Gottschalk, the New Orleans-born composer who had a flashy career in Europe (he even attracted the admiration of Liszt for his piano playing) and successful tours in Caribbean and South American nations, often arranged powerful, if obvious, piano pieces on the national airs or folk musics of his host nations so as to get favorable crowd reaction. "The Union" follows this practice, but is a little more heartfelt than the above description would suggest, mostly because Gottschalk, despite the being Southern-born, was an adherent of the Union cause in the Civil War. The piece itself is a twelve-minute, piano-pounding, rabble-rouser of a piece, quoting several Union-related tunes including "The Star-Spangled Banner."

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