Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 63

THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC AND AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION

ideals that had already been nationalized in
the fiery furnace of the Civil War. The his-
tory of the American civil religion does not
describe an arc of eschatological fulfillment.
The truth is almost the reverse.
Instead, a century and a half ago an inter-
nationalist vision of an American eschaton
was made national. This is what Julia Ward
Howe and her Battle Hymn helped achieve.
America as an "idea" was invented in the
decades leading up to the Civil War by
reformers who had one eye on Europe and
the other eye on America, who saw the rising
tide of nationalism, liberalism, and democ-
racy as a global emancipatory process that
had to be made to redeem America, while
America, acting as its truest self, would play
a leading, inspiring role in world transforma-
tion. This generation of idealists, every bit
as much as Bellah's in the 1960s, believed
it lived in a "revolutionary world" and acted
on that belief. The paradox is that such a nar-
rowly provincial understanding of America
as cultivated in Boston in the mid-nineteenth
century should come to be interpreted as
definitively American and the nation's gift to
a world remade in its own image.
Rudyard Kipling's reason for ending the
1891 version of The Light That Failed with a
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few stanzas of the Battle Hymn is hard to pin-
point. He seems not to have left behind any
explanation for its prominence in the novel's
closing scene. As the British journalists reach
the hymn's final verse and begin to sing, "In
the beauty of the lilies," one character stops
them and says, "Hold on. . . . We've nothing
to do with that. It belongs to another man"-
meaning Christ. But then the main character,
the artist Dick Heldar, who is going blind,
says, "No . . . the other man belongs."21 And
with that ambiguous, mysterious objection,
the novel ends. Whether the young Kipling
signaled by these words his belief that Christ
belonged with the British army in the Sudan,
or that Christ endorsed the British Empire,
or that the Battle Hymn of the Republic really
was meant, as Florence Howe Hall later
claimed, "for men of every clime who love
liberty," Julia Ward Howe's poem as written
in 1861 affirmed her own judgment that "the
other man belongs"-her Christ belonged in
the Greek war for independence, in Poland,
in Hungary, in Italy, and along the Potomac
as North battled South. For Howe and Bos-
ton's elite, the American Civil War erupted
in a global context of progressive historical
development as soldiers in blue died to make
men free.

Florence Howe Hall, "The Building of a Nation's War Hymn-I," The Independent 50 (September 15, 1898): 755-58, and
"The Building of a Nation's War Hymn-II," The Independent 50 (September 22, 1898): 830-32. Quotation at p. 831.
Emphasis in the original.
Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, edited with an introduction and notes by Paul Fox (Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets,
2011): 200-201.
See Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2013), and John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That
Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), 229-30.
Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999),
156-59.
Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 1:138.
"Rome," in Julia Ward Howe, Passion-Flowers (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), 26-27. The book was available in
print by December 1853.
Howe, Reminiscences, 194-95.
"From Newport to Rome," in Howe, Passion-Flowers, 59-67. The Wards owned a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1866 George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, directly associated the Franco-Prussian War and Prussia's unification of
Germany with the Union cause. Charles Crowe, George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1967), 257.
Edward D. Snyder, "The Biblical Background of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' " New England Quarterly 24, no. 2 (June
1951): 231-38.
Gary Williams, Hungry Heart, 268n57.

Modern Age - Fall 2014

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