THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Sidney Lanier

Sidney Clopton Lanier February 3, 1842 – September 7, 1881) was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned (resulting in his catching tuberculosis), taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes, though not exclusively, used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. Many schools, other structures and two lakes are named for him, and he became hailed in the South as the "poet of the Confederacy". A 1972 US postage stamp honored him as an "American poet".

On February 3, 1842, Sidney Lanier was born in Macon, Georgia. His father, Robert Lanier, was a lawyer, and his mother, Mary Anderson, was linked through her Virginian ancestry to members of Virginia's original House of Burgesses. In the poet's youth in central Georgia, it was music that first captured his interest. He learned to play the violin, flute, piano, banjo and guitar.

His proclivity for music was an early sign of his budding genius. By age fourteen, Lanier was enrolled as a sophomore at Oglethorpe College, where he graduated at the top of his class. At eighteen, he was offered a tutorship at the college, a position he held until the outbreak of the Civil War.

During the war, he fought primarily in the tidewater region of Virginia, where he served in the Confederate signal corps. Later, he and his brother Clifford served as pilots aboard English blockade runners. His ship was boarded on one of these voyages. Refusing to take the advice of the British officers on board to don one of their uniforms and pretend to be one of them, he was captured. He was incarcerated in a military prison at Point Lookout in Maryland, where he contracted tuberculosis (generally known as "consumption" at the time). He suffered greatly from this disease, then incurable and usually fatal, for the rest of his life.

Shortly after the war, he taught school briefly, then moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he worked as a desk clerk at the Exchange Hotel and also performed as a musician. He was the regular organist at the First Presbyterian Church in nearby Prattville. He wrote his only novel, Tiger Lilies (1867), while in Alabama.

This novel was partly autobiographical, describing a stay in 1860 at his grandfather's Montvale Springs resort hotel near Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1867, he moved to Prattville, at that time a small town just north of Montgomery, where he taught and served as principal of a school.

He married Mary Day of Macon in 1867 and moved back to his hometown, where he began working in his father's law office.

After passing the Georgia bar, Lanier practiced as a lawyer for several years. During this period he wrote a number of lesser poems, using the "cracker" and "negro" dialects of his day, about poor white and black farmers in the Reconstruction South. He traveled extensively through southern and eastern portions of the United States in search of a cure for his tuberculosis.

While on one such journey in Texas, he rediscovered his native and untutored talent for the flute and decided to travel to the northeast in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra. Unable to find work in New York City, Philadelphia, or Boston, he signed on to play flute for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland, shortly after its organization. He taught himself musical notation and quickly rose to the position of first flautist. He was famous in his day for his performances of a personal composition for the flute called "Black Birds", which mimics the song of that species.

In an effort to support Mary and their three sons, he also wrote poetry for magazines. His most famous poems were "Corn" (1875), "The Symphony" (1875), "Centennial Meditation" (1876), "The Song of the Chattahoochee" (1877), "The Marshes of Glynn", (1878)[6] and "Sunrise" (1881). The latter two poems are generally considered his greatest works. They are part of an unfinished set of lyrical nature poems known as the "Hymns of the Marshes", which describe the vast, open salt marshes of Glynn County on the coast of Georgia. (The longest bridge in Georgia is in Glynn County and is named for Lanier.)