It Is Well With My Soul

Horatio G. Spafford (1828–1888) was a successful Chicago lawyer with heavy investments in lakefront real estate — nearly all of which burned in the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871. But the fire was only the beginning of his sorrows.

In November 1873, Spafford sent his wife Anna and their four daughters — Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and little Tanetta — ahead of him to Europe aboard the French steamship Ville du Havre, planning to follow once business allowed. In the early morning of November 22, the ship collided with an iron sailing vessel in the mid-Atlantic and sank in about twelve minutes. Two hundred twenty-six people died, among them all four Spafford girls.

Anna was found unconscious, floating on wreckage. When the survivors landed in Wales, she sent her husband a telegram whose first words are among the most heartbreaking ever written: 'Saved alone. What shall I do.' The original telegram is preserved today at the Library of Congress.

Spafford sailed at once to join his wife. In a letter that still survives, he described the moment the ship crossed the waters where his daughters were lost: 'On Thursday last we passed over the spot where she went down, in mid-ocean, the waters three miles deep. But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe, folded, the dear lambs.'

The famous story says he wrote the hymn on deck at that very spot. The truth is, no one knows exactly when he wrote it — Anna remembered him writing it just after the terrible news, their daughter Bertha said it was on the voyage, and the singer Ira Sankey recalled it being written in 1876. The undated manuscript, on Chicago hotel stationery, survives at the Library of Congress. What matters is what he wrote: '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.'

The gospel songwriter Philip P. Bliss set Spafford's words to music and named the tune VILLE DU HAVRE, after the very ship that went down. The hymn was published in 1876 in Gospel Hymns No. 2.

That same December, Bliss and his wife Lucy were aboard a train that plunged through a collapsing bridge into an icy ravine near Ashtabula, Ohio. Survivor accounts say Bliss escaped through a window, but when he could not free his trapped wife, he stayed at her side. Their bodies were never found. He was thirty-eight. His trunk arrived safely in Chicago — inside was the text of one last unfinished hymn, 'I Will Sing of My Redeemer.'

The hymn's title phrase echoes one of the most remarkable women in scripture. In 2 Kings 4, a mother of Shunem whose son has just died saddles a donkey and rides to find the prophet Elisha. Asked, 'Is it well with the child?' she answers, against everything: 'It is well.' Her faith was rewarded; her son was restored. Spafford's daughters were not — and still he wrote her words.

The Spaffords' story did not end in Chicago. Three more children were born to them, and in 1881 the family moved to Jerusalem, where they founded the American Colony, a community that became beloved for its charitable work among the city's residents of every faith. Anna later said she felt she had been saved for a purpose. A children's medical center founded by their family serves Jerusalem to this day.

For all its fame, 'It Is Well with My Soul' had never appeared in an official Latter-day Saint hymnbook — not in 1985, nor in any earlier collection.

That changed on May 30, 2024, when it was released as hymn #1003 in the very first batch of Hymns—For Home and Church, alongside 'Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.' A hymn that generations of Latter-day Saints had loved from a distance finally had a number of its own.