A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War

In this lively volume, Gamble (The War of Righteousness), chair of history and politics at Hillsdale College, offers a cultural and intellectual history of Julia Ward Howe’s poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” First published in the New-York Tribune in January 1862, Howe’s alternative lyric for the Union song “John Brown’s Body” has long had an enduring place in U.S. political and popular culture, Gamble writes. After the song reached a wider audience upon its publication in the Atlantic in 1862, it made its way into hymnals, school pageants, patriotic songbooks, and revival meetings. Written in support of the Union cause, the song was repurposed after the Civil War for a wide variety of national and international Christian, military, and political ventures, and, in the early 20th century, it was even under consideration for the U.S. national anthem. Howe (and then her daughters) also actively sought to manage the hymn’s legacy and protested instances of what they saw as misuse, including a public battle with Princeton professor Henry van Dyke in 1918 about his updated version. After his historical account, Gamble somewhat diffusely argues that Howe’s hymn moved from its Christian evangelical roots toward a less sectarian role in creating and affirming America’s nationalism. Readers with an interest in 19th-century American religious and political popular culture will enjoy this biography of a hymn. (May)