Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 56

MODERN AGE

That did indeed happen. But the historical
error comes in supposing that Howe's Battle
Hymn had to be transformed (or "reimag-
ined," as cultural historians like to say) in
order to be universalized. Not so. The poem
proved so useful in 1898, 1917, 1944, and
beyond because it had always been about
international democratic revolution. And if
this is so, then the Battle Hymn of the Republic performed by combined military choirs at
Ronald Reagan's funeral at the Washington
National Cathedral in 2005 was the same
Battle Hymn sung by Union soldiers and civil-
ians in 1861. America's Battle Hymn had no
need to be reinvented. It was born universal.
On the whole, historians and biographers
have not situated the Battle Hymn of the
Republic in the world of ideas and events
prior to 1861. Historians of antebellum Uni-
tarianism, transcendentalism, nationalism,
and the New England literary renaissance
have had little reason to pay attention to
Howe. Yes, she was a liberal Unitarian, inti-
mate friends with the members of the Tran-
scendentalist Club, committed to nationalist
causes in Greece, Poland, Italy, Hungary,
and later Armenia, and a respected poet.
But she was a tertiary figure at best in these
other stories, obscured by William Ellery
Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller at the
forefront, and by such secondary figures as
George Ripley, Frederick Henry Hedge, and
William Henry Channing.
Howe's biographers on the other hand
have their own purposes for writing, and the
arcana of liberal Unitarian theology, tran-
scendentalism, philosophical idealism, and
nationalist ideology concern them only in
passing as they delve into Howe's upbringing,
marriage, literary career, and involvement in
the women's movement and other reforms.
Likewise, two recent books, one on Civil
War songs in general and one entirely on the
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FALL 2014

Battle Hymn, do not need the theology of
Howe's ministers in Boston, the ideology of
the European Revolutions of 1848, or Howe's
larger body of work to tell their stories.3
Combined, the good efforts of all these
studies still leave a gaping hole in our under-
standing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic
and do not account for its quick absorption
into the American civil religion. One of the
most helpful books showing the connection
between American authors and romantic
nationalism is Larry J. Reynolds's 1988
European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance.4 Reynolds makes a compel-
ling case built on biographical and textual
evidence that Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne,
Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman, along with
Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe, all responded to the Revolu-
tions of 1848 in their art. Even those such
as Hawthorne and Melville who thought in
Burkean terms and feared the consequences
of these revolutions for Europe and America
could not escape their influence.
If you are curious about this link, reread
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sometime with
an eye out for what was at the time of its
publication the recent Hungarian revolu-
tion and Austria's repression of the uprising
and you will find the characters discussing
these events repeatedly. Reynolds does not
mention Julia Ward Howe, but the same
illumination of detail emerges once her work
is placed in the setting of mid-nineteenth-
century European history.
Howe's poetry takes on clarity, greater his-
torical texture, and more significance for the
story of American civil religion once it is tied
to both romantic nationalism and liberal
Unitarianism. The label "romantic nation-
alism" poses some problems in definition
and keeps scholars busy trying to sort out
its various manifestations after the French
Revolution. Moreover, the lines dividing
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