In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis
  • Christian McWhirter
The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On. John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-199-83743-4, 416 pp., cloth, $29.95.

Few songs possess a history as complicated and confusing as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Its origins have been disputed since its creation, and its usage has always been controversial. It is—along with “Dixie”—the ubiquitous Civil War song.

This new study by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Civil War popular culture and its relevance both before and after 1865. Although the title suggests an examination of the “Battle Hymn” alone, the book is actually a history of all the songs set to the same melody as Julia Ward Howe’s famous anthem. In this regard (to borrow from the title’s metaphor), it is more of a family history than a biography. This is appropriate, as the authors correctly argue that the tune’s four most famous versions (“Say Brothers Will You [End Page 348] Meet Us,” “John Brown’s Body,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Solidarity Forever”) carry traces of each other in their usage and resonance.

Stauffer and Soskis are at their best when discussing the roots of these songs. The book’s greatest contribution is the way it untangles the history behind “Say Brothers” and conclusively dispels several creation myths, especially the still-persistent claim of southern songwriter William Steffe. The chapters on “John Brown’s Body” and the “Battle Hymn” add little to the already existing corpus of research but offer some valuable insights. The authors’ analysis of how the “Battle Hymn” fit into northern political and religious motivations is especially noteworthy, particularly the way they contrast the militancy and millennialism of Howe’s lyrics with the doubt and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Stauffer and Soskis could have engaged more directly with claims by Bell Irvin Wiley and others that the “Battle Hymn” did not enjoy significant popularity during the Civil War, but otherwise these chapters effectively analyze how these songs reflected and shaped mid-nineteenth-century America.

The later chapters, which examine how different groups laid claim to the “Battle Hymn”’s millennialism and Manichean worldview, are comparatively weaker. Each highlights a specific movement—progressivism, labor, fundamentalism, or civil rights—but focuses on a specific personality within each: Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Chaplin, Billy Sunday, and Martin Luther King Jr., respectively. This approach works most successfully in the labor chapter; as Chaplin’s tragic and troubled relationship with his own revision, “Solidarity Forever,” is fascinating. However, the music often disappears for several pages in these chapters as biographical detail dominates the text. Furthermore, the religious and ideological links between these historical actors and the “Battle Hymn” are often indirect and sometimes the product of analytical inference rather than concrete evidence. The book’s lengthy conclusion is more effective because it places the song in the foreground and traces its usage over a specific period of time (from World War II to the present). Indeed, the conclusion could serve as a model for future scholarship.

The book’s other weakness lies in its fourth chapter, in which Stauffer and Soskis contend that the “Battle Hymn” was effectively deprived of its sectional connotations by the end of the nineteenth century. They argue veterans and politicians, eager to supplant an emancipationist narrative of the Civil War with one that better fostered reconciliation, forgot or willfully ignored the abolitionism carried over from “John Brown’s Body” and best expressed in the “Battle Hymn”’s final stanza. While it is true many Americans, particularly in the North, endeavored to make the “Battle Hymn” into a conciliatory anthem, there is ample evidence many others, particularly in the South, never viewed it as such. [End Page 349] By concentrating primarily on northerners, Stauffer and Soskis overestimate how quickly the song transformed into a truly national anthem.

These criticisms aside, the authors make a significant contribution to...

pdf

Share