'The Battle Hymn of the Republic': America's Song of Itself
On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to speak in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. "I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land," King announced. "And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." And then he closed in his lyrical voice: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." The next day he lay dying on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel, struck in the cheek by an assassin's bullet.
The last line that King ever spoke in public came from a song, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861. It was a fitting finale to the life of a great American because the story of the "Battle Hymn" is the story of the United States. The song, now approaching its 150th anniversary, is a hallowed treasure and a second national anthem. We have turned to it repeatedly in national crises. The "Battle Hymn" has inspired suffragists and labor organizers, civil rights leaders and novelists—like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
But most of all, the "Battle Hymn" is a warrior's cry and a call to arms. Its vivid portrait of sacred violence, we can see how the nation's experience is intimately connected to this crusader's cry.
