Fraternity-Testvériség, 1961 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1961-12-01 / 12. szám
FRATERNITY THE WAR SONG THAT CAME OUT OF THE DAWN BY LOUISE HALL THARP The following story, condensed from the magazine “American Heritage”, is by the author of “Three Saints and a Sinner”, a book about Julia Ward Howe and her family. ★ ★ ★ Just four days after the Confederation fired on Ft. Sumter, the 12th Massachusetts marched through the streets of Boston on its way to the Worcester and Western Railroad Station. Every one of the men was a volunteer, and proud of it, and everything that was youth and eagerness and adventure was in the air that April day as they passed in review for the crowds to see and cheer. This was the great crusade, and the boys in new blue uniforms, with their glistening guns and bright bayonets, were on the march to make things right. To cap it all, they had a song — a truly great marching song that every outfit in the Union Army would be singing before long. Not many of these troops knew it, but this music had been composed by a Southerner named William Steife. It had started life about 10 years earlier as a camp meeting hymn in Charleston, S. C., and Steife called it “Say Brothers, Will We Meet You Over on the Other Shore?” One way or another, the regulars of the Second United States Infantry had picked up the melody, fitted new words to it and brought it along with them to Boston. That was where the 12th Massachusetts learned it, and anyone who saw the men on their way to war and heard them boom out the words, “John Brown’s body lies amoldering in the grave, his soul is marching on”, could tell it was their favorite. No one quite knew where the train would take them, but nearly everyone in Boston was out to see them get on it. Somewhere in the crowd that day was a small, attractive woman, just past 40, and the song she heard the soldiers sing was one she never forgot. In the Boston of 1861, only a stranger would have asked who Julia Ward Howe was, but the replies would have been as varied as the points of view. Most people knew her as a staunch opponent of slavery and the wife of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, reformer, abolitionist and director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Old friends had a different version. Mrs. Howe had been the wealthy Julia Ward of Bond Street, New York. Her father was Samuel Ward, head of the great banking firm of Prime, Ward & King. She was related to the Astors by a marriage of her colorful brother, Sam Ward, Forty-Niner, Wall Street plunger and playmate of princes. An authentic New York belle, red-haired Julia Ward had descended upon Boston society several times a year to captivate young men with her operatic voice and wicked wit. Nearly everything she did both shocked and fascinated her father’s Boston friends.
