Horatio Spafford

Horatio Spafford was a Chicago lawyer, a Presbyterian elder, and a friend of D. L. Moody. In 1871 his four-year-old son died of scarlet fever, and months later the Great Chicago Fire wiped out the property he had invested in. In November 1873 he sent his wife Anna and their four daughters ahead to Europe on the steamer Ville du Havre, meaning to follow; the ship was struck by an iron sailing vessel in the mid-Atlantic and sank in twelve minutes. All four girls drowned. Anna's cable from Wales read: saved alone.

Crossing to meet her, Spafford was told by the captain when they passed near the place where the ship went down, and there he wrote the lines about peace like a river. Philip Bliss set them to music. The Spaffords later lost a son as well, left a church that suggested their griefs were divine punishment, and moved to Jerusalem in 1881, where the colony they founded ran soup kitchens and a hospital. He died there of malaria in 1888.