Good afternoon! Today we bring you an 1862 song written by John S. Gibbons, to aid Lincoln’s call for 300,000 more Union troops. It first appeared in the New York Evening Post.
We are coming, Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream,
And from New England’s shore;
We leave our plows and workshops,
Our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance,
With but a silent tear;
We dare not look behind us,
But steadfastly before–
We are coming, Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more.CHORUS.–We are coming, we are coming,
Our Union to restore;
We are coming, Father Abraham,
With three hundred thousand more.If you look across the hill-tops,
That meet the Northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust
Your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant,
Tears the cloudy vail aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag,
In glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam,
And bands brave music pour–
We are coming Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more.(CHORUS.)
If you look all up your valleys,
Where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys,
Fast forming into line;
And children from their mothers’ knees,
Are pulling at the weeds,
And learning how to reap and sow,
Against their country’s needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping
At every cottage door–
We are coming, Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more.(CHORUS.)
You have called us, and we’re coming,
By Richmond’s bloody tide.
To lay us down, for freedom’s sake,
Our brother’s bones beside;
Or from foul treason’s savage group
To wrench the murderer’s blade,
And in the face of foreign foes
Its fragments to parade;
Six hundred thousand loyal men,
And true, have gone before–
We are coming, Father Abraham,
Three hundred thousand more.(CHORUS.)
Source: “America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets” by the Library of Congress.
Image Credit: Harper’s Weekly, September 7, 1861.
