Memories grave and gay

by Florence Howe Hall

It was said that if the Confederates had kept to the old flag, instead of adopting a new one, they might have won. Yet we know that was impossible, because the corner-stone of the sovereignty they sought to establish was human slavery. The politicians and leaders of thought on both sides knew this perfectly well from the beginning. The rank and file at first felt it only dimly. But in the Northern army the men who were doing the actual fighting were not long in doubt as to the real issues of the conflict. They sang:

“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the ground,

His soul is marching on.”

Old John Brown, who had died on the gallows that men might be free! They had hanged him and buried him in the ground, but his spirit led the Northern troops to victory! The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a nobler expression of the idea dimly outlined in the John Brown song.

Reading in later years the accounts written by Southern men and women, I have realized that the war was never brought home to us in New England in the same way as to the people of the South. It never came near us, nor did we expect it would. Some timid souls were anxious lest the Confederate rams should visit our Northern ports. But this was only a brief scare.

While we were spared the grim horrors of actual warfare in our midst, almost every aspect of life was affected by the four years’ conflict. In the spring of 1861, on my daily walk to Boston, I saw the posters calling for seventy-five thousand troops to serve for three months. We heard with deep indignation of the assault of the plug-uglies on the Massachusetts regiments as these passed through Baltimore. Several soldiers were killed—the sons of the Old Bay State being the first to shed their blood in defense of the Union.

During the stormy prelude to the Civil War my mother had written many verses expressing her indignation at the crime against Kansas, the attack on Charles Sumner, and the treatment of John Brown, as well as her hatred of slavery itself. While the war was in progress her pen continued active in the cause of human freedom and of patriotism. We of the younger generation were especially interested in the composition of “Our Country” because the music was written by our master, Otto Dresel. The song had power and dignity, with the swing important in music of this sort. A prize had been offered for a national song, but I do not think it was ever awarded. To my mother’s regret, Mr. Dresel afterward decided to use the tune as a setting for Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Army Hymn.” She told him that the words and music belonged together and ought not to be divorced.

The hour was not yet ripe for the writing of a true national song. In these earlier poems we see how much my mother was moved by the tragic events of the day as the panorama of our national history unfolded itself before her eyes. The white heat of emotion was only reached when she saw the stern realities of war—the bivouacs, the camp-fires, the rows of burnished steel, the hosts of our country’s defenders. The soul of that army, the army of freedom, took possession of her after that wonderful day when her carriage was surrounded by the marching soldiers. That night the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was written.

So she gave back to the soldiers of the Republic their half-expressed aspiration, clothed now in words of fire. In every hour of national crisis, whenever our country is in danger, those words flame up anew in the hearts of men.

Nor are they for our country only. In this present war they have been sung with wonderful effect under the great dome of old Saint Paul’s in London as well as at the battle-front. For the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” terrible as it is, is a Christian song. No one could have written it who was not familiar with the language and imagery of the Bible, Old Testament as well as New. It was the daughter of Samuel Ward, Puritan, who wrote, “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” But it was the wife of the old Revolutionist, the man whose life had been one long battle in behalf of his fellow-men, who wrote, “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat.”