Okay, to be fair, I fibbed a little. What most people think of as the music to The Battle Hymn of the Republic is actually the tune to the song John Brown’s Body. After John Brown’s botched attempt to start a slave rebellion in Virginia, capture, and execution, he became a symbol in the North of the evils of slavery, a martyr for the cause of liberty. The very popular half-song, half-march John Brown’s Body was a type of social hymn that conferred upon Brown a Christ-like Messianic status and condemned Virginia as a state of traitors to liberty. After the Civil War began, the tune was so popular that it was re-written again and again, with new lyrics added to the tune.
The most famous of these is the now classic Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe, There is a problem with it though. The song is nationalistic propaganda, a paean to the state that deifies not John Brown this time, but the United States of America. It turns what was a disastrous, bloody, brutal war that destroyed entire sections of the nation, not to mention tore apart families and friends, into a grand Crusade where those most responsible for the looting, killing, and destruction -soldiers- were made into symbols of Christ Himself. It is, in short, blatantly blasphemous. And in our present age, where the brutality of the State is so obvious the government’s true nature so revealed, that people are launching mass protests against it, the song is stupidly tone deaf to the corruption of the system itself, a corruption that can be traced back to (and beyond) the era the song was written. In a day when people are (hopefully) waking up to the sins of the State, songs equating it and its enforcers with the Son of God are obsolete.
So what is there to do? Well, we have options. My favorite comes from William Lloyd Garrison. Published on page 4 of the July 11, 1862 edition of The Liberator, he wrote his version during the same era as Howe wrote hers, but his never became as popular. This is most likely because he doesn’t mince words and lays the causes of the war directly at the feet of the nation itself. He sees the war not as some triumphant march or Christian Crusade, but as the scourging justice of God against a people so consumed by corruption, sin, and evil that they have allowed, protected, and prospered sick ideologies like racism and wicked practices such as slavery. In Garrison’s pen the “marching on” that is taking place is not an ode to war and war’s destruction as some twisted symbol of progress. Instead the progress that Garrison sees “marching on” is Truth and its revelation of the evils of slavery and how America had brutalized African-Americans, slave and free, with the hope that on that day when racial oppression ceases then Peace will replace war and strife. And on that day all of us will enjoy “sweet increase”- all one people, with one heart, with no poor among us. In other words, the ending of Garrison’s is a vision of Zion. That message is one that is directly applicable in our day and age where we see how far we’ve come but also how so much farther we have yet to go and when many are calling for a reckoning with the myths of America’s past so that we can stretch towards the greater tomorrow.
Our National Visitation
by W. L. G.
For the sighing of the needy, to deliver the oppressed Now the Lord our God arises and proclaims his proud behest; Through the Red Sea of His justice lies the Canaan of rest Our cause is marching on! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our cause is marching on! Hark! The tumult of the battle as it rages through the land! There is weeping, there is wailing, there is death on every hand! Before His fiery judgments what tyrant-force shall stand? Our cause is marching on! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our cause is marching on! For her manifold transgressions is our nation scourged and torn; She has forged the galling fetter- doomed a helpless race to mourn; And now she writhes in anguish, of her pride and glory shorn- For God is marching on! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! For God is marching on! No longer let her safety seek in refuges of lies! No longer with oppression make a sinful compromise! Let the trump of jubilee echo through the vaulted skies! As she goes marching on! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! For Truth is marching on! The blood shall flow no longer and all dissensions cease; For ruin, high prosperity – for horrid war, sweet peace; And Heaven shall smile upon us, and give us large increase, As we go marching on! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! As we go marching on!
Alright, so Garrison’s prose isn’t as graceful as Howe’s was. She seems to have been a better poetess than Garrison was a poet. But most of that seeming bulkiness has more to do with the way that Howe’s version of the tune has become the definitive version even though that wasn’t the case at the time. Even she had to alter the tune of John Brown’s Body in order to make her poem fit the music. When we allow Garrison the same leeway his lyrics work much better than they do when we try to graft them directly onto the modern tune of Battle Hymn. Also, I’ll take a song like Garrison’s which may be a little clumsy but whose message is more powerful and true over Howe’s glorifications of war and killing any day. The former is simply more Christian than the latter, so much so that I intend to print out the lyrics and carry them in my personal hymnal so that when the song inevitably comes up around political “holidays” I’ll have something much better, much truer to scriptural truths to sing. Glory, glory, hallelujah!