The new song spread quickly through the Union armies and was adopted by Union supporters who wanted to teach the southern rebels a lesson. That “something of importance” proved to be the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In February 1862, she sold her poem to the Atlantic Monthly, a well-known magazine, for five dollars. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me.” I… began to scrawl the lines almost without looking…. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don’t write it down immediately. I… awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. “I replied that I had often wished to do so,” Howe later wrote. A preacher standing with Howe encouraged her to write new lyrics to the tune. While there, Howe, a published poet, heard Union troops belting out a well-known marching song called “John Brown’s Body,” after the famous abolitionist, John Brown. In November 1861, a woman named Julia Ward Howe and her husband visited Washington, D.C.
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