Sarah Vowell: the history of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

At the memorial service at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, those gathered in the pews to mourn the more than 2,800 people who were murdered by terrorists three days before sang "The 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 fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

President Bush sang it. Ex-presidents Clinton, Carter, and Bush sang it. Watching it on television in New York City, I sang it. And across the sea at another service in another church, Queen Elizabeth sang it with tears in her English eyes, having sung the song 36 years earlier at the funeral of Winston Churchill, as Churchill himself had sung it along with FDR on the White House lawn in 1943.

Because that's when we sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," at wars and funerals. So "The Battle Hymn" was doubly appropriate on September 14. It was a funeral, we were at war.

And yet there we were, we gathered Americans, her Majesty the queen, chanting this beloved battle cry at the terrorists of the world. And buried inside the melody of the song was the rotting corpse of an American terrorist. Here are the lyrics that used to go to that tune back in 1860, lyrics that honor the terrorist as a hero.

John brown's body lies moldering in the grave, John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave. John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave; his soul goes marching on.

I don't throw around the word terrorist lightly, but if it's John Brown-- Brown, a white man who hated slavery so much that even his friend, the famed abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, wished Brown would shut up about it every now and then. Back in 1856, Brown and his men massacred five pro-slavery settlers from the south near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, dragging them from their homes as their wives and children looked on screaming. They hacked them up with knives, though Brown shot one man's mangled body in the head just to make certain he was dead for sure.

Then hoping to incite a slave uprising, Brown led a guerrilla attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia on October 16, 1859. 17 people lost their lives, including 10 of Brown's men, two of whom were his sons. Brown was executed on December 2, 1859.

Across the land, Brown's execution was either celebrated or mourned with the ringing church bells, depending on which side of the Mason Dixon Line one hung one's heart. In Concord, Massachusetts, Brown's friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, held a service in which Henry David Thoreau called Brown a crucified hero. Thoreau was so excited about Brown's martyrdom to the abolitionist cause, that he cheered that Brown's death gave people who were contemplating suicide, quote, "something to live for," exclamation point. And, as Lincoln puts it in his second inaugural, "the war came."

Then John Brown got a song of his own, sort of. Like every turn in this story, the song "John Brown's Body" is an accident of history. What happened was Union soldiers-- the 12th Massachusetts Regiment-- were stationed at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. As they went about their duties, the soldiers sang. One of their favorites was this Methodist hymn:

Say, brother, will you meet us on Canaan's happy shore?

There was a singing quartet in residence at the fort: Sergeant Charles Edgerly, Sergeant Newton J. Purnette, Sergeant James Jenkins, and Sergeant John Brown. One day in December of 1859, news arrived at the fort about the famous abolitionist. John Brown is dead. Some smart alec, thinking of his singing comrade Sergeant John Brown, is said to have replied, "but he still goes marching around."

A soldier named Henry Howgreen reportedly turned this wise crack into the first verse of the song about his comrade, "John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, his soul goes marching on." A soldier who played the organ set it to the music of "Say, Brothers, Won't You Meet Us." So the song was a joke, joshing among soldiers, the sort of ribbing a sergeant in today's army might get if he had the misfortune of being named Uday Hussein.

"John Brown's Body" became the regiment's marching song. They sang in public for the first time, here in Boston on State Street, on July 18, 1861. After that, they sang it marching down Broadway in New York City. They sang it so often they became known as The Hallelujah Regiment. On March 1, 1862, they sang in Virginia on the very spot the abolitionist John Brown was hanged.

Three months later, Sergeant John Brown drowned while crossing the Shenandoah River on his way to battle. Heartbroken, The Hallelujah Regiment never sang "John Brown's Body" again. But by that time, they were the only ones in the Union Army not singing it. Northern soldiers would sing it on parade, marching from battle to battle, sitting around camp fires at night. And since no one had ever heard of Sergeant Brown, every soldier who sang the song thought he was paying tribute to the famed abolitionist.

Lyrics kept getting added on, including one doozy of a stanza about the president of the confederacy.

We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, we'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree; as we go marching on.

In November of 1861, some white abolitionists from Boston, including Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe, and their minister Reverend James F. Clark, were touring a Union army base on the outskirts of the nation's capital. They heard some soldiers singing about John Brown's body "moldering in the grave." Reverend Clark turned to Mrs. Howe and wondered if she might like to write new, more uplifting lyrics to that fine melody of "John Brown's Body."

Not that Julia Ward Howe had a problem with John Brown. She had even hosted Brown at dinner in her home on one of his trips to Massachusetts, trying to drum up money he could use smiting the slave mongers. Basically, abolitionist pledge drive:  You are the public in public hanging.

Julia Ward Howe would recall of the morning she wrote new lyrics that she had "the feeling that something of importance had happened to me." Back home in Boston, she gave the poem to her neighbor, James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He paid Howe $4.00, gave her poem the title, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and published it in the February 1862 issue. "The Battle Hymn" became a huge hit.

Soldiers and citizens alike couldn't stop singing it. When Abraham Lincoln heard it at a rally, it is said that his eyes filled with tears and he yelled, "sing it again."

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."

That line in the hymn about the hero born of woman, which is a shout-out to the Virgin Mary by way of William Shakespeare, takes on an extra meaning in light of Julia Ward Howe's biography. Though she was married for 34 years, raised six children, and is, in fact, the creator of Mother's Day, Julia Howe was not without ambivalence about domesticity. For example, she wrote a poem entitled "The Present is Dead. " On her honeymoon.

In writing to her sister about what she called "the stupor of marriage and motherhood," Howe complained, "it has been like blindness, like death, like exile from all things beautiful and good."

So in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Howe reminds the nations that the Son of God had a human mom who did all the work. Hence, "let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel," Howe is rubbing in the fact that even Jesus had to be potty trained.

Like a lot of your bigger hit songs, "The Battle Hymn" has been ripped off numerous times. Countless renditions have been set to its tune, which is fair enough considering that Julia Ward Howe ripped off a song which was a rip off of a previous song.

There was "Solidarity Forever," a union number from the IWW songbook.

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, there can be no greater anywhere beneath the sun; yet what force on earth weaker than the feeble strength of one, for the union makes us strong.

There was "Glory Land," the official song for the 1994 World Cup, in which Darryl Hall, of and Oates fame, proclaimed to the soccer fans, "with passion rising high, you know that you can reach your goal."

And of course, that playground classic:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school, we have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule; we have marched unto the principal to tell him he's a fool, the school is burning down.

In the 1950s, around the time of the Korean War, something else happened to Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A word changed. The line "let us die to make men free" got changed to "let us live to make man free." The new wording acknowledged that sometimes war isn't always the answer. Plus, less of a downer.

And through the years, a civil war of sorts has broken out between those who would die and those who would live. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings "live" on their 1959 Grammy Award-winning recording of the song. Joan Baez, leading a sing-along at a black college in Birmingham in 1962, went with the traditional "die."

In my opinion, die is the way to go. When you get rid of the word, "die," you erase the most moving idea in the song, that if Christ died for us, we should be willing to die for each other. Why give that up? This is the one clear-cut case where you can ask yourself, "what would Jesus do," and you know the answer.

And, of course, people disagree about the wording. We disagree about everything else in this country. And when we sing the song today, I think we even disagree about who the serpents are that our heels should crush. Some of us see our enemies abroad, some see them at home, some of us are still mad at France. And that's the way it's been with this song all through its history. It gets adapted for one use, than another. The melody is so powerful, the words so strong, you feel like you really would lay down your life for a just cause - of your choosing.

The song starts off with "mine eyes," and "I have seen," and by the end it's "you and me" and "let us die" or "let us live," whatever-- "us" being the point. We're all in it together, if only for the length of the song.

  Sarah Vowell on This American Life