Lincoln And Liberty: A Song History

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“Lincoln and Liberty” belongs to the Republican campaign of 1860. The Hutchinson Family Singers, one of the era’s best-known singing groups, took part in that race, and John W. Hutchinson printed the song in his Hutchinson’s Republican Songster, whose title page carried the same rallying cry.[1][2] The words are generally credited to his brother Jesse Hutchinson.[1][3] That credit calls for caution, however: the Library of Congress notes that Jesse Hutchinson Jr., author of the family’s anti-slavery anthem “Get Off the Track!”, died of malaria in 1853, seven years before Lincoln ran for president.[4] None of the sources consulted here accounts for the discrepancy, so the authorship is best treated as uncertain.

1860 photographic portrait of a beardless Abraham Lincoln, seated

William Marsh, Abraham Lincoln, salted paper print, May 20, 1860, two days after his nomination for president. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The verses cheer the Republican ticket and play on Lincoln’s frontier years, a recurring note in the 1860 contest.[1] They were written to the old air “Rosin the Bow” (also “Old Rosin the Beau”),[1][3] which Irwin Silber, in his Folkways notes, called the favorite campaign melody from 1840 through 1864, adding that “hardly a President in those years won office without the aid of old Rosin.”[3] In 1860 alone it carried other Republican songs as well, among them “Roll on the Ball” and Jesse Clement’s “Old Abe, the Rail-Splitter.”[1] The tune itself is older and well traveled: an American song version was published in 1838, probably drawing on earlier British or Irish models, and the melody also served as the shape-note hymn “Sawyer’s Exit” in the 1850 Sacred Harp and as a country-dance tune.[5]

About a century later the song found new listeners in the folk revival, when Folkways Records included it on the anthology Songs of the Civil War, issued with Silber’s notes.[6][3]

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Sources

  1. White Rose Research Online (Derek B. Scott, in Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press): "The US Presidential Campaign Songster, 1840–1900".
  2. Internet Archive: "Hutchinson's Republican Songster, for the Campaign of 1860" (ed. John W. Hutchinson, New York, 1860).
  3. Smithsonian Folkways: "Songs of the Civil War" (FH 5717), liner notes by Irwin Silber.
  4. Library of Congress, Worlds Revealed blog: "Jesse Hutchinson's View From High Rock".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Old Rosin the Beau".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Lincoln and Liberty" (track, Songs of the Civil War).