During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers sang varied versions of “John Brown’s Body,” often in mocking and amusing tunes.
One side sang in admiration of John Brown, the American abolitionist, and one side sang in admiration of his death. Enter Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) to bring a precedent of peace.
President Abraham Lincoln invited Howe and her husband Samuel to Washington, D.C., because of their avid involvement in the Sanitary Commission. Most members of their group knew Howe published plays and poetry, and as the party visited a Union camp near the banks of the Potomac River, James Freeman Clarke, a clergyman in the company, asked Howe to write an inspirational new song benefiting the war effort to the music of “John Brown’s Body.”
Howe tells how she went to bed that evening, but awoke just before dawn with the words coming quickly to her mind. She knew if she failed to write the lines immediately she would lose them.
She recalled: “I searched for an old sheet of paper and a stub of a pen … and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking … I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.”
The Atlantic Monthly published Howe’s poem in 1862, and when put to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” it became an anthem — the most popular song of the North during the Civil War.
Howe’s spiritual faith resonates with Biblical images from both the Old Testament and the New Testament as she focuses on the principle of putting an end to America’s slavery issue. Since that time, the music and messages of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” have inspired many people with its symbolic, triumphant vision of Christ’s millennial advent.
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