The Battle Hymn of The Republic - History

History

The tune was written around 1856 by William Steffe. The first known lyrics were called "Canaan's Happy Shore" or "Brothers, Will You Meet Me?" and the song was sung as a campfire spiritual. The tune spread across the United States, gaining a reputation as the best song of its time.

Thomas Bishop, from Vermont, joined the Massachusetts militia before the outbreak of war and compiled a popular set of lyrics, circa 1860, titled "John Brown's Body", which became one of his unit's walking songs.

Bishop's battalion was dispatched to Murray, Kentucky early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops outside Washington on Upton Hill, Virginia. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company "K" of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. Howe's companion at the review, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men's song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembered:

I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, 'I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.' So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.

According to writer Irwin Silber (who has written a book about Civil War folk songs), the original lyrics were only obliquely about John Brown, the famed abolitionist. More particularly the lyrics were about a Scotsman of the same name who was a member of the 12th Massachusetts Regiment, and the lyrics were composed to poke some good-natured fun at the runty, mild-mannered Scotsman who shared the same name as the much more famous and fearsome abolitionist. An article by writer Mark Steyn provides some background behind the story. Apparently, the men of John Brown's unit had made up a song poking fun at him. It was this song they sang when Mrs. Howe passed by. Mrs. Howe, and everyone else who heard it, assumed (not unreasonably) that song was about John Brown the abolitionist.

Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly of February 1862. The sixth verse written by Howe, which is less commonly sung, was not published at that time. The song was also published as a broadside in 1863 by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia.

Both "John Brown" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic" were published in Father Kemp's Old Folks Concert Tunes in 1874 and reprinted in 1889. Both songs had the same Chorus with an additional "Glory" in the second line: "Glory! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!"

Julia Ward Howe was the wife of Samuel Gridley Howe, the famed scholar in education of the blind. Samuel and Julia were also active leaders in anti-slavery politics and strong supporters of the Union. Samuel Howe was a member of the Secret Six, the group who funded John Brown's work.