The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis

How did Julia Ward Howe’s pro–federal Union and abolitionist-inspired “Battle Hymn of the Republic” become the most recognizable American anthem of the 20th century? Why is it embraced by liberals and conservatives, radicals and businesspeople, whites, blacks and beyond? The story of the song, detailed exquisitely in this book by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis—respectively an esteemed professor of American history at Harvard and a newly minted Ph.D. from Columbia University—is more than a fascinating picture of the United States from the 19th century to the present. The book contains a multitude of stories that feature biracial friendships, social dramas and political intrigues. The whole tale is suffused with religious fervor. If you want to hear the harmonies within American civil religion as they sounded throughout American history, grab The Battle Hymn of the Republic and prepare to be moved.

The origins of the “Battle Hymn” are as fabulously twisted as the world of the antebellum United States. Its seeds were sown in the biracial evangelical awakenings of the American South. Revival fires had swept through the nation in the decades after the American Revolution, and from them a new song emerged, “Grace Reviving the Soul.” More commonly known as “Say Brothers,” it could be heard from the forests of Tennessee to the sea islands of South Carolina and in the Gullah dialects of slaves. The song migrated north into hymnbooks, but then it took an unexpected turn in the late 1850s, when John Brown changed America and a new song changed him.

After decades as a failed businessperson and an abolitionist zealot, Brown led a small group of African Americans and whites to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. The plan was to distribute arms, munitions and pikes to the hundreds or thousands of slaves who would flock to the uprising. They never showed. Brown’s group was defeated, and he was imprisoned. Several months later, he was executed. His physical body was buried. Another one was created in song and trotted out to war.