What is a nation's government meant to do? Or rather, what can a newly formed, cash-strapped, weakly centralized government do? This was a central question under debate in the years following the end of the American Revolution. The subtopics under consideration included whether to be governed by a written constitution, the extent of executive power, the fairness of taxation, the obligation to veterans, the need to militarize and the need for diplomacy, and the validity of organized protest. As Laura Lohman details in her new book, Hail Columbia! American Music and Politics in the Early Nation, these arguments played out, point by point, through music, with each issue being featured in a sizeable body of musical works.

Politics and music mutually inform each other in this book, to the extent that the direction of influence can be difficult to tease out. American political music responded to contemporary political machinations and also helped to fashion the government. Often functioning as propaganda, this repertory also influenced the beliefs and behaviour of the government's subjects and citizens. The statement that music both shaped government and was itself shaped by government might bring to mind an ouroboros. Indeed, it can be hard to locate agency in an argument in which direct political outcomes seem to occur of their own accord. Lohman's narrative is therefore at its most compelling when it stays local, foregrounding human actors, such as politicians, protestors, songwriters, printers and singers, and events, such as festivals, feasts and parades. Through such examples one comes to recognize that a more fitting snake image for the period would be the multiply severed ‘Join or Die’ serpent: as soon as people (in this book, by historical necessity, almost entirely white men) united the nation, its disparate states and contesting factions threatened to rend the nation apart. Each fracture was marked by a song.

The main argument Lohman advances is that music supported the consolidation of a unified nation and helped to propagate symbols of patriotism, but that music also was deployed in divisive partisan politics. Lohman's meticulous research and confident grasp of the truly wonky corners of US political history provides a firm historical foundation for her presentation of musical evidence. Using print materials, newspapers in particular, she introduces the reader to an abundance of songs, as well as hymns, satires, multi-movement odes, ballads and marches. Lohman claims that music was particularly effective in early American politics because it helped to make political ideas comprehensible and memorable, while communal performances ignited useful patriotic emotions. This argument is familiar, and indeed Lohman cites Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). But actual examples of unisonance are rare in Lohman's book. Instead, what she shows is that a recursive use of particular tunes and specific rhetoric tore holes in the national fabric, even when presented under the banner of patriotic unity. Music and politics correlate powerfully in many instances where nations are being formed, but in the early republic they do not so much coincide as crash into each other, take umbrage and end up squabbling on the ground until distracted by a new outrage. Depending on the attitude and temperament of the observer, these vituperative musical-political encounters are either engrossing or exhausting to behold.

The six chapters of the book proceed chronologically from the 1780s debates over the Constitution to the War of 1812, a period that saw the consolidation of the federal government under first one then another governing political party, as well as constant resistance to those in power. Much of the book's narrative is driven by accounts of partisan thrusts and counterthrusts regarding the politics of nation formation. Hindsight allows us to see that the first ruling party – the Federalists, who espoused, unsurprisingly, a federalist position with a strong central government and who viewed democracy with suspicion, not trusting the populace to vote wisely – could not beat back the ascendancy of the Democratic-Republican party, which harnessed rhetoric about universal human rights to champion a populist yet cosmopolitan vision of a representative government that listened to, rather than acted on, ‘the people’. To Federalists, Democratic-Republicans were Francophilic rabble-rousing advocates of violence and disorder, while Democratic-Republicans saw Federalists as crypto-monarchists whose elitism and love of Britain were dangerously paired with their eagerness to tax, tax, tax. To put it chronologically and simply, Federalists were the party of Washington and Adams, and Jefferson and Madison were the Democratic-Republicans, with a mighty shift in power around the 1800 election. Lohman's book fleshes out these rough characterizations of the two political parties, illustrating how they were abundantly substantiated through the many pamphlets, editorials, speeches and songs that scribblers and printers generated in the early republic.

National politics was not simply about domestic governmental affairs, and one of the most compelling aspects of Lohman's book is the way she shows that no matter how inward-looking partisan vitriol or patriotic propaganda may appear today, it usually had some basis in the new nation's insecurity regarding its international position. It is ironic, given the anxiety politicians and pundits felt about the early United States’ international position, that much political music was derived from Britain, and, to a far lesser extent, France. As Lohman relates, songwriters made contrafacta of well-known existing tunes, such as ‘Heart of Oak’, ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘The Ancreon in Heaven’ repeatedly, and happily sang ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘La Carmagnole’. (The companion website has links to recordings, lyrics and notation for many of the tunes discussed in the book.) Lohman argues that using such familiar melodies helped deliver the basic idea of what were usually quite knotty political messages. For example, Federalist propaganda directing states to ratify the Constitution used melodies from Revolutionary War songs, which, with new lyrics, hitched technical debates about the best modes and rules of governance to high-flying ideals of the Patriot cause. Pro-Constitution lyrics set to tunes such as ‘Liberty Tree’ helped disseminate the argument that the Constitution was an extension of the Revolution, and that failure to ratify it would be a dereliction of the Revolution's goals. However, the Constitution was far from desirable for many, particularly those who recognized that, despite its claim that authority to govern stemmed from ‘we the people’, it in fact utilized popular sovereignty in order to create a federal government that could pass laws that constrained and taxed those same people. Generations of scholars have sought to understand the meaning of popular sovereignty and the role of government according to the Constitution. What Lohman shows is that pro-Constitution propagandistic music was critical for rallying support for its ratification.

Such one-to-one alignments of political topics and events and particular repertory are found throughout Lohman's book. Beginning in the 1780s, the first chapter focuses on the Constitution, which required musical propaganda to delegitimize the popular protest it faced from people who saw restructuring the federal government as empowering elites at the expense, literally, of common citizens. Pushback against Federalist leaders gained traction in the 1790s, and chapter 2 recounts the rise of the Democratic-Republicans, who, galvanized by a shared conviction that Federalist leadership was dangerously pro-British, joined common cause with populist movements in Britain, Ireland and France, and developed a repertory of mocking songs to confront their powerful political foes. The Federalists’ own partisan songs are the subject of the next chapter, in which we read about how the ruling party produced a raft of songs that tore into the Democratic-Republicans following the nascent second party's serious political blunders in the late 1790s. Many of these partisan songs vilified political opponents, but some, such as ‘Hail Columbia’, were more subtle: the titular song had high-minded patriotic lyrics and was ostensibly bipartisan, but, as Lohman argues convincingly, in intent and in performance it strongly backed the Federalists’ nationalist agenda over that of the dissenting Democratic-Republicans. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 turn the corner of the nineteenth century and introduce the repertory that supported Thomas Jefferson's rise to power, as well as the crises his and James Madison's administrations faced (the highly destructive self-imposed Embargo and the differently destructive and much mythologized War of 1812). Throughout the book, Lohman demonstrates an impressive command over both the politics and the repertory.

Readers of this book might find themselves comparing the early republic's growing pains to the mature messes of the United States today. Indeed, Lohman opens the book with a list of traits that, as she observes, could apply to either era: ‘Personal attacks. Vulgar language. Inventive narratives. Exaggerated claims. Public protests. Language to embarrass, demean, bully, and weaken political opponents. Accusations made in the lowest of tones, and circulated through the most rapid of media’ (1). Writing this review in the summer of 2020, I would go further: an unstable king or a president whose subjects are revolting. Dastardly treatment of those who put their lives at risk for the good of all. Taxpayer dollars supporting evil federal abuse of non-citizens. Civil uprisings against deep injustice. On the streets and through our screens, the sounds of protest. But Lohman does not pursue diachronic parallels too far, and for good reason. As she points out, the reduction of political discourse to a moralistic binary of good and bad ultimately served propagandistic ends in the early republic. Moreover, this binary was exclusive. The voices fighting to make ‘we the people’ included we the women, we the enslaved and we the disenfranchised, as well as those fighting to respect the sovereignty of Indigenous people whose unceded territory the United States still occupies, were drowned out by partisan propaganda in the early republic.