I happened to be in Boston the day that Fletcher Webster’s regiment (the 12th Mass. Volunteers) came up from Fort Warren, landed on Long Wharf, and marched up State Street past the old State House, on their way to take the train for the Front, in the summer of 1861. As they came along, a quartette, of which Capt. Howard Jenkins, then a sergeant in this regiment, was a tenor voice, was singing something sonorous, which I had never heard. I asked my college friend Jacobsen, of Baltimore, who stood near me, “What are they singing?” He replied, “That boy on the sidewalk is selling copies.” I approached him and bought a handbill which, without the music, contained the rude words of the John Brown song, which I then heard for the first time, but listened to a thousand times afterward during the progress of the emancipating Civil War--before they were superseded by Mrs. Howe’s inspired lines, which now take their place almost everywhere. The chorus was borne by the marching soldiers, who had practised it in their drills at the Fort; indeed, it had been adapted from a camp-meeting hymn to a marching song, for which it is admirably fitted, by the bandmaster of Col. Webster’s regiment, and afterward revised by Dodworth’s military band, then the best in the country. It was this thrilling music, with its resounding religious chorus, which Mrs. Howe, in company with our Massachusetts Governor Andrew, heard near the Potomac, the next November, in the evening camps that encircled Washington. Yours ever, F. B. SANBORN. The following account of Mrs. Howe’s visit to Washington and of the circumstances connected with the writing of the “Battle Hymn” was written by Mr. A. J. Bloor, assistant secretary of the U. S. Sanitary Commission: “JULIA WARD HOWE “It was the writer’s privilege to be introduced early in the Civil War to Julia Ward Howe, the author of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ and now, through the fullness of her days, the dean of American literature, though recognized long ago as having employed her high gift of utterance not merely as the magnet to attract to herself an advantageous celebrity, but paramountly as the instrument for the righting of wrong and the amelioration of the current conditions of humanity.