#7: Civil War Oddity from God Caused the Civil War, Chapter 2

The Battle Hymn of the Republic went from being a South Carolina camp meeting tune, to a memorial ditty for a Yankee Abolitionist (John Brown), to a national battle song of Calvinist theology, written by a Unitarian, for a nation that was about 82% Transcendentalist in its beliefs. The North’s Hymn started in the South. The South’s theme song, “Dixie,” which was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite tunes of the War, was written by a Northern minstrel, Daniel Decatur Emmett, on a rainy Sunday in September, 1859. The two sides were intricately intertwined in the roles they played as God’s orchestrated, as well as orchestrating, instruments. If God did, in fact, give the words to Mrs. Howe as she states in her autobiography, the Hymn might be seen as the preliminary message to explain why He caused the War.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the faithful lightning of His terrible, swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

This is not a pretty picture. It ultimately talks of Judgment Day when Christ comes to end history. The Civil War with its 600,000 dead, thousands more wounded, and millions of dollars of damage done is just a drop in the bucket of the ultimate destruction of the universe described in the Book of Revelation to which Julia Ward Howe referred in the larger context of this first verse. It is the imagery of blood flowing as deep as a horse’s bridle. It is the picture of a vengeful, all-powerful, holy God who will take no prisoners because of the magnitude of human sin He has endured for millennia. One question can be raised here. If man is inherently good and ultimately perfectible as Unitarian doctrine of her day stated, why would Mrs. Howe write that grapes of wrath and a terrible swift sword need to be part of the process? Simply improving and expanding educational methods should do the trick, as the Transcendentalists and Unitarians believed.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.

This altar and fire imagery presents a God of Battles, an oft-used phrase during the War, in which several thousand stacked rifles with bayonets thrust toward the sky seemingly pay homage to the One who is going to use them as His instruments to execute His righteous sentence. That sentence can only imply personal and/or national guilt of some sort, another Calvinistic principle Mrs. Howe rejected. The inevitability of His day marching to completion without chance of turning is predestination in its shortest expression, an idea that the Rev. William Ellery Channing would consider nonsense.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
O be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

Now she hears the bugle call for God’s attack against humanity that will only go in one direction, with no chance of retreat from His declared purposes, Judgment Day with Heaven or Hell as the options. In response to this unmistakable proclamation she calls for a conversion experience in answer to the trumpet call sent forth, something she herself apparently never experienced up to the time she wrote her autobiography.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Seventy-five percent of this song talks of God’s wrath, judgment, and sentence. The final quarter brings hope that the inherent nature of Christ, not His teachings which are to be guides to a holy life, completely transfigures human beings. The glory in His bosom, the heart of the matter, does not soften the human heart. God says, “I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.”(Ezekiel 36:26, 27) The verbs all express inevitability to God’s will that does not rely on human will to accomplish His ends. The method He chose to use was Jesus Christ’s death as an atonement for sin, contrary to Dr. Channing’s view. It is our duty in our current day, a cherished word to many during the War, to die to set men free in a way that transcends the bonds of slavery of the soul, not just of the body.

sources:
Deen, Edith. Great Women of the Christian Faith. Barbour and Co., Inc. Westwood, New Jersey, 1959
Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences, 1819-1899. Negro Universities Press, New York, 1899.
Browne, C. A., Revised by Willard A. Heaps. The Story of Our National Ballads. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1960.