The Conquered Banner

It was written by Father Abram Joseph Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest and Confederate Army chaplain.

[1][3] It made Father Ryan famous[4] and this became one of the best-known poems of the post-war South, memorized and recited by generations of Southern schoolchildren.

[4] David O'Connell has described Conquered Banner as echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's extremely popular "Concord Hymn" (1837).

[8] John McGreevy calls it the most popular Confederate poem in the post-Civil War years.

[1] Attorney and Southerner Hannis Taylor wrote of the effect of Father Ryan's poem on readers sympathetic to the Confederacy: "Only those who lived in the South in that day, and passed under the spell of that mighty song, can properly estimate its power as it fell upon the victims of a fallen cause.