Meet Julia Ward Howe, the Remarkable Poet Who Wrote the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and Fought for Women’s Suffrage

Poet, philosopher, and suffragist Julia Ward Howe wrote a rallying cry in 1861 that would resonate for more than a century—echoing through the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

In the gray before dawn on a November morning in 1861, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) woke in her room at Willard's Hotel in Washington, DC. She lay still, waiting for the light. Then, as she later wrote in her 1899 memoir Reminiscences, "the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind." She sprang from bed, found a pen, and scrawled the verses "almost without looking at the paper," writing in the dark as she often did when lines came at night, afraid to light a candle and wake the baby. She returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to herself, "I like this better than most things that I have written.” 

She came to Washington with her husband Samuel, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, and Reverend James Freeman Clarke to visit Union soldiers in their camps and hospitals and meet with politicians such as President Lincoln. The day before, while returning from a troop review outside the city, their carriage was delayed behind regiments marching back to camp. To pass the time, the passengers began singing "snatches of the army songs so popular at that time," among them "John Brown's Body." Noticing how the soldiers responded, Clarke turned to Howe and said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?" She told him she often wished to do exactly that.

In February 1862, the Atlantic Monthly published "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Early Ambitions

Julia Ward Howe was born in New York City in 1819, the daughter of banker Samuel Ward and poet Julia Rush Cutler, who died when Howe was five. Her father provided her with an education that was customary for girls of her class at the time, including private tutors and music lessons. Though her father was a strict Calvinist, he allowed her access to her brother’s library full of European authors, while keeping what Howe felt was a tight grip on her social world. "My dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer," she wrote in Reminiscences. Through her tutor, she became fluent in French, and, through her brother’s library, she studied Latin, Italian, and German. She read philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Dante Alighieri, and Immanuel Kant, who broadened her horizons beyond her Calvinist upbringing. Still, she wrote, “I did aspire to much greater freedom of association than was allowed to me. I lived, indeed, much in my books.”

In 1843, she married Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician, educator, and abolitionist eighteen years her senior. The marriage brought her outside of Boston. Scholars describe their marriage as difficult, as Samuel disapproved of Howe’s literary ambitions and prohibited her from “participating in public reform work.” She continued writing essays, poetry, and plays and studied philosophy alongside the demands of a household that included six children. In 1854, she anonymously published Passion-Flowers, her first collection of poetry. "Its success became certain at once," she wrote to her sister in the week after it published; "Hundreds of copies have already been sold, and every one likes it.” In 1857, she published her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour. Despite her husband’s disapproval, she continued writing and publishing essays, and in 1908, Howe became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was eighty-nine years old.

The Hymn Goes Marching On

The “Battle Hymn” was "somewhat praised on its appearance," Howe recalled in her memoir, "but the vicissitudes of the war so engrossed public attention that small heed was taken of literary matters." She knew the poem had soon reached the camps when she heard the soldiers were singing it in chorus.

Perhaps the most famous story of the hymn’s power as the Union’s rallying cry came from Chaplain Charles McCabe in a lecture he gave in Washington after being released from the Confederate Libby Prison. He recalled how he and his fellow prisoners were told one night that the Union had suffered a terrible defeat. “They sat together in great sorrow” until the whispered truth came through: the Union had actually won the crucial battle at Gettysburg. “At this good news they all rejoiced, and presently made the walls ring with my Battle Hymn,” Howe wrote in her memoir, “it now became one of the leading lyrics of the war.”

The war ended, but the hymn remained socially important. A century later in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. closed "Our God Is Marching On,” his address to the thousands who had marched from Selma to Montgomery, with its lines repeated as a refrain: "His truth is marching on." In Memphis in 1968, the night before his assassination, he ended his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” with a single line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Building the Suffrage Movement

After the Civil War ended, Howe continued studying philosophy, reading Baruch Spinoza, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. She frequently participated in parlor lectures held by the Boston Radical Club, which brought intellectuals of the day together to discuss religion, literature, science, and social reform.

Soon, she was invited to a meeting in Boston to consider founding a woman's club. While she agreed with the modest proposal, she found herself drawn toward something larger. From this “small and modest beginning” came the foundation of the New England Woman’s Club, a space for lectures, debates, and philanthropic activities. In 1868, she was invited to a women’s suffrage meeting at Horticultural Hall. She arrived in her "rainy-day suit," hoping not to be noticed. She was called to the platform anyway. "When they requested me to speak," she wrote, "I could only say, 'I am with you.' I have been with them ever since."

She helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president. In 1869, she and Lucy Stone became co-leaders of the American Woman Suffrage Association, one of two national suffrage organizations to emerge from a Civil War-era split in the women's movement. For twenty years, she was an editor and contributor to the Woman's Journal, a weekly suffragist magazine. After her husband Samuel’s death in 1876, Howe was free to dedicate most of her time to reform work. She went on to lead the Association for the Advancement of Women and helped lead the General Federation of Women's Clubs—all of it driven, she wrote, by the “powerful stimulus of hope.”

She continued to write, insisting in her own words that women should be “no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility.”

She died in 1910, at ninety-one, still serving as acting president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association. The suffrage movement she helped build would secure the vote for many women in the United States with the passage of the Nineteenth Ammendment ten years after her death.

Sources

1. Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, 1819–1899. Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
2. Sandra F. VanBurkleo and Mary Jo Miles, "Howe, Julia Ward," American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1999; online ed. February 2000. 
3. Julia Ward Howe. Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, Vol. 1, edited by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, Maud Howe Elliott, and Florence Howe Hall. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1915.

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Meredith Herndon | Read More

Meredith Herndon is the writer and editor for the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.