7. It Is Well with My Soul

The Story Behind the Hymn

Horatio Spafford was a successful Chicago lawyer and devout Presbyterian layman, a close friend and financial supporter of evangelist D. L. Moody, whose life was struck by an extraordinary series of catastrophic losses within the space of only a few years in the early 1870s. He had already lost his young son to scarlet fever and then much of his considerable real-estate wealth in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, when in 1873 he arranged for his wife, Anna, and their four remaining daughters to sail ahead of him to England aboard the French steamship Ville du Havre, intending to join them himself shortly afterward once he had finished urgent business matters delayed by the fire's aftermath.

Mid-crossing, in the middle of the night, the Ville du Havre collided with an iron sailing ship in the North Atlantic and sank within only a matter of minutes. All four of the Spaffords' daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta — drowned in the wreck. Anna survived, having been found unconscious floating on a piece of wreckage, and upon finally reaching Wales she sent her husband a telegram containing only two devastating words: 'saved alone.'

Spafford immediately booked passage to cross the Atlantic and join his grieving wife. As his own ship's captain pointed out, at his request, the approximate location where the Ville du Havre had gone down, Spafford is said to have gone to his cabin and written this hymn's text on the spot — meaning its opening line, describing sorrows that 'like sea billows roll,' was for Spafford not a literary metaphor but a precise, literal description of the exact water beneath the ship carrying him toward his surviving family.

The Spaffords went on, a few years later, to found a religious community in Jerusalem known as the American Colony, devoted to charitable and relief work among the city's poor and sick regardless of their faith, an effort that continued for decades and earned lasting local respect across religious lines in the region. The hymn itself was set to music by Spafford's friend Philip Bliss (also responsible for hymn 53 in this collection, 'Wonderful Words of Life'), who died in a train accident only a few years after composing the tune, adding one more layer of tragedy to a hymn already born directly out of catastrophic loss — and yet it has remained, for a century and a half since, one of the most enduring hymns of faith held together in the same breath as grief, sung at funerals, in hospital rooms, and in countless private moments of loss ever since.