Howe had an operatic singing voice and was known in her circle as “Diva Julia.” One day, hearing her sing “John Brown’s Body” with soldiers on the road back to Washington after a troop review, a member of her group suggested that she write her own words to the song. That night, in a room at the Willard Hotel—looking out on an advertisement for a company in the booming, war-driven business of embalming—Howe did just that. The words came to her all at once, she maintained, as if through a visitation. Rising in the half-light of dawn, she rapidly scrawled out the poem in a fervid moral burst.
Howe removed John Brown from the song while enlarging his mission to the broader Union cause. She stirred in great heaps of the venerated biblical language—from Isaiah and Revelation—in which 19th-century Americans were fluent. The ease with which she composed the “Battle Hymn” may be explained in part by her connection to Brown himself: Her husband had been one of the “Secret Six” who had helped fund and plan Brown’s scheme to incite an insurrection aimed at destroying slavery. She herself had once met Brown, remembering him as “a Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.”
Although Brown was absent from Howe’s lyrics, his specter glared from between the lines, apocalyptic and militant. Whose soul was marching on with the Union Army? Who was wielding that terrible swift sword? Who had died to make men free? Brown had notorious associations with the sword; in Bleeding Kansas, he and his followers attacked and killed five pro-slavery settlers, including some by the blade. And Brown had animated at least some northern soldiers to understand their service as an extension of his crusade. Upon his death, he came to be seen as a Christlike figure by many, making “the gallows as glorious as the cross,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson is reported to have said.
At the same time, the obscurity of the connections—there for those who knew enough (and wished) to see them, absent for those who did not—was vital to the success of the “Battle Hymn.” It didn’t have to be seen as being about Brown, a discomfiting figure in many eyes. Immediately upon its publication in The Atlantic, the “Battle Hymn” was reprinted in newspapers throughout the northern states as a rallying cry. A New York Times article remarked on the power of the words, “warming and nerving the soldier’s soul like the notes of a trumpet.” The writer’s only criticism was that the “marching on” refrain called to mind a certain other song that the writer refused to name. Although the “Battle Hymn” would never supplant “John Brown’s Body” in popularity among Union soldiers, its diffusion into the culture was rapid. Only a few months after publication, it was sung at Fourth of July celebrations from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Marysville, California.