I am completely baffled in trying to understand why some Americans believe that the “Battle Hymn” song is patriotic. Surely they have never listened to the words. It is nothing but a hateful, war-mongering bit of drivel that belongs on the ash heap of history.
When people sing about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, they are not talking about wine-making; they are singing about killing fellow Americans. Terrible swift sword was not a metaphor, and Sherman’s swath of destruction through the South was no anomaly. Many Union troops felt a mission not only to defeat the enemy soldiers, but to destroy property and anything that might support the Rebel cause, including civilians. Some of the worst offenders were General Grenville Dodge of the XVI Corps, General James Wilson of the Military Division of the Mississippi, Colonel Noble of the 2nd Illinois Cavalry, Colonel Charles Smith of the Army of Tennessee 2nd Division, and Colonel Jennison of the 7th Kansas Cavalry, and there were many more. Many soldiers such as Custer only did in the Indian Wars what they had learned in the Civil War, conducting “total war” on the innocents. Soldiers today are put in Leavenworth stockade for acts that Union soldiers regularly practiced. Probably Southern soldiers would have been just as genocidal, but most of the war was fought in the South, so they had little opportunity. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania was the only Northern town burned during the war. A vast number were burned in the South.
Perhaps the worst thing about “Battle Hymn” is that wraps its hateful ideas in a mantle of righteousness – that those who committed these heinous crimes were doing the Lord’s work as His truth is marching on. The truth is that the Civil War accomplished only one good thing – the freeing of the slaves. The price for this was the killing of 620,000 men and the injuring and maiming of that many more. The price was also the destruction of the property of untold innocent people, the legacy of solving racial divisions by violence rather than by statesmanship, and the removing of freedoms of all Americans by concentrating power in Washington, D.C.
All the hateful things that occurred because of that dreadful war should be condemned and learned from, but they should never be celebrated with a “Battle Hymn.”