Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

Apart from his critical judgment Davidson shows the ability of a careful editor in weighing evidence as to the authorship of All quiet along the Potomac—a poem that all Southerners had claimed as the work of Lamar Fontaine.¹ Davidson publishes Fontaine's letter claiming positively the authorship, but side by side with it is one from Joel Chandler Harris, who was at that time, according to the editor, planning an edition of Southern poems, and who after much deliberation expresses the opinion that Mrs. Beers is the author of the poem. He quotes also a letter to the same effect from the editor of Harper's magazine. While he himself does not express an opinion, it is not difficult for the reader to be convinced by the reasoning submitted by Joel Chandler Harris. The mention of Harris suggests that in this volume he himself appears as the author of several poems which are as unlike his later writings as anything could well be. Davidson has the credit too of publishing for the first time in this volume McCabe's Dreaming in the trenches and Christmas night of ‘62, and certain recent poems of Maurice Thompson and Sidney Lanier. He also has much to say of poems that do not relate to the war.

In 1882 Francis F. Browne of Chicago carried out the purpose that Richard Grant White had expressed by publishing Bugle echoes—a collection of poems of the Civil War, Northern and Southern. Drawing upon the anthologies that have been discussed and upon separate editions of Southern poets, such as Hayne's edition of Timrod (1873), of Ticknor (1879), of Hayne (1882), he finds a much larger number of Southern poems that fit into his plan of suggesting the story of the Civil War by poems written at the time. Thus for the first time a systematic arrangement was made of this material. The result is altogether striking. The Southern poems, while slightly fewer in number (the proportion is 60 to 85), measure up well with those of the North. Side by side in this volume appear Bryant's Our country's call and Timrod's A Cry to Arms, Whitman's Beat, beat drums and Randall's My Maryland, Pike's Dixie and The battle hymn of the republic, Holmes's Voyage of the good ship Union and Ticknor's Virginians of the Valley, Lowell's Commemoration ode and Timrod's Ode to the Confederate dead, and at the very end Finch's The blue