Mike Magee
When I asked my brilliant literary agent, Jill Kneerim, when I would know that my book proposal was ready for submission, she replied directly, “It will be ready when I say it is ready.” Eleven months later, in April, 2018, she finally green lit the project, and two weeks after that, in an orchestrated two-round public auction, it “sold” to Grove/Atlantic Press.
I passed over the highest bidder in choosing to earn the opportunity to be associated with a literary and cultural publication – The Atlantic Monthly – that dates back to November, 1857, when it “quickly became known for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by a long line of distinguished editors and authors that includes James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
Their book publishing arm, the Atlantic Monthly Press, was incorporated in 1917. A merger in 1993 with Grove Press gave birth to Grove/Atlantic. Grove was no slouch when it came to social activism. Founded in 1951, it purposefully republished D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Complete and Unexpurgated, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as a challenge to U.S. obscenity laws at the time. And in 1965, they were the original and first publisher of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
The Atlantic Monthly’s name change to The Atlantic officially occurred in 2007 and signaled a broader and more modern editorial platform, a digital presence and engagement with multi-platform modern media. At around this time, corporate offices were moved to Washington, D.C., and the magazine focused down on politics featuring a longtime journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg. A decade later, noted philanthropist, Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased a majority stake in the growing empire, and Goldberg was elevated to editor-in-chief.
Now a decade later, with America’s 250th birthday upon us, the very same Jeffrey Goldberg penned an opening editorial – “America’s Promise” – in the July, 2026 edition. Meant to provoke, it opens with “It is quite interesting, and somewhat chastening, to realize that the most important piece of journalism published across the 169-year history of this magazine was not journalism at all, but a poem…”
That poem appeared on page 10 of Vol. IX – February, 1862. -No. LII. It had five stanzas, and no title when it was submitted. The author, an abolitionist poet and pacifist, Julia Ward Howe was a contributor and friend to then editor, James J. Fields. In November, 1861, while visiting Washington, D.C. with her husband Samuel, she was drawn to a group of Union soldiers who had joined voices to sing a familiar tune titled “John Brown’s Body” with the original hymn credited to John William Steffe, a South Carolina born Philadelphia bookkeeper in 1856, and lyrics added five years later by Mass 2nd Infantry Battalion.
Howe was not so impressed by the lyrics which she knew well, but rather by the enthusiasm of the soldiers who clearly loved the tune. And she wondered, what if I were to write different lyrics? Might the soldiers take them up as their own and pass them along to others?
As she slept on the idea, she was awakened by the tune in her head in the early morning hours, and rushed to a side desk to jot down the lyrics that had appeared spontaneously before they were lost.
The words are recognizable as poet-generated and religiously inspired. For example: “I have seen Him in the watch-fires 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: His day is marching on.”
Julia Ward Howe wasn’t certain what she had in her hands. But she took a chance and delivered the words to her friend and editor James T. Fields. Her note to Field’s revealed her ambivalence: “Fields! Do you want this, and do you like it, and have you room for it in January number? I am sad and spleeny…Isn’t this a melancholy view of things? But it is a vale you know.When will the world come to an end?”
The rest, as they say, is history. It was published with no byline “as was then the custom.” She was paid $5. Field is credited with adding the “grand, martial, and commanding title.”
Historians say that President Abraham Lincoln wept whenever he heard the song. And it traveled well, far and wide, reappearing over a century later on April 3, 1968 at the Mason Temple Memphis, Tennessee in Martin Luther King’s final speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” the night before his assassination.
Goldberg shares his discussion with The Atlantic historian, Jake Lundberg, on the significance of Howe’s effort. In his words, “By the time of the Great Depression, the ‘Battle Hymn’ had achieved a truly national character. The song’s stature is such that it can be used to make a statement in a way that the official anthem (The Star Spangled Banner) never can.”
It is said that every half century since America was born (1826, 1876, 1926, 1976, 2026) we as a nation have been forced to debate anew the steep chasm between our highest ideals as originally expressed in the Constitution, and the reality which is often brutal and disheartening. And yet, in the process, whether during the years of Reconstruction, the Robber Barons, Watergate, and now Trumpism, we are asked to recommit to the possibility that we meant what we said.
We often fall back on competing images to gauge our progress toward goodness, and are asked this July 4th to somehow see and interpret our reflection in a now non-reflecting pool. We are, and have always been, imperfect.
And yet, we are also the heirs of Julia Ward Howe, and her final words in stanza 5 of her original title less poem – “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.”
