Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,406

This is the grave of Julia Ward Howe.

Born in New York City in 1819, Julia Ward grew up rich. Her father was a stock broker and she went to all the best schools that accepted girls at that time. As a child, visitors to her family home included Charles Dickens, Charles Sumner, and Margaret Fuller. So yeah, she had all the advantages. Then her older brother married into the family of John Jacob Astor, which meant the money really started flowing in once those two families were connected.

Ward married the reformer Samuel Gridley Howe in 1841. He was 18 years older than she. She would soon become the more famous of the two. But it was not a good marriage. Howe was a reformer but he really struggled with his wife stepping out of traditional roles and being famous on her own. He could not deal with a woman doing something other than being a mother. Women working outside the home was anathema to him. They fought constantly. He tried to divorce her at one point, but she refused to consent to it. They did have 6 children, but basically operated as separate entities whenever possible. They mostly lived apart, her in a home with the kids in South Boston. She was deeply unhappy but according to her children, did everything possible to hide that from them, determined to create a happy home.

Like her husband, Howe was deeply invested in the reform movements of the era, including abolitionism. She was a very religious person as well and came under the spell of the radical minister Theodore Parker in the 1850s as he was preaching active resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act. Even before she was married, she had published essays on German philosophers and this continued after their marriage, again to Samuel’s chagrin. She published a book of poems anonymously in 1853 without even telling him! He legit had no idea it was her. She published another anonymous book of poems in 1857 too. He hated her poems. That’s because they were mostly about women’s equality, which he very much did not support. They separated from time to time, first in 1852; when he died in 1876, she discovered that he had burned through most of her family money.

But Howe kept working. She was like many abolitionists, in that she thought slavery was horrible and wrote about it, but also thought Black people were far from equal to whites. I want to urge readers again to remember that for most abolitionists, the problem with slavery was what it did to white people, not what it did to the slaves. She took a mission trip to Cuba and in 1860, wrote of it. A Trip to Cuba was considered an interesting book, but William Lloyd Garrison loathed it. See, Garrison was one of those exceptions. He really did think that the races were equal. He thought Howe a horrible racist and her disgust at seeing so many Black people in Cuba made him sick. But she mostly thought Garrison was nuts and to be fair, so did most people, including other abolitionists.

In 1861, Howe and her husband, presently together, went to Washington, D.C. There, they met with Abraham Lincoln and discussed the new war as the South committed treason in defense of slavery. While down there, her friend James Freeman Clarke, another reformer and abolitionist, suggested she write some new words to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” to create a war anthem. This became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” one of the most important songs in American history and made her personally famous.

By the late 1860s, Howe had worn down her husband’s opposition to her active involvement in reform movements and she spent the rest of her life all in on them. She became a major suffragist, helping to found the New England Woman Suffrage Association, among other groups. She and Lucy Stone co-headed the American Woman Suffrage Association beginning in 1869. William Claflin, the reform minded governor of Massachusetts, tried to name her a justice of the peace in 1871, but courts in Massachusetts intervened, arguing that only the legislature could make an exception to allow the appointment of a woman and to say the least, that wasn’t happening. In 1876, she founded the Association of American Women, a group advocating for higher education opportunities, and headed it for the next two decades. Moreover, and much to her credit, she avoided the racebaiting of a lot of suffrage activists during and after the ratification of the 15th Amendment. Yes, she was disappointed that it did not include women, but she realized that, at that moment in history, it was more critical to get Black men the vote.

Howe wrote constantly, often political tracts, but sometimes travel narratives as well. She also wrote a biography of Margaret Fuller in 1883. Later, she published The Love Letters of Margaret Fuller, which were perhaps slightly scandalous for the time, but the point was to humanize Howe’s hero and present her as both an intellectual and a woman. She toured all the time, both in the U.S. and Europe. She came out in favor of pacifism and against all wars. Her inspiration for this wasn’t so much the U.S. Civil War as it was the Franco-Prussian War. This made her wonder why men settled their arguments with violence and how women in power might act differently. So the pacifism was a direct result of her belief not only in women’s rights, but in the idea–common enough at the time–that women would bring purity and morality into the political realm. Using the ideas of developmental ideology and evolution common at the time (which would lead to some very dark paths in analyzing human behavior for others), Howe decided that men were at the first stage of evolution–individuals solving problems through violence to gain personal power. The second stage is where the nations of the world were at–men organizing into larger groups to gain power through violence for common cause and for personal power at the top. The third stage–the highest evolutionary stage–was motherhood (broadly conceived) and women needed to bring their purity into politics to stop things as silly and stupid as warfare.

Howe became a leader in the club movement of the late 19th century, as the reform movements of her youth merged into the new reform movements of the Progressive Era. She got to see both. In 1908, she was the first woman to be elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Howe died in 1910 at her home in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. She was 91 years old. Her children then wrote a collective biography of her that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1916. In 1970, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Julia Ward Howe is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other suffragists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Septima Clark, who did so much to bring the vote to Black men and women in the Civil Rights era, is in Charleston, South Carolina. Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett, the Hawaiian suffragist, is in Honolulu. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.