The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Cover of the 1862 sheet music for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
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| Lyrics | Julia Ward Howe, 1861 |
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| Music |
William Steffe, 1856; arranged by James E. Greenleaf, C. S. Hall, and C. B. Marsh, 1861 |
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"The Battle Hymn of the Republic", also known as "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory" outside of the United States, is a song by American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song "John Brown's Body." Howe's more famous lyrics were written in November 1861, and first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. The song links the judgment of the wicked at the end of the age (Old Testament, Isaiah 63; New Testament, Rev. 19) with the American Civil War. Since that time, it has become an extremely popular and well-known American patriotic song.
The "Glory, Hallelujah" tune was a folk hymn developed in the oral hymn tradition of camp meetings in the southern United States and first documented in the early 1800s. In the first known version, "Canaan's Happy Shore", the text includes the verse "Oh! Brothers will you meet me (3×)/On Canaan's happy shore?" and chorus "There we'll shout and give him glory (3×)/For glory is his own"; this developed into the familiar "Glory, glory, hallelujah" chorus by the 1850s. The tune and variants of these words spread across both the southern and northern United States.
At a flag-raising ceremony at Fort Warren, near Boston, Massachusetts on Sunday May 12, 1861, the John Brown song, using the well known "Oh! Brothers" tune and the "Glory, Hallelujah" chorus, was publicly played "perhaps for the first time." The American Civil War had begun the previous month.
In 1890, George Kimball wrote his account of how the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, known as the "Tiger" Battalion, collectively worked out the lyrics to "John Brown's Body." Kimball wrote:
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