Nothing, however, in Ives’s oeuvre captures so thoroughly Ives’s fascination with the Civil War as the first of the three movements of Three Places in New England, which he began working on in 1912 and scored in 1914—on either side of the Gettysburg reunion. That movement is clearly devoted to a musical portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s famous 1897 monument on Boston Common to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers—the first Union regiment to be recruited from Black state volunteers once the Emancipation Proclamation had sanctioned Black enlistment in the Union armies.
The movement, which Ives entitled “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment),” carries a brief poetic preface, written by Ives himself:
Moving,— Marching— Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly—swaying us on with you
Towards other Freedom!
The man on horseback, carved from
A native quarry of the world Liberty
And from what your country was made.
You images of a Divine Law
Carved in the shadow of a saddened heart—
Never light abandoned—
Of an age and of a nation.
Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving,—Marching—Faces of Souls!
The “Saint Gaudens” begins with slow-moving figures, mostly in the strings, followed by a hint of the Stephen Foster song “Old Black Joe” and its repeated promise, I’m coming, I’m coming, in the oboe—which, if the Shaw Memorial is any guidance, describes the oncoming column of Black soldiers who parade nobly and intently alongside Colonel Shaw on the monument. The lower strings march up the scale, and amid other wisps of melody, I’m coming is heard in the oboe and the clarinet interjects a syncopated tune. Then, the first clear fragment of “The Battle Cry of Freedom” is heard in the flute (and especially the phrase the Union forever).
The pizzicato beat becomes more agitated, then settles into a slow march, signaled by a steady pattern in the percussion. Above them, the violins play the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia” (Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!). The pace picks up (with what Ives calls “a lithe springy step”) as the strings play ragtime figures over the march rhythm, bringing to life what Ives imagined as the songs of the Black soldiers of the Union army. With rising figures from “Marching Through Georgia” punctuated by a fanfare, the music builds to a peak, falls away, then builds again to a climax. The violins burst out with a cry joined by an eruption from the brass, as though Ives wanted the trumpets to sound the charge for the 54th Massachusetts’ courageous but ultimately unsuccessful attack at Battery Wagner on July 14, 1863.