Oh we'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree

"Oh we'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree" (and similar) is a variant of the American folk song "John Brown's Body" that was sung by the United States military, Unionist civilians, and freedmen during and after the American Civil War.^[1][2][3][4] The phrase and associated imagery became relevant to the post-war legal issues surrounding the potential prosecution of former Confederate politicians and officers; the lyric was sometimes referenced in political cartoons and artworks of the time, and in political debates continuing well into the post-Reconstruction era.^[5][6][7][8]

"A Yankee Song" (The Charlotte Democrat, Charlotte, N.C., December 23, 1862)

History

Jeff Davis and the sour apple tree appear in print as early as August 1861.^[9] In 1880, a U.S. Army veteran claimed credit for first singing the lyric in spring 1862 in Virginia, having taken inspiration from a prior song about a "sick monkey in a sour apple tree."^[10] In 1947 a survivor of American slavery named Perry Vaughn recalled, "I fought in Abe Lincoln's army and played the bass horn in the Army band. I can still remember, like it was yesterday, playing 'We'll Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree.'"^[11]

A less bloodthirsty variant was "We'll feed Jeff Davis sour apples 'til he gets the diarhee."^[12]

Richard Wright's 1938 novella Big Boy Leaves Home references a white-supremacist variant: "We'll hang ever nigger t a sour apple tree."^[13]

Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died of natural causes in 1889.^[14]

Gallery

• 
  Cover for a spin-off "The Sour Apple Tree, or Jeff Davis' Last Ditch" depicts Davis in a dress, a common image after the end of the war, as when he was captured he was reportedly wearing a woman's cloak (Edison Collection of American Sheet Music at University of Michigan via HathiTrust)
• 
  This 1865 American political cartoon entitled "Freedom's Immortal Triumph" featured the imagery from the song (Library of Congress cph.3b35188)
• 
  Hecklers on Andrew Johnson's Swing Around the Circle tour called upon him to hang Jeff Davis; he asked them to consider hanging Wendell Phillips and Thaddeus Stevens instead (Panel from Andy's Trip by Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, October 27, 1866)
• 
  This political cartoon references the song lyric, and one of Andrew Johnson's stump-speech stock phrases ("treason must made odious"),^[15][16] in its critique of Horace Greeley's support for releasing Davis from Fort Monroe (Library of Congress LC-DIG-pga-09194)
• 
  "White Front Shoe Store advertisement" (The Dayton Herald, Dayton, Ohio, February 6, 1888)

See also

• Treason laws in the United States
• Virginia v. John Brown § Execution
• Category:People executed for treason against the United States
• commons:Category:Caricatures of Jefferson Davis