The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
Brown’s Body.” One of the catalysts to the Civil War was a raid by John Brown and his sons (who had previously been active in Kansas) on the federal arsenal at what was then Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to spark a slave uprising. After he was captured and hanged, Brown became a martyr for the anti-slavery cause.
The 2nd Battalion, which was also known as the Tigers, was garrisoned in Boston at the start of the war. It included a Scottish immigrant, who was also named John Brown. His comrades, with whom he had formed a choral group, used to tease him about how he could be John Brown when Brown’s body was “mouldering in the grave” (Stauffer 2015, 128). After the Tiger regiment merged with the Massachusetts 12th Regiment, it adopted the John Brown Song as its anthem, an arrangement by C. B. March that C. S. Hall, a Boston abolitionist, published in 1861. The verses that praised Brown as “a soldier in the army of the Lord” proclaimed that “His soul’s marching on!” (130). Despite a very jaunty beat, the words were fairly coarse.
In November 1861, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), a poetess and social activist who was married to Samuel Gridley Howe, who was a member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, visited troops in Washington, DC. After she joined them in singing “John Brown’s Body,” her Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke encouraged her to write more appropriate words for the song. That evening in the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, she wrote out the lyrics to what is sometimes referred to by its opening line, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord,” but probably more often simply as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
There were a number of other contemporary army and battle hymns, including an “Army Hymn” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott,” which bore the same time as Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Gamble 2019, 56–57). Holmes’s hymn had included a reference to the pillar of cloud and of fire that had guided Moses in the wilderness (58).
Drawing from the biblical book of Revelation and other scriptural passages (Snyder 1951), as well as from “an extensive popular culture in which biblical imagery was omnipresent” (Fahs 2001, 79), the first verse proclaimed,
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 has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on. (Gamble 2019, ix)
45
In February 1862, the Atlantic Monthly published this and four other verses on its front page.
The song, which is one of the most religious of songs that are sometimes sung in a secular setting, takes its imagery of the winepress of wrath, and “the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” from Revelation 14 and 19. This book, which describes the end of times, is particularly appropriate because it reflected the manner in which many individuals interpreted the Civil War in apocalyptic terms, the conclusion of which they hoped would bring about a new age of peace and prosperity (Stauffer 2015, 134). Gamble observes, “Protestant Americans, and Christians in general, would have understood Howe’s ‘coming of the Lord’ to mean the Second Coming of Christ. The more orthodox their theology, the more literal this coming in glory would be to them. Whether postmillennialist, premillennialist, or amillennialist, liberal or conservative, they would have imagined Christ the Lord returning to judge the world in righteousness” (2019, 53).
The second verse evoked the camps of the Union armies with the Old Testament image of an altar, which was a place of sacrifice:
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on. (Gamble 2019, ix)
The third verse continued,
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.” (Gamble 2019, ix)
This verse’s reference to the hero crushing the serpent’s head is a reference to Genesis 3:15, in which God, after condemning Satan for tempting Eve, said, “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Christians have traditionally interpreted this passage as the “protoevangelium, the first announcement of the gospel” portending Jesus as the seed of woman who would conquer Satan, although some of Howe’s friends thought that the hero to whom Howe referred was not Jesus but John Brown (Gamble 2019, 59, 62).
The fourth verse continued with images that evoked both the trumpets of battle and the trumpet that would call for a final judgment where God would judge all men:
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on. (Gamble 2019, ix)
46
The last verse would have special appeal to most Christians. It proclaimed,
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on. (Gamble 2019, ix)
Stauffer observes that the song was at once “a heroic song, an inspirational song, a revenge song, and a comradeship song” (2015, 136). Although chiefly sung by Northern soldiers, many of whom also continued to sing “John Brown’s Body,” the song gained wider acceptance in the 1880s as the nation sought reconciliation. As Stauffer explains, “Southerners, too, believed that they had fought for God and freedom” (139). Gamble observes that the hymn has been published in more than “470 hymnbooks, gospel songbooks, Sunday School supplements, and patriotic collections for the use of churches” since the Civil War, and been used by a wide variety of denominations (2019, 67).
The University of Georgia later adopted the song as its battle hymn, as did the Progressive Party—Theodore Roosevelt wanted it to be adopted as the national anthem—and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The song was a favorite of evangelists Billy Sunday and Billy Graham as well as of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who quoted the first verse in his speech at the Alabama capital in March 1965 (Stauffer 2015, 140–41). It has special appeal among those who believe they are fighting for a holy cause, and is commemorated by carvings on seven pillars in the Lincoln Bay of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The African American singer