Several songs of the Civil War remain popular a hundred and fifty years after its end. None has as many different associations or as complicated a history as Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Julia Ward Howe, the author of the text, grew up in a socially prominent family. She knew many of the leading literary figures of her day and aspired to be counted among them.

She wrote her abolitionist war poem to fit a folk tune that owed much of its character to slave culture. The earliest text we know for it appealed both to slaves and their owners, but for very different reasons. Her own text has had similarly broad appeal to groups of people who seem to have little in common.

Mostly under the influence of Battle Hymn of the Republic, people later fit other poems to the tune to serve other social causes. Yet many people probably know it only from singing it in church.

Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Me?

A camp song hymn known as “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Me” is the first published ancestor of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

It and similar revival spirituals must have circulated by oral tradition long before anyone thought to publish them.

This one provided the tune Howe used.

 

Say, brothers [or sisters, as ppropriate], will you meet me,
Say, brothers, will you meet me,
Say, brothers, will you meet me,
On Canaan’s happy shore?

Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Forever, evermore!

In May 1807, Stith Mead, a Methodist circuit rider, presided over a camp meeting revival in Boiling Spring, Virginia. It was only one small example of the camp meetings that swept through the American South and West in the early decades of the 19^thcentury.

Historians notice it chiefly because Mead decided to publish the songs sung there and at other revivals. His new hymnal appeared a month after the Boiling Spring revival ended. It was among the first that contained multiple camp songs, including “Say, Brothers.”

Camp meetings attracted people of all ages and from all walks of life. In particular, both blacks and whites attended them.

People at camp meetings didn’t sing from a hymnal, as some of them might have in more formal worship services. Many of them, both white and black, couldn’t read English, let alone musical notation. A new kind of singing associated with the camp meetings appears to have mainly slave origins. It depended on the repetition of lines of text. A refrain followed each verse.

Revival meetings started to spread to the North by the 1840s. “Say, Brothers” spread with them. Other texts became attached to the same tune. Soon enough, minstrel shows featured it with very unsacred texts.

John Brown’s Body

Early in the Civil War, soldiers in at least one military company loved to sing “Say, Brothers.” From that company came “John Brown’s Body.”

Abolitionist John Brown was executed before the war began. George Kimball and another John Brown later served together in the Massachusetts Second Battalion of Infantry.

Kimball recalled Brown as a “jovial Scotchman” who was “among the leading spirits, foremost always in fun making.” Brown also became the butt of many jokes about his name.

If he showed up late, someone would tell him to hurry up and help free the slaves. Or someone would say that he couldn’t be John Brown. John Brown was dead! “His body lies mouldering in the grave” became a standard part of the joke. Soon enough, the unit made up some doggerel poetry and put it to the tune of “Say, Brother.”

One member of the company, a church organist, notated it and had it published. Battalion officers tried to change the wording to something less irreverent. They suggested “Ellsworth’s Body” after the first martyr of the Civil War. But to no avail.

The influential firm of Oliver Ditson issued its own edition. The Gilmore Band added “John Brown’s Body” to its repertoire. Inevitably, the song became well known throughout the entire Union army—indeed, the entire nation.

In November 1861, a group of people including Howe and the Rev. James Clarke visited Union troops stationed near Washington, DC. There, they learned to sing “John Brown’s Body.”

The published version had a line, “We’ll hang old Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” Soldiers liked to substitute, “We’ll feed Jeff Davis sour apples ‘til he gets the diarhee.” Howe and Clarke likely heard that version. The two of them much preferred more elevated poetry, and Clarke asked Howe to provide it.

Battle Hymn of the Republic

The next morning, lines of poetry ran through Howe’s mind while she was still in bed. She got up, wrote them down, and went back to sleep. She later wrote that she felt “something important had happened to me.”

Then she submitted her poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which published it in its February 1862 issue.

Howe’s inspiration came from her thorough knowledge of Scripture. She imagined God exercising wrath to favor the Union side. Not just an army of flesh and blood soldiers, but “his truth is marching on.” Howe didn’t view the cause of freeing slaves from oppression as merely military or political. It was a holy war.

At the time, the nation as a whole knew the Bible much more thoroughly than the general public today. Most of the poem’s original readers probably found the imagery familiar. Maybe even comforting. Yet it took phrases that describe the ultimate battle between cosmic good and evil and applied them to the current war.

“John Brown’s Body” has more syllables than “Say Brother”; “Battle Hymn” has even more. These longer lines fit the same tune only by repeating some of the notes. I’m not sure if any pre-war hymn tunes had dotted notes like “Battle Hymn,” but plenty of later ones do.

Southerners, of course, objected to the way Howe portrayed God as opposed to their side of the conflict. Sectarian wounds decades after the end of the war may explain why “The Star-Spangled Banner” and not “Battle Hymn of the Republic” became our national anthem.

The influence of the Battle Hymn

Little else The Atlantic Monthly ever published had such broad influence. Not only did it become one of the best-known Civil War anthems, but it also became a staple in hymnals of all denominations.

Many Christians know it only as a hymn and have no idea of its connection with the Civil War.

Conservatives embrace it. Unfortunately, so do white supremacists. How ironic that they wrap themselves in slave-inspired music!

At the other end of the political spectrum, Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted it in his last speech before his murder. His church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, took it up as a memorial to him. Earlier, Judy Garland had sung it in tribute to President Kennedy after his assassination.

Decades later, President George W. Bush and four ex-presidents joined the choir of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC at the memorial service for 9/11. Ironically, the cathedral is only a few miles from where Howe first sang “John Brown’s Body” in tribute to a terrorist.

First Arkansas Marching Song

Black Union soldiers sang the tune with their own words. Here are a couple of verses of a text by Captain Lindley Miller of an Arkansas-based unit of former slaves:

See, there above the center, where the flag is waving bright,
We are going out of slavery; we are bound for freedom’s light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight,
As we go marching on.

CHORUS

We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn,
We’re colored Yankee soldiers, now, as sure as you are born;
When the masters hear us yelling, they’ll think it’s Gabriel’s horn,
As we go marching on.

The chorus, not surprisingly, is “Glory, glory hallelujah.”

Some other new texts to the tune

Howe’s poem also inspired poetry for the same tune used in other struggles. New words rallied the nation in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and during World War I.

Activists for women’s right to vote made a version called “Battle Hymn of the Suffragists” in 1890. Labor unions used the tune for “Solidarity Forever.” Some of its lyrics are so inflammatory that even left-wing activist and folk singer Pete Seeger decided to skip them.

On the lighter side, I came across a parody written for a banquet singalong in the 1920s. It must be in the same tradition of those minstrel songs of 80 years earlier.

He started off for Hot Springs in his merry Oldsmobile.
He ran into a snow bank and he couldn’t turn the wheel.
He bid his car a fond farewell and calmly went his way
And returned for it in May.

Chorus:
When he left, ‘twas in September,
If correctly we remember.
His wrath remained a glowing ember
That did not die till May.

Sources:

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: a biography of the song that marches on / John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis (Oxford University Press, 2013)
‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’: America’s song of itself / Dominic Tierney, The Atlantic. November 4, 2010
The long, winding history of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” / Grant Shreve, JSTOR Daily. October 20, 2017
One song glory: how “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became an anthem for every cause / Andrew Limbong, NPR. July 4, 2018
Origin of the John Brown song / George Kimball, The New England Magazine, new series 1 (1890): 371-76. Digitized at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112004314222;view=1up;seq=379