Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 55

ESSAY

THE BATTLE HYMN OF
THE REPUBLIC AND
AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION
Richard M. Gamble

A

t the end of the Spanish-American War
in 1898, Florence Howe Hall praised
her mother's Battle Hymn of the Republic for
its "universal quality-a hymn for men of
every clime," she wrote, "who love liberty
and are willing to lay down their lives for
its sake."1 Howe's second daughter, named
for Florence Nightingale, looked to none
other than Rudyard Kipling to confirm her
faith in the Battle Hymn's universality. At
the end of the original version of The Light
That Failed, as published in Philadelphia
by Lippincott's Magazine in 1891, the young
novelist had indeed quoted several stanzas
of what he called "the terrible Battle Hymn
of the Republic"-"terrible" in the sense of
dreadful or severe, as in God's "terrible swift
sword" of judgment. Kipling depicted a
group of rowdy British war correspondents,
about to head off to Africa in the 1880s to
cover the Sudan campaign, breaking into
America's war hymn "by the instinct of
association."2 No matter what Kipling meant

by the words "instinct of association," and
however ambiguous the novelist's actual use
of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Florence
Hall took the reference as a compliment
paid to the global humanitarianism of her
mother's most famous poem.
Hall's claim for universality challenges
what would otherwise be an easy and intui-
tive assumption that the Battle Hymn of the
Republic expanded from a national to an
international anthem of liberation after the
Civil War, that what began life as part of
the Union's wartime civil religion was first
nationalized after 1865 along with a lot of
other New England ideology, and then
internationalized in the Spanish-American
War, the First World War, the Second World
War, and subsequent American conflicts and
interventions. It would make sense to sup-
pose that the North's most famous war song
found continuing relevance as imperialists
and social gospellers took up its stanzas to
justify intervention at home and abroad.

Richard M. Gamble is associate professor of history at Hillsdale College.
55



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