He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: (Oddly, it had been a southerner named William Steffe who had written the original music.) Howe’s version was packed with Biblical imagery and phrasing. The new song spread quickly through the Union armies and was adopted by Union supporters who wanted to teach the southern rebels a lesson. That “something of importance” proved to be the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In February 1862, she sold her poem to the Atlantic Monthly, a well-known magazine, for five dollars. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.” I… began to scrawl the lines almost without looking…. 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… 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 replied that I had often wished to do so,” Howe later wrote. A preacher standing with Howe encouraged her to write new lyrics to the tune. While there, Howe, a published poet, heard Union troops belting out a well-known marching song called “John Brown’s Body,” after the famous abolitionist, John Brown. In November 1861, a woman named Julia Ward Howe and her husband visited Washington, D.C.
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