Personal shortcomings were not enough to keep Hewitt from becoming the Confederacy’s most prolific songwriter and a successful theater manager. In November 1861, seven months after Davis rebuffed his request for a military commission, Hewitt became manager of the Richmond Theater, a position he held until 1863. During that time he wrote some of his best-known songs, including ‘Rock Me to Sleep Mother,’ which was issued four separate times, and the music for ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,’ which was reissued on five separate occasions and which one music historian regarded as ‘arguably the best song to come out of the war.’ The lyrics of ‘All Quiet,’ written by Northerner Lamar Fontaine (the pseudonym of Ethel Lynn Elliot Beers), tell the story of a picket’s last moments as he walks patrol, a soldier whose death ‘will not count in news of the battle’ because he is ‘only one of the men’ and ‘not an officer.’ The soldier’s lonely death resonated in the hearts of millions of Northerners and Southerners. Although the words were set to music by several composers, it was Hewitt’s setting, said one music historian, that ‘unobtrusively allow[ed] the disconsolate text to speak directly to the listener,’ and immortalized it as the most poignant song of the war.

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While he was manager of the Richmond Theater, Hewitt met the Queen Sisters — a singing and acting group — and their manager-father, Alfred Waldron. The girls, along with their three brothers, were the darlings of the South, and they captivated Hewitt. After leaving the Richmond Theater, he moved back to Augusta to manage the concert hall and work with the Waldron family. There, he wrote many musical plays and dramas for the Waldrons — comedies such as The Exempt! Or Beware of the Conscript Officer, and two of his best-known musical plays: a patriotic operetta called The Vivandiere, which debuted another of his best songs, ‘The Valiant Conscript,’ and a satire, King Linkum the First, which characterized Abraham Lincoln as a henpecked husband. He dedicated his well-received song ‘You Are Going To The Wars, Willie Boy!’ to one of the sisters, Fannie Waldron. In 1864, he wrote another of his best-known songs, ‘Somebody’s Darling,’ which became so popular its publisher, Herman Schreiner, couldn’t keep up with orders. Modern audiences can still hear its haunting melody in the 1939 MGM film Gone With the Wind.

Hewitt’s personal life underwent profound changes over these years. His wife Estelle died in 1860, and three years later he married Mary Alethea Smith, who would give him four more children.

In April 1865, Hewitt began a music publishing business in Augusta, but the venture collapsed after the war. Unable to find work, he returned to Virginia where he found work at ‘female institutes,’ finishing schools for girls. He continued to change jobs regularly until 1874, when he moved back to Baltimore and opened his own music school, the Baltimore Academy of Music. As in the past, he earned additional money by writing for newspapers and local journals, and writing plays and musicals such as The Revellers, a work reflecting the growing temperance movement in the late 19th century. He also began work on his autobiography, Shadows on the Wall, or Glimpses of the Past, eventually publishing it in 1877.

Though he was aging, Hewitt remained indefatigable, writing songs, musical plays, and revising older works almost until his last days. In his late 80s he was still walking five miles a day. Time finally caught up to him in 1888: he fell down the stairs and broke his hip. He never recovered fully and remained housebound until he died a year and a half later on October 7, 1890. In one of life’s little ironies, it was the same date on which his longtime rival Poe had died in 1849.

Hewitt’s career, said historian Richard Harwell, ‘is the story of music in the Confederacy.’ The songwriter’s early works spoke to America’s coming of age and the social changes that impacted on families; his wartime songs chronicled the tragedy that tore families and the country apart; and his postwar tunes reflected the country’s Victorian morality. He was, in the opinion of many musical historians, one of America’s most prodigious composers, dramatists, musicians, and writers. He composed more than 300 songs, and 18 of his wartime tunes were published as sheet music. He unquestionably earned the title ‘Bard of the Confederacy,’ and in the words of music historian N. Lee Orr, ‘Visiting with him and his music for a time deepens our understanding of the story of America’s music.’

This article was written by E. Lawrence Abel and originally appeared in the October 2003 issue of Civil War Times magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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