The Rebel Yell: A Cultural History

The Rebel Yell

The Rebel Yell

A Cultural History

CRAIG A. WARREN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2014

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Caslon

Cover design: Erin Bradley Dangar / Dangar Design

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warren, Craig Andrew.

The rebel yell : a cultural history / Craig A. Warren.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1848-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8780-8 (e-book) 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Miscellanea. 2. Confederate States of America. Army—Miscellanea. 3. Southern States—Civilization.

4. Battle-cries. I. Title.

E468.9.W285  2014

973.7'13—dc23

For Jack and Reid, who know how to yell.

And for Sarah, who listens.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Very Peculiar Sound: 1861–1865

2. Yelling in Print: Veterans Remember

3. The Birth of a Scream: The Contested Origins of the Rebel Yell

4. Culture Wars: The Rebel Yell in a Reunited Nation

5. The Civil Rights Era and the Myth of the Lost Rebel Yell

6. More, More, More: The Rebel Yell in Popular Culture

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. William Howard Russell, war correspondent for the London Times, pictured in 1855

2. Portrait of Dr. James Harvie Dew, formerly of the 9th Virginia Cavalry

3. Cover of H. Allen Smith's 1954 book, The Rebel Yell

4. Frame from the short film The Rebel's Yell, housed at the Library of Congress

5. Rebel Yell Kentucky Bourbon bottle label, 2012

6. Passengers ride the Rebel Yell roller coaster during the late 1970s

7. Cover of Billy Idol's 1983 Rebel Yell album from Chrysalis Records

8. A visual rendering and comparison of the WBT Radio and United Daughters of the Confederacy recordings of the Rebel yell

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book spanned several years and a number of major life events. During that time, I benefited from the kindness and support of a great many people. The first and deepest thanks go to my wife, Sarah Whitney, with whom I have explored the joys and anxieties of parenthood. I cannot imagine a better partner, teacher, or friend. Thanks, too, to sons Jack and Reid. Each day, our boys teach me something new about myself and the world.

I also wish to thank my parents, Gary and Linda Warren, for being such superb friends and role models. My in-laws, Jim and Mary Whitney, have supported this project since the beginning, even if it meant my borrowing books from their library for years at a time. I am especially grateful to Jim for tracking down a number of helpful references to the Rebel yell.

Brian Lemon, one of my best and oldest friends, accompanied me on several trips to southern universities and historic sites in recent years. Each outing has shaped my work in some way. I look forward to our next excursion.

Considerable thanks are also due to my colleagues and students at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. The College granted me a research sabbatical during the fall of 2011, demonstrating confidence in my writing; for that I am appreciative. On a more personal level, I am indebted to colleagues Dean Baldwin, Greg Morris, Tom Noyes, and Joshua Shaw for their friendship over the last ten years. Better hallmates and confidants could not be had. I also want to thank Gary Viebranz, who devoted his time and expertise to the analysis of two recordings discussed in chapter 6.

Dan Waterman at the University of Alabama Press has been an incredibly patient editor, one whose enthusiasm for this project never wavered. I have valued his advice and steady guidance. Special thanks must also go to W. Stuart Towns and to the anonymous readers of my manuscript. Their recommendations proved invaluable in both trimming and enhancing the book.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the scholars whose work continues to inspire me as a teacher and writer: Paul Cantor, Stephen Cushman, Andrew Delbanco, Gary Gallagher, Jerome McGann, Bethany Nowviskie, Carol Reardon, Philip Sugden, and the late Greg Colomb. Greg was a great friend and mentor to me during my years at the University of Virginia. I miss him.

Introduction

The rebel yell was the sublimest Americanism that ever was born. It was the one Democracy that will never die here in the land of its birth.

—J. W. DuBose, The Rebel Yell (1897)

It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard.

—Ambrose Bierce, A Little of Chickamauga (1898)

Almost 150 years after Appomattox, the symbols of the Southern Confederacy continue to play a powerful and divisive role within American society. From street corners to the halls of Congress, Americans contend with Confederate imagery that holds widely divergent meanings for people of different racial, regional, and ideological backgrounds. Even more than Lost Cause statuary, today the public display of the Confederate battle flag ignites passionate debate about America's past and future. The flag also reminds us of the degree to which the Lost Cause has entered popular culture the world over. People now display the banner in communities as far away as England, Iraq, Lithuania, and South Africa. Like the six-gun and cowboy hat of the Old West, the battle flag has transcended its regional and national origins. It is therefore little wonder that academic and lay historians have written at length about the complex history of the flag as it existed both during and after the Civil War.¹

By contrast, perhaps no element of Confederate military lore has received less formal and sustained attention than the legendary battle cry of the southern soldier, the Rebel yell. Certainly the yell is not absent from the published annals of the Civil War. Many modern historians mention it in passing, usually to add flavor to accounts of military engagements. Few, however, have dwelled at length on the origins, sound, uses, and cultural significance of the screech. Still fewer have addressed its exploits and evolution after the war—during Reconstruction and the civil rights era and in popular culture of the late twentieth century and beyond. The reasons behind this neglect may at first seem apparent. As a battle cry, the Rebel yell remains invisible and intangible. One cannot find it atop a marble pedestal or stitch its likeness into the fabric of a state flag. Words are altogether absent from the peculiar scream, making it difficult and perhaps impossible to transcribe. Finally, many scholars find it hard to take seriously the idea of grown men wailing in falsetto. Although millions of nineteenth-century men and women respected or feared the scream, today it is often regarded in comic terms—a barbaric yawp voiced by the exuberant and inebriated rednecks of popular stereotype. It is no accident that a humorist penned the first book-length treatment of the Rebel yell: H. Allen Smith's The Rebel Yell: Being a Carpetbagger's Attempt to Establish the Truth Concerning the Screech of the Confederate Soldier plus Lesser Matters Appertaining to the Peculiar Habits of the South (1954). Smith interviewed a few southern scholars about the yell, but as indicated by his whimsical subtitle, his primary purpose was to conduct a comic exploration of an exotic southern culture.²

There also exists a less practical, and less obvious, reason why scholars have not more closely examined the Rebel yell as a postwar phenomenon. With the close of the nineteenth century, a growing number of commentators portrayed the southern screech as a lost artifact: a unique sonic experience that forever vanished with the surrender of the Confederate armies or, as some have argued, with the passing of the last Rebel veterans. Although slow to develop, by the late twentieth century the concept of a Lost Rebel yell had come to dominate public thinking about the battle cry. Obscuring the rich postwar career of the screech, the Lost yell served as a metaphor for the Old South, often remembered as a romantic, agrarian society tragically silenced by the gears of modern industry and an arrogant federal government.³

What has been lost by these standard approaches to the Rebel yell is less the authentic voice of the South than a fuller understanding of a fascinating vocal experience. Certainly I concede that the Rebel yell reflected aspects of antebellum southern society, and I accept the argument of etymologist Allen Walker Read that the screech of 1961 was not the same as that of 1861. But a strictly nostalgic or linguistic study of the yell can tell only part of its story. As a scholar of language and literature, I am drawn to the subject because of the considerable challenge that the scream presents to anyone wishing to communicate it in print. As a cultural historian, I am captivated by how Americans have interpreted and used the Rebel yell differently since 1865. Rather than ignore the Rebel yell after Appomattox, I want to examine it as an evolving cultural experience. To that end, I have set out to study the scream not only as a vocal blast but also as a verbal expression and brand name. By tracing how Americans have introduced the words Rebel yell to arenas such as politics, education, and entertainment—even when no actual yelling occurs—we can better understand the cultural legacy of the southern screech. And in a larger sense, we can witness how American identity depends on phenomena that cannot be seen, held, packaged, or codified.⁴

My conclusions may at times surprise readers. Although the yell is remembered primarily as a battle cry, Confederate troops voiced it outside of combat as well as on the battlefield. This study accounts for the most prominent uses of the Rebel yell during wartime, showing that it fulfilled numerous needs and expressed a range of emotions. The book also challenges prevailing beliefs about its advantages and origins. While the terrorizing of northern soldiers stood as an important use of the scream, it could also function as a liability on the battlefield, unnecessarily revealing Confederate positions and sometimes bolstering the morale of Union soldiers. No study of the battle cry can pinpoint its precise origins and etymology, but I do not, for example, accept the theory that Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson first inspired the Rebel yell. Nor does research support the idea that the yell derived primarily from Celtic traditions. Above all, I argue against the idea that any one true or authentic Rebel yell ever emanated from the throats of most southern troops. Each unit, army, and region produced its own variations on the scream. Indeed, each soldier voiced his own preferred pitch and sequence of sounds, perhaps altering his yell from one occasion to the next. The sheer multiplicity of noises, overlapping and working in concert, goes a long way toward explaining why memoirists often disagreed about how the scream sounded. In sum, I conclude that the Rebel yell was an utterly informal and irregular phenomenon. To argue otherwise is to reduce the screech to a standard battle cry that would never have justified the fame it has achieved.

Beyond the battlefield, I show that the Rebel yell has not always taken a back seat to the Confederate battle flag as a marker of southern culture and regional attitudes. To the contrary, the yell was perhaps the major symbol of white southern identity between 1865 and 1948. During this period of preeminence on the national stage, some Americans reviled the yell but most approached it with grudging respect or outright reverence. Although few people today know of the scream's complex history during the Gilded Age and early twentieth century, a large body of writing attests to the fact that citizens nationwide celebrated the Rebel yell as a cultural achievement and as an important American voice.

Chapter 1 begins by examining the accounts of the Rebel yell published and read during the war itself. Reports by journalists and foreign observers offered some of the best early evidence that an unusual form of yelling could be found among Confederate troops, both in camp and battle. From July 1861 onward, news of the southern scream circulated throughout the United States and Europe. Wartime commentators devoted only limited time to theories about the cultural and military origins of the yell. Rather, witnesses seemed content to say that the southern battle cry deviated drastically from the conventional shouts of northern and European soldiers. This chapter reveals that a burgeoning interest in the Rebel yell emerged during the war itself, as reflected in the pages of journalism, memoirs, fiction, and poetry.

Chapter 2 turns to postwar writing about the Rebel yell, particularly the published memoirs, diaries, reminiscences, and regimental histories authored by both northern and southern soldiers. As a result of these publications, the reputation and legend of the Rebel yell soared. Southern veterans often recalled the screech as an essential weapon in the Confederate arsenal, one that could demoralize and drive off Yankee forces. In turn, many northerners admitted that the Rebel yell had unnerved them during their years in uniform, sometimes severely. Veterans' narratives clarified that the Rebel yell did not exist solely as a battle cry used on the attack but conveyed numerous messages both on and off the field—often celebratory, sometimes poignant. To satisfy public interest, some authors sought to represent the famous scream on the page, and this chapter considers the different literary strategies for doing so. Old soldiers who tried to capture the yell in print did much to heighten public interest in the scream as a sonic experience, one that later Americans wished to hear firsthand.

Chapter 3 pauses to consider postwar debates over the cultural origins of the Rebel yell. Identified during the late nineteenth century as the Voice of the South, the screech attracted the attention of anyone seeking to shape popular understanding of southern identity. What races, bloodlines, and class strata should be most closely associated with the region, and whose voice deserved to be heard above the rest? In hoping to answer these questions, southerners from all walks of life posed theories as to how the Rebel yell came into being. Some argued that Native Americans taught the scream to colonial whites, who later employed it against the British during the Revolutionary War. Other origin theories linked the Rebel yell to hunting practices common in the South during the antebellum years, particularly fox and rabbit hunting. Having considered those possibilities, I take stock of and evaluate several other theories about the origins of the scream, from the Stonewall Jackson/First Manassas theory to more recent hypotheses concerning Celtic, African American, and Hispano-Muslim roots.

Chapter 4 returns to the chronological history of the Rebel yell, specifically to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The screech thrived in these final decades before the advent of a national culture of images, brought about by American mass media, television, and film. In a society deeply invested in oratory and the sounds of rural and urban life, the yell captured the popular imagination in a way that twenty-first-century Americans may find difficult to understand. Although the scream enjoyed sporadic use within the military actions of this period, by 1900 it led an active life off the battlefield and in a wide array of American political and social settings. This chapter charts the demilitarization of the Rebel yell, a process that took the cry out of the ranks of soldiers and into the hearts, minds, and mouths of civilians—especially white Americans of the postwar South. The chapter ends by considering a small but intent group of Confederate veterans who, at the turn of the twentieth century, sought to protect the Rebel yell from what they viewed to be its ignoble treatment at the hands of civilians and later generations. Proclaiming the Rebel yell to be forever lost, the writing and oratory of these men would in time have a powerful effect on popular understanding of the scream.

Chapter 5 studies the life of the screech amid the volatile civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During the centennial of the Civil War, many of the same issues over which that conflict was fought—white supremacy, states' rights, and the resistance to federal authority—again claimed the national spotlight. Although by mid-century the Confederate battle flag came to eclipse the Rebel yell as the most popular symbol of the white South, the scream played a role at several scenes of protest, including ones at which segregationists assaulted civil rights activists and federal agents. Paradoxically, at the same time that the battle cry rang out over a contested southern society, the myth of the Lost Rebel yell garnered growing attention from the American public.

It would have startled and perhaps annoyed many Confederate veterans to know that during the second half of the twentieth century, the Rebel yell would begin a career as a pop icon. Having avoided any lasting association with the violence of the civil rights era, the screech proved adaptable to virtually any environment and commercial enterprise. Chapter 6 follows the Rebel yell—as both a brand name and an aural experience—through a wide range of popular contexts, some of which had little or no connection to the historic South. In particular, I consider the factors that defanged the Rebel yell and transformed a terrifying, communal battle cry into a largely comic form of personal expression. The chapter also examines the legacy of the myth of the Lost Rebel yell, including recent attempts to rescue the yell from history. I explore at length the claims of the Museum of the Confederacy to have unearthed the authentic Rebel yell and employ audio editing equipment to help reveal the truth about the recordings found on the museum's popular The Rebel Yell Lives! compact disc.⁵

The concluding chapter considers Alice Randall's provocative 2009 novel Rebel Yell en route to contemplating the future of the scream as a southern icon. Having assessed the standing of the yell in a region in need of unifying symbols, I end with some final thoughts on what the battle cry can teach us about the American South, U.S. culture of the twenty-first century, and the writing of Civil War history.⁶

I began research for this project during the summer of 2008. At that time, only Smith's humorous study of the Rebel yell existed. During the period when I drafted the present work, another book on the scream saw publication, Terryl W. Elliott's self-published "Dammit, Holler ’em Across!": The History of the Rebel Yell (2009). When I became aware of the book and obtained a copy in 2012, I found it to be a helpful and engaging introduction to the yell, told in an enthusiastic voice. (The short preface ends by encouraging readers to relax, take a deep breath and get ready to Yell!) Elliott focused primarily on the scream as a Civil War battle cry and reached a number of conclusions that differ from my own. I therefore believe that readers can find profit in both of our books, and I trust that those interested in the yell will weigh each in turn. Elliott's book alerted me to the fact that, in 2010, the attorney and writer Monte Akers devoted a chapter to the yell in The Accidental Historian: Tales of Trash and Treasure. Reading Akers and Elliott together, I was gratified to find that others have likewise found reason to hesitate over the Museum of the Confederacy's conclusions about the Rebel yell. I believe my experiments with digital audio editing equipment, as described in chapter 6, will help answer these writers' questions about some of the best-known recordings of the battle cry.⁷

Readers will note that I have attached a variety of terms to the shriek of the Confederate military. Among these, I have most often used the words yell, screech, scream, and cry. These terms may be loosely synonymous, but each will suggest a slightly different sonic effect. In practical terms, the interchangeable wording has helped me avoid the constant repetition of the phrase Rebel yell. In a deeper sense, however, the shifting language is appropriate. The Rebel yell consisted of a blend of diverse, though often similar, noises. Therefore, while my verbiage may lack precision, it will nonetheless help convey the irregular and elusive nature of the scream.

All told, this book contends that the evolving Rebel yell, from 1861 through the early twenty-first century, can teach us much about American voice, region, race, history, and memory. The two quotations that begin this introduction demonstrate the dramatic distance that can separate different interpretations and memories of the scream. In 1897, J. W. DuBose of Alabama called the Rebel yell the sublimest Americanism that ever was born. For DuBose, the southern screech stood as an eloquent expression of the Continent's highest virtues. Celebrating the yell as a symbol of pure democracy, he suggested it would outlive those governments either crushed or corrupted on American soil. More famously, in 1898 the Union veteran and author Ambrose Bierce termed the Rebel yell the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard. Bierce enjoyed a long literary career during which he often captured, on the page, the most appalling of human vices and intonations. By making no attempt to represent the Rebel yell through analogy or metaphor, he set it apart as a uniquely horrid thing. Not all accounts of the scream occupy such extreme positions, nor have all commentators borne the regional biases of DuBose and Bierce. But the Rebel yell remains a deeply contested phenomenon, both as a historical subject and as a living form of expression. If the screech prompts us to consider American culture from diverse perspectives, then it surely deserves a close listening.⁸

For another reason, too, we ought to study the scream in earnest. There is something electric about the Rebel yell and its name, a visceral quality that stirs the senses. Individuals often perk up and express genuine excitement when discussing the battle cry, even those without any special interest in southern culture or Civil War history. In the pages to come, I investigate why a wild, incoherent scream has so captivated generations of sophisticated, articulate people. The answers are many and varied, ranging from a disdain for authority to the primal need to assert one's place in the universe. I admit that it has at times been hard to reconcile the popular appeal of the Rebel yell with the traumatic, controversial, and ugly episodes in which it has participated. But that appeal cannot be denied. During the years I spent researching and writing about the yell, I lost count of how many times I found it celebrated on television, in popular magazines, and over the World Wide Web. Such references testify to a public fascination that provides both the central premise of this book and its justification. Simply put, the Rebel yell stands as one of the most magnetic voices in all of American history.

1

A Very Peculiar Sound

1861–1865

White southerners greeted secession, in 1861, with a mixture of regret, disquiet, pride, and unbridled enthusiasm. Over time, most came to recognize the value in building a distinct national identity for the young Southern Confederacy. By doing so, Confederates could boost morale, find common ground, and articulate shared values and objectives. Just as important, they could show the Confederacy to be culturally and politically independent from the United States. Southern symbols became an essential part of the mission to establish national unity and independence. From the design of a new national flag to the writing of patriotic poetry, many citizens responded to the general hunger for Confederate emblems. The press encouraged such behavior, as when a Richmond magazine argued that new monuments—from statuary to songs—would arouse a new and holier love and zeal for the welfare and happiness of [our] country.¹

But as historians have pointed out, the Confederacy faced symbolic challenges from the very beginning. White southerners shared cultural, political, religious, and familial roots with their northern counterparts, and such connections went deep. Many Confederates celebrated George Washington and the Founding Fathers as their ancestors and heroes. Yet northerners could do the same. That shared history likewise clouded the Confederacy's efforts to develop its national flag. As Paul Quigley has noted, there were calls for the South to retain the stars and stripes, or something very close to it, reflecting a widespread feeling that the U.S. flag belonged as much to the South as it did to the North. Eventually the Confederacy developed three different national banners. But like the American flag, each employed red, white, and blue and used stars to represent states. Less formal symbols of Confederate identity likewise blurred with Yankee culture, as found in popular songs and sheet music. Some songs circulating in the Confederacy came straight from northern pens, another historian observed, while others simply had had their lyrics adapted to southern climes. Southern purists may have objected to the use of these works, but they failed to persuade neighbors to shed southern versions of songs like Who Will Care for Mother, Now. Even that beloved Confederate anthem, Dixie, had been written by a northerner. So while southerners clearly felt the need to create symbols of national identity, they struggled to find symbols that at once stood apart from northern culture and appealed to most Confederates.²

The Rebel yell proved to be an exception. The battle cry erupted organically from the throats of Confederate troops in 1861, an unnerving and uneven scream with no known lineage connecting it to the northern populace. It had no physical shape whatsoever and made no use of words, cadence, or melody. These qualities freed the yell from the problems hampering the nation's visible emblems and familiar anthems, many of which derived from European or northern precursors. What is more, in a Confederacy whose only experience was one of war, and indeed had no existence apart from war, the martial qualities of the Rebel yell appealed to the citizenry's sense of self. While Confederates developed more formal and standard markers of southern nationhood through 1865, they never found a more unique, naked symbol of Confederate unity and defiance. Far more than most Confederates realized during the war years, the scream made for a potent symbol of an independent southern nation.³

It would be impossible to name the precise moment when the Rebel yell first rang out, but it almost certainly occurred outside of battle. The Irish-born journalist William Howard Russell crafted what may be the earliest account of the screech on record, published in the London Times on July 10, 1861. Russell was a groundbreaking war correspondent whose