To the Editor of The N. Y. Tribune.Horace Greeley (1811–1872) established the
New York Tribune as a Whig daily in 1841. From its earliest days, the title was animated by a spirit of reform. By the mid-1850s, the various editions of the paper—daily, weekly, and semiweekly—had almost 280,000 subscribers (Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009], 2). Greeley, a force in the fledgling Republican Party, adopted a more radical stance against slavery in the 1850s. During the war, the Tribune "advocated vigorous prosecution of the war and expansion of its meaning: namely, that the war should become an emancipationist crusade, and that the emancipated slaves ought to be armed" (Tuchinsky, 171–72).Former
National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Sydney Howard Gay managed the Tribune from 1862 until 1865. Gay sidelined his own abolitionist convictions and concentrated on satisfying the general hunger for timely war news (Tuchinsky, 217). But Greeley, in his famous editorial address of August 1862, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," urged Lincoln to make war on slavery as a matter of military and moral necessity. Lincoln, then waiting to announce the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, responded by stating that "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery" (Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 5:388).
Sir:
Inclosed you will find a hymn written by our
beloved and revered fellow-citizen, Dr. Muhlenberg,William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796–1877), an Episcopal pastor committed to improving church and social services for his city-based congregations. By the time war broke out, Muhlenberg was known as the founder of Long Island's Flushing Institute (St Paul's College) and the director of St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. In 1862, the government appropriated one hundred beds at St. Luke's, for sick and wounded soldiers (Anne Ayres,
The Life and Work of William Augustus Muhlenberg [New York: Harper, 1880], 344–45). By March 1864 Muhlenberg was an associate member of the US Sanitary Commission (Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission [New York: n.p, 1866], 2:15).
Muhlenberg advocated the use of ritual and devotional music in church services. He wrote hymns and published collections including
Church Poetry (1823) and The Choir and Family Psalter (coauthored with the Reverend J. M. Wainwright, 1851). In "Give Thanks All Ye People" Muhlenberg combined his interest in hymnody with his Republican politics. "I am no party politician," he wrote in his journal on November 6, 1860, "but I am much interested in the success of the Republicans as opposed to slavery" (quoted in Ayres, 336). He voted for Lincoln and cheered when the results were declared. After the attack upon Fort Sumter, he wrote that "if ever there was a just war, this is one" (Ayres, 336, 341).
founder of St. Luke's Hospital, and writer of the im-
mortalimmortal hymn, "I would not live alway." Will you not
give it a place in your columns, and use your editorial in-
fluenceinfluence to induce our people throughout the loyal States
to sing it in the churches on the approaching Thanks-
givingThanksgiving,On October 3, 1863, President Lincoln declared a day of national thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. Among other blessings for which citizens should be thankful, he listed harvest "bounties" and continued territorial expansion, the preservation of peace with "all nations" and a "greatly contracted" theater of military conflict. These "gracious gifts of the Most High God" should be "acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People" (Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 6:496–97). He also recommended that citizens "implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union." The day of thanksgiving fell on November 26; the hymn appeared in the Anglo-African of November 28. as "The President's Hymn"?
It has a right to that designation. It is, as a compari-
soncomparison of the two will prove, a metrical version of the
President's proclamation, which this year, for the first
time, makes our "Harvest Home" a national festival—a
significant and blessed augury of that "more perfect
Union" with which, with God's blessing, the war shall
leave us as a people.
Solicitous to have the highest authority given to the
use of this National hymn, I obtained the reluctant con-
sentconsent of its writer (author also of the music to which it
is set) to ask our Chief Magistrate's permission to style
it "The President's Hymn." The Secretary of State
through whom the application was made, telegraphed
me a few hours afterward the President's leave, in the
decisive style which has now become so familiar to
our people—"Let it be so called." May we not hope
that millions of our people will, on November 26, be
found uniting in this National Psalm of Thanksgiving,
and that "The President's Hymn" will be the house-
holdhousehold and the temple song of that solemn and joyful day!
It will help to join our hearts as citizens, thus to blend
our voices as worshippersworshipers; and the blessings of Union,
Liberty and Peace will sooner descend on a people that
can thus unite in its praise and hosannahshosannas.
Respectfully yours,
Henry W. Bellows.Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882), minister at New York City's First Unitarian Church and president of the United States Sanitary Commission. The USSC was "a civilian relief operation that coordinated local supply efforts, provided battlefield relief, and offered medical advice to the U.S. Army during the Civil War" (Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000], vii). Bellows played a vital part in its formation and management. Authorized by Lincoln on June 9, 1861, the US Sanitary Commission became "the largest, most powerful, and most highly organized philanthropic activity that had ever been seen in America" (George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], 98). Its extensive program required a massive amount of popular support. Hundreds of local soldiers' aid societies sent money and supplies to regional branches; branch managers then forwarded supplies for distribution according to the commission's instructions.