Horatio Spafford: The Man Who Wrote “It Is Well” After Losing Everything
Most of us know the hymn. Very few of us know the story behind it.
Horatio Spafford was a successful Chicago lawyer, a man of faith, a friend of Dwight L. Moody, and by 1871 a man who had already known more grief than most people carry in a lifetime. His young son had died of scarlet fever just before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of the real estate investments he had built his financial future on.
He kept going. He poured himself into helping the victims of the fire. He stayed close to God and to his wife Anna and their four daughters. And in 1873, he planned to take his family to Europe for a much-needed rest, to travel with a Moody evangelistic campaign and do some good along the way.
At the last minute, business kept him in Chicago. He sent his wife and four daughters ahead on the French ocean liner Ville du Havre, planning to follow shortly.
On November 22, 1873, the Ville du Havre was struck by an iron sailing vessel in the middle of the Atlantic. The ship sank in twelve minutes. Anna Spafford was found floating unconscious on a piece of wreckage and rescued. Their four daughters, Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta, aged four to eleven, drowned.
When Anna reached Wales, she sent a telegram to her husband. It began: Saved alone. What shall I do.
Horatio Spafford boarded the next ship out of New York. He asked the captain to let him know when they passed the approximate location where his daughters had gone down. When the captain came to find him, Spafford stood at the rail and looked at the water.
And somewhere in that moment, on that ship, over that ocean, he wrote the words that have carried millions of grieving people through their darkest nights.
When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll, Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say: It is well, it is well with my soul.
He did not write those words because the grief was gone. He wrote them because he had found something underneath the grief that the grief could not reach. A bedrock. A God who was still there, still sovereign, still good, even when the sea had taken everything.
Horatio and Anna Spafford went on to move to Jerusalem, where they founded the American Colony, a community that served the poor of the city regardless of faith or background. They had more children. They suffered more losses. And they kept going.
The hymn Horatio wrote that night on the Atlantic has been sung at funerals, in prison camps, beside sickbeds, and in the ruins of disaster zones around the world. It has been sung by people who had no words of their own. It gave them his.
Some songs are written from comfort. This one was written from the ocean floor. That is why it reaches so deep.