Staunton’s Stonewall Brigade Band: Later History (1870-2006)

Beginning in the mid-1870’s, the musicians met and practiced in a bandroom ornamented with a pair of large, steel-engraved portrait prints of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. This section presents images of the portrait prints, places related to railroad promotion by Confederate veterans, and performances by the band that fostered sectional reconciliation.

Beginning in the mid-1870’s, the musicians met and practiced in a bandroom ornamented with a pair of large, steel-engraved portrait prints of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.¹ Literally as well as symbolically for the band, Lee’s postwar legacy balanced Jackson’s wartime legacy by encouraging North-South reconciliation, if only through Lee’s examples of living peaceably in a postwar Union dominated politically and economically by the North and by honorably redirecting energies that once defeated Northern armies in battle (with a ruthlessness comparable to Jackson’s) towards rebuilding and expanding Virginia’s economy and educational system. As commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee had commanded the band as well as the Stonewall Brigade, and Jackson himself, during most of the war. Unlike Jackson, of course, Lee survived the war and thus possessed—and eagerly seized—an opportunity to help lead the peacetime reconstruction and reconfiguration of the Shenandoah Valley.

The Stonewall Brigade Band led the opening-day parade at Augusta’s first, postwar county-fair in 1868. This event, held at a permanent fairgrounds adjoining the Virginia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind on the edge of Staunton, showcased local agricultural and commercial enterprise. Lee attended and received the collective greetings of 8,000 fairgoers. The band performed each day during fair week.

In 1870, the band played at a mass-meeting and barbecue held at the same fairgrounds to announce Lee’s assumption of the presidency of the Valley Railroad and to urge Augusta County to support the company financially. The outgoing president read a letter from Lee, too ill to attend in person, expressing his hope for the “speedy completion” of the railroad. Its directors were in the midst of planning a track between Harrisonburg and Salem, Virginia, along a route that passed through Augusta County and Staunton (as well as Lee’s hometown of Lexington in neighboring Rockbridge County). In a speech that Lee delivered the previous year in Baltimore, he had extolled the project as forging “the last link in the great [railroad] chain from the Northern Cities to the South and South-west.” Within the transportation network completed by the Valley Railroad, Lee asserted in the speech, Augusta County would contribute “the public Institutions of Staunton” as well as “important local trade.” Lee died six weeks after the promotion at the fairgrounds, but the railroad boom in western and West Virginia that he helped foster—as well as a second economic surge in the 1880’s and early 1890’s—crowded the musicians’ schedules with performances at new civic and educational institutions as well as with personal investment- and business opportunities.² (Ironically, postwar railroad-promotion and timber exploitation by Confederate veterans did much to propel fully one-third of Augusta County into direct ownership by the Federal government barely 50 years after the Civil War ended.)

The man who had presided over Lee’s military defeat would further encourage the band’s reconciliationist tendencies. As General-in-Chief of Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant won the respect of many former Confederates with his magnanimous treatment of Lee and the surrendering Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in 1865. During Grant’s brief railroad stopover in Staunton in 1874, the band supported Mayor Trout’s grossly inaccurate but well intentioned claim of near-complete, voluntary amnesia regarding the war, by serenading the general-turned-President with a song denoting national union: “My Country, ’Tis of Thee. ” A Staunton newspaper reported that, in the wake of the performance and Trout’s remarks, Grant “raised his hat and bowed several times to the Band.”³

The bandsmen eventually incorporated this encounter into a history that would claim Grant had honored them specifically in 1865, as well as in 1874. At Appomattox, Grant allowed the surrendering Confederates to retain most of their possessions. The gesture was directed towards all units of Lee’s army generally, but leading members of the Stonewall Brigade Band had by 1885 convinced themselves that the retention of their instruments 20 years before represented a special intervention by Grant on their behalf. In 1885, too, the musicians sent resolutions of sympathy to a cancer-stricken Grant and, later that year, traveled to New York to march in his funeral procession. They returned to New York 12 years later to play in the grand parade accompanying the dedication of his tomb.⁴

The band’s honoring of Grant, moreover, was but one set of a number of activities that advanced sectional reconciliation and drew considerable local publicity. In 1881, for example, the musicians played at a “Blue and Gray reunion” in Pennsylvania at the invitation of former Union soldiers. Staunton newspapers also reported on the band’s service, three years later, as musical host for visiting veterans of the 28th New York Infantry, whom the Fifth Virginia Infantry had fought at the Civil War battle of Cedar Mountain in 1862.⁵

In 1896, the band’s reconciliationist sentiment had evolved to the point that one Staunton newspaper criticized its members for traveling to Ohio and Pennsylvania to serenade Republican Presidential candidate William McKinley and enjoy fetes thrown by Union veterans. Referencing McKinley’s service as Union officer in the Shenandoah Valley and Augusta County during the Civil War, the Spectator and Vindicator fumed that the band seemed unaware that McKinley’s likely fiscal policies as President “would destroy the homes and despoil the country in time of peace as he and his followers did in time of war.” This reaction evidently had little effect; the musicians again serenaded McKinley during Staunton railroad stops in 1897 and 1898.⁶

Not even the harshest critics could accuse the band of a permanent Northern bias. The musicians’ activities carried the inarguable, Southern cachet of the six Confederate veterans who continued playing in their ranks through 1896.⁷ More subtly, too, the band discouraged criticism of its reconciliationist activities by frequently mixing homage to Northern and Southern Civil War soldiers at the same event, or by commemorating historical figures and themes honored by Americans from all regions.

As part of Memorial Day observances in Staunton in 1887, for instance, the band serenaded both William W. Averell, who had led Union cavalry occupying Staunton in 1864, and hometown celebrity, John D. Imboden, who had commanded Confederate cavalry opposing Averell and other Union commanders that year. In 1889, the musicians joined Northern militiamen and veterans at a series of exercises in New York that marked the centennial of George Washington’s Presidency.⁸

In Staunton in the summer of 1898, amid an especially high tide of national, reconciliationist sentiment (boosted by the spectacle of thousands of Southerners entering Federal military service during the Spanish-American War), the musicians began periodic performances of “From Fireside to Battlefield.” This production saw them assume the roles of white Americans of all sectional allegiances, who divided, fought, and then reunited in the course of a virtual Civil War. In his history of the band, Marshall M. Brice would describe “Fireside to Battlefield” as “involving pyrotechnics, calcium light effects, and war songs of both North and South.” The climax, Brice added, came when “the band divided into two choruses, half the members remaining in the stands, the other half marching away, the two forces then acting as opposing troops, meeting and clashing.”⁹

The activities that respectfully incorporated people and perspectives once perceived as oppositional to the former Confederacy were monoracial in emphasis and not extended to African-Americans as a whole. The ranks of the bandsmen remained restricted to whites through the mid-20th century, and their performances referencing blacks’ lives during the Civil War era evoked prewar idylls rather than the horrors of slavery or the wartime record of sacrifice and martial exertion by African-Americans on behalf of Union.¹⁰ Ironically, this approach advanced monoracial, sectional reconciliation still further by employing stereotypes that met with the hearty approval of white audiences in the North as well as the South.

In 1900, for instance, the musicians won a prize for their performance of “Reminiscences of the Plantation” at a national convention of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in New Jersey.¹¹

Yet photographic evidence shows that black residents of Augusta County joined whites in audiences at the band’s local performances. Its members, moreover, extended assistance on occasion to local black musicians.

In 1977, the Stonewall Brigade Band achieved racial integration by electing Fonda Braxton, an African-American, to full membership status. At least three other African-Americans have played in the band since her induction.¹²

Previously, the band had bridged another divide by extending full membership to white women.¹³

Today, the Stonewall Brigade Band performs proudly as “the nation’s oldest community band to be sponsored by local government and funded by tax monies.”¹⁴