ made him famous, the song was likely originally published not so much for the purpose of generating money for him, but more because it made money for the publisher, and it was a way of advertising his theatrical shows about Irish legends and songs, which he offered both in England and later the US. Stateside, Crouch also served as a Confederate trumpeter in the war, based in Virginia. At the end of his life, he settled in Maryland, working as a conductor.
66 Michael R. Turner and Antony Miall, Just a Song at Twilight: The Second Parlour Song Book (London: M. Joseph, 1975): 202; discussed in Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour, 2nd edn (Milton Park: Routledge, 2017): 100; William H.A. Williams, ’Twas Only an Irishman's Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996): 41.
67 Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 42–61; Sarah Gerk, ‘Away o'er the Ocean Go Journeymen, Cowboys, and Fiddlers: The Irish in Nineteenth-Century American Music’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014); Sarah Gerk, ‘“Higher Universal Language of the Heart”: The Reputations of Moore's Irish Melodies in the United States’, in The Reputations of Thomas Moore: Poetry, Music, and Politics, ed. Sarah McCleave and Tríona O'Hanlon (New York: Routledge, 2019): 142–66. See also Jon W. Finson, The Voices that are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 270–78.
68 Lawrence Kramer, ‘On Deconstructive Text–Music Relationships’, in Music, Culture and Society: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 173–9; Stephen Rodgers, ‘Mental Illness and Musical Metaphor in the First Movement of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique’, in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York: Routledge, 2006): 235–56.
69 For more on Hayes, see Basil Walsh, Catherine Hayes, 1818–1861: The Hibernian Prima Donna (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000).
70 Significantly, I have found no primary sources documenting a performance of ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ at the 2 June 1849 concert at Buckingham Palace. Hayes's own account of the evening in her autobiography fails to mention ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’. Catherine Hayes and a Contributor to the Dublin University Magazine, Memoir of Miss Catherine Hayes, the ‘Swan of Erin’ (London: Cramer and Co., n.d.): 15. Additional relatively contemporaneous sources that omit mention of ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ include Tallis’ Dramatic Magazine, and General Theatrical and Musical Review (London: John Tallis and Company, 1850): 33–35. In newspaper accounts of the evening, Catherine Hayes is usually listed after Giulia Grisi, who was also singing that evening; see ‘Grand Concert at Buckingham Palace’, Bell's New Weekly Messenger (3 June 1849): 4. For a programme of the evening see ‘Her Majesty's Concert’, Evening Mail [London], 4 June 1849, 3.
71 For instance, before Hayes's appearances in Washington, DC, in 1852, the DC-based paper The Republic began reporting her plans for a US tour in May 1851. They announced that they had received lithographed portraits of her from her ‘avant couriers’. ‘Correspondence of the Republic’, The Republic [Washington, DC], 24 May 1851, 3. One month later, the same paper quoted a favourable London review that praised her successes both in London and in Italy. They reported again that the review had been submitted to them. ‘Miss Catherine Hayes’, The Republic, 26 June 1851, 2.
72 Roach, Joseph, ‘Barnumizing Diaspora: The “Irish Skylark” Does New Orleans’, Theatre Journal 50/1 (1998): 39–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 39.
73 Mississippi Free Trader, cited in Daily Orlinean, 25 February 1852.
74 F.N. Crouch, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ (Columbia, SC: Julian A. Selby, c. 1863); F.N. Crouch, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ (Richmond, VA: George Dunn and Company, c. 1864); Mrs. Crawford, words, and F.N. Crouch, music, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ (New Orleans: P. P. Werlein, n.d.).
75 John Graziano, dir., Music in Gotham: The New York Scene 1862–75, https://www.musicingotham.org/, accessed 1 August 2019.
76 ‘We have often heard this ballad sung, but never before with so much sweetness as it was by Mr. Henry’, New York Clipper, 4 February 1865, 342.
77 Delavan S. Miller, Drum Taps in Dixie: Memories of a Drummer Boy, 1861–1865 (Watertown: Hungerford-Holbrook, 1905): 71.
78 Kathleen Mavourneen, or St. Patrick's Eve: A Domestic Irish Drama in Four Acts (Clyde, OH: Ames’ Publishing Co, [1867?]).
