The Story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic

by Florence Howe Hall

Before the peep of day.[43]

The best-known story tells of the British officer who was brought blindfolded into Marion’s camp and entertained at a dinner consisting solely of sweet potatoes. Small wonder that he made up his mind the Americans could not be conquered, since they were able to subsist on such scanty rations!

Reversing the text of Scripture, General Marion provided his men with swords made of saws, ammunition being scanty. He was as well known for his humanity as for his ingenuity. It is said that once, wishing to draw his sword, he found it rusted into the scabbard, so little had it been used.

When my mother, as occasionally happened in her later years, would quietly slip off on some expedition which her daughters feared was too much for her strength, we would remember her kinship with the “Swamp Fox.”

Of her parents, it should be said that both were deeply religious. Her mother, Julia Cutler Ward, a woman of very lovely character and intellectual tastes, died at the early age of twenty-seven. Her father, Samuel Ward, one of the “Merchant Princes of Wall Street,” was well known for his integrity, liberality, and public spirit. He was especially interested in the causes of temperance and religion, being “one of the foremost promoters of church-building in the then distant West.” He was also one of the founders of the New York University, and owned the first private picture-gallery in New York.

Thus we see that my mother, like so many of her fellow-Americans, came from a long line of God-fearing and patriotic men and women. In the words of the “Battle Hymn” we hear not only the voice of the Union Army, but an echo of all the aspiring thoughts and noble deeds of the builders of our great Republic.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Abraham Lincoln said of this law: “I look upon that enactment not as a law, but as a violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence and is being executed in violence” (letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855).

[2] From The Journals and Letters of Samuel Gridley Howe. Dana, Estes & Co.