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Robert E. Lee once remarked that without music, there would have been no army. Music was a large part of life during the War Between the States, both in the camps and at home. The typical soldier had grown up with the wildly popular Minstrel music. The child of the 1840s wanted to grow up to play fiddle, banjo and sing minstrel music and many, many of them did. They brought those songs and fiddles and banjos to the War. The fiddler and banjo player were popular fellows around civil war campfires. Relics from civil war camps testify that jaw harps and harmonicas were extremely popular as well. Not only was music a major source of entertainment, it was also a way to give voice to feelings that words alone often could not express. New songs such as Dixie, Battle Hymn of the Republic and Bonnie Blue Flag fanned the patrotic flames of the soldier and those left at home as well.

An incident that occurred during the Battle of Williamsburg:

Federal Corps commander Samuel Heintzelman joined the desperate struggle to close the broken ranks. He hit on the novel idea of rallying them with music. Finding several regimental bands standing by bewildered as the battle closed in, Heintzelman ordered them to take up their instruments. "Play! Play! It's all you're good for," he shouted. "Play, damn it! Play some marching tune! Play 'Yankee Doodle,' or any doodle you can think of, only play something!" Before long, over the roar of the guns, came the incongruous sound of "Yankee Doodle" and then "Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue." One of General Joseph Hooker's men thought the music was worth a thousand men. "It saved the battle," he wrote.

Survivors of General George Pickett's disastrous charge at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 3, 1863) remembered in later years that Confederate regimental bands stationed in the trees played stirring martial airs as they started off across the mile-long field that separated them from George Meade's Army of the Potomac. Those same bands greeted them with "Nearer, My God, To Thee" as they streamed back to the safety of their own lines after being repulsed at the stone wall. At the Battle of Franklin Tenn. in 1864 the Confederates charged the Union troops to strains from regimental bands of "Bonnie Blue Flag and Dixie".