Despite being a Humanist, I have always loved many of the great hymns of the Christian faith. While Christianity is wrong in so many ways, the deep love and reverence for their God shines forth in many of the truly great songs. The hymn that begins “When peace like a river attendeth my way” is sung softly at bedsides and belted in packed sanctuaries and it has long been my favorite hymn. Its refrain—“It is well with my soul”—sounds almost impossible when life breaks. That impossibility is the point. The words were forged in grief.
Horatio Gates Spafford was a prosperous Chicago attorney and a lay leader in his Presbyterian church. In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire consumed large portions of the city—and with it much of Spafford’s real-estate investments. The family leaned on faith and friends (including evangelist D. L. Moody and musician Ira D. Sankey) as they began again. Two years later, they planned a recuperative trip to Europe. Business delayed Horatio, so his wife Anna and their four daughters—Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and baby Tanetta—sailed ahead on the French liner SS Ville du Havre.
In the early hours of November 22, 1873, midway across the Atlantic, the Ville du Havre was struck by the British iron sailing ship Loch Earn. Within minutes the proud steamer slipped beneath the waves. Anna was rescued, unconscious and clinging to wreckage; all four of the Spafford daughters drowned. Nine days later, from Cardiff, Wales, Anna cabled her husband two searing words that have echoed through hymn history: “Saved alone.”
Horatio boarded the next ship to join his wife. As his vessel approached the approximate site of the sinking, the captain notified him. Tradition says Spafford stood over that watery grave and began to frame the lines that would become “It Is Well with My Soul.” The Library of Congress exhibit preserves his own description of passing “over the spot,” and presents an early manuscript of the text.
There is, however, another account—closer to the event and probably more reliable—recorded by Ira D. Sankey. In his 1906 memoir, Sankey wrote that Spafford actually composed the hymn some years later, in 1876, while Sankey was staying with the Spaffords in Chicago. Either way, the lyric rises out of the same storm: a father and mother learning to say “it is well” in the aftermath of unthinkable loss.
Spafford’s text found its musical home through Philip Paul Bliss, one of the great gospel songwriters of the 19th century. Bliss wrote the tune and named it VILLE DU HAVRE, in quiet memory of the ship that carried the Spaffords’ girls to their deaths. The song appeared in Gospel Hymns No. 2 (1876), compiled by Bliss with Sankey, and quickly became a staple of Moody’s evangelistic meetings.
The hymn’s stanzas are not sentimental; they are steel. The opening images borrow Scripture’s metaphors of peace as a river and sorrow as billowing seas, then move to the heart of Christian hope: “My sin—not in part, but the whole—is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no more.” The final stanza lifts its eyes to the end of the story, when “the clouds be rolled back as a scroll” and the Lord descends—language that echoes 1 Thessalonians 4 and Revelation. Hymnologists have traced these biblical threads and even noted how Spafford revised certain lines over time (“thou hast taught me to know” becoming “to say”). The text we sing today is the fruit of that refining.
Tragedy did not end in 1873. The Spaffords’ next son, Horatio Jr., born two years after the wreck, died of scarlet fever in 1880 at age four. Wounded by loss and increasingly out of step with their former church, Horatio and Anna gathered like-minded believers—dubbed “the Overcomers” by the press—and in 1881 led a small band to Jerusalem. There they founded what became known as the American Colony, a Christian utopian community that poured itself into relief work without regard to creed, serving Muslim, Jewish, and Christian neighbors alike. The hotel that bears its name stands to this day, but the Colony’s deeper legacy is compassion shaped by suffering.
Bliss’s own story adds a poignant coda. Later in 1876—just months after introducing VILLE DU HAVRE—Philip and his wife, Lucy, were killed in the Ashtabula River railroad disaster in Ohio, one of the deadliest train wrecks of the 19th century. His tune, like Spafford’s text, passed into the church’s memory as a gift sealed with tears.
What makes “It Is Well with My Soul” endure is not merely the drama of its origin, but the way it teaches the tongue to do what the heart cannot yet feel. The hymn invites singers into that same stubborn trust: to say by faith what grief cannot say by sight.
Whether Spafford penned his lines over the Atlantic’s grave or at a table in Chicago, the song bears the shape of loss met by love, pain met by promise. And so Christians keep singing it at gravesides and in hospital rooms, at revivals and quiet vespers, finding in its cadence the courage to breathe, “Whatever my lot… it is well.”
