ROOTS Music History Podcast · ROOTS | Music History Podcast

The Story Behind the Song Trump Danced to at His Inauguration: Battle Hymn of the Republic

·47 min·3 clips

Julia Ward Howe says she “scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

The episode opens at Donald Trump's inauguration. The host says the song played during the ceremony and then came back at the inauguration-night galas and balls, which sets up the bigger question of why this hymn keeps turning up at major political moments. From there, the episode builds the song's history through John Brown. Brown is described as a man with strong religious convictions and a family deeply involved in military life and opposed to slavery. His father, Owen Brown, opened a tannery in Ohio. That tannery is where Jesse Grant, Ulysses S. Grant's father, once worked. David Hudson, the founder of Hudson, Ohio, also appears in the family circle and is said to have visited often with Jesse Grant and Owen Brown. John Brown grows up around those conversations. The episode makes clear that this background helped sharpen his abolitionist convictions. Owen Brown also opened a safe house in Hudson for fugitives escaping slavery. John Brown helped there and met people fleeing the South, which only made his belief that slavery had to be confronted directly even stronger. The host presents Brown as the most forceful figure in a family already opposed to slavery. That matters because it places him right in the middle of the country's rising North-South tensions. The narration keeps moving chronologically, with one event leading neatly into the next. The host also pauses to point listeners toward Brown's memoirs and another long book on the subject. Those asides give the show its lived-in, research-notes feel. There is also a note that Brown settled in a black neighborhood in New York in 1849, which the host treats as a striking detail for the time. Throughout, the episode keeps circling back to the song itself. It asks why The Battle Hymn to the Republic has become such a reliable fixture at high-profile political events. The answer unfolds through biography, abolition history, and the moral weight that attached itself to the song over time. What emerges is a story about a hymn that did not stay just a hymn. It became part of the way the country stages itself. The episode ends with that larger sense of historical residue still hanging around the song.

As heard by us

A familiar hymn is traced through abolition politics, presidential ceremony, and a very present narrator.

ROOTS Music History treats The Battle Hymn to the Republic less like a hymn and more like a running thread through American ceremony, abolition politics, and public memory.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

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Want the backstory behind a song tied to political ceremonies?

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