One of the most appealing among the hundreds of songs concerning the life of the soldier in the army was All Quiet Along The Potomac. During the long periods between major battles and campaigns, a soldier's main assignment was the lonely one of picket and sentry duty. The song was based on an actual incident claimed as having taken place during the time of inactivity following the first Battle of Bull Run [21 July 1861], while the forces of both sides were gathering strength. For many days the newspapers could merely report in their headlines "All Quiet Along the Potomac," for there were no major battles to describe, and the people were in a tense period of expectation of great events in the future.
According to the story, a Confederate soldier, said to be Lamar Fontaine of the Second Virginia Cavalry, was standing night guard on a lonely outpost with one of his best friends, John Moore. After completing his six-hour assignment, he awakened his sleeping friend to take over. Moore stirred the glowing coals of the fire. The flames which leaped up revealed the position to the enemy pickets stationed on the opposite bank of the Potomac River, and made him a perfect target, framed in the fire's light. The bullet of a Union sharpshooter found its mark in Moore.
As he determined that his friend had been killed, Fontaine's eyes fell upon the headlines of a newspaper lying on the ground: "All Quiet Along the Potomac." The next day he wrote the poem.... So popular was the work, set to music by both Northern and Southern composers, that the commanders of the opposing forces, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, issued a joint order prohibiting the barbarous custom of picket fire, again exhibiting the powerful influence which a song can exert in times of war.
The preceding information is from C. A. Brown (revised by Willard A. Heaps), The Story of Our National Ballads, New York, NY, 1960, pages 210-212. Another story of the song is also that it was inspired by newspaper headlines. A young New York woman, Ethel Lynn Eliot Beers, wrote the poem early in the war and it was published as "The Picket Guard" in the November 30, 1861 edition of "Harper's Weekly." Both versions of the authorship of the poem agree that in 1863 it was set to music by John Hill Hewitt, himself a poet, newspaperman, and musician, who was serving in the Confederate army. This song may have inspired the title of the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel, Im Westen nichts Neues, (All Quiet on the Western Front).
| Potomac |
LYRICS
All quiet along the Potomac, they say,
Except now and then a stray
picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in
the thicket.
'Tis nothing, a private or two now and then
Will not count in
the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men,
Moaning
out all alone the death rattle.
All quiet along the Potomac tonight,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully
dreaming,
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
O'er the light
of the watch fires, are gleaming;
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night
wind,
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping,
While stars up above,
with their glittering eyes,
Keep guard for the army is sleeping.
There's only the sound of the lone sentry's tread,
As he tramps from the
rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle bed,
Far
away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, and his face, dark
and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for
the children asleep,
For their mother, may Heaven defend her.
The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love
yet unspoken
Leaped up to his lips when low-murmured vows,
Were pledged to
be ever unbroken.
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eye
He dashes
off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to its place
As
if to keep down the heart-swelling.
He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree
The footstep is lagging and
weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light,
Toward the
shades of the forest so dreary.
Hark! Was it the night wind that rustled the
leaves,
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looks like a rifle --
"Ah! Mary, good-bye!"
And the lifeblood is ebbing and splashing.
All quiet along the Potomac tonight,
No sound save the rush of the
river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead --
The picket's
off duty forever.