"John Brown's Body" is a piece of American public culture that started to develop in 1859 following the radical abolitionist's raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry (then in Virginia), subsequent trial and execution on 2 December 1859. Before the raid "Pottawatomie" John Brown was a public figure both as a moral righteous outlaw and anarchist race traitor. This was visible through news coverage during Kansas statehood immediately preceding the Civil War. Kansas was important to the national balance between states with slavery and states without. America's original compromise between northern industrializing capitalists and southern plantation aristocrats was unbalanced by new (mid) western Free Soil states. This national concern translated into Bleeding Kansas before becoming the Civil War. Kansas' violent transitional period from territory into state followed indigenous depopulation and settler colonialism. This muddled authority included multiple contested state constitutions and extra-legal individuals like John Brown who tried to influence politics through violence.

Brown is a contested historical symbol. One version of Brown is a (mid) Western stormy revolutionary prophet, product of the charismatic Second Great Awakening, who is under direct orders from God to free black people. Another version is a quixotic tool for emancipation in thrall of New England elites who conflated abolition and industry. In the modern American pantheon Brown is an executed insurrectionist, martyred savior and sectarian terrorist. To most he represents a catalyst, punctuation or transition between the simmering contradictions of the founding--a newborn nation developing inconsistent culture; and the Civil War--the national resolution of one of these regional contradictions: slavery.

The Civil War marching hymn is the most prolific manifestation of John Brown the cultural artifact that belongs to both church choirs and Communist parties. The tune started as "Say, Brothers will you Meet Us"--a hymn from the American revivalist camp tradition, a characteristic of the Second Great Awakening. This tune has been credited to Steffe as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and as "John Brown Song!" by Greenleaf, Hall, Marsh, and others. These familiar versions of the tune framed the evolving popular lyrics that followed.

According to Kimball's autobiographical history of the song from 1889 it started in Boston Harbor which is a very powerful place in America's symbolic map. Kimball joined the Massachusetts militia in April 1861 and his battalion was the garrison at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. In the bunch were "many good singers..." They sang religious and secular songs including "Say, brothers, will you meet us?" which they altered, "quickened a little", and changed the lyrics to become "John Brown's Body." The song was about both "the old hero of Harper's Ferry" and a Scottish member of the battalion. This is the piece promoted by Greenleaf, et al.

Abolitionist socialite Julia Ward Howe reworked these lyrics to include allusions to Biblical Judgment Day to the song. This includes the [Revelation 14:14-19] about an angel squeezing people through a wine press at the point of a sickle: the "wrath of God...reap[ing] the vine of the earth." Another allusion is to [Revelation 19:15] about a "sharp sword...[to] strike the nations" before God takes over with a "rod of iron." Howe's fourth trumpet is inspired by the seven trumpets from [Revelation 8:6-12]. She describes a "judgment-seat" which might refer to [2 Corinthians 5:10] about good works but is probably another reference to Revelation [20:11-15] which features a Great White Throne of Judgment that unbelievers see before being thrown into a lake of fire.

The original version authored by Kimball and the soldiers does link Christian language like "pet lambs" and "army of the Lord" to a familiar hymn. The language of Biblical Armageddon employed by Howe is of a different pitch. She published the song as "Battle Hynm of the Republic" in The Atlantic Monthly November 1861. Julia Ward was married to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. Samuel was one of the Secret Six: the clandestine backers of John Brown. Both Kimball and Howe were working within the overlapping American folk music and Christian millenialist traditions but they had different tools and audiences. There are obvious class distinctions between the soldier's tangible work song and the socialite's hallucinatory protest hymn. They both spurred John Brown's corpse toward Civil War years after he was hung in Virginia.

The long abolition period included Brown's Bleeding Kansas, Lincoln's Civil War and Grant's Reconstruction. John Brown's mouldering body organizes against the chattel slavery without translation because that was the issue that animated the man. A subsequent period of American history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, was dominated by a labor movement and not abolition of slavery. In 1912, the song was reworked to become "Solidarity Forever" by Ralph Chaplin during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike. Chaplin was from Kansas and Chicago on his way to Tacoma. While in West Virginia he was inspired by the tune to "John Brown's Body" and wrote his most famous lyrics to the tune "Say, Brothers..." which is described by the LRS as "John Brown's Body." Chaplin's "Solidarity Forever" first appeared in the 9th edition of the Little Red Songbook.

The Wobblies added lyrics over the years. Steve Suffet has specific credits in the 36th edition of the LRS in 1995. Others featured on iww.org include "The New Solidarity Forever" by Jack Langan, "Aristocracy Forever" by Judi Bari and "Solidarity with Teachers" by Jason Justice and Malini Cadambi. Chaplin also wrote a preamble which can be seen in the 19th edition of the LRS. The pre-amble is a typically stark Wobbly vision of class relations, "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common..."

The song is only part of the dissenting media that John Brown inspired. Transcendentalists like Thoreau in "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (30 October 1859) were sympathetic to Brown's charismatic religious abolitionism. Emerson's "John Brown" given at Boston in (18 November 1859) is another in this tradition of speeches often presented at fundraisers. Whitman was at Brown's execution and wrote about it in "Year of Meteors." The most famous and replicated is probably Emerson's quotation from "Courage" (7 November 1859) which compares Brown's gallows to Christ's cross. According to Emerson's 1859 journal, available at Harvard's Houghton Library, Emerson lifted this statement from Mattie Griffith Browne.

Brown's final address to the courtroom from November 2 was published by contemporary newspapers and is used by historians, biographers and poets to give a true voice to Brown's vision. In it, he uses language inspired by the charismatic leaders of the second Great Awakening but it theology is less of Revelation and more of liberation. After referencing the golden rule [Matthew 7:12] and empathizing with prisoners everywhere [Hebrews 13:3], Brown explains that God "instruct[ed]" him to "interfere[]...in behalf of His despised poor." He doesn't dismiss the contradiction between his religious mission and republican tradition. Brown is "satisfied" with his treatment during the trial but "[felt] no consciousness of guilt." His "intention" was not "against...life...,to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection." His righteousness is being unbothered by the incongruity of his actions and rhetoric. His statement isn't a plea or confession. Everyone inspired by the martyred Brown replicates or reconciles this unresolved conflict of his life, between works and deeds.

The conflict that follows John Brown is that he was an individualist interacting basic parts of organized society like church and state. He created his own theology separate from organization but based in tradition. He disobeyed some laws and tried to overthrow the regime that enabled them but accepted national sovereignty in this world. He accepted his execution without protest. He was a killer, insurrectionist and heretic who is celebrated by moral Christians and the federal Union that executed him.