All Quiet Along the Potomac

The is a tune I listened to occasionally when researching the American Civil War 1861 - 1865, however over recent day's the tune has stuck in my mind. I am now memorising the tune and playing it on my Dixon G Whistle.

This version is played on the Piano and sounds very well, there is another version played on the whistle, somewhere but I can't find it on YouTube. But this version will give you a flavour of the tune - Here is a little about the tune, as usual it has a sad ending with the death of the poet who penned the words!

All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight" was a poem first published as "The Picket Guard" by Ethel Lynn Beers in Harper's Weekly, November 30, 1861, attributed only to "E.B." It was reprinted broadly both with that attribution and without, leading to many spurious claims of authorship. Finally, on July 4, 1863, Harper's Weekly told its readers that the poem had been written for the paper by a lady contributor whom it later identified as Beers.

The poem was based on newspaper reports of "all is quiet tonight" based on official telegrams sent to the Secretary of War by Major-General George B. McClellan following the First Battle of Bull Run. Beers noticed that the report was followed by a small item telling of a picket being killed. She wrote the poem that same morning she read it in September, 1861.

In 1863 the poem 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 All Quiet on the Western Front.

Ethelinda Lynn Beers (January 13, 1827 – October 11, 1879) was an American poet best known for her patriotic and sentimental Civil War poem "All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight".
Born Ethelinda Eliot in Goshen, New York, she was a descendant of Puritan missionary John Eliot. She published poetry as "Ethyl Lynn" and after her marriage at age 19 to William H. Beers appended her married name to her poems.

In 1863 she published General Frankie: a Story for Little Folks. She feared publishing her collected works as she thought she would die after its publication, a premonition which came true.

The day after the publication of All Quiet Along the Potomac and Other Poems she died in Orange, New Jersey.

HMA