This second "set" of three orchestral pieces present magnificent and contrasting portraits of American life in the musical forms of an elegy, a ragtime, and a tone poem. "An Elergy to Our Forefathers" begins with mysterious patterns evocative of the past scored for the low strings, harpsichord, bells, piano, and string harmonics. Fragments of songs in American history—"Old Black Joe" and "Jesus Loves Me"—arise from this atmosphere, together with very brief phrases from "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen," "Reveille," and "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground." The movement fades slowly away.

The lively and sometimes raucous "The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People's Outdoor Meeting" contains some of the ragtime music found in Ives' First Sonata for Piano, alternating with snatches from the traditional hymns "Bringing in the Sheaves" and "Welcome Voice"—all these are combined in angular combinations like a landscape painting integrating nature with the spirituality and robustness of a folk gathering.

"From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose" begins with an intoning choir in the distance, a mysterious sustained atmosphere of a shared tragedy hangs over everything—in this case, the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915 (over a 1000 people perished, including 128 Americans). The music builds very slowly with the hymn line "In the Sweet Bye and Bye" in the violins uniting the chaotic feelings. The melody is then turned about and stretched, the full brass section enters with the hymn surrounded by "dissonant" harmonics, and the music ends much as it began. This movement is based upon a real incident that was observed by Ives—as people were waiting for the L-train at the Hanover Square Station in New York on that day, an organ grinder began to play the hymn and the people joined in singing, continuing even as they boarded the train. The train departed leaving only the sound of the organ-grinder's hymn in the empty station. The acoustic image of this movement is truly three-dimensional and contains some of Ives' most remarkable writing.

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