Albin J. Kowalewski contributed a piece to The New York Times’s Civil War liveblog, Disunion, on the 1861 search for a national anthem by the self-named “National Hymn Committee” of New York:
The committee wrote off the three existing contenders immediately: “Yankee Doodle” was “childish,” they said. “Hail, Columbia” was “pretentious.” The “Star-Spangled Banner” was just too hard to sing — indeed, according to the committee’s spokesman, Richard Grant White, they found it “to be almost useless.”
The committee turned to the literary public for help. From mid-May to early August, it held a contest challenging Yankee poets to compose “a national hymn or popular and patriotic song appealing to the national heart,” as George Templeton Strong, a committee member, described it. The competition would be judged blindly, and the committee retained the rights to publish and market the entries, the proceeds of which would go to the local “Patriotic Fund.” To the winner, however, the 13 committeemen promised $500 and the thanks of a grateful nation.
Punchline: it didn’t end well.
The problem was, the committee couldn’t agree on a clear winner. But not because there were so many good options — rather, it was because there were hardly any. On Aug. 9, 1861, the hymn committee announced that it couldn’t, in all fairness, choose a winner. “Although some of [the songs] have a degree of poetic excellence which will probably place them high in public favor as lyrical compositions,” it said in the New York Times, “no one of them is well suited for a National Hymn.” Strong was more blunt in private: most poems were “rubbish.”