Horatio Gates Spafford (October 20, 1828, Troy, New York - October 16, 1888, Jerusalem) was a prominent American lawyer and Presbyterian church elder. He is best known for penning the Christian hymn It Is Well With My Soul, following a family tragedy in which his four daughters died aboard the S.S. Ville du Havre on a transatlantic voyage.
Video Horatio Spafford
Life
He was the son of Gazetteer author Horatio Gates Spafford and Elizabeth Clark Hewitt Spafford.
On September 5, 1861, he married Anna Larsen of Stavanger, Norway, in Chicago. The Spaffords were well known in 1860s Chicago. He was a prominent lawyer and a senior partner in a large and thriving law firm.
The Spaffords were also prominent supporters and close friends of evangelist Dwight L. Moody.
Spafford invested in real estate north of an expanding Chicago in the spring of 1871. When the Great Fire of Chicago reduced the city to ashes in October of that same year, it also destroyed most of Spafford's sizable investment.
The wreck of the Ville du Havre
Scarlet fever killed his four-year-old son. Two years later, in 1873, Spafford decided his family should take a holiday somewhere in Europe, and chose England knowing that his friend D. L. Moody would be preaching there in the fall. He was delayed because of business, so he sent his family ahead: his wife and their four children, daughters eleven-year-old Anna "Annie", nine-year-old Margaret Lee "Maggie", five-year-old Elizabeth "Bessie", and two-year-old Tanetta.
On November 22, 1873, while crossing the Atlantic on the steamship Ville du Havre, their ship was struck by an iron sailing vessel and 226 people lost their lives, including all four of Spafford's daughters. Only his wife, Anna Spafford, survived the tragedy. Upon arriving in England, she sent a telegram to Spafford beginning "Saved alone." Spafford then sailed to England, going over the location of his daughters' deaths. According to Bertha Spafford Vester, a daughter born after the tragedy, Spafford wrote "It Is Well with My Soul" on this journey.
It Is Well with My Soul lyrics
The original manuscript has only four verses, but Spafford's daughter states how later another verse (the fourth in order below) was added and the last line of the original was slightly modified. The music, written by Philip Bliss, was named after the ship on which Spafford's daughters died, Ville du Havre.
Later years
Following the sinking of the Ville du Havre, Anna gave birth to three more children. On February 11, 1880, their son, Horatio Goertner Spafford, died at the age of three, of scarlet fever. Their daughters were Bertha Hedges Spafford (born March 24, 1878) and Grace Spafford (born January 18, 1881). After the ordeal at sea, Anna and Horatio Spafford became religious outsiders. They left their Presbyterian congregation and held faith-based prayer meetings in their own home. Their Messianic sect was dubbed "the Overcomers" by the American press.
In August 1881, the Spaffords set out for Jerusalem as a party of thirteen adults and three children and set up the American Colony. Colony members, later joined by Swedish Christians, engaged in philanthropic work amongst the people of Jerusalem regardless of their religious affiliation and without proselytizing motives--thereby gaining the trust of the local Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities.
In Jerusalem Horatio and Anna Spafford adopted teenager Jacob Eliahu, then Jacob Spafford (1864-1932), born in Ramallah into a Turkish Jewish family, who as a schoolboy, discovered by chance the Siloam inscription.
Maps Horatio Spafford
Death
Four days shy of his 60th birthday, Spafford died on October 16, 1888, of malaria, and was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery, Jerusalem.
Legacy
During and immediately after World War I, the American Colony played a critical role in supporting the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities of Jerusalem through the great suffering and deprivations of the Eastern front and the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides. The American Colony did this by running soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable ventures.
References
External links
- SpaffordHymn.com : The original Hymn manuscript penned by Horatio Spafford
- Cyber Hymnal Photos of Horatio Spafford and a MIDI file of the hymn
- Elisabeth Elliot recalls tea with Horatio Spafford's daughter
- Gospelcom.net
- Christianity.ca Many details on life of Spafford
- The Library of Congress Exhibition covering the start of The American Colony in Jerusalem, the Spafford Family tragedy, their move to Jerusalem, their time in the Holy Land, and the American Colony at work
- Works by or about Horatio Spafford at Internet Archive
- Works by Horatio Spafford at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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