One of the most popular patriotic anthems of all time, this song is often performed at the funerals of American soldiers and statesmen, presidential nominating conventions and inaugurations (both Republican and Democrat), and at Independence Day church services and festivities. It was played during the Boston fireworks show on Wednesday, only a mile or so away from where its lyricist, Julia Ward Howe, is buried.
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” originated during the Civil War. On November 17, 1861, Howe traveled with her husband, Samuel, then director of the Army’s Sanitary Commission, to inspect a Union camp outside Washington, DC. While there, she took notice of a particularly catchy marching song that the troops were fond of singing, called “John Brown’s Body (Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave).” The song memorializes John Brown, the radical abolitionist who was executed in 1859 after leading an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), that killed fourteen men. Brown became a Union hero, praised by the pens of famous writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and even the French novelist Victor Hugo, whose open letter requesting a pardon for Brown was published by newspapers in both the U.S. and Europe. “His soul’s marching on!” the Union soldiers sung in refrain—until Howe rewrote the lyrics, that is.
She did so at the urging of a friend, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, who was part of the traveling party that winter. “Why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?” he suggested—something higher-minded, something grander and more poetic, not so coarse.
Howe’s solution was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It carries the same rah-rah sentiment as the old song, with the added weight of biblical references to Christ’s judgment of the wicked. She penned the new lyrics overnight, and they were published two and a half months later, on the front page of the February 1862 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Notice the conflation of Christian apocalyptic imagery with the Union military campaign of the 1860s. Continue reading
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