Mrs. Beers’s right to the authorship of this famous song has been very severely contested, but there seems to be no reason now to doubt that the really fine poem is hers. Though there have been numerous claimants for its authorship, the one who has come nearest to carrying the day is, strange to say, a Southerner. It is curious indeed that a war song should be claimed by both sides, but that has been the story of this song. This Southerner is Lamar Fontaine. Mr. Fontaine was born at Gay Hill, Texas. Twenty years before the war his father moved to Austin, Texas, and was secretary to General Lamar, for whom the son was named. When the war broke out this young Lamar Fontaine became a major in the Confederate Army. Some time in 1862, when the poem All Quiet Along the Potomac appeared in a Southern newspaper, Lamar Fontaine’s name was attached to it. Davidson, the author of Living Writers of the South, wrote to Fontaine in regard to the authorship of this hymn, and in replying Fontaine said: “The poem in question was written by me while our army lay at Fairfax Courthouse, or rather the greater portion, in and around that place. On the second day of August, 1861, I first read it to a few of my messmates in Company I, Second Virginia Cavalry. During the month of August I gave away many manuscript copies to soldiers, and some few to ladies in and about Leesburg, Loudon County, Virginia. In fact, I think that most of the men belonging to the Second Virginia, then commanded by Colonel Radford, were aware of the fact that I was the author of it. I never saw the piece in print until just before the battle of Leesburg (October 21, 1861), and then it was in a Northern paper with the notice that it had been found on the dead body of a picket. I hope the controversy between myself and others in regard to All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night, will soon be forever settled. I wrote it, and the world knows it; and they may howl over it, and give it to as many authors as they please. I wrote it, and I am a Southern man, and I am proud of the title, and am glad that my children will know that the South was the birthplace of their fathers, from their generation back to the seventh.”

Another Southern man, however, and a distinguished one, puts a very different look on the case. Mr. Chandler Harris of Georgia writes a letter for insertion in Mr. Davidson’s volume in the course of which he says: “After a careful and impartial investigation of all the facts in my reach, I have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Beers, and not Mr. Fontaine, wrote the poem in question. My reasons for believing that Mr. Fontaine is not the author of All Quiet, are several:

“1. The poem appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861, as The Picket Guard, over the initials of Mrs. Ethel Beers of New York.

MOUNT VERNON
MOUNT VERNON

“2. It did not make its appearance in any Southern paper until about April or May, 1862.

“3. It was published as having been found in the pocket of a dead soldier on the battlefield. It is more than probable that the dead soldier was a Federal, and that the poem had been clipped from Harper’s.

“4. I have compared the poem in Harper’s with the same as it first appeared in the Southern papers, and find the punctuation to be precisely the same.

“5. Mr. Fontaine, so far as I have seen, has given elsewhere no evidence of the powers displayed in that poem. I, however, remember noticing in the Charleston Courier, in 1863, or 1864, a ‘Parodie’ (as Mr. L. F. had it) on Mrs. Norton’s Bingen on the Rhine, which was positively the poorest affair I ever saw. Mr. Fontaine had just come out of a Federal prison, and some irresponsible editor, in speaking of this ‘Parodie’ remarked that the poet’s Pegasus had probably worn his wings out against the walls of his Northern dungeon.

“You probably know me well enough to acquit me, in this instance at least, of the charge of prejudice. I am jealous of Southern literature, and if I have any partiality in the matter at all, it is in favor of Major Lamar Fontaine’s claim. I should like to claim this poem for that gentleman; I should be glad to claim it as a specimen of Southern literature, but the facts in the case do not warrant it.”

Mr. Alfred H. Guernsey, for many years editor of Harper’s Magazine, bears testimony that the poem, bearing the title The Picket Guard, appeared in Harper’s Weekly for November 30, 1861. He further declares that it was furnished by Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers, whom he describes as “a lady whom I think incapable of palming off as her own any production of another.”

Mrs. Beers was born in Goshen, New York, and her maiden name was Ethelinda Eliot. She was a direct descendant of John Eliot, the heroic apostle to the Indians. When she began to write for the newspapers she signed her contributions “Ethel Lynn,” a nom de plume very naturally suggested by her Christian name. After her marriage, she added her husband’s name, and over the signature of Ethel Lynn Beers published many poems. In her later years Mrs. Beers resided in Orange, New Jersey, where she died October 10, 1879, on the very day on which her poems, among them All Quiet Along the Potomac, were issued in book form.

There has never been any contest as to the music of the song, which was composed by J. Dayton, the leader of the band of the First Connecticut Artillery.

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STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER
STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER