Irish sergeant called it a lament for the dying confederacy. Except at the same time the chorus has a touch of rejoicing at the end of thd war, and an echo of the Day of Jubilee.

I read it as a lament for the war, and the destruction brought by the war. The words as written by Robertson bear close reading. It's a subtle bit of writing , avoids coming down on any side, just fed upo with the war. It's about being stuck in the middle, and being messed around by both sides, which is what happens.

The Union cavalry destroys the railway, the Confederate Army commandeers the best from the land, and recruits the best young men as well. More than it is right to take.

Regardless of how the war ends, the singer will keep working the land like his father did before him, and like his brother did before he went off and got himself killed in the war. And like the flattened sugar cane, its namesake, Virgil Cane's brother, isn't going to come back to life. (And the very name Cane carries a reminder of Cain and Abel and brother killing brother in a Civil War.)

Whether intentional or noit (and it probably was, written in 1969), more than anything it's coloured by Vietnam, - the civil war out there and the civil war back home in America.