Footstools in The Battle Hymn of the Republic

"He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on."

This, the final verse of the Battle Hymn, was written by Julia W. Howe (1819 - 1910) in 1861 during the early days of the American Civil War. Howe was visiting a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. when she heard soldiers singing the song “John Brown’s Body,” and was taken with the strong marching beat.

She wrote the words early the next day. "I awoke in the grey of the morning, and as I lay waiting for dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to entwine themselves in my mind, and I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses, lest I fall asleep and forget them!” So I sprang out of bed and in the dimness found an old stump of a pen, which I remembered using the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.

The hymn appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and Howe received five dollars for her literary effort. It was sung at the funerals of among others, Winston Churchill (1965),the assasinated American senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 and former US president Ronald Reagan.

Some commentators argue that The ‘Battle Hymn’ theme has nothing to do with Christianity or God. It is a political-patriotic song about the destruction of the South, written in religious terminology. Howe deliberately created the idea that the north was doing God’s work. It paints a picture of a vengeful God destroying His enemies the South, and elevating the north’s cause to that of a ‘holy war.’ In doing so, Howe portrayed the South and its people as evil and the enemy of God.

As a Unitarian, Julia Ward Howe believed the Unitarian doctrine that man is characteristically good and he can redeem himself by his own merits without any help from a saviour. She rejected basic Biblical truths such as a literal Hell “I threw away, once and forever, the thought of the terrible Hell which appears to me impossible.” Mrs. Howe also refuted the exclusive claim of Jesus, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” [John 14:6] by saying, “Having rejected the exclusive doctrine that made Christianity and special forms of it the only way of spiritual redemption, I now accept the belief that not only Christians but all human beings, no matter what their religion, are capable of redemption. Christianity was but one of God’s plans for bringing all of humanity to a state of ultimate perfection.”

Others suggest the song does not praise war however it praises the cause that war was being fought for. There is surprise in the shallowness of people who assume the cause for the abolition of slavery was centered in a small band of anti-christian radicals. There is nothing in the lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic that
any liberal, right thinking person could not agree with.

And so with the words "the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave, Our God is marching on." Julia Ward Howe was describing far more than the conflict between Unionists and Confederates. Indeed this was a matter of good versus evil, right againt wrong with Howe firmly on the side of the Abolistionists.

The author has been making footstools and other soft furnishing items for over 20 years.