Songwriters Hall of FameInducted 1970

Julia Ward Howe, writer, poet, leader for women’s suffrage, and author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, was born in New York City on May 27, 1819.

She was born into a wealthy Manhattan family and received her early education from governesses and private schools. In 1841, Ward met her future husband, Samuel Howe on a visit to Boston. The two were married on April 23, 1843 and settled in Boston where they would raise six children. Together, they published the anti-slavery periodical Commonwealth, and worked on political causes centering around abolition and later the Civil War. Dedicated to self-education, Howe studied philosophy, learned several languages and began to get more involved in public life and writing. In the late 1950’s, Howe’s poems and plays began getting attention in national magazines.

Inspired from a 1861 visit to Washington in which Howe and her husband were escorted by President Lincoln to visit a Union Army camp in Virginia, a clergyman familiar with Julia’s poetry urged her to write a new song for the war effort to replace the slave song “John Brown’s Body”. As Howe described the event later: “I replied that I had often wished to do so”.in spite of the excitement of the day I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately.…

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