Lyrics
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 hath loosed the fateful lightning 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;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
He has sounded forth 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.
In 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.
Public domain hymn text (written 1861, published 1862). Words by Julia Ward Howe, set to a traditional American camp-meeting melody.
The Story Behind the Hymn
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" grew out of a single night in November 1861, during one of the darkest early stretches of the American Civil War. Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist, writer, and poet, was staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., and had spent part of the day visiting Union troops encamped near the city, where she heard soldiers singing the marching song "John Brown's Body" to a well-known camp-meeting tune. A companion suggested she try writing new words, worthier of the melody, for the soldiers to sing.
By Howe's own account, she woke in the gray hours before dawn with the lines of the poem already forming in her mind. Afraid the words would slip away before morning, she got up in the dark, found a pen, and wrote the verses almost without looking at the page, scrawling them out in one sitting. The poem drew its imagery directly from Scripture — the trampled winepress of Revelation 14, the sword and lightning of divine judgment, the marching advance of God's truth through a nation at war with itself.
Howe sold the poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which published it in February 1862 under the title "Battle Hymn of the Republic," paying her a modest few dollars for it. Set to the same stirring tune the soldiers already knew from "John Brown's Body," the new words spread quickly through Union camps and beyond.
More than a century and a half later, it remains one of the rare hymns equally at home in a church service and a civic occasion — a poem written in the space of one sleepless night that has outlasted the war which inspired it, still sung as both a hymn of faith and a hymn of a nation.
