The Story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic/Chapter 4

by Florence Marion Howe Hall

IV

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

"The crimson flower of battle blooms" in a single night—The vision in the gray morning twilight—It is written down in the half-darkness on her husband's official paper of the U. S. Sanitary Commission—How it was published in the Atlantic Monthly and the price paid for it—The John Brown air derived from a camp-meeting hymn—The simple story in her own words.

OVER and over again, so many times that she lost count of them, was my mother asked to describe the circumstances under which she composed "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Fortunately she wrote them down, so that we are able to give "the simple story" in her own words.

The following account is taken in part from her Reminiscences and in part from the leaflet printed in honor of her seventieth birthday, May 27, 1889, by the New England Woman's Club. She was president of this association for about forty years:

"I distinctly remember that a feeling of discouragement came over me as I drew near the city of Washington. I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission. My husband, as already said, was beyond the age of military service, my eldest son but a stripling; my youngest was a child of not more than two years. I could not leave my nursery to follow the march of our armies, neither had I the practical deftness which the preparing and packing of sanitary stores demanded. Something seemed to say to me, 'You would be glad to serve, but you cannot help any one; you have nothing to give, and there is nothing for you to do.' Yet, because of my sincere desire, a word was given me to say which did strengthen the hearts of those who fought in the field and of those who languished in prison.

"In the late autumn of the year 1861 I visited the national capital with my husband, Dr. Howe, and a party of friends, among whom were Governor and Mrs. Andrew, Mr. and Mrs. E. P. Whipple, and my dear pastor, Rev. James Freeman Clarke.

"The journey was one of vivid, even romantic, interest. We were about to see the grim Demon of War face to face, and long before we reached the city his presence made itself felt in the blaze of fires along the road, where sat or stood our pickets, guarding the road on which we traveled.

"One day we drove out to attend a review of troops, appointed to take place at some distance from the city. In the carriage with me were James Freeman Clarke and Mr. and Mrs. Whipple. The day was fine, and everything promised well, but a sudden surprise on the part of the enemy interrupted the proceedings before they were well begun. A small body of our men had been surrounded and cut off from their companions, re-enforcements were sent to their assistance, and the expected pageant was necessarily given up. The troops who were to have taken part in it were ordered back to their quarters, and we also turned our horses' heads homeward.

"For a long distance the foot soldiers nearly filled the road. They were before and behind, and we were obliged to drive very slowly. We presently began to sing some of the well-known songs of the war, and among them:

'John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave.'

This seemed to please the soldiers, who cried, 'Good for you,' and themselves took up the strain. Mr. Clarke said to me, 'You ought to write some new words to that tune.' I replied that I had often wished to do so.

"In spite of the excitement of the day I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, 'I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately.' I searched for a sheet of paper and an old stump of a pen which I had had the night before and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I had learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room where my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not without feeling that something of importance had happened to me."

It will be noted that the first draft of the "Battle Hymn" was written on the back of a sheet of the letter-paper of the Sanitary Commission on which her husband was then serving. Mr. A. J. Bloor, the assistant secretary of that body, has called attention to this. His account of the eventful day is given at the close of this chapter.

My mother gave the original draft of the "Battle Hymn" to her friend, Mrs. Edwin P. Whipple, "who begged it of me, years ago." Hence below the letter-heading:

Sanitary Commission, Washington, D. C.
Treasury Building

1861

we find the inscription

Willard's Hotel
Julia W. Howe
to
Charlotte B. Whipple

The draft remained for many years in the possession of the latter, until it was sent to Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin, in order to have a facsimile made for the Reminiscences.

Mr. and Mrs. Whipple were among the familiar friends of our household in those days. The former achieved brilliant successes both as a writer and as a lecturer. He was greatly interested in the anti-slavery agitation; "His eloquent voice was raised more than once in the cause of human freedom." The younger members of our family remember him best for his ready and delightful wit. The fact that he was decidedly homely seemed to give additional point to his funny sayings. Mrs. Whipple was as handsome as her husband was plain—sweet-tempered and sympathetic, yet not wanting in firmness.

Before publishing the poem the author made a number of changes, all of which are, as I think, improvements. The last verse, which is an anticlimax, was cut out altogether.

We find from her letters that she hesitated to allow the publication of the original draft of the "Battle Hymn"^[1] because it contained this final verse. She did not consider it equal to the rest of the poem.^[2] After consulting other literary people, in her usual painstaking way, she decided to have the first draft published.^[3] It will be noted that in the first verse "vintage" has been substituted for "wine press." The first line of the third verse read originally,

I have read a burning gospel writ in fiery rows of steel.

The later version,

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:

brings out more clearly the image of the long lines of bayonets as they glittered in her sight on that autumn afternoon. In the fourth verse the second line was somewhat vague in the first draft,

He has waked the earth's dull bosom with a high ecstatic beat,

The allusion was probably to the marching feet of the armed multitude. The new version,

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:

is more direct and simple, hence accords better with the deeply religious tone of the poem.

In the last stanza,

In the whiteness of the lilies he was born across the sea,

now reads,

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

A number of people have asked the meaning of this line. The allusion is evidently to the lilies carried by the angel, in pictures of the annunciation to the Virgin, these flowers being the emblem of purity.

The original version of the second line read,

With a glory in his bosom that shines out on you and me,

The present words,

Transfigures you and me,

give us a clearer and more beautiful image. The passion of the poem seems, indeed, to lift on high and glorify our poor humanity.

It is interesting to note that my mother associated with her husband the line,

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

Not long before her death, new buildings were erected at Watertown, Massachusetts, for the Perkins Institution for the Blind, founded and administered for more than forty years by Dr. Howe. His son-in-law, Michael Anagnos, ably continued the work during thirty more years.

When we were talking about a suitable inscription in memory of the latter, I suggested to my mother the use of this line. The answer was, "No, that is for your father."

The original draft of the "Battle Hymn" is dated November, 1861; it was published in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1862. The verses were printed on the first page, being thus given the place of honor. According to the custom of that day, no name was signed to them. James T. Fields was then editor of the magazine. My mother consulted him with regard to a name for the poem. It was he, as I think, who christened it "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The price paid for it was five dollars. But the true price of it was a very different thing, not to be computed in terms of money. It brought its author name and fame throughout the civilized world, in addition to the love and honor of her countrymen. As she grew older and the spiritual beauty of her life and thought shone out more and more clearly, the affection in which she was held deepened into something akin to veneration.

The "Battle Hymn" soon found its way from the pages of the Atlantic Monthly into the newspapers, thence to army hymn-books and broadsides. It has been printed over and over again, in a great variety of forms, sometimes with the picture of the author, as in the Perry prints. A white silk handkerchief now in my possession bears the line,

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

worked in red embroidery silk.

My mother was called upon to copy the poem times without number. While she was very willing to write a line or even, upon occasion, a verse or two, she objected very decidedly, especially in her later years, to copying the whole poem. Always responsive to the requests of the autograph fiend, she felt that so much should not be asked of her. For it naturally took time and trouble to make the fair copy that came up to her standard. It was with some difficulty that I persuaded her to send a promised copy to Edmund Clarence Stedman, for his collection.

"But mamma, you said you would write it out for him."

With a roguish twinkle, she replied, "Yes, but I did not say when."

However, the verses were duly executed and sent to the banker-poet.

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Armenian, and doubtless other languages. New tunes have been composed for it, but they have failed of acceptance. My mother dearly loved music and was a trained musician, hence her choice of a tune was no haphazard selection. She wrote her poem to the "John Brown" air and they cannot be divorced.

I have been so fortunate as to secure from Franklin B. Sanborn an account of the origin of the words and music of the "John Brown" song. Mr. Sanborn, biographer of Thoreau, John Brown, and others, is the last survivor of the brilliant group of writers belonging to the golden age of New England literature.

Concord, Mass., 1916.

Dear Mrs. Hall—I investigated quite thoroughly the air to which the original John Brown folk song was set; . . .

I happened to be in Boston the day that Fletcher Webster's regiment (the 12th Mass. Volunteers) came up from Fort Warren, landed on Long Wharf, and marched up State Street past the old State House, on their way to take the train for the Front, in the summer of 1861. As they came along, a quartette, of which Capt. Howard Jenkins, then a sergeant in this regiment, was a tenor voice, was singing something sonorous, which I had never heard. I asked my college friend Jacobsen, of Baltimore, who stood near me, "What are they singing?" He replied, "That boy on the sidewalk is selling copies." I approached him and bought a handbill which, without the music, contained the rude words of the John Brown song, which I then heard for the first time, but listened to a thousand times afterward during the progress of the emancipating Civil War—before they were superseded by Mrs. Howe's inspired lines, which now take their place almost everywhere.

The chorus was borne by the marching soldiers, who had practised it in their drills at the Fort; indeed, it had been adapted from a camp-meeting hymn to a marching song, for which it is admirably fitted, by the bandmaster of Col. Webster's regiment, and afterward revised by Dodworth's military band, then the best in the country. It was this thrilling music, with its resounding religious chorus, which Mrs. Howe, in company with our Massachusetts Governor Andrew, heard near the Potomac, the next November, in the evening camps that encircled Washington.

Yours ever,

F. B. Sanborn.

The following account of Mrs. Howe's visit to Washington and of the circumstances connected with the writing of the "Battle Hymn" was written by Mr. A. J. Bloor, assistant secretary of the U. S. Sanitary Commission:

"Julia Ward Howe

"It was the writer's privilege to be introduced early in the Civil War to Julia Ward Howe, the author of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' and now, through the fullness of her days, the dean of American literature, though recognized long ago as having employed her high gift of utterance not merely as the magnet to attract to herself an advantageous celebrity, but paramountly as the instrument for the righting of wrong and the amelioration of the current conditions of humanity.

"I was presented to Mrs. Howe by her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a companion of Lord Byron in aiding the Greeks to throw off the yoke of the Turks, and the philanthropist who opened the gates of hope to the famous Laura Bridgman, born blind, deaf, and dumb. Dr. Howe invented various processes by which he rescued her from her living tomb, as he subsequently did others born to similar deprivations, and he was careful to leave on record such exhaustive and clear statements as to his methods that, after his decease, the track was well illumined wherein later any well-doer for other victims in like case might open to them, through their single physical sense of touch, the doors leading to all earthly knowledge so far stored in letters. . . .

"Dr. Howe, on the outbreak of the Civil War, consented to serve as a member of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization of influential Union men, springing from a central association in New York City for the relief of the forces serving in the war, and consisting of a few Union ladies, one of whom, Miss Louisa Lee Schuyler, suggested the formation of a similar but larger and wider-spread body of men, representing the Union sentiment of the whole North, into which her own society should be merged as one of—so it turned out—many branches.

"Such a body was accordingly enrolled and, with Dr. Bellows, a prominent Unitarian clergyman of the day, as its president, was appointed a commission, by President Lincoln, as a quasi Bureau of the War Department, to complement the appliances and work of the Government's Medical Bureau and Commissariat, which, at the sudden outbreak of the war, were very deficient.

"Of this commission I was the assistant secretary, with headquarters at its central office in Washington. . . . On the occasion of General McClellan's first great review of the Army of the Potomac—numbering at that time about seventy thousand men—at Upton's Hill, in Virginia, not far from the enemy's lines, Dr. Howe asked me to accompany him thither on horseback to see it, which I did. Mrs. Howe had preceded us, with several friends, by carriage, and it was there, in the midst of the blare and glitter and bedizened simulacra of actual and abhorrent warfare, that he did me the honor of presenting me to his wife, then known, outside her private circle, only as the author of a book of charming lyrical essays; but for years since recognized, and doubtless, in the future, will be adjudged, the inspired creator of a war song which for rapt outlook, reverent mysticism, and stateliness of expression, as well as for more widely appreciated patriotic ardor, has more claim, in my estimation, to be styled a hymn than not a few that swell the pages of some of our hymnals. I have always thought it an honor even for the Sanitary Commission with all its noble work of help to the nation in its straits, and of mercy to the suffering, that Julia Ward Howe's 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' should have been written on paper headed 'U. S. Sanitary Commission,' as may be seen by a facsimile of it in her delightful volume of reminiscences. It seems a pity that Mrs. Howe, an accomplished musical composer in private, as well as a poet in public, should not herself have set the air for her own words in that famous utterance of insight, enthusiasm, and prophecy."

1. Reminiscences, 1899.
2. In the reprint of the "Battle Hymn," made in England for the use of the soldiers during the present war, this discarded verse has, through some misunderstanding, been included.
3. See Julia Ward Howe, Vol. II, Chap. xi.