1865-Dated Mammoth Format Lithograph with facsimile Signed and Printed "Your Friend John Brown” with printed text “HIS SOUL IS MARCHING ON'" printed below, “Enlarged And Painted, By J.W. Dodge, From The Original Picture Taken From Life”, Broadway, N.Y., Extremely Fine.
This impressive Mammoth Size Large Format Lithograph of John Brown measures about 11 x 14 inches the image seated on a 19.75 x 15.75 inch heavy cardstock sheet as issued. It presents a three quarter-length portrait of John Brown standing with his hands in his pockets, his distinct dramatic looking face and hair appear in sharp detail and contrast. Below the image, a facsimile signature reading "Your Friend, John Brown" appears in flowing script, with the title "His Soul is Marching On" in quotation marks beneath, and the publication line "Enlarged and Painted by J.W. Dodge from the Original Picture Taken from Life, Published by the Artist, 713 Broadway, N.Y." at the base. The print is further inscribed "Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1865 by John W. Dodge in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York." An excellent example for display, the central image is outstanding, the printed black text complete and fully readable. The wide outer surround having some small scattered spots with some minor chipping to the extreme outer edges of no consequence, especially if framed.

This historic print's title borrows its language directly from "John Brown's Body," the marching song that swept through Union camps during the Civil War and gave rise to the refrain "his soul is marching on." The song's tune and cadence were famously repurposed by Julia Ward Howe for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," cementing Brown's martyrdom in the popular imagination of the war years. Dodge's mammoth-format lithograph, issued in the Civil War's final months, capitalized directly on that wartime iconography, presenting Brown not as the failed raider of Harpers Ferry, but as a marching, unified symbol of the Union cause. A smaller carte-de-visite photographic version of this same image and title is held in the collection of the Library of Congress, and a copy of this exact print is held in the Library of Congress's Liljenquist Family Collection, confirming it as a genuine period publication rather than a later reproduction.

A powerful and historically significant piece of Civil War era abolitionist iconography, this print connects one of the most galvanizing figures and events of the antebellum sectional crisis to the popular wartime mythology that carried his name to the front lines and beyond. The lithograph presents in choice very fine condition.


This is the well-documented 1865 lithograph, "Your Friend John Brown, 'His Soul Is Marching On,'" being a large-format print reproducing a portrait of the abolitionist by artist J.W. Dodge (likely John Wood Dodge), taken "from life" and enlarged for print publication.

It was published by the artist at 713 Broadway, New York, six years after Brown's 1859 execution and squarely in the year of Union victory, when Brown had become a martyr-hero of the antislavery cause and "His Soul Is Marching On" drawn from the famous marching song that was already a widely recognized phrase.