Masterpieces of American Eloquence: Christian Herald Selection
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
(Reminiscences, 1819-1899 is presented here in a high qual...)
Reminiscences, 1819-1899 is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Julia Ward Howe is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Julia Ward Howe then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
(Excerpt from Passion-Flowers
I have not sat at the heave...)
Excerpt from Passion-Flowers
I have not sat at the heaven-spread board, Nor worn the fillet Of glossy bays, I have but hearkened your song without.
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(A Trip to Cuba, tells us of an 1859 trip the author had t...)
A Trip to Cuba, tells us of an 1859 trip the author had taken. At the time it had generated outrage from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, for its derogatory view of Blacks. (Julia had only recently become an abolitionist in the 1850s, her family believing it to be a social evil. She thus believed it was morally right to free the slaves but did not believe in social or racial equality.)
Julia Ward Howe was an American author and reformer.
Background
Howe was born in New York City in 1819. She was the daughter of Samuel Ward, a wealthy banker, and Julia Rush (Cutler) Ward, writer of occasional poems. She was a descendant of John Ward of Gloucester, England, one of Cromwell's officers who came to America after the Restoration and settled in Rhode Island. Two of her ancestors, Richard Ward and Samuel Ward, were colonial governors of Rhode Island. Her grandfather, Samuel Ward, was a distinguished Revolutionary officer.
The Ward house on the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, then very far uptown, contained a picture gallery, and its carefully chosen art strongly influenced the young girl. An urge for self-expression found vent, even in childhood, in poems and romances. The ethical spirit controlled the esthetic, however.
Education
Having abundant means, her parents gave her an excellent education under governesses and in private schools, and her inborn esthetic taste had ample means of cultivation.
Julia Ward Howe received an honorary degree from Smith College.
Career
Even in her youth, the European prestige of her father's banking firm, together with her own eager interest, had accustomed her to think internationally, and her trip abroad strengthened this habit and began friendships with literary people and leaders of thought in several countries. Her marriage also placed her in the Boston environment of philosophers, poets, and Unitarians; practically all of the prominent Massachusetts intellectuals and reformers of that period became her acquaintances. She herself began to exercise her literary gifts assiduously, and in spite of domestic duties, proficiency in performing which she acquired with some difficulty, she published anonymously in 1854 her first volume of lyrics, Passion Flowers. This was followed by Words for the Hour (1857), also a volume of poems; A Trip to Cuba (1860) and From the Oak to the Olive (1868), both prose travel sketches; and by a play, The World's Own (1857). None of these productions, notwithstanding the facile music and buoyant spirit of the lyrics, obtained, or indeed merited, general recognition, although The World's Own was produced for a few performances at Wallack's.
It was inevitable that the Abolitionist movement should enlist both the Howes as enthusiastic crusaders. Mrs. Howe helped her husband edit The Commonwealth, an anti-slavery paper, and "Green Peace, " their Boston residence, was a center of anti-slavery activity where Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and many others gathered. From her war experience came at length a poem which won extraordinary popularity, though it brought her in cash – from the Atlantic – only four dollars.
One night, while visiting a camp near Washington, D. C. , with the party of Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, too stirred by emotion to sleep, she composed to the rhythm of "John Brown's Body, " "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, " scribbling down in the dense darkness of her tent the lines she could not see. It is probable that much of the popularity of the poem was due to the long rolling cadence of the old folk song, and even more to the hysteria of the moment; but the honors, public and private, showered upon the author, have seldom been equaled in the career of any other American woman.
From 1870, when marriages of daughters and son began the breaking up of the family life completed by Dr. Howe's death in 1876, the major part of her time was given to public service, which extended through the United States and across the sea. No movement or "Cause" in which women were interested, from suffrage, to pure milk for babies, could be launched without her. Her courage, her incisiveness and quickness of repartee, her constructive power, the completeness of her conviction accompanied by a balance of mind, and a sense of humor that disarmed irritation made her the greatest of woman organizers. In her earliest great campaign, where she "had the honor of pleading for the slave when he was a slave" (Reminiscences, p. 444), she was an enthusiastic follower of others; now she became a leader.
In 1868 she allied herself with the woman's suffrage movement, and when the New England Woman Suffrage Association was formed, she became its president. In 1869 this organization issued the call for the meeting in Cleveland at which the American Woman's Suffrage Association was formed, of which she became one of the most active representatives. The movement for peace enlisted her fervid support, and in September 1870 she issued an "Appeal to Womanhood throughout the World, " calling for a general congress of women to promote the alliance of different nationalities, "the amicable settlement of international questions, " and the general promotion of peace. It was translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish. On December 23, 1870, a meeting was held in New York to arrange for a "World's Congress of Women in behalf of International Peace, " at which she made the opening address; the following year the American Branch of the Woman's International Peace Association was formed with Mrs. Howe as president.
In the spring of 1872 she went to England, hoping to insure the holding of a woman's peace conference in London, but in this enterprise was unsuccessful. While in England she sat as a delegate at a prison reform congress. She made addresses before the Massachusetts legislature in the interests of reform, the Boston Radical Club, the Concord School of Philosophy, and in Faneuil Hall, where she plead the cause of the oppressed Greeks.
If lyric poetry was the literary medium of Mrs. Howe's early life, the essay and its vocal counterpart, the lecture, were the more frequently chosen vehicles of expression in her later years. An ineradicable sense of humor alone saved her from being too didactic. She had an unusual command of Italian, Greek, and French. The philosophy of Comte she read in the original, and she had sufficient familiarity with German to grasp the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Spinoza. Her love of communicating knowledge led her to embody what she had acquired in addresses and essays. Among her publications are: Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1876); Modern Society (1881), essays on various topics; Margaret Fuller (1883), possibly the best of her works from the standpoint of literature; Is Polite Society Polite? (1895), essays; From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898); Reminiscences (1899); and At Sunset (1910). She also aided in editing numerous publications.
Death came to her from pneumonia in her ninety-second year.
As a Unitarian she consistently worked in the interests of liberal religion and occasionally preached sermons from Unitarian pulpits and from those of other denominations.
Membership
In February 1868 the New England Woman's Club was formed, one of the earliest of such institutions, and Mrs. Howe was one of its first vice-presidents, and from 1871 to 1910, with the exception of two short intervals, she was its president. She also was a leader of the New England Woman Suffrage Association.
She was the founder and from 1876 to 1897 president of the Association of American Women, which advocated for women's education. She also served as president of organizations like the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and the New England Suffrage Association.
In 1881, Howe was elected president of the Association for the Advancement of Women. In 1908 Julia was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a society; its goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art.
Connections
Though she chafed because her father's religious scruples delayed her entrance into New York society, when she chose her husband he was not one of the youths with whom she had sung and danced, but a man of unusual moral earnestness, Samuel Gridley Howe, almost twenty years her senior. After their marriage in 1843, they spent a year in England, Germany, France, and Italy.
Four of her six children survived her – Florence Marion Howe Hall, Henry Marion Howe, Maud, the wife of John Elliott, and Laura Elizabeth, the wife of Henry Richards. The youngest, Samuel, born in 1859, had died in early childhood; the eldest, Julia, wife of Michael Anagnos, in 1886.