 Most Washington citizens embraced the arriving troops, although there were pockets of apathy and Southern sympathy.Upon hearing a Union regiment singing "John Brown's Body" as the soldiers marched beneath her window, resident Julia Ward Howe wrote the patriotic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune.The significant expansion of the federal government to administer the ever-expanding war effortand its legacies, such as veterans' pensionsled to notable growth in the city's population, especially in 1862 and 1863 when the military forces and the supporting infrastructure dramatically expanded from early war days.