Howe, Julia Ward

Life Span
to
Full name
Julia Ward Howe
Place of Birth
Birth Date Certainty
Exact
Death Date Certainty
Exact
Gender
Female
Race
White
Sectional choice
North
Origins
Free State
No. of Spouses
1
No. of Children
6
Family
Samuel Ward, Jr. (father), Julia Rush (mother), Samuel Gridley Howe (husband, 1843)
Occupation
Writer or Artist
Relation to Slavery
White non-slaveholder
Other Affiliations
Women’s Rights

Julia Ward Howe (American National Biography)

Scholarship
By far Howe's most famous work, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," was published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. She wrote the poem in 1861 while in Washington, D.C., with her husband, who was helping distribute supplies to Massachusetts regiments. Set to the music of "John Brown's Body," her poem became the rallying song for the North during the final year of the Civil War.

The "Battle Hymn" also brought Howe the fame required to more actively pursue a writing career. In 1867 she produced eleven issues of a literary magazine, Northern Lights. That same year she wrote about her European travels in From the Oak to the Olive (1868). In 1870 she founded the weekly Woman's Journal, a successful, widely-read suffragist magazine to which she contributed for twenty years. She edited a defense of coeducation titled Sex and Education in 1874 and brought out a collection of her own addresses, Modern Society, in 1880. She published a biography of Margaret Fuller in 1883, and another collection of lectures, Is Polite Society Polite?, in 1895. Her popular memoirs, Reminiscences, appeared in 1899. Indeed, Howe continued to write lectures, poems, and articles until her death.
Sandra F. VanBurkleo and Mary Jo Miles, "Howe, Julia Ward," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00348.html.
Chicago Style Entry Link
Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. view record
Grant, Mary H. Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868. Brooklyn: Carlson Pub., 1994. view record
How to Cite This Page: "Howe, Julia Ward," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/23154.