Staunton’s Stonewall Brigade Band: Early History (1855-1927)

By virtue of longevity, the Stonewall Brigade Band has served as Augusta County’s principal mode of public commemoration of the Civil War. By 1866, the band had begun a long series of public, postwar performances to memorialize Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate soldiers. This section presents images of one of the band’s original saxhorns, its first members, and some of the Confederate monuments beside which it has performed.

The Beginnings of the Band

By virtue of longevity, the Stonewall Brigade Band has served as Augusta County’s principal mode of public commemoration of the Civil War. Its musicians initially called themselves “The Mountain Sax Horn Band” and used the alternate title “Turner’s Silver Cornet Band” by 1859. The Civil War and its memory soon prompted the band to adopt its current name, “The Stonewall Brigade Band.”¹ By 1866, the band had begun a long series of public, postwar performances to memorialize Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate soldiers. Such performances, alone, offered scant foundation for postwar reconciliation between North and South.

A group of white, male citizens of Staunton organized the Mountain Sax Horn Band in 1855. Patented in Europe in the 1840’s, saxhorns are a family of brass wind instruments. Each contains three valves that can produce, by over-blowing, those members of the harmonic series from the second through the eighth.²

The Stonewall Brigade Band during the Civil War

During the Civil War more than half of the Mountain Sax Horn Band’s founding members entered service with the Fifth Virginia Infantry. The Fifth would serve as one of the two principal infantry units from Augusta County in what became Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In April 1862, eight of the bandsmen joined six other soldier-musicians in receiving the official designation, “Fifth Regiment Band. ” A year later its musicians, in turn, merged with those in the four other Virginia regiments that, along with the Fifth, composed an infantry brigade formerly under the direct command of General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. In May 1863, the five regiments and the newly consolidated band received the official designation “Stonewall Brigade” in memory of Jackson, who was mortally wounded at Chancellorsville that month.³

The Staunton bandsmen returned periodically to their hometown, most often while accompanying Confederate troops during the campaigns waged for control of the Shenandoah Valley. In May 1862, for instance, the musicians led fellow Confederate soldiers through Staunton as part of maneuvering by Jackson that would spare Staunton Union occupation that year.⁴

In February and March 1863, the musicians returned (now unaccompanied by other troops), paraded through Staunton, and played concerts to raise funds for soldiers’ families. One of the town’s newspapers noted proudly that the band’s “sweet strains of music” had “cheered the soul of ‘Stonewall Jackson’ and his brave soldiers in the ‘tented field.’”⁵

Away from the tented field and during combat, the musicians mainly served as litter (stretcher) bearers and as hospital assistants. Such duty spared them many frontline hazards; only one of the antebellum bandsmen from Staunton died while in Confederate service. At Appomattox in April 1865, the Stonewall Brigade Band numbered seven active members when it surrendered with the Army of Northern Virginia’s other remaining units. By August of that year, the organization had resumed peacetime performances in Staunton.⁶

The Stonewall Band After the War

In 1864, the bandsmen visited “in silent reverence” the grave of Stonewall Jackson in Lexington, Virginia, and they probably provided the musical accompaniments to many battle-zone funerals of Southern soldiers.⁸

In 1866, the Stonewall Brigade Band held a benefit concert to help fund the Confederate section in Staunton’s Thornrose Cemetery. Thornrose contained the grave of William E. Woodward, the sole Civil War fatality from among the ranks of the antebellum Staunton bandsmen, as well as the graves of many other Southern soldiers, local and non-local, known and unknown. Later that same year, the musicians played in Staunton on the anniversary of Stonewall Jackson’s death, then led a parade of Confederate veterans to Thornrose to decorate the graves of their fallen comrades. By itself, this gesture of memorializing both their brigade’s former commander and his former troops buried in Staunton offered scant foundation for postwar reconciliation between North and South. Jackson had been ruthless towards the Union enemy, and the inscription on Woodward’s monument in Thornrose expressed a similarly unyielding sentiment in quoting Woodward’s dying words: “I will never retreat. Victory or death.”⁹

During a railroad-stop by President and Mrs. Ulysses Grant in 1874, Staunton’s mayor, N.K. Trout, informed the President that the Stonewall Brigade Band was the “only remnant of war” memory in the town.⁷ Trout would have been more accurate in characterizing the band as Augusta County’s most visible remnant of Civil War expression, rather than its only such expression. A charter drafted for the bandsmen in the 1870’s prescribed a generous array of venues: “fairs, commencement exercises, and parades of every description.” By the late 1890’s, their performing schedule would expand to an average of three concerts weekly. Doubtless there existed ample wartime precedent for their memorializing and commemorating the Confederacy in much of this postwar activity.

In addition to these events, and postwar performances at Jackson’s grave in Lexington, the Stonewall Brigade Band commemorated and celebrated the Confederacy at a dizzying variety of functions after the Civil War. The bandsmen raised money for and performed at monuments and burial grounds for Confederates outside Staunton and entertained surviving Southern veterans of all ranks and their families, both in Augusta County and at distant points. During performances, the musicians often evoked the Southern war effort by playing “Dixie.”¹⁰

In 1877, the musicians began an intermittent, annual tradition of joining the Virginia Military Institute cadet corps for commemorative exercises at the New Market Battlefield, site of a Confederate victory in nearby Rockingham County. When Stonewall Jackson’s only child, Julia, married less than a decade later, the band presented her with a scroll that bore the rosters of both its current and Civil War-era incarnations, thereby proclaiming the close ties to Jackson of even those musicians too young to have served in the war. In 1927, the band played at the dedication of stone-mounted, bronze tablets erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to mark the area of Stonewall Jackson’s mortal wounding and the troop-positions of Confederate forces on Civil War battlefields in and around Fredericksburg.¹¹