Julia Ward Howe (/haʊ/ HOW;[1] May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was an American author and poet, known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as new lyrics to an existing song, and the original 1870 pacifist Mothers' Day Proclamation.

Her father Samuel Ward III was a Wall Street stockbroker, banker, and strict Calvinist Episcopalian.

Her mother was the poet Julia Rush Cutler Ward,[2] related to Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox" of the American Revolution.

Her eldest brother, Samuel Cutler Ward, traveled in Europe and brought home a private library.

[4] Her brother, Sam, married into the Astor family,[6] allowing him great social freedom that he shared with his sister.

[7] In Boston, Ward met Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and reformer who had founded the Perkins School for the Blind.

[13][14] In 1852, the Howes bought a "country home" with 4.7 acres of land in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which they called "Oak Glen.

The book collected personal poems and was written without the knowledge of her husband, who was then editing the Free Soil newspaper The Commonwealth.

[2] Unpublished during her lifetime but certainly part of her twenty-first century legacy is a fragmentary novel, The Hermaphrodite, assembled from manuscript fragments in Harvard's Houghton Library by Gary Williams and published in 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press.

In 1871, the Massachusetts Supreme Court made the decision that women could not hold any judicial offices without explicit authorization from the legislature, thereby nullifying Howe's appointment to justice of the peace.

[21] She was inspired to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" after she and her husband visited Washington, D.C., and met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in November 1861.

During the trip, her friend James Freeman Clarke suggested she write new words to the song "John Brown's Body", which she did on November 19.

[22] The song was set to William Steffe's already existing music and Howe's version was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.

[25] Unlike other suffragists at the time, Howe supported the final version of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had omitted the inclusion of language originally barring discrimination against women as well as people of color.

[21] Her reason for supporting this version of the Fifteenth Amendment was that "she viewed black men's suffrage as the priority.

Around the same time, Howe went on a speaking tour of the Pacific coast and founded the Century Club of San Francisco.

In 1890, she helped found the General Federation of Women's Clubs, to reaffirm the Christian values of frugality and moderation.

[35] At her memorial service approximately 4,000 people sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as a sign of respect as it was the custom to sing that song at each of Julia's speaking engagements.

[36] In 1912, the members of the New England Women's Club commissioned a marble bas-relief plaque of Howe in profile featuring the opening words of The Battle Hymn of the Republic by sculptor Cyrus Dallin.

It was originally installed to the left wall of the then main hall of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1913.