Battle Hymn Of The Republic: A Song History

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The tune came before the hymn. Its chorus grew out of “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us,” a camp-meeting song that passed from singer to singer well before it reached print.[1] Some hymnals credit the melody to William Steffe,[2] while other accounts treat his authorship, placed around 1856, as suspected rather than proven.[3] After John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry and his execution, soldiers fitted the tune with new words. Historian Boyd Stutler traced “John Brown’s Body” to ribbing at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor aimed at a young Scottish soldier who happened to share the abolitionist’s name, and Oliver Ditson & Co. had it out as sheet music in 1861.[1]

1865 photograph of Union troops on horseback marching down Pennsylvania Avenue past crowds of onlookers

Alexander Gardner, Grand Army Review, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, photograph, May 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

In November 1861 Julia Ward Howe was in Washington with a party that included the minister James Freeman Clarke. Riding back from a review of Union troops, the group sang army songs, “John Brown’s Body” among them, and Clarke suggested she write a worthier text for the melody. She woke before dawn at Willard’s Hotel with the lines taking shape and wrote them out in the dark.[4] The Atlantic Monthly printed the poem in February 1862;[5] editor James T. Fields paid her five dollars and is credited with the title.[6] The magazine version had no refrain; Ditson added one when it issued the hymn with music, and J. W. Dadmun’s Eolian Harp carried it into a hymnal that same year.[1] Howe’s poem caught on chiefly with Northern civilians, while many soldiers held on to their improvised John Brown verses.[5]

The hymn has since appeared in well over 600 hymnals.[2] Martin Luther King Jr. ended his March 25, 1965 address in Montgomery, at the close of the Selma march, by reciting it,[7] and he drew on its lines again in his final speech in 1968.[4] The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 1959 recording, in Peter Wilhousky’s arrangement, reached the Billboard top 20 and won a Grammy for best performance by a vocal group or chorus.[8]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: "Battle Hymn".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
  3. Historic Boston Inc.: "An Anthem for Five Dollars: Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn and the Old Corner Bookstore".
  4. Smithsonian American Women's History Museum: "Meet Julia Ward Howe, the Remarkable Poet Who Wrote the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' and Fought for Women's Suffrage".
  5. Library of Congress: "Today in History - January 28".
  6. American Battlefield Trust: "Civil War Music: The Battle Hymn of the Republic".
  7. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "How Long, Not Long".
  8. Church News: "Tabernacle Choir, Orchestra's history, legacy of 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'".