Julia Ward Howe
By November 1861, seven months into the Civil War, the Union and the Confederacy were preparing for a prolonged conflict. Soldiers often sang songs to pass the monotony of life in the army. One such song was a Methodist hymn that was popular at the time called “Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us,” which has its roots in the rural South in the early 1800s.
The 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, known as the “Tiger Battalion,” began to change the lyrics of “Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us” to refer to the abolitionist John Brown, who unsuccessfully tried to start a slave rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Brown was captured and executed the same year.
It so happened that this battalion also had a soldier named John Brown. Other soldiers would tease him for sharing the same name as the more famous John Brown. The soldiers would say things such as, “That’s not John Brown, John Brown is dead.” Soon, the men from Massachusetts would sing “Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us” with their own lyrics, such as, “John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave / but his sole goes marching on.” The soldiers’ version of the song became known as “John Brown’s Body.”
Julia Ward Howe, her husband Samuel, and their pastor, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, came through a Union camp in November 1861, where the soldiers were singing “John Brown’s Body.” Howe was a poet and writer from New York who was accompanying her husband as part of his duties for the Union Sanitation Commission – a precursor to the Red Cross – whose purpose was to try and alleviate diseases that were killing Union soldiers.
Upon hearing the tune, Reverend Clarke challenged Howe to write her own lyrics. Howe did just that. As Howe describes it, before dawn the next day, she “scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.” She wrote new lyrics but kept the chorus of “Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us” – the words “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was born.
Here are the lyrics Julia Ward Howe published in 1862:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
CHORUS:
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
CHORUS
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
CHORUS
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.
CHORUS
While there are many stirring renditions of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, it is worth pausing for five minutes to listen to this one by the West Point Band and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at West Point, New York. (Note: Like many versions, this one only includes stanzas one, two, and five.)
Both sides in the Civil War believed God was on their side and invoked his name. Leading figures of the time, from President Abraham Lincoln to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, proclaimed that the Almighty would ultimately decide the outcome of the war.
As a Christian woman and abolitionist, Howe invokes powerful Biblical imagery as a reminder to beware of God’s power. It is the last line in the final stanza in which she seems to summarize what the war was about for her and the Union: “As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free, While God is marching on.” This is a reference to ending slavery forever.
Howe’s lyrics appeared in the February 1862 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, for which she was paid five dollars. The magazine gave Howe’s words the title “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The hymn quickly became a national battle cry. In 1864, a Union soldier named Chaplain Charles McCabe was released from a Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, after contracting typhoid fever. He recovered and was invited to sing a solo of the “Battle Hymn” at the U.S. Capitol with President Lincoln in attendance. His performance was so well received that Lincoln, with tears in his eyes, asked McCabe to sing it again. He complied. The “Battle Hymn” was said to be a favorite of Union prisoners, who sang the hymn in defiance of their Confederate captors.
After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe became active in the women’s suffrage movement and an advocate for world peace. She died in 1910 at age 91, but “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” endures as one of the great American hymns. Americans sing the “Battle Hymn” at all times, but it seems to garner special attention when American soldiers are deployed overseas.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ended his last public speech on April 3, 1968, his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, this way: “And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! For mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” He was assassinated the next day in Memphis, Tennessee.
John Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath” took its title from the first stanza of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The 1989 movie Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts’ service during the Civil War, took its title from the “Battle Hymn,” with one of the lead characters proclaiming, “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!”
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” has been embraced by Americans from every corner of the country. It makes us proud to be Americans, grateful for our servicemen and servicewomen, and reminds us to appreciate the freedoms we enjoy under the watchful eye of the Almighty.