We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in nineteenth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.

Historical Context

"We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" draws on the dream of the patriarch Jacob in Genesis 28, in which he sees "a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it." The spiritual turns that vision into an image of the believer's own ascent — a slow, deliberate climb toward God, one round of the ladder at a time.

The song is among the older spirituals, developed in the oral tradition well before the Civil War; it is often cited as having spread into wide use before 1825, making it one of the earliest spirituals to cross over into white congregations as well. It was carried into the concert repertoire by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and documented by John Wesley Work and James Weldon Johnson.

Cultural Significance

The genius of the song is its structure, which embodies its meaning. Each repetition of "every round goes higher, higher" can itself rise in pitch, so that the act of singing enacts the climb. The song is slow and patient — there are no shortcuts up a ladder; one ascends round by round, step by step. For a people whose deliverance would come, if at all, only through generations of patient endurance, the image of the steady climb carried quiet encouragement.

The phrase "soldiers of the cross" frames the climb as disciplined, committed labor — the work of those enlisted in a cause. And the questions of the later verses ("Sinner, do you love my Jesus? If you love Him, why not serve Him?") turn the song outward, calling the listener to join the climb. Love is not enough; it must become service.

The ladder itself — reaching from earth to heaven, with movement in both directions — is an image of connection between the suffering world below and the promise above, a reassurance that the distance between the two can be crossed.

Scholarly Notes

James Weldon Johnson noted the spirituals' gift for building theology into musical form, and "Jacob's Ladder" is a clear case: the ascending structure is itself the sermon.

The song's early and wide diffusion — including its adoption by white congregations in the early nineteenth century — makes it an important example of how the spirituals moved across the lines of a segregated religious culture, carried by camp meetings and revivals.

In the twentieth century, the song was adapted into the freedom-song tradition as "We Are Climbing Freedom's Ladder," its patient upward imagery applied directly to the long climb toward civil rights — one more instance of the spirituals' continuing life in each generation's struggle.