Excerpt from The National Clay Melodist: Illustrated With Original Designs, a Collection of Popular Patriotic Songs for Presidential Campaign About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. In No Party Now, Adam I. P. Smith challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, Smith argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly non-partisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of anti-party discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. By the time of the 1864 election they sought to de-legitimize partisan opposition with slogans like "No Party Now But All For Our Country!" No Party Now offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the "party period paradigm" in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As Smith shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

Political historians have traditionally interpreted the people and events of each presidential era by studying books, periodicals, letters, diaries and speeches. One source of printed material that has not received much scholarly attention is published music, much of which has been all but lost in the archives of libraries and museums. The traditional librarianly cataloguing of music has ignored important aspects such as lyrical content and cover art, making it impossible to comprehensively locate and study items by subject matter. Presidential Sheet Music presents an exhaustive listing of presidential-related music in all printed forms, and provides information on each piece. Thus may we expand our understanding of political communication and discourse throughout American history. A sizable Introduction discusses matters from the publication in 1768 of The Liberty Song (which formally made music an instrument of political expression in America) to the few 1980s and 1990s presidential songs and marches. There are also helpful appendices which list music by titles, composers, publishers, and candidates.