Marching Song of The First Arkansas - Interpretation

Interpretation

The black soldiers are in exuberant spirits, bragging in the first three stanzas that they will show the rebels they are formidable fighters. They are fighting for the law, which offers equal treatment, as well as the Union. As soldiers, the third stanza says, they are striking out for a new life, leaving behind “hoeing cotton” and “hoeing corn.”

The most powerful challenge to the mores of the antebellum South is presented in the fourth stanza, where the black soldiers demand social equality, and more: “They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin.” White Southerners will have to acknowledge their actual blood relations among the former slaves. A heavy debt is owed: “They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin” (as Romans 6:23 notes, the “wages of sin is death”). The black soldiers demand reparations, or threaten retaliation: “They will have to give us house-room, or the roof shall tumble in!”

In stanzas five and six, slavery has been abolished forever by the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln is described as “Father Abraham,” a title that associates the President with the Old Testament patriarch, emphasizing the religious sanction to the abolition of slavery. The song is a powerful summary of the hopes and dreams of the black soldiers. Years later, a Civil War veteran told Norman B. Wood “he once heard a black regiment sing it just before a battle and they made the welkin ring, and inspired all who heard it.”