The Song That Came After — A Hoosier Coda on Sherman’s March

Post 6.5 paired a poem written during the war with an order issued three years after the guns stopped. This second Hoosier coda pairs a song with a march. The order of those two is the editorial argument: the march came first, the song came after, and the gap between the experience and its commemoration is the part of the story Memorial Day was made to hold.

January 1865 — six weeks after Savannah

On December 21, 1864, Sherman’s army marched into Savannah after roughly five weeks and three hundred miles from Atlanta. The campaign was over. Sherman wired Lincoln on December 22 offering the city as a Christmas gift. The country read about it in the papers and waited for the next move.

Three weeks later, a thirty-two-year-old printer-songwriter in Chicago named Henry Clay Work finished a new song. Work was employed by the music publishing firm of Root & Cady — the same Chicago house that had published George F. Root’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” in 1862 and had supplied Union regiments with sheet music for the rest of the war. Root & Cady published Work’s new piece on or about January 9, 1865. The song was called “Marching Through Georgia.” The title page of the first edition carried two dedications: to Major General William T. Sherman, and — first — to the composer’s cousin Mary Lizzie Work, of New Washington, Indiana. The Hoosier dedicatee is documented in the Library of Congress sheet music record. New Washington is a small town in Clark County, on the Indiana side of the Ohio River across from Louisville. The most-played Union veterans’ song of the nineteenth century was, on its own title page, addressed to a Hoosier woman before it was addressed to the general it commemorated. It would sell more than five hundred thousand copies of sheet music in its first twelve years.

The song opened with a stanza that announced what kind of song it was:

The voice is past tense. The bugle is “good old.” The singing is something the boys “used to” do. The song was written, from its very first line, to be remembered with rather than sung during. That tense is the whole point.

What Theodore Upson actually saw, the November before

Six weeks before the song existed, Theodore Frelinghuysen Upson of the 100th Indiana Volunteer Infantry was walking out of Atlanta with the rest of Sherman’s army. He was nineteen years old. He had been a soldier for more than two years, since mustering in at Fort Wayne in September 1862.

What he wrote about the march, in the diaries and letters that Indiana University historian Oscar Osburn Winther later compiled into With Sherman to the Sea (Louisiana State University Press, 1943; Indiana University Press reissue 1958), did not sound like Henry Clay Work’s chorus. It sounded like a soldier on a march:

That second passage is the one that catches now. The “large following” Upson describes was the column of formerly enslaved people who attached themselves to the marching army across Georgia — the same people Work’s song would invoke six weeks later in a single celebratory chorus, “the flag that makes you free.” Upson’s diary records that Sherman tried in every way to send them back. They came anyway. Thousands of them — the standard scholarly estimates run well into the tens of thousands — made the march from plantation to coast with the Union army.

The song would tell that story as triumph. The diary tells it as something more complicated — a Union general trying to refuse the people who saw his army as their freedom, and the people coming anyway.

The full song as written in 1865

What follows is the entire song as Henry Clay Work published it in January 1865. The second stanza contains language of its moment that this post chooses to preserve as historical record rather than alter, on the same verbatim-discipline principle Post 6.5 used for Forceythe Willson’s 1863 verse. A note follows the verse block.

What the song does that the diary cannot

George F. Root, the elder Chicago publisher who had hired Henry Clay Work for Root & Cady in 1861, explained in his 1891 autobiography The Story of a Musical Life why “Marching Through Georgia” kept selling and being sung when most other war songs had quieted:

That is the song’s own genre. Root’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” was written to get men into the war. Work’s “Marching Through Georgia” was written to give men a way to remember the war once they had come out. The first was for marching toward the fight. The second was for marching home from it — and, more durably, for the rest of life afterward, in town halls and GAR encampments and on the front porches of children and grandchildren.

The historian Christian McWhirter has read the song this way too: it “celebrated Sherman’s campaign from Atlanta to Savannah; but it also told listeners how to interpret Union victory. Speaking as a white soldier, Work turned the targeting of Confederate civilian property into a celebration of unionism and emancipation. Instead of destroyers, Union soldiers became deliverers for slaves and southern unionists. Georgia was not left in ruins but was converted into ‘a thoroughfare for freedom.’” That is what songs that survive their war do. They are not just commemorations of what happened. They are arguments about what it meant.

Sherman against the song he was dedicated to

The man to whom the song was dedicated came to hate it. The reason was nothing to do with the lyrics. It was the volume and the repetition.

By the 1880s and 1890s, “Marching Through Georgia” was the standard band piece at GAR national encampments — the annual reunion of Union veterans’ organizations. At the 1890 Boston national encampment, by accounts in the secondary literature, the song was played at length and repeatedly by the regimental bands as Sherman passed the reviewing stand. Sherman’s patience — never famously deep — collapsed. According to the same accounts, he declared that he would not attend another national encampment until every band in the United States had signed an agreement not to play “Marching Through Georgia” in his presence. He kept the substance of that promise for the rest of his life. He died on February 14, 1891.

The song was played at his funeral.

What Indiana posts sang for the rest of the century

The 100th Indiana, like every other Union regiment, mustered out in 1865 and went home. Theodore Upson learned carriage-building in Morristown, New Jersey, married Anna Elizabeth Beach in May 1867, returned to Indiana, and served as commander of his local Grand Army of the Republic post. He died at home on January 29, 1919.

From the late 1860s until Upson’s death and beyond, the Indiana GAR posts — hundreds of them, in towns from Indianapolis to Wabash to Lima to every county seat the war had reached — held annual encampments and Memorial Day services. They sang the songs that were appropriate to those occasions. “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground.” “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And, above all others, “Marching Through Georgia.”

This is the part of the song’s life that the song itself anticipated. “Sing it as we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,” the opening stanza directs. The instruction is not to the men marching out of Atlanta in November 1864. The instruction is to the boys those men became, decades later, sitting in GAR halls in Indiana with thinning hair and their original company comrades shrinking by the year, singing a song that named for them what the years before had been about.

What two documents do together

Upson’s diary is the experience. Work’s song is the commemoration. They were written six weeks apart, by men who never met, about the same forty-day stretch of Georgia road. The song’s title page named a Hoosier first — Mary Lizzie Work of New Washington, Indiana — before it named the general it celebrated. The diary was kept by a Hoosier soldier from Steuben County who walked through Georgia and recorded what he saw. Each preserves what the other cannot.

The diary preserves the “large following” Sherman tried to send away — the human complication the song could not fit into a chorus. The song preserves the editorial frame the diary did not yet know it would need — the argument that this march was for freedom and not destruction, the interpretation under which an entire generation of Union veterans would tell their grandchildren what they had done.

Memorial Day is the calendar form of that same pair. The day exists because the country needed a way to remember together what its soldiers had remembered separately in their diaries and letters and at their own kitchen tables. The day did not preserve their experience; it preserved their commemoration of it. A song could do the same work in a single chorus.

This series has now read two Hoosier codas after the trilogy. Post 6.5 paired a poem with an order. Post 6.6 pairs a song with a march. Both pieces argue the same thing in different forms: the documents of memory are not the same as the documents of experience, and a series about the Union dead has to read both.

This is the second and final coda. The Hoosier ground is read. There are no more codas. Post 7 moves to new ground — to other regiments, other states, other voices. The promise made at the close of Post 6 holds, and the door now closes behind it.

Sources

• Henry Clay Work, Marching Through Georgia, words and music (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1865; plate 424-3). Library of Congress sheet music collection, loc.gov/item/2023784277; Duke University Historic American Sheet Music collection (b2018), also reproduced via IMSLP and Connecticut College Historic Sheet Music Collection (item 898). Five stanzas + chorus; original sheet music includes piano accompaniment. Title page carries two dedications: “To cousin Mary Lizzie Work, of New Washington, Indiana” and “In Honor of Maj. Gen. Sherman’s Famous March ‘from Atlanta to the Sea.’”
• George F. Root, The Story of a Musical Life: An Autobiography (Cincinnati: The John Church Co., 1891). Full text digitized at Internet Archive (Cornell University Library copy, cu31924022255784). Root’s assessment of “Marching Through Georgia” as a “glorious remembrance on coming triumphantly out” appropriate to soldiers’ gatherings is the post’s editorial centerpiece; it is reproduced here through standard biographical and musicological literature on the song (the present author has not verified the exact page reference against the primary 1891 scan).
• Theodore F. Upson, With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries & Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson, edited by Oscar Osburn Winther (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943; reissued Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958). Quotation of the “large following” passage and the march-loadout passage drawn from published excerpts of the volume.
• Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Source of the “Speaking as a white soldier… thoroughfare for freedom” reading of the song’s lyrical argument. Quoted here via standard secondary literature on the song; the present author has not verified the exact page reference against the primary 2012 volume.
• Wikipedia, “Marching Through Georgia,” accessed 2026-05-16. Source for the 500,000-copies sales figure, the 1890 GAR encampment seven-hour anecdote, Sherman’s lifelong refusal, and the funeral-performance detail; underlying citations include Florine Thayer McCray, David J. Eicher, Sigmund Spaeth, and Edwin Tribble. This post cites Wikipedia as the entry point; the underlying claims rest on the scholarship Wikipedia references.
• This series, Entries 1 through 6.5, available at /blog.html.