Battle Hymn of the Republic
Julia Ward Howe - 1862


Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,
He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword 
His truth is marching on.

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
His truth is marching on. 

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps 
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps 
l can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps 
His day is marching on. 

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
His truth is marching on. 

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnish`d rows of steel, 
"As ye deal with my contemners, So with you my grace shall deal;" 
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel 
Since God is marching on. 

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
His truth is marching on. 

He has sounded form the trumpet that shall never call retreat 
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat 
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! 
Our God is marching on.

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
His truth is marching on. 

ln 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.

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! 
His truth is marching on. 
 

*For a while she and her husband published the Commonwealth,
an Abolitionist newspaper, but for the most part he kept her
out of his affairs and strongly opposed her involving herself
in any sort of public life. In February 1862 The Atlantic
Monthly published her poem "Battle Hymn of the Republic," to
be set to an old folk tune also used for "John Brown's Body."
The song, written during a visit to an army camp near
Washington, D.C., in 1861, became the semiofficial Civil War
song of the Union Army, and Howe became famous.

After the war Howe involved herself in the woman suffrage movement.
In 1868 she helped form and was elected the first president
of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, an office she held
until 1877, and from 1869 she took a leading role in the American
Woman Suffrage Association. She helped found the New England
Women's Club in 1868 and succeeded Caroline M. Severance as
its president in 1871. She was later active in the General
Federation of Women's Clubs International. She also took up
the cause of peace and in 1870 published her "Appeal to
Womanhood Throughout the World," a call for an international
conference of women on the subject of peace. In 1871 she became
first president of the American branch of the Woman's
International Peace Association.