The Union

This broadside, The Union, as well as The Good Shepherd, The Happy Man, An Invitation to Reformation, and The Exiles of Eden, include exhortations to forsake worldly vice for Christian blessings and some give conversion experiences as well. It is interesting that none of them bears an imprint. It is possible that they were ordered and purchased in bulk by itinerant missionaries.

There are many tunes titled “Union” with varying texts (Temperley). This broadside text was usually known as “The New Union,” a different hymn, which was among the most popular hymn texts of its period. It was printed in 1804 in two Boston collections, Abner Jones’s Melody of the Heart and Elias Smith’s Collection of Hymns. Jones and Smith (both 1769-1846) were the founders of the early nineteenth-century revival sect known as “Christians” or “The Christian Connection” (Klocko 131). The hymn was printed in theVermont Gazette on March 20, 1804, and the contributor suggested that the text, although it “is not the most elegant in stile, it is esteemed to be far from despicable, and [is] . . . sung in various religious circles.”

George Pullen Jackson was impressed with the spread of this conversion experience hymn in the nineteenth century.

This song, with its insistent text burden of union of man with God, seems peculiarly Baptistic and Methodistic. It appeared in the very earliest publication of spiritual folk-songs, that is, in Ingalls’ Christian Harmony of 1805. With its usual ten stanzas . . . (though we find in different places as many as 24 entirely different stanzas all built on the same unique plan and ending in “union”) the song romped through the more than six decades following the time of the Ingalls book and up to its appearance in the Revivalist of post-Civil War times. Its appearance also in the English Ranters’ (Primitive Methodists’) Hymns and Spiritual Songs of around 1820 and in Richard Weaver’s (English) Tune Book of 1861 shows that its popularity was not confined to America. (qtd. in Klocko 489)

This broadside includes fourteen verses. When Jeremiah Ingalls printed the hymn and its music as “The New Union,” the text numbered twenty-two verses. A broadside entitled The Union Hymn (1809) printed by S. Howe in Greenwich, Massachusetts, has thirty-two verses. Later the same hymn can be found as “Heavenly Union,” beginning “Come saints and sinners, hear me tell” (Wyeth [1820] 121).

Ingalls used a number of common secular tunes in his work. This tune probably dates from the 1770s and was called “Cuba’s March.” It was played by American fifers well into the nineteenth century, appearing in manuscripts and printed tutors (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). Reflecting the broadside title, a Massachusetts fifer collected the melody in the early 1800s as “The Union or York Shire” (Shattuck 72).