John Brown’s Body

I love history.

Of every subject I’ve studied, history is the one I’m most passionate about. I love seeing how the different threads connect through time. I love to see how several things we would have never thought were connected – things distinct in our cultural understanding – are actually intimately connected in history.

On any given 4th of July, Memorial Day or Flag Day you are almost guaranteed to hear a symphonic rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic regally playing in the background. Now seen as a song of national pride, the history of this song has its roots in the most divisive season and figure of US history, John Brown, his raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the Civil War.

John Brown—America’s first terrorist[1]—was an American revolutionary abolitionist in the 1850s who promoted and practiced violent rebellion as a means to abolish slavery in the US. His fame began in “bloody Kansas” where he fought and killed pro-slavery militia and ultimately was sealed at his attempt of inciting the slaves of the South to revolt by raiding the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Though still divisive, after his execution in 1859 for treason, Brown’s reputation was reclaimed by many influential Northerners who saw his actions as sparking the Civil War and ultimately leading to the Emancipation Proclamation. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists, along with William Lloyd Garrison were greatly responsible for rescuing John Brown from infamy. Emerson said Brown would make the gallows as glorious as the cross and Amos Alcott wrote that Brown was the “type and synonym of the Just.”[2] Nobody, however, probably captured the significance of Brown more succinctly than the famous orator and Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who remarked, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at least, begin the war that ended slavery.”[3]

Therefore, John Brown’s significance, lost to many today, was unmistakable in 1860s America. Abraham Lincoln himself, who had originally resisted a Civil War, once remarked that an armed Civil War would be a “John Brown raid on a gigantic scale.”

Shortly after Brown’s hanging, a song surfaced in honor of his revolutionary life and death. The melody of this song, John Brown’s Song, was taken from an old folk tune On Canaan’s Happy Shore.

Two years after his death the song had become a marching tune for the Union Army. In 1862 Julia Ward Howe, the wife of one of the “Secret Six” –a group of wealthy Bostonites who had funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry — created his eternal link with American history by writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic to the tune of John Brown’s Body. The original melody and chorus were maintained from the original song straight through to the final version, proclaiming “Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!”

David Reynolds writes that, “With her memorable images of a just God; ‘trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,’ and loosening ‘the fateful lightnings of His terrible sword’ against the slaveholding South, she caught the essence of John Brown, a devout Calvinist who considered himself predestined to stamp out slavery. She had coupled his God-inspired antislavery passion with the North’s mission and had thus helped define America.”[4]

The Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Slavery, Marching Tunes, the Church, Hymnology, Lincoln and so much more all wrapped into John Brown and his little raid on Harper’s Ferry. If you love history, it doesn’t get any more interesting than that!

Check out some of the similarities between the songs below.

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John Brown’s Body

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; (3X)
His soul’s marching on!

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His soul’s marching on!

He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord! (3X)
His soul’s marching on!

(Chorus)

John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back! (3X)
His soul’s marching on!

(Chorus)

His pet lambs will meet him on the way; (3X)
They go marching on!

(Chorus)

They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree! (3X)
As they march along!

(Chorus)

Now, three rousing cheers for the Union; (3X)
As we are marching on!

***

Battle Hymn of the Republic

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

(Chorus)

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)