1861 ‘I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper’, the fervent abolitionist remembered, fearing to use a light ‘lest I should wake the baby’. Then she returned to bed and fell asleep, ‘saying to myself, “I like this better than most things I have written”’.1
Though she was already a published poet, Howe was right to guess that ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ would eclipse her other work. It came just in the nick of time to galvanise the Union’s moral fervour. Since April of that year America had been embroiled in a civil war, and since July the first Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, as the victorious South had the right to call it) had made it clear that the war was going to be bloody and prolonged.
On her way back from visiting an army camp, Howe heard soldiers along the road singing the ballad ‘John Brown’s Body’. Brown was the militant abolitionist who tried to start a slave revolution at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859, and was hanged for his troubles. ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave’, the song went, ‘but his soul goes marching on’. It’s not recorded whether she also heard the soldiers’ favourite pastiche of the ditty, ‘John Brown’s bollocks are a-dangling in the air’, but in any case Howe was persuaded she could find more seemly and patriotic words to the same tune.
Her version contains six verses, each followed by the chorus ‘Glory, Glory, Halleluja’ thrice, followed by a variant of ‘His truth is marching on’. The God invoked is one of vengeance, not mercy. He is ‘trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’ and has already ‘loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword’. Here even Jesus, though born ‘in the beauty of the lilies’, is not forgiving, but an incitement to violent sacrifice: ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.’
Howe’s lyrics really do sound as though they were ‘got twixt sleeping and waking’. It’s grapes that are trampled, not their vintage; Christ was born in a stable in winter, not ‘in the beauty of the lilies’. Maybe their oddity is why they have been such a rich source of American titles, like The Grapes of Wrath (1939; the first edition had the whole anthem printed on its end-papers) and John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), and Martin Luther King, Jr., used ‘Mine eyes have seen the coming’ in numerous speeches.
1 Quoted in Elaine Showalter, A Jury of her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, London: Virago Press, 2009, p. 134.