The story behind The Battle Hymn of the Republic:
...when Julia Ward Howe heard the song for the first time that fall day, “John Brown’s Body” was already famous. She loved the martial vigor of the music, but knew the words were “inadequate for a lasting hymn”. So her minister, Dr Clark, suggested she write some new ones. And early the following morning at her Washington hotel she rose before dawn and on a piece of Sanitary Commission paper wrote the words we sing today, casting the war as a conflict in which one side has the advantage of God’s “terrible swift sword”:
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…She finished the words and went back to bed. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. They didn’t credit Mrs Howe and they paid her only four dollars.
Actually, that's the end of the story. The whole thing is way more complicated (but fascinating). You can read it here at SteynOnline, but be warned, you'll need a flow-chart or a calculator or something to keep up.
