"Rebels to the end - The Rebel Yell" Topic

Stumbled across this by accident, but thought it was well worth sharing :)

YouTube link

Thanks for an interesting find.

FUN(NY)! Obviously nobody there and then was taking "the" Rebel Yell seriously. It could be, and was, anything that came out of a terrified Rebel throat….

If anyone was "terrified" it was the Federals on the receiving side.

Hah, hah. One-sided terrorism. Sure thing.

People involved in terrifying circumstances SCREAM. Call it a "yell" if you want to. I'm sure that the Yankees were screaming just as hard.

The Rebels had a morale momentum going up till July 1863. But you don't hear about a "Yankee Yell", even though the sound would be indistinguishable.

Morale makes all the difference in how ears perceive things, and surely the memory of being terrified and running away played into this mystique of the so-called Rebel Yell. Afterward, the Union soldiers would be looking for any reason to explain why they ran away. "Aw shucks, Ma, they sceered me half to death, like demons they wuz with their mouths wide open and yellin' fer my blood!" That's how it went down.

It was nothing special, just a horde of men screaming as they forced themselves into combat. One side won a lot, the other side began to expect to lose, and they anticipated the screaming as part of their fear even before it started….

??A yell isn't a scream. The union boys would "Huzzah".

Ah, yes. The old myth about how Rebs yelling "scared" Billy Yank.

I would have made a terrible rebel, apparently – I can't get my voice anywhere close to that high-pitched falsetto thing they are doing.

I was responding to the insulting remark by the Ace.My mistake.

The thing you also have to understand which (Great War Ace, seems not to), is that you are seeing a bunch of 70-80 year old men doing this and pretty much for fun…You are not seeing hundreds of young men and boys running through a cornfield with muskets and bayonets ready, and blood in their eyes…

It's easy to sit in the comfort of your chair and "discuss" this from the safety of your keyboard….you didn't have to face it….

Thanks Murphy.

Hate the stench of a yankee. That is why they were screaming. They had to run towards the stench. I would have screamed and yelled too.

I have no patience for the attitude, "You lost, get over it."

And I have no patience for romanticizing the short span of months that the losing side was scaring the beejeezus out of the eventual "winners".

I stand by my original point: anyone in combat is terrified and will make any noise whatsoever if that will keep him facing in the right direction. No group of human beings has a special "gene" that makes his screaming more potent than the rest of us….

I have read stories in which both sides were terrified by the other's warcry. Northern boys by the rebel yell, and southern boys by massive huzzahs. I read somewhere about Confederates in Petersburg listening to the Hurrahs of Union brigades preparing to assault, and being terrified by the numbers the sound indicated.

There are two good Hurrah scenes I have seen on TV. In the French film Champes De Honour on the Franco-Prussian war, there is a scene were the protagonist and small french force are assaulted by the Prussians. Not many actors. But the Prussian actors are hurrahing with such elan that it looked and sounded terrifying. The other is in the recent Danish series on 1864, when the Danes give a Hurrah and charge. Pretty inspiring. They also did a good job with the Prussian yelling during the charge. You can feel the terror of the troops being turned into coarse yelling so as to keep them moving into the hail of fire and canister.

War is terror and fear. Soldiers of both sides were human beings, and like human beings they were terrified. You control terror and fear by yelling. By making it into anger, rage, wrath. Nothing special to it. The use of it though as a tactical element can be special, but not unknown in history. War cries have been part of armies since antiquity.

Some people………Ease the stick out slowly.

Great War Ace,
I'm not sure what romanticism you are referring to. There were numerous occasions where the Confederates did more than scare "the bejeezus out of the eventual winners." I'm afraid that type of logic falls under the mistake of reading the war backwards from Appomattox and viewing the Union victory as inevitable. There were numerous occasions in '61-'64 where it appeared the South was close to achieving its independence.

Also, this idea that the Rebel yell a) wouldn't have been unique to the Southern troops and b) didn't have a genuine effect on Federal soldiers is simply shocking to me. The men themselves wrote about the rebel yell -- north AND south. To suggest that their accounts (both during the war and post-war) were inaccurate or can only be seen as romanticized memory is post-modern tripe. They wrote about it, even during the war -- not with a view to how they would be perceived after the war but what they actually experienced. How (and why) would we second guess that?

I'm 63, and I was a late in life child. My great grandfather was in the 20th Tennessee. My grandmother learned the rebel yell from him, and she used to voice it for me. It sounded exactly – exactly – like the sound in the YouTube clip.

At least it's not Yee-Hah and Wooooo!
Like some Toby Keith concert.

That's amusing. There clearly was a right way to do it if nothing else. Does sound a bit like a Skynyrd concert I went to..,

You should've heard mine at a couple of reenactments.

I've read accounts where the two sides had a distinct yell. The Confederates had their Rebel Yell, the the Union their Huzzah (or Hurrah). So I think to say they both just screamed and sounded alike in the middle of combat does not match up with the participants own recollections.

Don't the Billy Yank and Johnny Reb Life of books mention this, with sources?

I'm not sure what romanticism you are referring to.

On this thread, we have Murphy's "blood in their eyes".

Hindsight makes "our side" into heroes. The war was a travesty of things going as wrong as they possibly can. A million dead, Americans killing Americans, including collateral damage.

Also, this idea that the Rebel yell a) wouldn't have been unique to the Southern troops and b) didn't have a genuine effect on Federal soldiers is simply shocking to me.

Of course it was unique, it was coming from the throats of Rebels.

Where did I say it didn't "work"? I said the terrorism was not one-sided. Being sceered was not one-sided.

So I think to say they both just screamed and sounded alike in the middle of combat does not match up with the participants own recollections.

There is a difference between "huzzah" or "Rebel Yell" before combat, and the sound that would escape a man terrified for his life, close enough to the enemy to see their eyes through the smoke (like the fight along the Sunken Road, or other similar fire fights where they were practically close enough to spit at each other). By that point nobody was engaging in Rebel Yells en masse, much less "Huzzah!" en masse. That was reserved for victory at the end, or whipping up courage before the attack….

I remember reading that one Confederate veteran said when asked to do the Rebel Yell that he could not because to do it correctly ……

He needed a mouth that was full of teeth

and

A stomach that was empty of food.

Neither of which he had now.