My ancestors -- 13 generations of them -- knew a whole lot more about war than the history you learned in school might suggest, so much so that they certainly had a right to have a song about a day in which they could "study war no more."
Of course you may know that on April 9, 1865, 157 years ago today, the American Civil War more or less ended with the surrender of Confederate commander-in-chief Gen. Robert E. Lee to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. You may know with the end of the Civil War also came the end of what the Confederacy was fighting to conserve forever: the FOREVER slavery status of Africans in America.
Who you may not have heard of were the 180,000 United States Colored Troops whom both Gen. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln said were their best, most devoted and disciplined troops, without whom the Civil War could not have been won at all.
You may not have heard of the 160-170 documented cases in which the ancestors of those troops literally fought for their freedom in uprisings, so many and so well that James Madison, in drafting the Constitution, was pressed by his friends to include a SECOND Amendment to allow them to have a "well-ordered militia" at all times, because all such men knew that if they did not maintain the right to bear arms, their slaves might overcome them and succeed in freeing themselves.
You may never have heard of Nat Turner, the man who in 1831 proved several such men right ... nor of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, in which the slaves there overthrew the French and kicked them off the island.
My ancestors in the North American sphere understood war, to a point that terrified their captors ... and the 13th generation found complete victory. Chattel slavery is no more, in the old form.
Nevertheless, although the history of how my ancestors did not passively accept their enslavement has been hidden, their enduring legacy includes their many songs, in which they took the hate and dehumanization they endured and translated them into visions of hope, peace, joy, love, and justice unlike the world had ever heard or seen before. What was meant for evil, God used my ancestors to turn to enduring good, good that I share with you in this song vision of the time of which my ancestors dreamed, to pass over to a land in which they could "study war no more" ... and, for the length of the song (which has many more verses), they took themselves and their hearers there.