The Julia Ward Howe Bicentennial: The Woman Behind “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

Born 200 years ago today, the great American Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910).

Howe was a woman of many accomplishments, but posterity remembers her best as a songwriter. She’s the person who wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861), one of the oldest popular tunes still in regular circulation. If you don’t know it by name, the words should be familiar:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;He is trampling out he vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:His truth is marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah!Glory, glory, hallelujah!Glory, glory, hallelujah!His truth is marching on.

Countless additional verses and choruses follow the opening salvo. Written to the tune of the slightly older song, “John Brown’s Body”, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became the Union Army’s fight song during the Civil War, the usual counterpoint the Confederacy’s “Dixie”. It’s been used in a zillion movies, and covered by innumerable patriotic singers. Even the lyrics have been pillaged. John Steinbeck used the phrase “The Grapes of Wrath” for the title of his famous novel. Historian Bruce Catton used “Terrible Swift Sword” to title the middle volume of his Centennial History of the Civil War. Martin Luther King quoted the song in speeches. Marian Anderson sang it concert. Judy Garland sang it on her variety show when JFKdied; Andy Williams sang it when RFK was assassinated five years later. Anita Bryant sang it as LBJ’s funeral. It has also been parodied, and the melody has sometimes been used ironically as facile political commentary.

I take particular pride in writing about Howe because she comes from an old Rhode Island family and she’s a distant relation (we’re both descended from Roger Williams, Pardon Tillinghast, and other figures of local eminence). Her Ward ancestors were Cromwellians who had fled to Newport upon the restoration of Charles II. Her great and great-great grandfathers were Governors of the Colony. Great Grandfather Samuel Ward (1725-1776) was also a delegate to the Continental Congress, a political rival of Stephen Hopkins, and one of the founders of Brown University. Her father, Samuel Ward III (1786-1839) was a bank president, and one of the founders of New York University and the New York Temperance Society, serving as its first President. Her brother, Samuel Ward IV (1814-1884) was a friend of Longfellow’s, the husband of an Astor, and an important Washington lobbyist. It was surely these Wards who inspired the name of the main character in H.P. Lovecraft’sThe Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Julia Ward was raised amongst New York society, educated by tutors and attended private schools. Through her brother, she met the literary likes of Margaret Fuller and Charles Dickens. By 1841 she had converted to Unitarianism, a sect associated with most of the progressive movements of that time.

Two years later she married Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), a physician and activist who had volunteered bravely in the Greek Revolution (1828) and the July Revolution in France (1830), and was also the founder and head of the Perkins Institution, America’s oldest school for the blind (1829). Later he would also found the unfortunately named Massachusetts School for Idiot and Feeble-Minded Youth.

The Howes produced six children throughout the 1840s and ’50s, but their union was contentious. Julia, who had published essays on Goethe and Schiller prior to their marriage, aspired to continue her literary life. Howe felt that she should focus solely on raising the children. This situation was stifling, so she continued to write on the sly. One of the products of her pen from the mid ’40s was kept secret from everybody until quite recently. She began work on a novel called The Hermaphrodite, which delivered what its title advertised. She never finished it, but fragments were discovered and published, much to the delight of queer scholars, in 2004.

Meanwhile, the Howes were drawn into the Abolitionist cause. Samuel Howe ran unsuccessfully for the Congress on the issue in 1846. In 1851 he co-founded the antislavery newspaper the Daily Commonwealth, which Julia helped him edit. Meanwhile she published two anonymous books of poetry, Passion-Flowers (1853) and Words for the Hour (1857) and penned two plays Leonora, The World’s Own, and Hippolytus (both also in 1857). On the eve of the Civil War came her travel book A Trip to Cuba (1860).

Samuel Howe was one John Brown’s backers in his Harper’s Ferry adventure in 1859, known as the Secret Six. That event helped spark the Civil War, and it is in this context that Julia wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which were printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862. Samuel served on the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission from 1863 to 1864. Later he continued to work for the Freedman’s Bureau which that Commission helped found.

By the post-war period, Julia was quite famous on account of her song, and her oldest children were quite grown. Her husband was now advanced in age and busy with his government work, so from this point on, she continued both her literary and political work unobstructed. Her two major causes in her remaining years were women’s suffrage, and pacifism.

In 1867 she put out 11 monthly issues of a literary magazine called Northern Lights (1867). From 1872 to 1879 she edited Lucy Stone’s suffrage magazine Woman’s Journal, continuing to contribute to it for many years beyond that. Her later books included From the Oak to the Olive (1867), Modern Society (1881), Margaret Fuller (1883), Women’s Work in America (1891), Is Polite Society Polite? (1895) and Reminiscences 1819-1899 (1899).

In 1870, Howe began a campaign for a creation of a national Mother’s Day, very much tied to her pacificist sentiments. She published a famous and influential proclamation advocating for the observance. Mother’s Day was finally instituted decades later, but by then was uncoupled from any anti-war sentiments.

From the late 1860s until the end of her life, Howe founded, co-founded, and served in leadership capacities in a seemingly numberless amount of national and local women’s clubs and organizations. In 1908 she was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later she passed away at the family manse in Portsmouth, Oak Glen, which still stands. All four of Howe’s daughters became writers. In 1916, they collaborated on The Life of Julia Ward Howe, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.