Marching On

     John is a common first name. Brown is a common family name. We can be sure that many men have borne the name of John Brown. 

    The most widely known is this fellow. 

    This is John Brown the anti-slavery agitator and Christian zealot, who considered himself on a God-given mission to eradicate slavery in the United States. Speeches and writings would never succeed, he thought. Blood would have to be shed -- much blood indeed. And so he attacked a federal armory in Virginia, hoping to spark a slave revolt. It failed.  U.S. Marines (led by Robert E. Lee) captured Brown and his fellow zealots at Harper's Ferry. This John Brown was the first person in the United States to be executed for treason, but he was a hero to many nonetheless.

     A couple years later, there was another John Brown serving in the Massachusetts militia. The southern states, eager to defend white supremacy, had recently declared war on the northern states. Infantryman John Brown endured a lot of jokes about his name: "Why, this can't be John Brown, John Brown is dead." As a group, the soldiers took a familiar folk tune and added some words about John Brown's body rotting beneath the earth while his spirit carried on above ground.

      A few months later, a lady of letters happened to attend a public viewing of Union troops and hear these soldiers singing. She was known for her critiques of the roles imposed upon women in society; her husband did not approve of that. One morning she got up and rapidly wrote several new stanzas for the song that one John Brown helped write about another. It soon became perhaps the best-known anthem of the Civil War. 

     That lady of letters was Julia Ward Howe. Her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, had secretly been (along with Frederick Douglas) one of the six people who funded the attack on Harper's Ferry. The anthem Julia Ward Howe wrote was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Its last stanza reads:

 

     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.

 

     Union armies sang this song all over the country as they marched to the battles that eradicated slavery on this continent. One suspects that the most famous John Brown, despite his distaste for liberals who fought the scourge of human bondage with pens, would have approved this particular piece of poesy.