Battle Hymn of the Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was born in the gray of a November morning in 1861, when Julia Ward Howe woke before dawn in a Washington hotel room and reached for a stub of pencil. She scrawled verses she'd been composing in her half-sleep, barely glancing at the paper. By February of the following year, those lines appeared on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly, for which she had sold them for four dollars. What started as a rewrite of a soldiers' marching song would go on to frame the speeches of a civil rights leader, ring out at presidential funerals, and take root in sporting stadiums on four continents. How did a single night's work become woven so deeply into so many different kinds of public life? And where did the melody itself come from, long before Howe ever heard it?

• 2. Before the Battle Hymn

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  The melody Howe borrowed had already traveled a long road before she ever heard it. Its earliest traceable ancestor is a folk hymn called "Say, Brothers will you Meet Us", also known as "Glory Hallelujah", which grew in the oral tradition of revivalist camp meetings in the late 1700s. The first known text, "Canaan's Happy Shore", carried the verse "Oh! Brothers will you meet me / On Canaan's happy shore?" and a chorus of "There we'll shout and give Him glory / For glory is His own." By the 1850s that chorus had evolved into the familiar "Glory, glory, hallelujah" refrain, and the tune had spread across the country.

  The soldiers' song that would directly precede Howe's version was created not by a single composer but by a battalion. In 1890, George Kimball described how the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, the so-called "Tiger" Battalion, collectively built "John Brown's Body" out of jokes they made at the expense of a fellow soldier named John Brown. He bore the same name as the abolitionist hero, which made him a constant target. Kimball recalled that a "wag would add, in a solemn, drawling tone... 'Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.'" These sayings worked their way into melody. As Kimball described it, "ditties composed of the most nonsensical, doggerel rhymes" were gradually fitted to the hymn tune, until lines emerged about Brown's soul "marching on" that gave the song its lasting power.

  Some battalion leaders found the words coarse and tried to push for more fitting lyrics, without success. Publisher C. S. Hall eventually joined members of the battalion in selecting and polishing verses for publication. The song was first performed publicly, according to the historical record, at a flag-raising ceremony at Fort Warren, near Boston, on Sunday, the 12th of May, 1861. The Civil War had begun only the month before.

• 3. One Night at the Willard

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  Julia Ward Howe was not a bystander to the politics of her day. She and her husband Samuel Gridley Howe, a scholar in education of the blind, were both active leaders in anti-slavery politics and strong supporters of the Union. Samuel was a member of the Secret Six, the group who funded John Brown's actual work. When Julia heard the soldiers' song during a troop review outside Washington on the plains of Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, she heard it through that political lens.

  Rufus R. Dawes, then commanding Company "K" of the 6th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, later stated in his memoirs that it was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company who started the singing at that review. Howe's companion that day, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, suggested she write new words for the tune. That night, staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington, she did.

  Howe's own account of the writing is among the most vivid passages attached to this song's history. She recalled waking in the gray of the morning twilight, the lines of the poem beginning to form. "I must get up and write these verses down," she told herself, "lest I fall asleep again and forget them." She found a pencil stub she'd used the day before and scrawled the stanzas almost without looking at the page. Crucially, what she produced was not simply a new set of words grafted onto a marching song. Her version deliberately linked the Union cause with God's vengeance at the Day of Judgment, drawing on allusions to biblical passages including Revelation 19. Where the soldiers' song was a communal joke grown into an anthem, Howe's was a theological argument for why the Union fight was righteous. The sixth verse she wrote was not published at the time of the song's first appearance in The Atlantic Monthly.

• 4. Grief, Ceremony, and Television

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  In the century after Howe's night at the Willard, the "Battle Hymn" accumulated a weight of public ceremony that few songs have matched. In 1953, Marian Anderson sang it before a television audience of sixty million people, broadcast live over both the NBC and CBS networks as part of The Ford 50th Anniversary Show.

  In 1960, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir won the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group or Chorus for their recording of the song. Arranged and edited by Columbia Records and Cleveland disc jockey Bill Randle, the 45 rpm single reached number 13 on Billboard's Hot 100 the previous autumn. It remains the choir's only Top 40 hit on that chart.

  On the 22nd of November, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed the "Battle Hymn" live on national television. Judy Garland had wanted to dedicate her weekly television show to Kennedy, but CBS would not allow it; she performed the song in December 1963 without being able to name him.

  The song moved through grief again in 1968, when Andy Williams recorded an a cappella version at Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral. Backed by the St. Charles Borromeo choir, his version reached number 11 on the adult contemporary chart and number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. Anita Bryant performed it at the halftime show of Super Bowl V on the 17th of January, 1971, and then again on the 25th of January, 1973, during the burial services for President Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. Most recently, the Morehouse College Glee Club performed it at former President Jimmy Carter's funeral ceremony at the Carter Center in Atlanta on the 4th of January, 2025.

• 5. The Hymn and Civil Rights

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  Martin Luther King Jr. wove the lyrics of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" into his sermons and speeches at critical moments. On the 25th of March, 1965, following the successful Selma to Montgomery march, he delivered his speech "How Long, Not Long" from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The song's imagery ran through it. In Memphis, Tennessee, on the evening of the 3rd of April, 1968, the night before his assassination, King ended his final sermon "I've Been to the Mountaintop" with the song's opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

  Decades later, on the 3rd of July, 2015, Bishop Michael B. Curry of North Carolina delivered a sermon to the Episcopal Church's General Convention after being elected the first African American Presiding Bishop of that church. He built his message around the lyrics of the "Battle Hymn", and after he proclaimed "Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on", a letter from President Barack Obama was read congratulating him on the election.

  Howe's verses had also made their way into literature well before these moments. Carol Steinbeck, wife of John Steinbeck, drew the title of his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath from words in the first verse. John Updike drew the title of his novel In the Beauty of the Lilies from the same source. Bruce Catton named two volumes of his Centennial History of the Civil War after the song: Terrible Swift Sword and Never Call Retreat. The "marching on" imagery had become a shared literary inheritance, available to writers, preachers, and politicians reaching for language that carried a weight beyond their own words.

• 6. Glory on the Terraces

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  The "Battle Hymn" crossed the Atlantic in a form its author would likely never have predicted: as a football chant. The story of how the refrain "Glory, glory, hallelujah!" arrived at Tottenham Hotspur is unusually specific. In September 1961, during the 1961-62 European Cup, Spurs' first opponents were the Polish side Gornik Zabrze. The Polish press described Spurs as "no angels" because of their rough tackling. When the return leg was played at White Hart Lane, some supporters wore angel costumes and held placards with slogans such as "Glory be to shining White Hart Lane." The crowd sang the refrain as Spurs beat the Poles 8-1, and a tradition was born. The song was later released as the B-side to "Ossie's Dream" for the 1981 FA Cup final.

  Hibernian followed in 1963 with Hector Nicol's release of "Glory, glory to the Hibees". Leeds United fans chanted "Glory, Glory Leeds United" during their 1969-70 FA Cup run to the final. Manchester United adopted it before the 1983 FA Cup final. The records released by Hibernian, Tottenham, Leeds United, and Manchester United are all official releases of what began as a terrace improvisation.

  The tune spread beyond Britain and beyond football. Fans of the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club in Australia sing "Glory, Glory to South Sydney." Perth Glory in the A-League Men carry the refrain in their very name. The Northern Ireland football team's self-deprecating anthem "We're not Brazil, we're Northern Ireland", written by Stewart McAfee, uses the melody and includes the line "Mine eyes have seen the glory of Espana '82"; a studio recording featuring local broadcasters George Jones and Jackie Fullerton was released in 2006. The University of Georgia's rally song "Glory Glory to Old Georgia" has been sung at college football games since 1909. The University of Colorado has used its version, "Glory Colorado", as a fight song for more than a hundred years.

• 7. Adaptations and Parody

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  From almost the moment Howe's version appeared, other writers took the melody and turned it to new purposes. In 1901, Mark Twain wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated" as a commentary on the Philippine-American War; it was later recorded by the Chad Mitchell Trio. The labor movement claimed the tune for "Solidarity Forever", a marching song for organized labor in the twentieth century. In 1932, the American consumers' cooperative movement published "The Battle Hymn of Cooperation." The 1994 World Cup official song "Gloryland", performed by Daryl Hall and the Sounds of Blackness, used the same tune.

  Civil War-era soldiers themselves created alternative versions. The "Marching Song of the First Arkansas" followed the lyrical structure of Howe's hymn and has been described as a powerful early statement of black pride and a desire for full equality. The 1st German Rifles, composed largely of Forty-eighters from New York and fighting under Louis Blenker, sang a translated version about fighting for the freedom of the Union with firm belief in unity, referencing the Revolutions of 1848 after which they had emigrated.

  Leonard Cohen paraphrased a line from Howe's song in "Steer Your Way", originally published as a poem in The New Yorker. The Smiths' 1983 song "These Things Take Time" quotes the opening line, recasting it as "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the sacred wunderkind". Dream Theater incorporated the lyrics into "In the Name of God", the final track on their 2003 album Train of Thought. In 2019, former Christian singer Audrey Assad recorded "Your Peace Will Make Us One", keeping Howe's religious themes while removing the violent imagery. The melody has also been adapted in the Finnish military, in Japanese nursery rhymes, as the theme for a Japanese electronics chain, as Christmas carols in Indonesia, and as the tune for "Badluram Ka Badan", the marching song of the Assam Regiment of the Indian Army, with its chorus altered to "Shabash Hallelujah". The song Howe wrote in one pre-dawn session at a Washington hotel has become, in effect, a musical container that each generation refills for its own purposes.