Battle Hymn of the Republic

One of the most famous American songs is Battle Hymn of the Republic, but it is less a comment just on the history but the mood of the country during the Civil War, because the song was written as a rallying cry, based upon another song, John Brown's Body, that had a more controversial origin.

Julia Howe wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic while visiting a Union camp and listening to the soldiers in the weary, sometimes frightened, moods as the war raged on all about them.  The Civil War pitted brother against brother, with each side having its cause.  The Union cause, to preserve the Union, was that orientation of the song Howe wrote.

On Nov. 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe, a well-known poet living in Boston at the time, wrote the song based on one of the popular songs of the day, “John Brown’s Body,” which she was encouraged to rewrite with different words, to give a rousing battle cry for the troops and the cause they were fighting for.

Howe later related that the song had come to her in an early morning, as she maintained,“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.’ ” She jumped out of bed, found an old stump of a pen nearby, and scrawled the verses on the back of a piece of stationery. Falling back to sleep with a drowsy sense of satisfaction, she thought to herself, “I like this better than most things that I have written.”

When Howe awakened later that morning she found the paper on which she had written six stanzas, beginning, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,”  those first words of the famous poem that has endured within the body of the song.

Howe understood the song’s value and hoped it would motivate and inspire the Northern troops.  Much of the original song has been left intact, but like many of these historical masterpieces, the words were changed soon after Howe wrote the song, to give it an even more patriotic flavor.

But here, with the original lyrics of Julia Howe, is the famous Battle Hymn of the Republic done in the simple style it was likely once performed, with the exception of the video that illustrates the song: