The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe

A Biography

Elaine Showalter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781451645927
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

A "lively biography" ( The New Yorker ) of Julia Ward Howe, the powerful feminist pioneer and author of the Civil War anthem, "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Julia Ward (1819–1910) was an heiress who married a handsome accomplished doctor who worked with the blind and deaf. But Samuel Howe wasted her inheritance, mistreated and belittled her, and tried to stifle her intellect and freedom. Nevertheless Julia persisted and wrote poetry and a mildly shocking sexual novel that was published to good reviews. She also wrote the words to probably the most famous anthem in the country's history—the Civil War anthem, "Battle Hymn of the Republic."After Samuel died when she was fifty-one, Julia lived another forty years as a dynamic, tireless, and successful activist for women's rights, pacifism, and social reform. She became a groundbreaking figure in the abolitionist and suffrage movements, and a successful author and lecturer who fought her own battle for creative freedom and independence. In the "riveting" ( The New York Times Book Review ), "unfailingly vivid" ( The Atlantic ) and "invigorating" ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, esteemed author Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe's determined self-creation and brings to life the society she inhabited and the obstacles she overcame. The Civil War challenged nineteenth-century ideas of separate spheres for men and women. In Howe's case, this transformation led to a rebellion against her marriage. She fought a second Civil War at home and discovered ways to combine domestic chores with creativity and politics, and she helped establish Mother's Day to honor women and to recruit them to her causes. "A biography with the verve and pace of a delicious novel…Showalter reveals the entwining of Howe's public and private lives, as she righteously battled her husband and society, and finally saw the glory she always believed she deserved" ( The Boston Globe ).

THE PRINCESS IN THE CASTLE

Julia Ward grew up living like a princess in a fairy tale. The daughter of a wealthy New York banker, the oldest of three devoted sisters, and the pet of three energetic brothers, she spent her childhood in a splendid Manhattan mansion where the finest tutors instructed her in music and languages, and her summers with her grandmother and cousins in Newport. She was cherished, indulged, and praised; but, she confessed in her memoir, she also felt like “a young damsel of olden time, shut up within an enchanted castle. And I must say that my dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer.”¹ The combination was paradoxical and prophetic. As she grew up, Julia would often relive the experience of the princess in the castle—loved and admired, but also restricted and confined.

An avid reader, she dreamed from an early age of becoming a great writer herself and tried to prepare herself intellectually for the role: “A vision of some important literary work which I should accomplish was present with me in my early life, and had much to do with habits of study acquired by me in youth, and never wholly relinquished.”² Her family tolerated her literary dreams, and supported her habits of study, but expected her to become a belle first and a housewife after. Her brothers were educated to be successful professionals; the sisters were trained to have all the feminine accomplishments. At the height of their youth and beauty, they were known as the Three Graces. Julia, the most beautiful and accomplished of all, was called the Diva.

Julia’s father, Samuel Ward, had made his own way to riches. He went to work at fourteen as a clerk in the investment banking firm Prime and King, which had handled loans for the construction of the Erie Canal. Even then he knew that he wanted to become “one of the first bankers in the United States.”³ By the age of twenty-two, he became a partner in the renamed Prime, Ward, and King. Ward was a disciplined, purposeful, serious young man, but his marriage in 1812 to sixteen-year-old Julia Cutler was a passionate love match. First to please her, and then to make up for the hard work and long self-deprivation of his apprenticeship, he set up an expensive household. Despite his pious Low Church upbringing, and his wife’s even stricter Calvinist beliefs in hellfire, sin, and damnation, Ward had no guilt about his wealth. Spending money on the family was not sinful, he believed, but proper and spiritually sanctioned. Banking was a “lofty and ennobling” profession, valued “for the power it confers, of promoting liberal and beneficent enterprises.”⁴

Within a decade of their marriage, the Wards had six children: Samuel, born in 1814; Henry in 1817; Julia on May 27, 1819; Francis Marion in 1821; Louisa in 1823; and Annie in 1824. (Another daughter, also named Julia for her mother, had been born in 1816 and died of whooping cough at the age of three.) Somehow, in the intervals of repeated pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, Julia Cutler Ward did fund-raising for the Society for Promotion of Industry among the Poor, which helped to train impoverished mothers as seamstresses. She also wrote poems and published them anonymously in the newspapers. Although she joked that her husband was indifferent to her “effusions,” he expressed some pride when her poem on General Lafayette’s arrival in New York was published. In 1849, her poem “Si Je Te Perds, Je Suis Perdu” was included in Rufus Griswold’s anthology The Female Poets of America.⁵

By 1820, the Ward family was living in a big house at number 5 Bowling Green, at the tip of Manhattan, fast becoming the chicest address in the city and known as Nob’s Row. Ward enjoyed buying splendid furniture, gold cornices, and the grand pianoforte without which no society home was complete. He gave his wife extravagant gifts, most spectacularly a lemon-yellow carriage, which had bright blue cushions and a blue interior, and was pulled by a pair of bay horses with black manes. This luxurious vehicle, the Cadillac of coaches, cost $1,000 and was driven by a black coachman named Johnstone.

The young Wards had an active social life. In the winter, they went sleighing and entertained their friends at “caudle parties,” where steaming-hot whiskey punch was served and the guests got “red as roosters.”⁶ Samuel threw himself into the efforts to find husbands for his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Eliza and Louisa, hiring tutors and professors to train them in ladylike accomplishments and social graces, and buying them stylish gowns for their debuts. To inaugurate their Bowling Green home and introduce Louisa to eligible young men, the Wards invited seventy of the most fashionable people in New York, including Mrs. John Jacob Astor, wife of the richest man in the United States, to a lavish dinner dance. There Louisa met a suitable lawyer from Savannah named Matthew Hall McAllister and later married him. As Samuel Ward became richer and richer, he also worked harder and harder, and gave generously to New York universities and charities.

Bowling Green was a good place to raise small children. In 1823, the fort in New York Harbor protecting the city from invasion in the War of 1812 had been converted into a resort named Castle Garden, a popular destination for fireworks, picnics, and ice cream, with a big auditorium for celebrations and concerts. (It is now Castle Clinton National Monument, which gets three million visitors a year as the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty.) Every day, Julia’s Irish nurse took her for a walk to nearby Battery Park to watch other little girls playing, and every afternoon at three, Johnstone came to take the Ward children and their nurses for a sedate ride. Julia Cutler Ward tried to teach her little daughter to sew. Reflecting on the failure of her early indoctrination in needlework, especially her struggles with the use of a thimble, Julia Ward Howe blamed her own clumsiness; but she did not have memories of her mother as seamstress. She remembered her parents instead as a glamorous couple whose entertainments she was sometimes allowed to watch as a special treat, especially a night when they took her out of bed and dressed her in an embroidered cambric slip with a pink rosebud on the waist. Four-year-old Julia was taken down to the drawing rooms, “which had undergone a surprising transformation. The floors were bare, and from the ceiling of either room was suspended a circle of wax lights and artificial flowers. The orchestra included a double bass. I surveyed the company of the dancers, but soon curled myself up on a sofa, where one of the dowagers fed me with ice-cream.”⁷ This dreamlike party, with its illuminations, decorations, music, dancing, beautiful dresses, and sweet foods, was to remain her image of enchantment throughout her life.

The days of wine and roses were short. Julia Cutler Ward endured several bouts of inflammation of the lungs, or tuberculosis, was bled by leeches and blistered with poultices, and became so slender and pale that she drew attention as a fashionable beauty. As her sister Eliza observed, since her illnesses began, Mrs. Ward had “grown wondrous handsome.” Her complexion was clear and glowing, “her figure extremely slim and genteel, and the expression of her countenance . . . peculiarly interesting.”⁸ Genteel slenderness, however, gave way to sunken cheeks and persistent headaches and coughs. Faced with an early death, Mrs. Ward reverted to the Calvinist beliefs of her family, repented for her sins, and prayed for forgiveness.

On November 11, 1824, giving birth to her seventh child, Annie, she died of puerperal fever at the age of twenty-seven. Her relatives had gathered around her sickbed to pray for her salvation; as her granddaughters would write, “she was almost literally prayed to death.”⁹ In the middle of the night, the family woke the children to tell them their mother was dead and took them to the bedroom to kiss her cold cheek. Julia remembered very little of these early years, but she dreamed of her mother until the end of her life, and each of her own pregnancies was accompanied by depression and fear of death.

Samuel Ward was so devastated that he refused to see his infant daughter for weeks. In his grief, he became a convert to his wife’s Calvinist beliefs and a model of evangelical piety and sobriety. He never remarried. Soon after her death, he sold the Bowling Green house and most of its furnishings, and moved the family uptown to a house at number 16 Bond Street, then at the northern edge of Manhattan, just above Houston Street. In 1825, Bond Street was a remote, isolated, and risky neighborhood, but Samuel saw its potential, and he persuaded his family to buy property on the same street—his father at number 7, and two unmarried brothers, his brother John next door at number 8, and his brother Henry at number 14. By the 1830s, Bond Street had become a flourishing and exclusive neighborhood of more than sixty houses. The six motherless children were surrounded in the Ward compound by an enclave of affectionate aunts and uncles. Aunt Eliza, who had not yet succeeded in finding a husband, despite her brother-in-law’s best efforts, moved in to take care of them. She was used to being the family caregiver; after her own father’s death, when she was fifteen, she had taken over the management of the household and raised four younger siblings. Tall and awkward, with large uneven teeth and hairy moles on her face, she had good-naturedly put up with being the designated spinster and enduring the humiliating customs that went with the role; at the weddings of her younger sisters, she had to dance in her stocking feet. When her youngest sister died, she was available to supervise the upbringing of her nieces and nephews.

As Julia described her childhood, her father’s religious views ruled the household, and “the early years of my youth were passed in seclusion not only of home life, but of a home life most carefully and jealously guarded from all that might be represented in the orthodox trinity of evil, the world, the flesh, and the devil.”¹⁰ There would be no more parties or balls; Samuel Ward forbade dancing parties, the theatre, and concerts, and gave up his favorite pastimes of smoking and playing cards. To his worldly brothers’ dismay, he even became the president of the Temperance Society and threw away the bottles of fine Madeira in his cellar.

To protect his children, especially his daughters, from the “dissipations of fashionable society, and even the risks of general intercourse with the unsanctimonious,” Ward restricted socializing to the family circle.¹¹ Their family routines were unvarying, austere, and strictly observed: simple meals, water to drink, and prayers twice a day. He also took a Puritanical view of Saturday evening, regarding it as the proper time to prepare for the marathon religious observances of Sunday, which started with the luxury of coffee and muffins, but then devolved into two church services plus two Sunday-school meetings. Julia got some pleasure from looking at the showy bonnets, all flowers and feathers, at the Grace Church, known as “the Church of the Holy Milliner.” In the intervals between sermons, the children were permitted to read pious books, and Julia was grateful for the didactic stories of Mrs. Sherwood, which passed Sabbath muster. Mr. Ward was a stern disciplinarian, whose displeasure cast a chill over the children, although he never spanked or whipped them. “My little acts of rebellion were met with some severity,” Julia recalled.¹² She adored him but feared him as well.

For the Ward daughters especially, life was spent indoors, like the little girls of Victorian genre painting, who are often represented looking wistfully out the barred window. The older boys had a riding ring where they could ride their ponies, but the girls were discouraged from outdoor pursuits. When they were allowed to take walks, they were clothed in thin cambric dresses, white cotton stockings, and Moroccan kid slippers, even in the coldest weather, and often came down with colds, “proving conclusively to the minds of their elders how much better off they were within doors.”¹³ Much later, with daughters and sons of her own, Julia reflected on the fashions, activities, and health of boys and girls. “Boys are much in the open air. Girls are much in the house. Boys wear a dress which follows and allows their natural movements. Girls wear clothes which almost impede their limbs. Boys have, moreover, the healthful hope held out to them of being able to pursue their own objects, and to choose and follow the profession of their choice. Girls have the dispiriting prospect of a secondary and decorative existence, with only so much room allowed them as may not cramp the full sweep of the other sex.”¹⁴

Still, Mr. Ward, whose own education had been cut short, and who had never been to Europe, wanted his children to have the educational opportunities he had missed, to learn to speak foreign languages, and to be taught by the “best and most expensive masters.”¹⁵ The boys were sent to board at the progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, directed by Joseph Cogswell and George Bancroft. Cogswell was a literary sophisticate who had spent years in Europe, where he became a friend of Goethe, got to know Sir Walter Scott, and even visited the celebrated lesbian couple the Ladies of Llangollen. Bancroft rose to become a distinguished historian and minister to Great Britain and Berlin.

The girls were mostly educated at home, but Julia had a group of extraordinarily gifted and accomplished teachers. Indeed, her private education may have been better than the rote learning her brothers received at boarding school, and was certainly more intense and tailored to her talents and interests. While her brothers often complained of the dullness of their studies, she considered the hours with her books the brightest of her day. As a little girl, she studied French six to eight hours a day for conversation, and read the fables of La Fontaine. A French dancing master came to teach the girls steps they were not permitted to practice outside their home. As Julia grew older, she studied piano and the works of Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Princess in the Castle
• Chapter Two: The Knight-Errant
• Chapter Three: The Hero and the Belle
• Chapter Four: Marriage and Maternity
• Chapter Five: Rome again, Home again
• Chapter Six: Passion-Flowers
• Chapter Seven: The Secret Six
• Chapter Eight: The Civil War
• Chapter Nine: A New World
• Chapter Ten: The Woman’s Department
• Chapter Eleven: The Eleventh Hour
• Abbreviations
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Photo Credits
• Index
• Copyright