On the Lord’s Side
On a pastor assuring the President that “the Lord is on our side!” he replied:
“I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
“TO CANAAN!”
This hymn plays quite a part in the music of the Civil War. There is a negro variation—“Canaan’s fair and happy land,” given to the old hymn, “Canaan’s happy shore,” which, better known by its chorus: “Say, brothers, will you meet us?” and turned by the soldiers into the grand “John Brown’s body’s moldering in the grave, but his soul is marching on,” was paraphrased by Julia Ward Howe into a “battle hymn.” And Holmes wrote “To Canaan,” relative to the first levy. And to top these, the Southerners had a parody on the “Old John Brown,” also called “Lincoln Going to Canaan.”
“GOING TO CANAAN!”
Although the South is a poetic country, no bard wrote any “Marseillaise Hymn” on that side. One of the few effusions bidding tolerably for publicity was “Lincoln Going to Canaan,” a parody on the numerous negro camp-meeting lays in which Lincoln was hailed as the coming Moses. This burlesque was laid before Mr. Lincoln, he taking the grim relish in hits at him, caricatures and sallies, which great men never spurn.
“Going to Canaan,” he (is reported to have) said. “Going to cane ’em, I expect!”