feet!
Our God is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free!
While God is marching on.

When Lincoln's first Emancipation Decree (made necessary by the fact
that so many blacks belonging to the disloyal were fighting for the
Union), that all slaves in the Rebel States from New Year's Day, 1863,
shall be free, is promulgated; and when, two years later, the
Constitution is amended so as to forbid slavery all through the
Republic, now again united; when the nation generously provides food,
shelter, and education for the emancipated; and when the freed bondmen
greet their liberty-loving President in Southern streets with shouts of
gratitude and cries of 'Father Abraham'--you may know that John Brown's
soul is marching on.

There in America and elsewhere it continues its march. Wherever the
swift cruiser speeds in pursuit of the infamous slave-ship, in every
heart-beat of the brave seamen who feel they are on a righteous errand
and will overhaul her in the King's--aye, in God's--name, we hear the
march of John Brown's soul.

When a nation of free men rises up in wrath at the issue of some
official document that seems to be couched in temporizing language on
this supreme subject, or at some government that has tolerated
conditions that approximate slavery, and will have none of it, we know
the old hero's soul is marching on.

Whenever in secret council the ambassador of a free people negotiates a
treaty, and, backed by the most sacred impulses of those he represents,
urges an anti-slavery clause, we know John Brown's soul is on the march.

And march it shall, while nations learn to prize liberty as God's great
chartered right to every man, while they read the shining letters of
the Golden Rule, while they remember that God made all men of one blood
and that all are redeemed by the blood of One.

While God looks down from His heaven and sees the distressed face, or
hears the piercing cry of the oppressed, and can turn the hearts of men
to fight His battles upon earth, the soul of John Brown will be
marching still.

E