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Some history of the Battle Hymn of the Republic

The tune was written around 1855 by William Steffe. The first known lyrics were called "Canaan's Happy Shore" or "Brothers, Will You Meet Me?" and the song was sung as a campfire spiritual. The tune spread across the United States, taking on many sets of new lyrics.

Thomas Bishop, from Vermont, joined the Massachusetts Infantry before the outbreak of war and compiled a popular set of lyrics, circa 1860, titled "John Brown's Body" which became one of his unit's walking songs. According to writer Irwin Silber (who has written a book about Civil War folk songs), the original lyrics were only obliquely about John Brown, the famed abolitionist. More particularly the lyrics were about a Scotsman of the same name who was a member of the 12th Massachusetts Regiment, and the lyrics were composed to poke some good-natured fun at the runty, mild-mannered Scotsman who shared the same name as the much more famous and fearsome abolitionist.^[1]

Bishop's battalion was dispatched to Washington, D.C. early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops in Washington. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company "K" of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. By this time the association with the diminutive Scotsman John Brown was forgotten or unknown to most listeners, who heard only a rough and somewhat oddly-phrased marching song about John Brown the abolitionist. Howe's companion at the review, the Reverend James Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men's song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" [1]. Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, "I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, 'I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.' So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper."^[2]

Howe's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly of February 1862. The sixth verse written by Howe, which is less commonly sung, was not published at that time. The song was also published as a broadside in 1863 by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments in Philadelphia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has made numerous recordings of Julia Ward Howe's Civil War song, performed from the 1944 arrangement by Peter J. Wilhousky, which has become the preferred one for choruses everywhere.

It should be mentioned that in the 1944 arrangement, the last verse ends with the original words: "As He died to make men holy, Let us DIE to make men free." This was later changed for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir recordings to:
"As He died to make make holy, Let us LIVE to make men free."

That is the same as changing the words of a valuable historical document and is typical of "politically correct" changes made to songs from the past to make them more appealing.

http://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/BattleHymnoftheRepublic.htm