Blessed Assurance

Frances Jane Crosby was born on March 24, 1820, in Southeast, New York. When she was just six weeks old, she developed an eye infection. A local doctor put hot mustard poultices directly on her inflamed eyes — a treatment that destroyed her optic nerves permanently. Her father died when she was only six months old, leaving her mother Mercy to raise her alone. But her grandmother Eunice moved in, and would become the most important person in Fanny’s young life.

Eunice held Fanny and described everything in vivid detail — colors of flowers, patterns of birds’ wings, how sunlight filtered through leaves. They listened to birdsongs until Fanny could identify each species by sound alone. More importantly, Eunice taught Fanny to memorize the Bible. By age ten, Fanny had memorized the first four books of the Old Testament, all four Gospels, most of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and many Psalms. This enormous store of biblical language would later pour naturally into her hymn writing. And Fanny wasn’t serious or sheltered — she climbed trees, rode horses without a saddle, and played tag with neighborhood children.

Having never seen a sunrise, a flower, or her own mother’s face, eight-year-old Fanny wrote: “O what a happy soul am I! Although I cannot see, I am resolved that in this world contented I will be; How many blessings I enjoy that other people don’t! To weep and sigh because I’m blind, I cannot, and I won’t.” This wasn’t denial. It was a deliberate, conscious choice — one she would renew every day of her 94 years. Years later she wrote: “If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me.”

At the Institution, Fanny discovered her clear singing voice, studied music formally, and wrote poetry constantly. She became something of a celebrity — addressing Congress and becoming the first woman to speak publicly in the U.S. Senate Chamber. Despite her religious upbringing and deep knowledge of Scripture, she didn’t experience what she called “true conversion” until age thirty. In 1850, singing at a revival meeting, they reached the line in Isaac Watts’s hymn, “Here, Lord, I give myself away.” Something broke open inside her. She surrendered completely to Christ. Every hymn she would ever write flowed from this moment.

Fanny married Alexander Van Alstyne, a blind musician, in 1858. Their only child died in infancy — a grief she rarely spoke of publicly but that deeply marked her. By 1880, she and Alexander had quietly separated, though they never divorced. She moved into small apartments in New York, often living in near-poverty. Publishers paid her very little — sometimes as little as one or two dollars per hymn — for songs that earned them fortunes. Yet she consistently said she had everything she needed. Her security was never in circumstances.

In 1864, composer William B. Bradbury asked Fanny to write hymn texts for him. Her partnership with publisher Lucius Biglow and composer Ira Sankey made her a household name. Her process was remarkable: a composer would play a melody, and she would immediately “see” the words that fit. She composed entirely in her head and dictated them to someone else — sometimes writing three or four complete hymns in a single day. Because publishers didn’t want too many hymns by one author in their books, Fanny wrote under at least 200 different pen names. She eventually wrote between 8,000 and 9,000 hymns — more than any person in history.

One day in 1873, Fanny visited her friend Phoebe Palmer Knapp, who played a new melody and asked, “What does this tune say to you, Fanny?” Fanny listened. Then, without hesitation, she began dictating: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!” The entire hymn came spontaneously in minutes. It captured something essential about Fanny’s faith: absolute certainty in God’s love despite circumstances that would have crushed others. She had never seen beauty, never enjoyed financial security, lost her only child, lived separated from her husband — yet she proclaimed not tentative hope, but assurance.

By the 1870s, Fanny’s fame was at its height. She could have lived comfortably accepting speaking fees and honors. Instead, she spent much of her time working among New York’s poor and desperate, living in the Lower East Side’s worst slums. She sat with alcoholics, prostitutes, and homeless men at rescue missions, listening to their stories. Her hymn “Rescue the Perishing” came directly from this work. She continued writing hymns and giving speeches well into her nineties. Her ministry came directly from her wounds — blindness, poverty, loss — all turned outward in service to others.

Fanny Crosby died on February 12, 1915, at the age of 94. Her gravestone in Bridgeport, Connecticut reads simply: “Aunt Fanny — She hath done what she could — Fanny J. Crosby — 1820–1915.” No list of 8,000 hymns. No mention of Congress. No celebrity honors. Just that one quiet line from Mark 14:8 — the same words Jesus spoke in defense of the woman who anointed him. Fanny had spent her whole life doing what she could, with what she had, from where she was. That was enough.