Five dollars was all she was paid by the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for her poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," published FEBRUARY 1, 1862.
It became Lincoln's favorite song and the Union's theme song.
Her name was Julia Ward Howe, the daughter of a Wall Street banker and the wife of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of a school for the blind in Boston, which grew into the famous Perkins Institute.
Julia and her husband entertained John Brown in their home and published the anti-slavery journal Commonwealth.
In 1861, Julia traveled to Washington, D.C., and saw the city teeming with military, horses galloping all around and innumerable campfires burning.
Julia Ward Howe wrote:
"I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight;
and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.
... Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, 'I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.'
So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper."
"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 lighting 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.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished 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 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.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth 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."
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
So profound was effect of Julia Ward Howe's song that Theodore Roosevelt dedicated his book to her, Fear God and Take Your Own Part (NY: G.H. Doran Co., 1916, p. v.):
"This book is dedicated to the memory of Julia Ward Howe:
because in the vital matters fundamentally affecting the life of the Republic, she was as good a citizen of the Republic as Washington and Lincoln themselves ..."
Roosevelt continued:
"She was in the highest sense a good wife and a good mother ... At the same time she fulfilled her full duty to the commonwealth ...
She preached that stern and lofty courage of soul which shrinks neither from war nor ... suffering and hardship and danger ...
She embodies that trait more essential than any other in the make-up of the men and women of this Republic -- the valor of righteousness."
After the Civil War, slavery was legally ended in the United States, but research reveals that there is actually more slavery today than at any time in history.
Many of the loudest voices demanding critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, and reparations for past slavery of Africans are strangely silent regarding modern-day slavery of Africans.
Christian Solidarity International reports over 35,000 Sudanese people are enslaved.
The International Centre for Investigative Reporting reports that modern slavery in Nigeria ranks highest in Africa.
Current slavery exists around the world, being called by different names, such as:
- generational indebtedness as in South Asia;
- forced labor in North Korean prison camps;
- socialist and communist countries strip dissidents of human rights and reduce them to servitude;
- exploited labor for mining and agriculture in South America and Africa;
- illicit drug production and trade;
- human-trafficking; and
- sex-slavery in cities across the world, including the United States, where the FBI has conducted stings during Super Bowl weekend.
Slavery is also part of Islamic Sharia Law, which has a long history of forced marriages, child brides, and slave markets.
Over the 1,400 years of Islamic expansion, an estimated 180 million Africans were sold in Muslim slave markets of:
- North Africa:
Tangier (Morocco), Marrakesh (Morocco). Algiers (Algeria). Tripoli (Libya), Cairo (Egypt), Aswan (Egypt); Khartoum, (Sudan);
- West Africa:
Aoudaghost (Mauritania), Timbuktu (Mali), Gao (Mali), Bilma (Niger), Kano (Nigeria);
- Swahili Coast:
Bagamoyo (Tanzania), Zanzibar (Tanzania), Kilwa (Tanzania), Sofala (Beira, Mozambique), Mombasa (Kenya);
- Horn of Africa:
Assab (Eritrea), Massawa (Eritrea), Nefasit (Eritrea), Tadjoura (Djibouti), Zeila (Somalia), Mogadishu (Somalia), Kismayo (Somalia);
- Arabian Peninsula:
Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Zabīd (Yemen), Muscat (Oman), Aden (Yemen), Socotra (Indian Ocean);
- Indian Ocean:
Debal (Sindh, Pakistan), Karachi (Sindh, Pakistan), Janjira (India), Surat (India), Mandvi, Kutch (India).
In addition to Africans, over a million Europeans were captured and sold into Muslim slavery.
Anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner wrote the book White Slavery in the Barbary States (1853).
In it, he documented that throughout the Middle Ages, Muslim Barbary pirates raided coastal towns from the eastern Mediterranean to the Netherlands, and as far north as Iceland, carrying away white Europeans as slaves.
They then sold them throughout the Ottoman Empire and the North African Barbary states of Morocco, Algiers, Salee, Oran, Tunis, Tripoli and Bacra, not stopping until forced to by the Barbary Pirate War of 1816.
Charles Sumner wrote:
"The Saracens, with the Koran and the sword, potent ministers of conversion, next broke from Arabia, as the messengers of a new religion,
and pouring along these shores, diffused the faith and doctrines of Mohammed ... even ... entered Spain, and ... at Roncesvalles ... overthrew the embattled chivalry of the Christian world led by Charlemange. (The Song of Roland) ...
Algiers, for a long time the most obnoxious place in the Barbary States of Africa, the chief seat of Christian slavery ... the wall of the barbarian world ..."
Sumner continued:
"And Cervantes, in the story of Don Quixote (Man of La Mancha) ... give(s) the narrative of a Spanish captive who had escaped from Algiers ...
The author is supposed to have drawn from his own experience; for during five and a half years he endured the horrors of Algerine slavery, from which he was finally liberated by a ransom of about six hundred dollars."
In Fear God and Take Your Own Part, 1916, Theodore Roosevelt wrote his address to the American Sociological Congress:
"The civilization of Europe, America and Australia exists today ... only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization ...
stretching through the centuries from Charles Martel in the 8th century and those of John Sobieski in the 17th century ..."
Roosevelt continued:
"During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors;
and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents;
... and today nobody can find in them any 'social values' whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influences are concerned."
In the spirit of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, Theodore Roosevelt concluded with a challenge:
"There are such 'social values' today in Europe, America and Australia only because ... the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do -- that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.
If Europe ... had not been able to defend itself ... there would have been no 'social values' ... and no sociologists to discuss them."
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Thank you. I enjoy these minutes in history and they keep my curiosity lit to want to know more. I share them with the intention of having others educate themselves on how we have come to this point in our history.