Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/84

 496 Patriotic Songs and Hymns in 1861 at New Orleans, it made an especially sensational "hit" and soon all the Confederate states rang with it.' On 30 April of that year The Natchez Courier printed Albert B. Pike's "Southrons, hear your country call you," a stirring lyric itself, but only a temporary substitute for the Emmett words, "I wish I was in de land ob cotton," the first stanza of which is known everywhere in America. Fanny J. Crosby's attempt to regain the tune for the North with her "On ye patriots to the battle" was wholly unsuccessful; the other Southern variants died away; Pike's version is now a literary memory; but Emmett's original words and music still bring people to their feet as no other song in America does. They stand in deference to the tradition of The Star Spangled Banner, but they rise to Dixie itself. The melody for The Battle Hymn oj the Republic has had quite the most varied career in the history of American patri- otic song. It came into being as a Southern camp-meeting song early enough to have been included in Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Collection of 1852. With the organization of the 1 2th Massachusetts Infantry in 1861 two Maine men in the second battalion introduced to camp "Say brothers, will you meet us, On Canaan's happy shore? " To this melody the glee club of the unit evolved a set of verses half applied to one of their own members, a Scotch John Brown. When these words became the characteristic song of the regiment, the officers tried in vain to have the words applied to Ellsworth, the first Northern commissioned officer who had fallen in the War. Inevitably many new versions were composed on John Brown of Ossawatomie — by H. H. Brownell, Edna Dean Proctor, Charles Sprague Hall, and anonymous writers; and from these developed variants beyond recall. The hymn had become a war ballad of widest popularity; but the ballad was to be rehabilitated as a hymn again. This occurred when Julia Ward Howe, one of a party to visit the Army of the Potomac in December, 1861, was urged by James Freeman Clarke to dignify the chant with adequate words. Her attempt was christened by James T. Fields and appeared in the Atlantic, February, 1862, as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The marked differences between these three lyrics show how vital ' See, also. Book III, Chap. ill.