STEPHEN FOSTER’S CIVIL WAR
Thirty-eight cents and a scrap of paper bearing the wistful words, “dear friends and gentle hearts.” Such were the aggregate personal effects collected from the worn leather pocketbook of Stephen Collins Foster at the time of his death in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital on January 13, 1864. The small change attested to the reduced circumstances of a man who had once been America’s foremost popular composer. As for the sentiment Foster had recorded on the penciled fragment, it was far removed from the rancorous Civil War that had raged around him for nearly three years.
Foster’s background and experience yield mixed clues to his feelings about the war. There were numerous Democratic connections in his family. His father, William, had been an Andrew Jackson man. Having lost property through foreclosure by the Bank of the United States, he no doubt felt a personal stake in Old Hickory’s campaign against the “Monster Bank.” William had served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and his daughter Ann Eliza married the Reverend Edward Buchanan, brother of the rising Democratic politician James Buchanan. Stephen would devote a modicum of his artistic talent to Buchanan’s successful run for president in 1856, including writing a pro-Democratic campaign song, “The White House Chair,” and lyrics for an anti-Republican ditty titled “The Abolition Show.”
Stephen may have left scant evidence of his feelings during the secession crisis, but his brother Morrison, then working in Cleveland, clearly spelled out his own position in a letter to the editor of the , the city’s Democratic daily. Noting a popular opinion in the North that “it would be better as a matter of interest that the free States were separated from the slave States and become as to them a foreign nation,” the writer declared that he was
