Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us?
Traditional
- Lyrics written by
- Julia Ward Howe
- Originally written by
- [Traditional]
- Publication date
- February 1862
- Composition date
- December 1861
- Language
- English
- ISWC
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T-902.649.618-4 ISWC
- Adapted from
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Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us? written by [Traditional]
- Comments
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"Battle Hymn Of The Republic" came to be when an abolitionist author, Julia Ward Howe, overheard Union troops singing "John Brown's Body" and was inspired to write a set of lyrics that dramatized the rightness of the Union cause. Within a year this new hymn was being sung by civilians in the North, Union troops on the march, and even prisoners of war held in Confederate jails.
As a result of their volunteer work with the Sanitary Commission, in November of 1861 Samuel and Julia Howe were invited to Washington by President Lincoln. The Howes visited a Union Army camp in Virginia across the Potomac. There, they heard the men singing the song which had been sung by both North and South, one in admiration of John Brown, one in celebration of his death: "John Brown's body lies a'mouldering in his grave." A clergyman in the party, James Freeman Clarke, who knew of Julia's published poems, urged her to write a new song for the war effort to replace "John Brown's Body".
She described the events later: "I replied that I had often wished to do so.... In spite of the excitement of the day I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately. I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of a pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me." The result was a poem, published first in February 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly, and called "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
In the late 1800s, during the song's height of popularity, a number of other authors claimed to have played a part in the origin of the song. Some sources list William Steffe, Thomas Brigham Bishop, Frank E. Jerome, and others as the tune's composer. Given the tune's use in the camp meeting circuits in the late 1700s and early 1800s and the first known publication dates of 1806–1808, long before most of these claimants were born, it is apparent that none of these authors composed the tune that was the basis of "Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us?", "John Brown's Body" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic". - Licensing
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