[2] At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Hudson enlisted in the Union Army, joining Company K of the 10th Pennsylvania Reserve Regiment on June 20, 1861.
[1] Between June 1862 and February 1863, Hudson served as a nurse at the General Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland.
While working at the hospital, he met Mary Smith, from Annapolis; the couple married on March 4, 1863.
[1] An accomplished musician, after his discharge Hudson began teaching music at a college in Alliance, Ohio, where he remained for five years.
[1] Hudson was a prohibitionist, who advocated for total abstinence from alcohol,[1][2] and wrote many songs about temperance.
[2] Hudson's best-known original hymn is "My Life, My Love, I Give to Thee," which was published in his collected Salvation Echoes (1882).
[7] Describing the composition of this hymn, Williams wrote:[7] About 1875, I was helping in meetings in Troy, Ohio, where Professor R. E. Hudson conducted the singing, when, just before retiring one night, he asked me to write a song for a book he was preparing to publish.