In keeping with tradition, one dramatic beat of the presidential inauguration in January was the Naval Academy Glee Club’s performance of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While it was standard inaugural fare, it was also, of course, a nauseating co-optation. A song of solidarity, bravery and liberation — an alternative national anthem — was sung in service of an authoritarian coward’s big day.
Those who seek to combat authoritarianism in America should not cede the language of patriotism to the Trumpist right. National artifacts like “Battle Hymn” both emerge from and spread an altogether different vision of America than the ethnonationalist vision currently in power. And the history of Julia Ward Howe’s famous poem — which really is a poem, contrary to American readers’ supposed distaste for poetry — marches from, through and around Iowa.
Howe’s verses, with their terrible swift sword and their vengeful produce, were grafted onto the tune of a preexisting Civil War marching song, “John Brown’s Body” (which, in turn, borrowed its tune from the spiritual “Will You Meet Us?”) After assassinating pro-slavery settlers in the Territory of Kansas and hiding out with his militia in Springdale, Iowa, the zealous abolitionist famously hightailed his as-yet unmouldering body to the national armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
Brown’s 1859 failure to seize the Harper’s Ferry armory in the name of abolition, and his subsequent hanging, were frequently commemorated by the Union cause. In a poem, Herman Melville described John Brown’s dead face and “streaming beard” swinging from the gallows as the portentous “meteor of the war.”
The lyrics of “John Brown’s Body” are less metaphorical. “They will hang Jeff Davis to a tree!” soldiers sang of the Confederate president, repaying Brown’s martyrdom with a like end. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” to be sure, but this only meant that “He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord! His soul’s marching on!” The meter here is as catchy as the lock on a rusty musket.
No wonder, then, that the song became a hit with the troops. In his article on the music of the Civil War, Iowa historian Timothy Walch quotes the Iowan soldier George Bradway describing “an impromptu celebration on July 4, 1864”:
Nothing new was going on till night when the Lieu Col said we would have a candle light procession so every fellow got a piece of candle put it in his bayonet and fell into ranks we marched about half way to Memphis shouting yelling and singing patriotic songs such as the stars spangled banner rally round the flag and John Brown they fairly made things shake when they was singing the latter.
As legend has it, the New England poet Julia Ward Howe — who was also an abolitionist, feminist and prison reform activist — heard a Union regiment singing “John Brown’s Body” during an 1861 visit to Washington D.C. alongside her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. Like Brown, Mr. Howe also had a significant role in the 1850s struggle to keep Kansas free of slavery. (He was also a participant in the Greek Revolution of the 1820s and the French Revolution of 1830.) In his letters, he wrote:
I have traversed the whole length of the State of Iowa on horseback or in a cart, sleeping in said cart or in worse lodgings, among dirty men on the floor of dirty huts. We have organized a pretty good line of communication between our base and the corps of emigrants who have now advanced into the Territory of Nebraska. Everything depends upon the success of the attempt to break through the cordon infernale which Missouri has drawn across the northern frontier of Kansas.
As the abolitionist Howes overheard the Washington soldiers, they knew of what the soldiers sang. It came, so to speak, with the Territory. Julia was inspired to write her own words to the tune, and the most widely performed song of the Civil War was born. Lines from her poem have been referenced in other quintessential American texts, from the final line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech to the title of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Howe’s lyrics may be less punk than “John Brown’s Body” (although the band FBS does do a great punk cover of the “Battle Hymn”), but they are a sophisticated piece of poetry. In Howe’s hands, the material world is graven with God’s righteous language. At a Union encampment after sundown, the poem’s speaker “can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,” and she has “read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel.” God’s message, embedded in the world, is a warning of judgment: “He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; / Be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!”
The depiction of the world as possessing a pressing message carries over into yet another set of lyrics to the tune of the “Marching Song of the First Arkansas.” The First Arkansas, also known as the 46th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, was an African American Union regiment under the command of white officers. The regiment was based in Helena, Arkansas. Minos Miller, a Black soldier with the 36th Iowa Infantry Regiment who was also based in Helena, wrote to his mother in January 1863 describing the camp’s reaction to the news of the Emancipation Proclamation eight days before:
we are rejoising to day over Brags [Braxton Bragg] defeat and old Abes [Abraham Lincoln] Proclamations [Emancipation Proclamation] we got the news last night at 8 oclock that all the negros was free and them that was able for the servis was to be armed and set to guarding foarts […] I feel like fighting now for we have some thing to fight for[.]
Around the one-year anniversary of the Proclamation in January 1864, one of the white captains of the First Arkansas, a lawyer and poet named Lindley Hall, wrote the regiment’s “Marching Song,” in his rendition of Black dialect. Like “John Brown’s Body,” the “Marching Song” is unafraid to name the regiment’s enemies: “See dar above the centre, where de flag is wavin’ bright, / We are goin’ 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!”
And, like “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the material world is figured as speaking. Whereas in Howe, the speech in question is God’s “righteous sentence,” in the “Marching Song” the animals of the forest and the waters of the Mississippi sing out the words of the Emancipation Proclamation:
We heard de Proclamation, massa hush it as he will,
De bird he sing it to us, hoppin on de cotton hill,
And de possum up de gum tree, he couldn’t keep it still,
As he went climbing on.
Dey said, “Now colored bredren, you shall be forever free,
From the first of January, Eighteen hundred sixty-three.”
We heard it in de riber goin’ rushin’ to the sea,
As it went sounding on.
We are entitled to feel discomfort about the fact of a white officer writing a song in Black dialect, composed to rouse Black soldiers into fighting to their deaths. But I also believe that we would not be doing justice to history if we neglected the power of this vision. Steeped as 19th century America was in the King James Bible, the river’s song of the Proclamation evokes one of God’s (many) questions for Job: “Where wast thou when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
In closing, one more Iowa tie. Back in 2016, midway through the first year of Trump 1.0, a plane landed in Frankfurt, Germany. The remains of an American veteran of the Second World War were on board. So were the choir of the Iowa Ambassadors of Music, who had just been on a concert tour of Europe. After the pilot announced that the soldier’s remains would be escorted off-board by an Army private, the Iowa choir performed the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” for the private, as the plane sat on the tarmac.
A fellow passenger recorded the performance and posted it on Facebook. The performance went viral, and it made national news. The choir’s intent, however, was not fame or popularity, but to display respect and solidarity for a dead soldier who had, in whichever Axis theater he had fought in, combatted fascism. “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
That is the song’s real legacy, presidential inaugurations aside.
Below is the full text of Howe’s 1862 poem, “Battle-Hymn of the Republic.”
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.Chorus
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.[Chorus]
His day is marching on.I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”[Chorus]
Since God is marching on.He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.[Chorus]
Our God is marching on.In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.[Chorus]
While God is marching on.
