“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a character song through and through, and we know this from its opening line: “Virgil Caine is the name.” (I’ve always found that name to be eye-rollingly pretentious on Robertson’s part, but it does seem notable that his Southern narrator shares a name with the Bible’s first murderer.) It’s about the devastation of war as experienced from the losing side, but, with the possible exception of the line “They should never have taken the very best” (an ambiguous they that could refer to either the Confederate war machine or the Union army), which prompts some audible applause in The Last Waltz, there’s not much in the song that rings as an explicit endorsement of the Confederacy. In fact, the song’s chorus refers to “bells ringing” and “people singing” and is notably major-key, almost triumphant. (This is one of the reasons James’ rewrite of the song’s refrain, “Tonight we drive old Dixie down,” works as well as it does.)
A byproduct of the lyrics’ belabored historical frame is that it obscures the song’s origin, in a time the United States was mired in another war. I hear “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an anti-war song first and foremost, and one that is definitively rooted in the Vietnam era. By 1969, the war in Vietnam was deeply unpopular and an obvious disaster of U.S. foreign policy. The Tet Offensive of the previous year had made it abundantly clear that the United States was losing the war, and less than two months after its release, the details of the My Lai Massacre would be made public by journalist Seymour Hersh.
So why write an anti-war song in the middle of the Vietnam War told from the perspective of a Tennessean in 1865? Only Robbie Robertson can say for sure, and these days he’s mostly evasive on the subject. But in an essay written at the dawn of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, historian C. Vann Woodward observed that the American South was unique in being the only part of the United States to have experienced military defeat, and thus might be uniquely suited to offer caution to the bellicose triumphalism that was coming to define U.S. Cold War policy. As scholar Keri Leigh Merritt has chronicled, white poverty was endemic to the antebellum South, and many of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy were defending a system that was perpetuating their own economic subjugation, killing and dying for what W.E.B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wage” of white supremacy. (The Civil War was often described by those who fought in it as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”)