By MIKE MAGEE
When I asked my brilliant literary agent, Jill Kneerim, when she would know my book proposal was ready to be submitted, she responded directly: “It will be ready when I say it is ready.” Eleven months later, in April 2018, he finally gave the green light to the project, and two weeks later, in an orchestrated two-round public auction, it was “sold” to Grove/Atlantic Press.
I bypassed the highest bidder by choosing to win the opportunity to be associated with a literary and cultural publication – The Atlantic Monthly – dating back to November 1857, when it “quickly became known for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by a long list of distinguished editors and authors including James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
Its book publishing arm, Atlantic Monthly Press., incorporated in 1917. The 1993 merger with Grove Press gave rise to Grove/Atlantic. Grove was no slouch when it came to social activism. Founded in 1951, it intentionally republished Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Complete and Unexpurgated by DH Lawrence, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller as a challenge to American obscenity laws of the time. And in 1965, they were the first and original editor of The Autobiography of Malcolm X..
The Atlantic Monthlies name change to The Atlantic It officially happened in 2007 and signaled a broader, modern editorial platform, a digital presence and a commitment to modern cross-platform media. Around this time, the corporate offices moved to Washington, D.C., and the magazine focused on politics and featured a longtime journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg. A decade later, prominent philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs bought a majority stake in the growing empire, and Goldberg was promoted to editor-in-chief.
Now, a decade later, as America’s 250th anniversary approaches, Jeffrey Goldberg himself wrote an opening editorial – “America’s Promise” – in the July 2026 issue. Intended to provoke, it opens with “It is quite interesting, and in some ways sobering, to realize that the most important journalistic article published throughout 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 presented. The author, abolitionist and pacifist poet, Julia Ward Howe, was a collaborator and friend of the 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 Philadelphia accountant born in South Carolina in 1856, and lyrics added five years later by the 2nd Battalion Mass. Infantry.
Howe was not so impressed by the lyrics she knew well, but by the enthusiasm of the soldiers who clearly loved the tune. And she wondered, what if he wrote different letters? Could soldiers take them as their own and pass them on to others?
While she was sleeping over the idea, the melody in her head woke her up early in the morning and she ran to a side desk to jot down the lyrics that had appeared spontaneously before getting lost.
The words are recognizable as generated by poets and of religious inspiration. For example: “I have seen him at the bonfires of a hundred surrounding camps; an altar has been built to him in the dew and damp of the evening: I can read his just sentence by the light of the dim and burning lamps: his day advances.”
Julia Ward Howe wasn’t sure what she had on her hands. But he took a chance and handed the words over to his friend and editor James T. Fields. Her note to Field’s revealed her ambivalence: “Fields! You want this, you like it, and you have room for it in the January issue? I am sad and splendid… Isn’t this a melancholy view of things? But it is pale, you know? When will the end of the world come?” The rest, as they say, is history. He published that issue on page 10 of the February 1862 issue, without a signature “as was then the custom.” They paid him $5. Field is credited with adding the “grand, martial, commanding title.”
Historians say that President Abraham Lincoln cried every time he heard the song. And it traveled well, far and wide, reappearing more than a century later, on April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, in Martin Luther King’s final speech, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” the night before his assassination.
Goldberg shares his discussion with The Atlantic historian Jake Lundberg about the importance of Howe’s effort. In his words, “By the time of the Great Depression, the ‘Battle Hymn’ had taken on a truly national character. The stature of the song is such that it can be used to make a statement in a way that the official anthem (The Star Spangled Banner) never could.”
It is said that every half century since the United States was born (1826, 1876, 1926, 1976, 2026) we, as a nation, have been forced to once again debate the deep chasm between our highest ideals, as originally expressed in the Constitution, and 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 turn to competing images to measure our progress toward goodness; We ask this 4th of July to see and interpret in some way our reflection in a pond that now does not reflect. We are and always have been imperfect.
And yet, we are also hosts to Julia Ward Howe, and her final words in stanza 5 of her original untitled poem: “Just as he died to sanctify men, let us die to make men free, as God advances.”
Mike Magee MD is a medical historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s medical industrial complex. (Grove/Atlántico, 2020)