CHAPTER XII

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_.