On April 12, 1861 South Carolinians opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charlestown Harbor to begin America’s bloody Civil War. Several months later a Rhode Island woman composed a battle hymn to inspire American soldiers to fight and preserve the Union. That inspirational lady was Julia Ward Howe.
Though born in New York City on May 27, 1819, Julia Ward Howe had deep Rhode Island roots. Two of her ancestors, Richard Ward and Samuel Ward, prominent colonel governors, and her grandfather Colonel Samuel Ward Jr., commanded the Black Regiment in the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778.
Her father, Samuel III, was a prominent New York banker who furnished her with a first-class private education and standing in New York’s social circles. In 1843 Julia married Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston, almost 20 years her senior. The Howes established a home in Boston where he founded the Perkins School for the Blind and Julia bore five children in the first twelve years of her marriage.
Since Boston was the hub of mid-nineteenth century America’s literary and reform activity, Julia avidly partook of both intellectual currents. In 1854, she published her first volume of lyrics and others followed in rapid succession.
Julia and Samuel embraced abolitionism and co-edited an anti-slavery newspaper Green Peace. Their Boston home became a center of abolitionist activity where Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and other anti-slavery leaders gathered. As a Unitarian she consistently advocated the tenets of this liberal religion.
After the outbreak of the Civil War, Julia visited a military camp near Washington, DC in a party led by Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts. The emotional experience prompted her to write a poem titled The Battle Hymn of the Republic that Atlantic Monthly paid her $4.00 to publish. It soon became the unofficial anthem of the Union Army and remains one of America’s most stirring hymns.
For the remainder of her long life, Julia became a leader of reform causes, most notably women’s suffrage and the campaign for world peace. No movement or “cause” in which women had an interest – — from voting rights to pure milk for babies – — escaped her notice and involvement. She was the president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, the New England Women’s Club, the Association for the Advancement of Women, and the American branch of the Woman’s International Peace Association, among her many civic posts.
True to her family’s Rhode Island roots, she summered annually in Newport and became the center of a group of literati that included the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, historian George Bancroft, artists John LaFarge and John Singer Sargeant, and philosopher Henry James.
Both in Boston and on Aquidneck Island she wrote an impressive array of reform articles, poetry, essays, and women’s books including Sex and Education (1874) a plea for coeducation, Modern Society (1881); Margaret Fuller (1883), a biography of the early advocate for women’s rights; Woman’s Work in America (1891); Is Polite Society Polite? (1895), a collection of essays; From Sunset Ridge; Poems Old and New (1898) and her Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (1899).
In 1870 she founded the weekly Woman’s Journal, a widely read suffragist magazine, to which she contributed articles for 20 years. After her husband’s death in 1876, she intensified her many reform activities. They continued unabatedly throughout the next three decades.
Julia died on October 17, 1910 in Portsmouth at her summer home “Oak Glen”, not far from the spot where her grandfather and his Black soldiers had beaten back a charge of Hessian troops in 1778. She was ninety-one. Two of her daughters, Laura Richards and Maud Howe Elliot, then wrote a revealing two-volume biography of their famous mother. Published in 1916, it preserved Julia Ward Howe’s memory for future generations and won the first Pulitzer Prize for biography in the process.
When Julia was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cabridge, Massachusetts, approximately 4,000 persons joined in singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It had been the custom of audiences to sing that anthem at each of Julia’s many speaking engagements. She has been inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.
Patrick T. Conley
President, Heritage Harbor Foundation and President Emeritus, Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame