Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic and spent the following half-century campaigning for suffrage and for peace. She was a wealthy New York banker's daughter, educated privately and widely read in four languages, who married the reformer Samuel Gridley Howe and found that he expected her to stop writing; she published anonymously and unhappily for years, and the marriage was miserable. In November 1861 she visited a Union camp near Washington, heard the soldiers singing John Brown's Body, and was told by a companion that she ought to write better words for the tune. She woke before dawn and wrote them. The Atlantic Monthly paid her four dollars for it in February 1862. Its imagery is millennial rather than martial - the grapes of wrath, the terrible swift sword, the line about Christ dying to make men holy and the marching soldiers dying to make men free - and it turned the Union cause into a religious one, which is a large part of why it lasted. Afterwards she campaigned for woman suffrage, helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1870 issued an appeal to the women of the world against war, having watched the Civil War and then the Franco-Prussian one; the modern Mother's Day descends distantly from it. She was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She published a volume of poems in 1854 that her husband regarded as a public humiliation, partly because it discussed the marriage. She stayed in it. Late in life she was widely honoured, lecturing into her eighties, and some four thousand people attended her memorial service in Boston.

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