There were tunes written for this song in both North and South. John Hill Hewitt wrote the Confederate tune, which is the one in the Levy collection. It's also the one the DT links to. Unfortunately Levy's sheet music is in key of b-flat so even if you read music, it would be hard to get the chords.

Levy's search page is at This address

which will be a blue clicky thing if I haven't misread the HTML example in the little cheat sheet at the front of "Web Pages for Dummies."

I typed in "all quiet along the Potomac" in quotes and got one set of reproduction sheet music plus some "stuff."

The northern tune, given in Irwin Silber's "Songs of the Civil War," was written by W.H.Goodwin.

Here's part of Silber's intro to the song:

"During the first days of the war, a familiar War Department announcement as it appeared in the nation's newspapers was: "All quiet along the Potomac." [This was during the period when McClellan was "waiting for supplies" and doing damn-all; and Lincoln sent his famous telegram, "Mr. McClellan, if you are not using the Army of the Potomac just now, I should like to borrow it." - RF] One day, in SSeptember, 1861, to the above announcement was appended the words, 'A picket shot.'

"This brief newspaper report was, supposedly, the inspiratin for this song which was written by Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers of Goshen, New York. It was printed in Harper's Weekly, ... [as] 'The Picket Guard'; within a short time it had been set to music by a number of composers."

He says it was immensely popular throughout the South as well, with Hewitt's tune. Major Lamar Fontaine of Mississippi also claimed to have written the poem, (not at all uncommon behavior in that era...-RF) but Mrs. Beers is considered the true author.

This is why there's an extra half-verse in some versions: She didn't give her poem an even number of verses. Various versions include/omit different half-verses to come out even.

Silber also says that some editors took offense and even refused to include the words "not an officer shot, only one of the men" because it was considered unpatriotic.

BTW when Walter Kittredge wrote "Tenting Tonight," he sought in vain for a publisher because the song was considered unpatriotic and anti-war. Finally he took it to the Hutchinsons, a very successful singing family who were also outspoken abolitionists. They published it and of course the rest is history; probably no other song was sung as often by the soldiers of either side....

Well WW none of this gets you any info about the chords, but since we have chords now i hope that's not a problem. Have you tried it yet with Uncle Jaque's chords? I'm going to steal them too, Uncle J. I usually sing it unaccompanied but have been trying to get re-acquainted with my guitar. The sheet music does say it's in 6/8 time.