Fraternity-Testvériség, 1961 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1961-12-01 / 12. szám

10

FRATERNITY

of the great phrases of the Old Testament was a vision of the long blue lines, the pickets huddled around the campfires and the righteousness, the anger and the dream which the nation’s youth had taken into battle.

“I must get up and write these verses before I forget them”, she told herself. Later it seemed to Mrs. Howe as if the poem had come to her as a revelation from a source beyond herself. She had good reason to think so.

For years she had studied and practiced the art of poetry, counting the syllables, laboring over her rhymes, working for hours on a single stanza. In this whole original manuscript she crossed out or changed only four words, and a final stanza was discarded because it spoiled the climax.

After writing it down, she fell asleep for awhile, and when she awoke she could remember what had happened but found that she had forgotten the words.

The story varies as to when the Army began singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Probably it was taken up simultaneously by more than one regiment. Chaplain Charles Cardwell McCabe of the 122nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry read the poem in the “Atlantic” and was so impressed with it that he memorized the words. Marching along with the Ohioans, he taught them the “Battle Hymn” to the melody he doubtless knew already as a hymn tune.

Captured at Winchester, Va., Mr. McCabe was sent to Libby Prison along with hundreds of other Northern troops and herded together in a great bare room. Suddenly, a Negro who brought food to the men leaned over and whispered to one of the groups. There had been a great victory at a place called Gettysburg.

Men jumped to their feet, cheering, crying, embracing one another hysterically, and in the center of the room Chaplain McCabe stood up and began to sing: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” As he came to the chorus, every voice joined in, and the walls of Libby Prison echoed to the thankful words of “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” as few other men could have sung them.

Someone told Mrs. Howe of a large meeting in Washington, attended by the President, where Mr. McCabe told of his wartime experiences. When he spoke of that night in Libby Prison, he raised his voice again in the “Battle Hymn”.

“The effect was magical; people shouted, wept and sang together . . . and above the applause was heard the voice of Abraham Lincoln, exclaiming while the tears rolled down his cheeks, ‘Sing it again!’ ”

After the war, Mrs. Howe became a woman’s suffrage leader and continued to write, turning out travel books, essays and poetry. But no poem she wrote ever again reached the heights of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and her books seem hardly readable today.

When Julia Ward Howe died in 1910, the song that played the 12th Massachusetts off to war, which she had made into a mighty battle hymn for all Americans, North and South, was sung at her funeral by the blind children from Perkins Institution.

(Reprinted from "The Washington Post")