Who is the King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. (Psalm 24:8)

Today in 1861, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was during the darkest days of the Civil War, and Howe on a visit to Washington was touring a local Union Army Camp on the Potomac in Virginia. Having heard the soldiers there singing a tribute to John Brown, hanged in 1859 for leading an insurrection of slaves at Harper’s Ferry, she thought the words to the hymn could bear some improvement. Her pastor encouraged her to do just that.

Here is how Howe describes the experience of writing the hymn, which would be published the following year in The Atlantic Monthly.

I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don’t write it down immediately. I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.

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