Craig A. Warren - The Rebel Yell: A Cultural History

The rebel yell was the sublimest Americanism that ever was born. It was the one Democracy that will never die here in the land of its birth.

J. W. DuBose, The Rebel Yell (1897)

It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard.

Ambrose Bierce, A Little of Chickamauga (1898)

Almost 150 years after Appomattox, the symbols of the Southern Confederacy continue to play a powerful and divisive role within American society. From street corners to the halls of Congress, Americans contend with Confederate imagery that holds widely divergent meanings for people of different racial, regional, and ideological backgrounds. Even more than Lost Cause statuary, today the public display of the Confederate battle flag ignites passionate debate about America's past and future. The flag also reminds us of the degree to which the Lost Cause has entered popular culture the world over. People now display the banner in communities as far away as England, Iraq, Lithuania, and South Africa. Like the six-gun and cowboy hat of the Old West, the battle flag has transcended its regional and national origins. It is therefore little wonder that academic and lay historians have written at length about the complex history of the flag as it existed both during and after the Civil War.

By contrast, perhaps no element of Confederate military lore has received less formal and sustained attention than the legendary battle cry of the southern soldier, the Rebel yell. Certainly the yell is not absent from the published annals of the Civil War. Many modern historians mention it in passing, usually to add flavor to accounts of military engagements. Few, however, have dwelled at length on the origins, sound, uses, and cultural significance of the screech. Still fewer have addressed its exploits and evolution after the warduring Reconstruction and the civil rights era and in popular

There also exists a less practical, and less obvious, reason why scholars have not more closely examined the Rebel yell as a postwar phenomenon. With the close of the nineteenth century, a growing number of commentators portrayed the southern screech as a lost artifact: a unique sonic experience that forever vanished with the surrender of the Confederate armies or, as some have argued, with the passing of the last Rebel veterans. Although slow to develop, by the late twentieth century the concept of a Lost Rebel yell had come to dominate public thinking about the battle cry. Obscuring the rich postwar career of the screech, the Lost yell served as a metaphor for the Old South, often remembered as a romantic, agrarian society tragically silenced by the gears of modern industry and an arrogant federal government.

What has been lost by these standard approaches to the Rebel yell is less the authentic voice of the South than a fuller understanding of a fascinating vocal experience. Certainly I concede that the Rebel yell reflected aspects of antebellum southern society, and I accept the argument of etymologist Allen Walker Read that the screech of 1961 was not the same as that of 1861. But a strictly nostalgic or linguistic study of the yell can tell only part of its story. As a scholar of language and literature, I am drawn to the subject because of the considerable challenge that the scream presents to anyone wishing to communicate it in print. As a cultural historian, I am captivated by how Americans have interpreted and used the Rebel yell differently since

My conclusions may at times surprise readers. Although the yell is remembered primarily as a battle cry, Confederate troops voiced it outside of combat as well as on the battlefield. This study accounts for the most prominent uses of the Rebel yell during wartime, showing that it fulfilled numerous needs and expressed a range of emotions. The book also challenges prevailing beliefs about its advantages and origins. While the terrorizing of northern soldiers stood as an important use of the scream, it could also function as a liability on the battlefield, unnecessarily revealing Confederate positions and sometimes bolstering the morale of Union soldiers. No study ofthe battle cry can pinpoint its precise origins and etymology, but I do not, for example, accept the theory that Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson first inspired the Rebel yell. Nor does research support the idea that the yell derived primarily from Celtic traditions. Above all, I argue against the idea that any one true or authentic Rebel yell ever emanated from the throats of most southern troops. Each unit, army, and region produced its own variations on the scream. Indeed, each soldier voiced his own preferred pitch and sequence of sounds, perhaps altering his yell from one occasion to the next. The sheer multiplicity of noises, overlapping and working in concert, goes a long way toward explaining why memoirists often disagreed about how the scream sounded. In sum, I conclude that the Rebel yell was an utterly informal and irregular phenomenon. To argue otherwise is to reduce the screech to a standard battle cry that would never have justified the fame it has achieved.