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Wood, Kirsten E. “Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic. American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (October 2014): 1083-1116.
“Join with Heart and Soul and Voice” analyzes how the discourse of music, particularly as it appeared in political festivities, created what author Kirsten Wood terms a “harmonious republic” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She emphasizes the idea of harmony in terms of music as “a system in which internal variety meant delightful contrast,” which she then conflates with the idea of harmony as an essential component of the relatively new American Republic.[1] Rather than examining the ways in which the idea of harmony theoretically influenced politics, she argues that music itself provided a unifying way for Americans to express political ideas, celebrate their victories, and impart the burgeoning seeds of American virtues.
Wood claims that music’s unique ability to do such far-reaching work stemmed from two countering reasons. In one way, it reached the illiterate, by providing an easy and memorable way to internalize and emotionally connect to political ideas. She notes that the most popular and lasting songs “came easily to the tongue and voice and…summoned up the feelings many Americans believed important to their national union.”[2] Conversely, music permeated American society and became so important to political activity because printing them along with audience reactions to them at political or social gatherings gave newspapers a way to visually represent the ordinary man’s participation in political activity.[3]
This argument is well supported throughout the article, and draws from an interesting combination of primary sources. Wood mainly examines newspaper prints of songs, as they directly relate to one of the main premises she works to prove. Several prints are reproduced on full pages within the article, both making for an interesting visual, and giving the reader the rare opportunity to directly engage with the same primary source as the author. However, she also looks at letters from luminaries of the era, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams, as well as tracts or speeches relating to music. Wood uses these sources in two interesting ways that bolster her argument.
First, these letters and speeches give her article context, displaying the strong presence of music in daily life in the Early American Republic. This essentially proves the legitimacy of using music as a source, which is still relatively revolutionary in terms of academic history. Second, the letters in particular show an interesting aspect of music’s function. An interesting example is John Adams’ son-in-law William Smith, who claims the new American government could very well utilize music as a means of “captivating the mob.”[4] Wood does not pursue this line of thinking, instead choosing to portray music as a way for ordinary Americans to involve themselves in politics and express their opinions. She even emphasizes the malleability of songs, using “Hail Columbia” as an example that was often reworded or differently intoned in order to reflect specific events or appeal to certain groups.[5]
Several of the articles in Beyond the Founders similarly address the idea of mass political involvement through political festivities and ordinary means. Jeffrey Pasley’s “The Cheese and the Words” and Andrew Robertson’s “Voting Rights and Voting Acts” are the most overt examples of this parallel. Pasley argues that the strength of popular political culture during the same period discussed by Wood stemmed from the fact that arose from daily life, meaning that Americans participated in politics by “devising their own mean of building support…with their own local resources.”[6] He uses the humorous example of a group of Massachusetts women who sent President Jefferson a “mammoth” wheel of cheese to express their support as an example. This idea of ordinary actions as representations of political involvement is present in Wood’s word too, although she never explicitly states it as such. Her emphasis on music as popular and quite ordinary implies that those who engaged in music as a form of political activity, were doing exactly the same thing as Pasley’s cheesemakers: they focused their preexisting abilities or passions on political expression.
Robertson also examines the political involvement of ordinary Americans, although in a much different way. His article in Beyond the Founders makes the ultimate argument that deferential political rituals served the purpose of establishing an identity and providing citizens with an image of “egalitarian inclusiveness.”[7] This too, connects to Wood’s work on music in the Early American Republic. While Wood’s work focuses on political celebrations and festivals, rather than the more formal electioneering rituals detailed by Robertson, both authors seem to be making the broad point that ritual was quite important to mass involvement in politics (even if, as Robertson acknowledges, that involvement is largely imagined).
Beyond the Founders as a whole focuses on portraying the Early American Republic in a different way from the norm, whether “from the top down, from the bottom up, and perhaps especially from the middle out in every direction.” [8] The articles within the book demonstrate the ways in which public involvement, rather than the actions of a few important men, effected American government and history. Wood’s excellent and thought provoking article could quite easily fit into this volume just as well as the articles the editors originally chose.
[1] Kirsten E. Wood, “Join with Heart and Soul and Voice”: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic, American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (October 2014): 1087.
[2] Wood, 1107.
[3] Wood, 1102.
[4] Wood, 1098.
[5] Wood, 11111-1113.
[6] Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 49.
[7] Andrew W. Robertson, “Voting Rights and Voting Acts” in Beyond the Founders, 75.
[8] Beyond the Founders, 18.