Everyone has lost something that hurt so deeply it seemed impossible to say all was well. Horatio Spafford lost his fortune, four daughters, and a son, and still left behind the words that have comforted whole generations of grieving Christians.
Born in Troy, New York, on October 20, 1828, Spafford became a successful lawyer in Chicago, a partner in the firm Spafford, McDaid & Wilson. He was also a close friend of the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, whose ministry he supported as a volunteer.
In 1871 the Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the family’s real estate investments. Two years later, business commitments kept him from traveling with his wife Anna and their four daughters to Europe: they set sail without him aboard the ship Ville du Havre.
On November 22, 1873, the Ville du Havre collided with another vessel and sank. The four girls, Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta, drowned. Anna survived and sent a two-word telegram: “Saved alone.” Spafford sailed to meet her.
According to accounts preserved by his contemporaries, it was on that crossing, passing near the site of the wreck, that Spafford wrote the verses that would become “It Is Well with My Soul,” published in 1876 with a melody by Philip Bliss.
Grief did not spare the family: in 1880 their son Horatio Goertner, born after the shipwreck, died of scarlet fever at age 4. In the years that followed, Spafford began to question central doctrines of his Presbyterian church, such as the existence of hell, and claimed to receive direct revelations from God. After a confrontation that led to the pastor’s removal from the congregation, he and Anna separated from the church along with a group of followers who became known as the “Overcomers.”
In 1881 the Spaffords moved to Jerusalem with a small group of believers from Chicago, forming the American Colony. There they distributed food, cared for the sick, and took in orphaned children of the city, without regard to religion.
The community also enforced, for about two decades, strict rules of celibacy and family separation, including children placed under the colony’s collective care; biographers record this period as a controversial point, sharply criticized by contemporaries, and reversed only in the early twentieth century. Horatio died of malaria in 1888, at age 59.
The hymn he wrote is still sung at funerals and worship services around the world as a declaration of faith in the midst of suffering. Spafford’s life reminds us that Christian hope does not deny suffering: it insists on saying that all is well, resting not on circumstances, but on Christ.