This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
No steamboat stop on the Upper Mississippi has ever been as filled with the glory of flags and songs as a small landing below a gentle rise on the east edge of Davenport, Iowa. There, in August of 1861, Union troops opened Camp McClellan as a collecting point for Iowa volunteers.
All that fall, the companies of eager recruits marching down to the steamboat landing to go south to the war went with fanfare. Nearly all of them were accompanied by at least one band, and by wives, children, and townspeople. At the landing, there were speeches by city officials.
The recruits themselves would have been singing the abolitionist song, "Darling Nellie Gray" as they marched. And almost certainly, they would have sung a gospel tune by a South Carolinian to words new since 1859: "John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave…Glory, glory, hallelujah." Davenport's Germans regarded John Brown as their own special hero and were proud of the fact that he had stopped in Davenport for supplies on the way to Harper's Ferry.
The recruits would likely have sung the new verse added last May: "They will hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree, Glory, glory, hallelujah." Not for another three months, until December, would Julia Ward Howe hear that same tune sung by soldiers going into battle near Washington, D. C., and sit down that very evening to write new words: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…Glory, Hallelujah."
And one by one, new songs would keep the spirits at Camp McClellan high and the flags waving. By the end of January 1862, after Lincoln issued a call for additional volunteers, they would be singing "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." Still later would come "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground," "Just Before the Battle, Mother," and the "Battle Cry of Freedom."
By the end of the war, more than forty thousand of the eighty thousand Iowa volunteers had come down the hill from Camp McClellan to the steamboat landing, all of them singing.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
