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NUMBER 9 Ira Sankey continued to sing "Hold the Fort," although his friend Fanny Crosby, the famous blind singer, thought that "The Ninety and Nine," for which Elizabeth C. Clephane wrote the words and Sankey composed the music, was the most popular of the songs he sang. As the leading gospel singer of his day he undoubtedly did more than any of his contemporaries to popularize Bliss's songs, as well as those of other writers. At the same time, according to Richard Ellsworth Day, Bliss's music "was the very foundation of Sankey's great career." It is not surprising, in any case, that the songs he sang in Moody's services should have become known as "the Moody and Sankey hymns," and so it was by that name that William Tecumseh Sherman knew them.

Sherman did not hear about "Hold the Fort" until June 1875, when the song was already five years old. He learned about it from William E. Dodge, who probably was a friend of Moody's and was a member of a committee that administered the income from the various editions of Gospel Hymns, as later editions of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs were known. Writing Dodge, Sherman remarked that he "was glad to know for the first time that one of [the] hymns of Messrs Moody & Sankey was founded on the defence of Alatoona [sic] Ga." In signaling "the fact of our coming," he added, "I do not think I used the words—'Hold the Fort'; that however was the duty of the garrison and they did it nobly—Manfully." French, the Confederate commander at Allatoona, also came to know "Hold the Fort," observing it was sung "wherever the cross is seen and Christianity prevails." As Fred Brown points out, it evidently escaped French that he could be taken for the prototype of Satan in Bliss's second verse: "See the mighty host advancing, Satan leading on."

In 1876 Moody and Sankey held revival meetings in the Hippodrome in New York City. Early in 1877, shortly after the death of Bliss, the revivalists, refusing to be intimidated by Bostonian culture, carried their evangelism to the Athens of America. Actually, they had been invited by representatives of a number of Boston churches, and a brick tabernacle—said to be "much the smallest, though one of the pleasantest, of the series of great buildings erected for the Moody and Sankey revival meetings"—was built to receive them. Frances E. Willard, the temperance advocate, conducted women's meetings, which were a feature of the Moody services. During one tabernacle meeting at which Sankey sang "Hold the Fort," Phillips Brooks came over from Trinity Church and "pronounced the benediction."