Never Call Retreat

We tend to think we have one national anthem, but to me, we have always seemed to have two. The first is the official one, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The second is “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The two are different on every level. Only one of them provokes us to ponder our identity as a nation.

Visit amunra-opinie.pl for more information.

When we sing the first, we sometimes forget that we’re actually asking a question, and not a very important one. “O say can you see,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” begins, in search of an affirmation about the flag: It was there in the evening, when we saluted it; it was there through the night, when we saw it in the flashes of battle; is it still there now, as the day breaks?

The second brooks no doubt. When we sing it, we don’t ask a question. We testify. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” we proclaim, before working through four more stanzas of earnest witness—seeing, hearing, and feeling God’s wrath on the way to service in a great national cause.

The difference between the two songs is more than a matter of syntax. Though notoriously difficult for vocalists, “The Star-Spangled Banner”—recalling a single battle from a little-remembered war—is not a challenging text. The “Battle Hymn” is easier to sing, but harder to reckon with. Truly a hymn rather than an anthem, it is a song for serious movements and solemn occasions. It is stirring in its driving tune, but unsettling in its sanctified vision of violence. When Julia Ward Howe wrote it in a single blaze of inspiration, in November 1861, she captured the upright, abolitionist cast of mind common among many northerners: the idea that the Civil War was a holy crusade to end slavery and save the nation—a narrative of sin and redemption. When The Atlantic published her poem in February 1862, it quickly became a staple of American patriotic observance that would, in time, transcend its origins in the horrific destruction of the Civil War.

“It is a misfortune of popular songs that they spoil their own effect by constant repetition,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. remarked in an 1865 lecture on war poetry. The opposite is true for “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It has existed in a state of constant repetition since the Civil War, but its effect has remained undiminished and in fact has grown, though the song’s purpose has shifted over time. We will surely be hearing it throughout this year, as the nation marks its 250th birthday. The rousing urgency of the lyrics and music can’t be ignored—they seem to possess a power, according to the lyrics themselves, “that transfigures you and me.”

The “Battle Hymn” was part of an almost desperate lyrical effusion in the early phases of the Civil War. In the face of a cataclysm they were only beginning to understand, poets and songwriters poured out verse. Most of the work is now forgotten, its sentimental and romantic nature wildly unmatched to the grim reality of the conflict taking shape. In 1861, a group of prominent New Yorkers launched a competition for a new national anthem, arguing that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with its impossible vocal range and vague patriotic message, was “almost useless.” The promised $500 prize elicited many submissions—all of them, according to the organizers, characterized by “decent dulness” or “fantastic folly.” The prize was not awarded.

Walt Whitman grasped that something entirely different was called for. In “Eighteen Sixty-One,” he produced not merely a poem about the war but a poem about what war poetry should sound like. He addressed his words directly to a personified 1861: “No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,” Whitman wrote. “Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano, / But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying rifle on your shoulder.” Whitman offered the poem to The Atlantic for $20. The magazine declined.

Julia Ward Howe didn’t fit Whitman’s description of a manly war poet, but by her own admission she had held from youth the keen sense that she was destined to produce a great, age-defining work. Howe could scarcely have imagined that it would be a war poem. She had published two collections of verse in the 1850s, both of which tilted toward more personal themes, including the struggles of her difficult marriage to the dour physician and reformer Samuel Gridley Howe and the torments of her affection for a male friend in Rome. Like Whitman, though, Howe recognized the transformative effects of wartime. In “Our Orders,” published in The Atlantic in July 1861, she acknowledged that it was now the writer’s job to “wage the war of words,” though the poem itself is treacly stuff that hardly portends what was about to come.

Howe would tell the story of her own enduring contribution to the war of words for the rest of her life, and the legend of the otherworldly inspiration behind the “Battle Hymn” grew with the song’s stature in American culture. In 1861, Howe accompanied her husband and a group of Massachusetts dignitaries on a trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. While Samuel busied himself with the affairs of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a soldiers’-aid organization, Julia immersed herself in the wartime life of the capital. Her encounters with soldiers in camps acquainted her with a Union Army marching song, “John Brown’s Body,” that had originated among Massachusetts soldiers but spread quickly through the ranks. Set to the tune of an old southern hymn, it was what Holmes called “a strange song”—perhaps as strange as the wild-eyed abolitionist who inspired it; he was hanged in 1859 after a failed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Three times it repeats the line “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave” before proclaiming that “his soul’s marching on.” Then comes the thunderous “Glory, glory hallelujah” of the chorus.

Hulton Archive / GettyJulia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics to “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and John Brown, the abolitionist and insurrectionist, who inspired the song that Howe adapted to her purpose 

Howe had an operatic singing voice and was known in her circle as “Diva Julia.” One day, hearing her sing “John Brown’s Body” with soldiers on the road back to Washington after a troop review, a member of her group suggested that she write her own words to the song. That night, in a room at the Willard Hotel—looking out on an advertisement for a company in the booming, war-driven business of embalming—Howe did just that. The words came to her all at once, she maintained, as if through a visitation. Rising in the half-light of dawn, she rapidly scrawled out the poem in a fervid moral burst.

Howe removed John Brown from the song while enlarging his mission to the broader Union cause. She stirred in great heaps of the venerated biblical language—from Isaiah and Revelation—in which 19th-century Americans were fluent. The ease with which she composed the “Battle Hymn” may be explained in part by her connection to Brown himself: Her husband had been one of the “Secret Six” who had helped fund and plan Brown’s scheme to incite an insurrection aimed at destroying slavery. She herself had once met Brown, remembering him as “a Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.”

[From the December 2023 issue: Drew Gilpin Faust on the men who started the Civil War]

Although Brown was absent from Howe’s lyrics, his specter glared from between the lines, apocalyptic and militant. Whose soul was marching on with the Union Army? Who was wielding that terrible swift sword? Who had died to make men free? Brown had notorious associations with the sword; in Bleeding Kansas, he and his followers attacked and killed five pro-slavery settlers, including some by the blade. And Brown had animated at least some northern soldiers to understand their service as an extension of his crusade. Upon his death, he came to be seen as a Christlike figure by many, making “the gallows as glorious as the cross,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson is reported to have said.

At the same time, the obscurity of the connections—there for those who knew enough (and wished) to see them, absent for those who did not—was vital to the success of the “Battle Hymn.” It didn’t have to be seen as being about Brown, a discomfiting figure in many eyes. Immediately upon its publication in The Atlantic, the “Battle Hymn” was reprinted in newspapers throughout the northern states as a rallying cry. A New York Times article remarked on the power of the words, “warming and nerving the soldier’s soul like the notes of a trumpet.” The writer’s only criticism was that the “marching on” refrain called to mind a certain other song that the writer refused to name. Although the “Battle Hymn” would never supplant “John Brown’s Body” in popularity among Union soldiers, its diffusion into the culture was rapid. Only a few months after publication, it was sung at Fourth of July celebrations from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Marysville, California.

[Read: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: America’s song of itself]

Charles McCabe, known as the “singing chaplain,” was a Methodist attached to the 122nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He and others in his unit had been captured at Winchester, Virginia, by the Confederates and were being held as prisoners in Richmond. In 1863, upon learning of the Union victory at Gettysburg, McCabe led his fellow prisoners in a rendition of the “Battle Hymn” so spirited that, as he recalled, the prison’s walls “quivered in the melody.” In February 1864, after his release in an exchange, McCabe brought the “Battle Hymn” to a meeting of the U.S. Christian Commission in the House chamber in the Capitol, with Abraham Lincoln in attendance. Leading the chorus, McCabe brought the president close to tears. “Sing it again,” Lincoln is said to have called out.

The song took on a life of its own—or rather, many lives, and not always ones that could have been foreseen. As the historians John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis observe in their book about the song, Howe’s words were deeply sectional, aligning God with the northern side. But after the Civil War, the “Battle Hymn” came to occupy a curious and awkward position, with consequences that gave it national meaning. The original “John Brown’s Body” continued to be popular among Black Americans and many northern veterans, and continued to be widely sung. By comparison, the stately and transcendent language of the “Battle Hymn” made it seem more anodyne, less threatening. It was certainly more palatable in the former Confederacy. Among the gestures of goodwill and fellow feeling that featured at veterans’ reunions and other war memorializations—common throughout the country in the decades after the war—was the performance of both the “Battle Hymn” and “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, one after another. It is an abiding irony that post–Civil War reconciliation culture and its repressive racial politics helped lay the foundations for the nationalization of the “Battle Hymn.”

The song had grown out of a bloody domestic conflict, but later in the century its rhetorical force appealed to those with foreign ambitions. In an emotional appeal for military intervention in Cuba a little more than a month after the sinking of the USS Maine, in 1898, Senator John M. Thurston found a justification for war and an imperialist mission in Howe’s words. He invoked the final verse of the “Battle Hymn”—“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea”—as he urged his colleagues to advance the cause of humanity “under the American flag” beyond the nation’s shores. Theodore Roosevelt, who came to national prominence during the Spanish-American War, deployed the song in his return to presidential politics ahead of the 1912 election; he invoked it again while beating the drum for American intervention in the Great War, claiming that only those with “cold and timid hearts are not stirred by the surge of the tremendous ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ”

[Watch: Jon Batiste reinterprets “Battle Hymn of the Republic”]

Others found very different applications for the song. The International Workers of the World repurposed it into “Solidarity Forever,” which would become the enduring anthem of the modern labor movement. Black Americans kept alive the ancestral connections between “John Brown’s Body” and the “Battle Hymn,” and the words of the hymn were woven throughout the story of the civil-rights movement. In one notable moment in 1932, the NAACP convened at Harpers Ferry for its annual meeting and dedicated a memorial marker to honor Brown. The historians Stauffer and Soskis describe how the group declined to perform “America” at the meeting’s close and broke into the “Battle Hymn” instead.

By the time of the Great Depression, the “Battle Hymn” had achieved a truly national character. The song’s stature is such that it can be used to make a statement in a way that the official anthem never can. The acclaimed opera singer and civil-rights pioneer Marian Anderson performed the hymn, not the anthem, for a television audience of 60 million people in 1953. The hymn is a staple at presidential inaugurations and at the funerals of presidents and other national figures—Robert F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, John McCain, George H. W. Bush. It was sung in 1968 by mourners outside the Georgia capitol building as the body of Martin Luther King Jr. passed by. King had invoked its words after the march to Selma, and the last sentence of the last speech he gave before his assassination was this: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

As he was finishing his Dust Bowl epic in 1938, John Steinbeck didn’t have a title. Upon reading the manuscript, his wife, Carol, suggested one: The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck argued for it in correspondence with his agent. Its roots were biblical, but what Steinbeck had in mind was “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and its vivid elaboration of “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The “Battle Hymn,” Steinbeck knew, was a march, and as he explained to his agent, “this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning.” It was also true, Steinbeck said, that “people know the Battle Hymn who don’t know the Star-Spangled Banner.”

On official occasions, the “Battle Hymn” is today mostly performed adagio—the song’s grandeur can live at a slow tempo. But Steinbeck was right to think of it as a march. Its origins are there, in “John Brown’s Body” and the rhythmic advance of men going to war in 1861. Those men were only vaguely aware of the horrors that awaited them, but the commitment they expressed, in song, on foot, is the wellspring of the hymn’s enduring effect—its faith in American promise, its exhortation to persevere. Julia Ward Howe cast their commitment in the eternal language of a sacred text in order to create a sacred text of her own, and our own.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Never Call Retreat.”

Read full story at source