Horatio Spafford

Life

Son of Gazetteer author Horatio Gates Spafford and Elizabeth Clark Hewitt Spafford, he married Anna Larsen of Stavanger, Norway on September 5, 1861, in Chicago. The Spaffords were well known in 1860s Chicago. He was a prominent lawyer, a senior partner in a large and thriving law firm. He and his wife 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 took his young son of four from him. 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. 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 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. During and immediately after World War I, the American Colony played a critical role in supporting these communities through the great suffering and deprivations of the Eastern front by running soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable ventures.

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.

Four days shy of his 60th birthday, Spafford died on October 16, 1888, of malaria, and was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery, Jerusalem.