JULIA WARD HOWE
1819-1910
Julia Ward was born in New York City, and lived most of her life there
and in Boston. Her father was a wealthy banker, with a fine sense of
American noblesse oblige. Her mother, a woman of scholarly tastes, died
when Julia was only five.
Mr. Ward gave his children every possible advantage--lessons in French
and Italian and music, as well as the best English education; and the
three daughters had as good a training as the three sons. Julia was
an unusual child with a wonderful memory, and learned very quickly.
She wrote poems, solemn poems, when a very little girl. At nine she
listened at school to recitations in Italian and handed the amazed
instructor a composition in that language asking to be allowed to join
the class--and this request was granted, though the other pupils were
twice her age.
Life was a serious thing to this child who was brought up very
strictly, with duty and dignity constantly impressed upon her. She
heard frequently stories of her ancestors--colonial governors,
Revolutionary officers, Nathaniel Greene, and Marion, the “swamp fox
of Carolina,”--the long line passed before the grave little girl,
terrible as an army with banners; but always with the trumpet call of
inspiration in the thought that they belonged to her.
When she was sixteen her brother returned from several years of study
in Germany, and a new world was opened to her--German philosophy and
poetry, and simultaneously New York society; for at once he made the
Ward home one of the social centers of the city. Julia became the
reigning favorite and won everybody by her beauty and charm, her tact
and ready wit and good humor. She continued her studies regularly,
translating German and French and Italian poems, reading philosophy and
writing verses.
Visiting in Boston, she made the acquaintance of the literary group
there--Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Holmes. Charles Sumner was
her brother’s intimate friend, and one day when he and Longfellow
were calling on Miss Ward they suggested driving over to the Perkins
Institute for the Blind.
They had frequently talked to her of its founder, Doctor Samuel Gridley
Howe, the truest hero that America and their century had produced, and
withal the best of comrades. The Chevalier, they named him, a Bayard
without fear and without reproach. She knew something of the six years
he had spent in Greece, fighting during the war for independence
and serving as surgeon-in-chief. She knew of his pioneer work for
educating the blind, and of his marvelous achievement in teaching Laura
Bridgeman--the little blind and deaf and dumb girl, the statue which he
had brought to life.
When the three friends arrived Doctor Howe was absent, but before
they had finished their tour of the building Sumner spied him from
the window and called out, “There he is now, on his black horse.” The
young lady saw him, “a noble rider on a noble steed,” and into her
life he rode that day, like a medieval chevalier, in spite of the
fact that he was forty and she only twenty-four, in spite of the fact
that she had lived a gay social life and he was a serious reformer and
philanthropist who believed that with the world so full of needy people
no one had a right to luxury.
Life with a reformer husband was not always the care-free thing Julia
Ward had known, but she had shipped as mate for the voyage, she once
said with a merry laugh, and added, “I can not imagine a more useful
motto for married life.” She realized always that the deepest and
most steadfast part of herself she owed to Doctor Howe. “But for
the Chevalier, I should have been merely a woman of the world and a
literary dabbler.”
With all the cares and joys of a rich home life with her six children,
she found time for study and writing. She published two volumes of
verse, the first anonymously, but the secret could not be kept, for
people declared that no one but Julia Ward Howe could be its author.
In addition to his work for the blind, Doctor Howe edited an
anti-slavery paper called the _Boston Commonwealth_, and his wife
helped him with that task. Garrison, Sumner, Phillips, Higginson and
Theodore Parker became their friends and co-workers. To balance the
reformers, Edwin Booth, Holmes, Longfellow and Emerson were frequent
guests, drawn by the magnet of Mrs. Howe’s personality.
The slavery question became more and more acute, and soon the country
was plunged into civil war. Every earnest woman longed to be of some
immediate service to the nation and to humanity. Mrs. Howe was fired
with the desire to help. Her husband was beyond the age for military
duty, her oldest son was a lad, the youngest child two years old. She
could not leave home as a nurse. She lacked the practical deftness to
prepare lint and hospital stores. She seemed to have nothing to give,
there was nothing for her to do.
If only her gift for verses were not so slight! If she could but voice
the spirit of the hour!
During the autumn of 1861 Julia Ward Howe visited Washington. With
friends she went to watch a review of the northern troops, at
some distance from the city. While the maneuvers were going on, a
sudden movement of the Confederates brought the pageant to a close.
Detachments of soldiers galloped to the assistance of a small body of
men in danger of being surrounded and cut off from retreat; while the
troops remaining were ordered back to camp.
The carriage with the Boston visitors returned very slowly to
Washington, for soldiers filled the roads. There were tedious waits
while the marching regiments passed them. To beguile the time and to
relieve the tense situation, they sang snatches of popular army songs,
and one of these was _John Brown’s Body_.
“Good for you!” called out the passing boys in blue, and joined in the
chorus with a will, “His soul goes marching on.”
“Mrs. Howe,” asked James Freeman Clarke, who was in the carriage with
her, “why don’t you write some really worthy words for that stirring
tune?”
“I have often wished to do it,” she replied.
And that night her wish was fulfilled. Very early, in the gray of the
morning twilight, she awoke and as she waited for the dawn the poem
came to her, line by line, till the first stanza was finished. Phrase
by phrase, and another stanza! The words came sweeping over her with
the rhythm of marching feet. Resistlessly the long lines swung into
place before her eyes. “Let us die to make men free, while God is
marching on,” and the _Battle Hymn of the Republic_ was achieved.
“I must get up and write it down, lest I fall asleep again and forget
it,” she said to herself. In the half light she groped for pen and
paper and scrawled the lines down, almost without looking--a thing she
had often done before, when verses came to her in the night. With the
words put down in black and white, safe from oblivion, she went to
sleep again, saying drowsily to herself, “I like this better than most
things I have written.”
The poem was published soon after in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but
aroused little comment. The war, with alternate victory and defeat,
engrossed public attention. Small heed could be paid to a few lines in
a magazine.
But an army chaplain in Ohio read it, liked it, and memorized it before
putting down the _Atlantic_. Captured at Winchester, where he had
delayed to help the doctors with the wounded, this chaplain was sent
to Libby Prison, in Richmond. One large, comfortless room the Union
men had, with the floor for a bed. The Confederate officer in charge
told them one night that the South had just had a great victory; and
while they sat there in sorrow old Ben, a negro who sold them papers,
whispered to one prisoner that this news was false, that Gettysburg had
been a great defeat for the South.
The word passed like a flame. Men leaped to their feet, and broke into
rejoicings. They shouted and embraced one another in a frenzy of joy
and triumph. And the fighting Chaplain McCabe, standing in the middle
of that great room, lifted up his fine baritone voice and sang, “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Every voice took
up the chorus and “Glory, glory hallelujah, our God is marching on,”
rang through Libby Prison. You can imagine the effect of the tremendous
uplift of the lines.
Released, the fighting chaplain began work for the Christian Commission
and gave a lecture in the hall of representatives in Washington.
As part of his recent experiences he told this incident of their
celebration of the battle of Gettysburg, and ended by singing Mrs.
Howe’s poem, as only the man who had lived it could sing it. The great
audience was electrified. Men and women sprang to their feet and wept
and shouted. Above the wild applause they heard the voice of Abraham
Lincoln calling, while the tears rolled down his cheeks, “Sing it
again!”
McCabe sang it and the nation took up the chorus. The story of this
lecture made the hymn popular everywhere. It was sung in all the homes
of the North, at recruiting meetings and rallies. The troops sang it in
bivouac at night, and on the march. The Union army seized on it as its
battle cry and sang it as they went into action.
This song, which wrote itself in a wonderful moment of inspiration,
embodied the very soul of the Union cause. Yet throughout its twenty
lines there is no hint of sectional feeling. It was like an electric
shock to the people of the North, the call of a silver trumpet, the
flash of a lifted sword. It inspired them with hope and courage, giving
a new faith in the justice of God. The strength it brought to millions
of men and women can never be measured.
And in the world war of the twentieth century, somewhere in France,
it was sung over and over. Phrase by phrase, the words fitting new
conditions, as they fitted those of the sixties--the lightning of His
terrible sword, the fiery gospel written in burnished rows of steel,
the trumpet that shall never call retreat, sifting out men’s hearts
before His judgment seat, let us die to make men free--these apply in
any warfare or crusade where men are fighting not for self, but for
ideals.
After the war was ended Mrs. Howe continued to study, to write essays
and poems, to give lectures, to serve in many great causes. But she
is best remembered for the message which seemed to come to America,
through her loving and sorrowing heart, from God himself, in the
_Battle Hymn of the Republic_.