Hold the Fort!/The Sawdust Trail: Beginnings in Winnebago County
The Sawdust Trail: Beginnings in Winnebago County
The scene now shifts from the footboards to real life, and from Georgia in the fall of 1864 to Illinois in April 1870. There, at the Winnebago County Sunday School Convention, in Rockford, on Thursday and Friday, 28–29 April, Major Daniel Webster Whittle, an official of the Elgin Watch Company and a guest speaker at the convention, related a version of the fateful events at Allatoona in October 1864. To Whittle, who recalled that Sherman had signaled "Hold the Fort; I am coming," the events at Allatoona were "an illustration of the inspiration derived by the Christian from the thoughts of Christ as our commander and of His coming to our relief."[20]
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In the audience was 32-year-old Philip Paul Bliss,[21] who had just met Whittle and traveled to Rockford to sing at the latter's request.[22] The Rockford Register carried a report of the convention in its edition of Saturday, 30 April 1870, but it did not, alas, report Whittle's remarks on Allatoona, although it stated that he spoke several times. The Register did report, however, that both Bliss and his wife attended the convention. This was the beginning of a close relationship between Bliss and Whittle that was to last until Bliss's sudden death not quite seven years later.
Whittle was a Civil War veteran who had been cited "in terms of high commendation" in the Vicksburg campaign, in which he received a wound in the right forearm. Later, in the Atlanta campaign, he was on Major General Oliver O. Howard's staff in the Army of the Tennessee and won his majority by brevet promotion at the close of the war.[23]
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Whatever its imperfections, Whittle's account so inspired Bliss that he wrote "Hold the Fort" and dedicated it to the major. According to Whittle, Bliss wrote the song in Whittle's Chicago home at 43 South May Street, where Bliss and his wife moved in order to be near the First Congregational Church, of which Bliss became the choirmaster in July 1870.[28] Ira D. Sankey, another of Bliss's friends, said that the day following the convention Bliss and Whittle conducted a meeting in the Chicago Y.M.C.A., where Bliss wrote the words of the chorus on a blackboard and sang the song for the first time, with the audience joining him in the chorus.[29]
"Hold the Fort" was first published in 1870 as sheet music [30] by the famous Chicago firm of Root & Cady.[31] Both at home and abroad people soon were singing:
Ho! my comrades, see the signal
Waving in the sky!
Reinforcements now appearing,
Victory is nigh!
"Hold the fort, for I am coming,"
Jesus signals still
Wave the answer back to heaven,
"By thy grace, we will."
See the mighty host advancing,
Satan leading on;
Mighty men around us falling,
Courage almost gone:
See the glorious banner waving,
Hear the bugle blow;
In our Leader's name we'll triumph
Over every foe.
Fierce and long the battle rages,
But our Help is near;
Onward comes our Great Commander,
Cheer, my comrades, cheer![32]
Bliss's inspiration for some of his other songs also came from events he heard about or experienced. The title and sense of "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning," for example, came from Dwight L. Moody's moralizing upon a shipwreck said to have occurred near Cleveland, while "Roll on, O Billow of Fire!" was a product of the great Chicago conflagration in which Moody lost his home and two churches with which he was associated.[33]
When he wrote "Hold the Fort" in 1870 Bliss was engaged in holding song conventions and in composing and teaching music. The same year he contributed to a music book for Sunday schools, one of several such books he contributed to or edited in the next few years. He was professionally and financially successful, earning as much as $100 for a four-day convention engagement. After only two weeks in the army at the end of the Civil War, he went to Chicago as a member of a quartet called the Yankee Boys to sing for the music publishers Root & Cady at patriotic meetings. The Yankee Boys failed, but the firm kept Bliss on. For four years he engaged in convention work under an arrangement with his employers, and then he struck out on his own.[34] As suggested by the Yankee Boys interlude, Bliss's first interest was secular music. His first composition was the sad tale of poor departed "Lora Vale," a song which George F. Root arranged and Root & Cady published in 1864:
Calmly fell the silver moonlight
Over hill and over dale,
As with mournful hearts we lingered
By the couch of Lora Vale.
Lora, Lora still we love thee,
Though we see thy form no more,
And we know thou'lt come to meet us,
When we reach the mystic shore.[35]
In 1869 Bliss met Dwight L. Moody,[37] who would soon become the center and driving force of evangelism in the United States. Indeed, in the 1930s Herbert W. Schneider described him as "the greatest of all the evangelists," whose "campaigns in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland between 1857 and 1899 not only influenced millions but also raised revivalistic methods to a somewhat higher plane."[38] In 1870 Bliss met Whittle, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. At first there was simply a period of close association, but after appeals from Moody and encouraging meetings in Waukegan, Illinois, in March 1874 they decided to devote themselves completely to the gospel, Whittle preaching it and Bliss singing it.[39] For both men this decision meant a financial sacrifice. Bliss relinquished a financially rewarding career and in the next year or so gave over to benevolences his share of the considerable royalties he earned in collaboration with Ira D. Sankey. The royalties on Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, which Bliss and Sankey issued in 1875, ran to $60,000 almost immediately, but neither author took a cent for himself.[40] Whittle gave up his position as treasurer of the Elgin Watch Company, in which he was earning the substantial salary of $5,000 a year.[41] A Chicago Tribune writer who liked Whittle's preaching better than that of the learned ministers of the day declared that the evangelist "has a clear ringing voice, and, like all . . . evangelists of the school to which he belongs, he knows how to handle a Bible. . . ."[42]
From Illinois, Bliss and Whittle carried their evangelism to other states in the Middle West, with a penetration of Pennsylvania in 1874, and then of the South. In 1876 they were in Georgia, where they were at special pains to visit Kennesaw Mountain, to which they journeyed "on a beautiful April morning." On top of the mountain they found "part of the framework of the signal station" from which Allatoona had been signaled in 1864. It was a Confederate platform which Union signalmen had first used in July 1864, abandoned, reoccupied, and put to use in October. From the mountain, Bliss and Whittle could see Allatoona and were much inspired. After kneeling in prayer they "sang 'Hold the Fort,' looking out upon the distant . . . [Allatoona], looking up to the clear blue sky, and hoping and almost expecting that Jesus might then appear, so near He seemed to us that April day." Bliss, his friend said, "reckoned it, while he lived, as one of his blessed days, and the memory of it to me . . . will continue to be while life lasts, a transfiguration scene."[43]
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Before the year was out, on 29 December, Bliss and his wife, both still under 40, met sudden death on a wild and snowy winter night when the iron bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio, on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad, collapsed and dropped the "Pacific Express" into Ashtabula Creek where it caught fire from its stoves and kerosene lamps. Horror was added to horror by bungled rescue operations and by the robbing of helpless survivors. Absolutely nothing that could be identified as Bliss and his wife, or as belonging to them, was ever discovered. As George Root put it, they disappeared "from the earth as completely as did Elijah in his flaming chariot." They were survived by two sons, Phillip Paul and George Goodwin.[44]
George F. Root, who was in a position to make a professional estimate of Bliss, observed in 1891 that Bliss's "musical training and experience were too limited to permit safe flight on his part beyond simple harmonies, although it was easily seen that he had a natural vein of true melody. What a wonderful use his songs have performed now for more than a score of years." Root added that Bliss's "unselfish devotion to his work made for him such friends while he lived and such mourners when he died as few men have ever had.[45]
Another and later evaluation would have it that Bliss's songs, when "judged by the standards of art," were "decidedly inferior, but the masses could understand and sing them, and their melody, martial note, joyousness, and hope produced the religious exhilaration desired." An even more recent description calls Bliss's songs "homey" and has it that they sounded "very much like the ballads of the music-hall stage," which is to say that they had a wide appeal.[46] The popularity of "Hold the Fort" sustains these views, for by the time of Bliss's death it was said to have been translated into "nearly all the European languages . . . into Chinese and the native languages of India," and was, in short, "popular beyond any other Sabbath School song of the age."[47]
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After Bliss's death, Whittle continued his evangelism, with James McGranahan replacing his old friend Bliss as the major's gospel singer.[48] Whittle also continued his relationship with Moody, under whose auspices he had begun his evangelistic work. For some years he maintained his home in Northfield, Massachusetts, where Moody founded the Northfield Seminary and the Mount Hermon School for boys and held annual religious conferences. In addition to his preaching, Whittle wrote a number of gospel songs, generally under the pseudonym "El Nathan." His friend George Stebbins thought these songs put him "well in the front rank" of the gospel song writers. One of them, set to music by his daughter May, was "Moment by Moment," which he wrote during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the last year or two of his life he lived with May, who was married to Dwight L. Moody's eldest son, William R. Moody. These years were tragic for Whittle and a measure of the personal sacrifice he had made for his religion. Working and living with troops during the Spanish-American War led to a complete breakdown of his health [49] and, finally, to the old soldier's first application for a Civil War pension. Although a claim based upon his wound at Vicksburg was approved in 1900, efforts to persuade a tightfisted and coldhearted Pension Bureau to approve payments at a higher rate were apparently fruitless, despite the efforts of such influential friends as President William McKinley, Major General Howard, and John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia merchant. Poor in worldly goods, the major went to his reward the next year.[50]
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Bliss, Whittle, and Moody were now dead, and Ira Sankey, who had made "Hold the Fort" as popular in the British Isles as in the United States, was in broken health and would join his friends in the heavenly chorus in 1908.[51]