Wherever rise the peoples,
Wherever sinks a throne,
The throbbing heart of freedom
Finds an answer in his own.
So wrote the poet Whittier of Samuel Gridley Howe, remembering his services to the Greeks, to the Poles and others. The lines are equally true of his wife, Julia Ward Howe, and of the spirit animating her war lyric. Although written in the midst of the greatest civil war that was ever fought and won, there is no word of North or South, no appeal to local pride or patriotism, no word of sectional strife or bitterness. The God to whom appeal is made is the God of freedom. The enemy to be overcome, the serpent who is to be crushed beneath the heel of the hero, is slavery.
It is amusing and yet sad to find that some literal souls have fancied that my mother intended to designate the Southerners by “the grapes of wrath.” Needless to say that the writer intended no such narrow and prosaic meaning.
The “Battle Hymn” may well be compared to the “Marseillaise.” The man is to be pitied who can hear either of them without a thrill of answering emotion. Both have the power to move their hearers profoundly, yet they are as different as the two nationalities which gave them birth. The French national hymn appeals to us by its wonderfully stirring music more than by the words. We can imagine how the latter aroused to a frenzy of feeling the men of the French Revolution, when they rose to throw off the yoke of centuries of oppression and misrule. Feudalism perished in France to the fiery music of the “Marseillaise.” Slavery died in America to the old “John Brown” tune, as slow and steadfast in movement as the Northern race who sang it.
In our war lyric we seem to hear an echo of the old cry, “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” Yet we did not fully recognize its tremendous power until Kipling christened it “The terrible Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
In the closing scene of The Light that Failed[34] we are shown a group of English newspaper correspondents about to start for a war in the Soudan. They are met together for a last evening of song and merrymaking, yet one of their number “by the instinct of association began to hum the terrible Battle Hymn of the Republic. Man after man caught it up—it was a tune they knew well, till the windows shook to the clang, the Nilghai’s deep voice leading:
“‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’”