On November 18, 1861, the Lord began to speak a beautiful word of hope to a fractured American society as a woman by the name of Julia Ward Howe slept fitfully while troops marched in the streets below. As she lay waiting for the dawn, the lines of a beautiful poem began to fashion themselves in her thoughts. The memory of some of the greatest lines in the Old Testament came to her mind, mingled with the faces of soldiers seated around campfires and battle trumpets recently heard. The cost of the Civil War had not been counted; the horror of the war had not been foreseen. It had been entered upon in excitement, almost a pleasurable …