The 1860s were the ten most momentous years of Julia’s life. In 1860, she was forty-one years old. She had given birth to her sixth child, but she may have expected to have more; the average age of menopause in the 1850s was forty-six, and Chev thought eight children were a reasonable and healthful number for a family. She had accepted matronly middle age and had even begun to take up the once-despised domestic crafts of needlework, cross-stitch embroidery, knitting, and hooking rugs. A photograph labeled “circa 1862” shows her with shiny dark hair in a bonnet trimmed with flowers, a full silk dress, and a black velvet cloak, her hand resting on a Bible lying on an elaborately embroidered cloth-draped table. Another photograph from the 1860s shows her with a heavy braid wrapped like a crown around the top of her graying hair. Worried that her hair was thinning, she was attempting to disguise it with a hairpiece.
The winter of 1861 began cheerfully. For once, the Howes had a good German cook, and Julia was enjoying her baby boy. She bought him warm winter clothing, loved coming home from a party and joining him in their bed. But the parties ended abruptly in April with the attack on Fort Sumter and the declaration of war. Fathers and sons in Boston enlisted; mothers and daughters in Boston were making lint bandages; but Julia felt depressed by her inability to contribute to the fight. “I could not leave my nursery to follow the march of our armies, neither had I the practical deftness which the preparing and packing of sanitary stores demanded,” she recalled. “Something seemed to say to me, ‘You would be glad to serve but you cannot help anyone. You have nothing to give, and there is nothing for you to do.’ ”1 That mocking and belittling inner voice was probably an echo of Chev. He had been serving as a member of the US Sanitary Commission during the summer and had submitted his first report in July. “Soap! Soap! Soap!—I cry but none heard,” he complained to Governor Andrew. But he was discouraging about women’s efforts to help the commission.
Julia was grateful for Chev’s invitation to accompany him to Washington for commission meetings in the fall of 1861. Setting out as a woman with nothing to give and nothing to do, she would return as the author of the greatest American war anthem in history. Departing from Boston, the Howes traveled by ferry and train, accompanied by James Freeman Clarke; governor John Andrew and his wife, Eliza; and critic Edwin P. Whipple and his wife, Charlotte. Julia was apprehensive, but also excited “to meet the grim Demon of the War face to face,” rather than imagine it from newspaper reports and men’s conversations. As they reached the outskirts of the city of Washington, the Bostonians saw clusters of armed men seated by campfires; Chev explained that these were pickets, Union soldiers protecting the capital against a feared invasion from Confederate troops stationed across the Potomac. The Howes stayed at the bustling Willard’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in the middle of Washington, a place described by Hawthorne in 1862 as “more justly . . . the centre of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.”2 Rooms at the Willard cost four dollars a night, about sixty in contemporary terms. That was high for a hotel; the Willard was in demand and had doubled its prices. Now the broad avenue was crowded with mounted officers and horse-drawn ambulances bringing the wounded into the city hospitals. The Washington offices of the New York Herald were next door, and across the street was “the ghastly advertisement of an agency for embalming and forwarding the bodies of those who had fallen in the fight or who had perished by fever.”3
Embalming had become one of the images of death in the war. Dr. Thomas Holmes, a coroner’s physician from New York, had developed an embalming technique and was given a commission from the Army Medical Corps to treat Union officers. His services were in so much demand that he extended the service to enlisted men, and after the war he estimated he had embalmed about four thousand soldiers in all. Other physicians advertised too, even handing out cards to soldiers marching out to battle; but death on the field was too abrupt and bodies too numerous to allow for many funeral obsequies.
While Chev was busy at meetings, Julia went with Clarke and William Henry Channing, another Unitarian minister, to visit hospitals and army camps. At the headquarters of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, Colonel William Greene asked her to speak to his men. She had never spoken in public; Chev was strongly opposed to such activities for women, although Parker had encouraged her. At first she was overcome by shyness, and tried to run away and hide in one of the hospital tents, but at last, “as well as I could,” she told the soldiers “how glad I was to meet the brave defenders of our cause, and how constantly they were in my thoughts.” That first public address was legitimized in a way that overruled Chev and was well received by the audience. She began to think it might be possible to share her ideas on other platforms.
Chev’s account of Julia’s activities in Washington, or rather his assumptions about the way she would be occupying herself, presented her as a social butterfly enjoying the opportunity to charm a new audience. “Your Mama is having a very delightful time,” he wrote to twelve-year-old Laura; “the weather is delicious: there are expeditions every day, to camps, objects of curiosity. In the evening there are many people gathered in the Salon of the hotel . . . people who can appreciate talent and wit and conversational power are sure to be drawn to her.” He, meanwhile, was doing the serious work: “I go about inspecting camps and hospitals and doing what I can to help the cause of freedom.”4
Chev wasn’t there when she spoke to the soldiers, or when John Andrew arranged for the Boston contingent to meet President Lincoln in a drawing room at the White House. She remembered “a tall, bony figure, devoid of grace; his countenance almost redeemed from plainness by two kindly blue eyes.”5 All except Andrew, “whose faith never wavered,” felt disappointed by the man who was then regarded by many intellectuals as simple and clumsy, his leadership most charitably credited as meaning well. Julia was not impressed by his conversation and shocked by his uneducated backwoods accent, pronouncing “heard” as “heerd.” Leaving the White House, James Freeman Clarke ruefully noted, “We have seen it in his face; hopeless honesty; that is all.”6
They joined the thousands of civilians who rode out in carriages to watch General George B. McClellan’s elaborate troop reviews, designed to display the splendor and discipline of the Army of the Potomac. On November 18, Julia and her companions drove out to watch a parade at Munson’s Hill in Northern Virginia. While they were watching, there was an attack by Confederate soldiers on a small group of outliers, and some of the soldiers went to defend them; the parade broke up, and the remaining men were ordered back to their barracks. In the slow drive back to Washington, the Bostonians were surrounded by troops and passed the time by singing army songs including “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground; his soul is marching on,” which had become especially popular with the Massachusetts regiments. “The soldiers seemed to like this,” she recalled, “and answered back, ‘Good for you!’ Mr. Clarke said, ‘Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for this stirring tune?’ I replied that I had often wished to do this, but as yet had not found in my mind any leading toward it.”
That night she found powerful words in her dreams:
I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the early morning twilight, and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me during the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed the writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, “I like this better than most things I have written.”7
This often-repeated account suggests she had written in the dark so as not to wake the baby. But Sammy had been left behind in Boston. Chev was not in the bedroom either; they had taken separate rooms at the Willard. He did not read the lines in Washington, although she had scribbled them on the notepaper of the US Sanitary Commission. Two days later, on the way home, she read the verses to James Clarke, who liked them very much. The composition of the “Battle Hymn” was a repetition of the composition of Passion-Flowers, a secret only to her husband; but this time, Chev could not grumble. Her minister had given her permission to write. Even more than her book, the “Battle Hymn” would change the balance of power in their marriage.
Back in Boston, she made a small number of revisions and sent the poem to James Fields at the Atlantic Monthly, with a playful note: “Do you want this, and do you like it, and have you any room for it in the January number? I am sad and spleeny, and begin to have fears that I may not be after all, the greatest woman alive.”8 It was an unusually self-deprecating cover letter, but her self-mocking admission to Fields showed how low her confidence had fallen. Fields paid her five dollars, came up with the title “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and published the poem anonymously on the cover of the magazine in February 1862.
The same month, Chev published a letter “To Mrs.—and other loyal women” in which he asked women not to send supplies to the troops. “Our men in the field do not lack food or clothing or money,” he wrote to discourage charitable ladies, “but they do like noble watchwords and inspiriting ideas such as are worth fighting and dying for.”9 He had no idea that those words and ideas were on the way, or that his wife would supply them.
The “Battle Hymn” attracted little notice at first. Julia explained that “we were all too much absorbed in watching the progress of the war to give much heed to a copy of verses more or less.”10 But slowly it caught on, and her six-stanza contribution to the Union struggle ultimately outweighed all her husband’s lengthy reports. By December 1863, she was reciting the “Battle Hymn” at the dedication of a statue of John Brown in Boston. By February 1864, the “Battle Hymn” was being performed to cheering audiences in Washington in front of President Lincoln.
Why was the “Battle Hymn” so much more successful than any of Julia’s other writings? Of course, it is about a great national conflict, a life-and-death struggle, rather than a marital quarrel. Julia had linked or projected her own emotions onto a moment of historical mythmaking. But it is also a better poem. Her lifelong knowledge of biblical imagery, her decades of training as a poet, and her own longing to be part of the war effort, fueled and fused her creative imagination. She drew upon images from her reading, from sermons, from her dreams, from her unconscious, from her anger at her husband, and from her view of the Civil War as a holy war.
Above all, the syncopation of the music got her away from the predictable quatrains and peculiar stanzas of her usual verse. Written to be sung, the words were meant for the ear and not the eye. Instead of the ungainly feminine rhymes of her passion poems, ending on a weak syllable, her lines ended on a forceful final rhyme. Her language is elevated, but she does not impose awkward contractions to make the meaning fit the meter. There were many who wrote new words to “John Brown’s Body,” but the “Battle Hymn” had the most serious and uplifting language; there were many who composed new music for Julia’s lyric, but unsuccessfully. As her daughters wrote, “it is inseparably welded to the air for which it was written, an air simple, martial, and dignified: no attempt to divorce the two could ever succeed.”11 The “Battle Hymn” was specific to an occasion, but it could also be adapted for chorale and eulogy, memorial and inspiration. As David Reynolds comments in his cultural biography of John Brown, “without Julia Ward Howe, John Brown may not have become fused with American myth. . . . She caught the essence of John Brown, a devout Calvinist who considered himself predestined to stamp out slavery. She had coupled his God-inspired antislavery passion to the North’s mission and had thus helped define America.”12
• • •
Almost every family in Boston was in mourning during the war. But back at home, the Howes felt safe: Henry was only fifteen; Sammy a four-year-old child. Then, in May 1863, Sammy came down with croup, which rapidly turned into diphtheria. Now prevented by vaccination, diphtheria was a terrible scourge in the nineteenth century, characterized by a barking cough, high fever, and swelling of the throat. The family physicians tried their futile remedies of steam, beef tea, and water by injection. On the fifth day, Chev returned from Washington, but Sammy died in his parents’ arms at 3:00 a.m. Chev was too crushed by grief to attend the funeral on May 19; instead, James Freeman Clarke rode in the carriage with Julia to Mt. Auburn Cemetery. “Your little funeral, dear,” she wrote that evening in the journal she had just begun to keep, “was bitter and agonizing. . . . The small white casket was placed on the front seat in the carriage. We came near the gate of Mount Auburn, when I began to realize that the parting was very near. I now opened the casket, took your dear little cold hand in mine, and began to take silent farewell of you.”13
A few days later, the Howes went to New York, seeking comfort from the family at 8 Bond Street. Chev stayed in a hotel, since Uncle John’s house was full; he was sick and bedridden most of the month, and Julia visited him there. The celebrated abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher had promised to make a condolence call at Bond Street, but he didn’t show up; on Sunday all except Chev went to hear him preach on “Variety of Opinion in Minor Matters of Religion,” a topic “not at this moment of special interest to me,” Julia noted bitterly. On her birthday, May 27, she wrote “the one thing I desire now is reunion with my darling baby boy.” For weeks she dreamed that she was trying to nurse him in the dark. Most heartbreakingly, Julia and Chev seem to have been unable to share their grief or console each other. “We take a different course about dear Sammy,” he told her. “You seem to cherish his memory,—I strive to let him go.”14 There would be no more babies; her childbearing years were over. When he recovered from the first wave of his grief, Chev buried himself in ever-expanding reform work. On June 2, she went to see a medium named Foster who gave her vaguely consoling messages about Sammy in heaven, but said “nothing definite.”
Julia turned to her studies and, writing for refuge and distraction, and perhaps unconsciously, expressed her conflicted feelings through six essays on philosophy and religion: “How Not to Teach Ethics,” “Doubt and Belief,” “Moral Triangulation, or The Third Party,” “Duality of Character,” and “The Fact Accomplished.” “The Third Party” was the keynote of the series, and a metaphor for her state of mind. In it, she compared the bonds of matrimony to the compact uniting the States. Under what conditions, she asked, were divorce and secession justified? And “if North and South agree to set aside their bonds of union, and to become two republics, why should they not do it?” Ultimately, she concluded, the sacredness of the bond precluded cancellation. Somehow, the parties had to find a way to stay together.
She called her lecture series “Practical Ethics” and determined to offer it to a Boston audience. She doesn’t say whether Chev read the lectures, but he insisted that if she gave them, she could not accept payment. In November 1863 she invited some of her friends to a Monday-night lecture series in her home. Attendance was excellent, the audience was attentive, and questions were respectful. Emerson, although unable to be present, was especially interested in “The Third Party.” Julia took advantage of the meetings to work on her presentation and rhetoric. She tried to avoid anticlimax and to aim for clarity. Giving a lecture was midway between acting and teaching, which she approached through inducing a kind of trance-state: “on the morning of the day on which I was to give my lecture, I would read it over, and a curious sense of the audience seemed to possess me, a feeling of what it would and what it would not follow.”
Her hopes that she had established herself as the preeminent civic poet of Boston, however, were soon dashed. At the November ceremony to dedicate the great pipe organ at the Boston Music Hall, the largest in the United States, the celebrated actress Charlotte Cushman recited an ode that had been commissioned from Annie Fields, the young wife of James T. Fields. It would be Annie Fields’s first published poem. Julia had expected to be invited to write the ode; instead, she had to smile politely at the reception given by the Fieldses after the ceremony, when the authorship of the anonymous ode was revealed. Most unwisely, in an indication of her emotional vacillation during this difficult year, she used her position at theCommonwealth to write a nasty unsigned review of the poem:
The ode which was now presented to the public, judged from a literary point of view, deserves neither praise or criticism. It had no characteristic of a poem other than phrase and rhyme, and presented the mere wardrobe of poetry, without a body or soul . . . with no stamp of originality, and with no line that will remain . . . The false ambition of this attempt merely blocked the way from something better. Surely, among the literary men and women of Boston, among those who really could, might have been found someone who would have spoken the word for the hour which, whether in prose or in verse, was what the public wanted to hear.15
The review offended Annie Fields and her husband; even Longfellow reproached Julia for having been unkind. In her notebook, Mrs. Fields wrote: “Julia Ward Howe has said and sung her last as far as Boston goes. Her jealousy of the Odist got the better of her better judgment and she has written out her gall for the Commonwealth. Alas! Where was her good genius?” At a dinner party given by Mary Ward Dorr, she added later, the company picked “Julia as clean as any duck for the spit.” Julia eventually wrote a note of apology, and Annie Fields graciously accepted it, but she never really forgave those snide remarks. She joked with friends that Julia resembled Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, bursting in upon a newly organized society of working women “like a whirlwind,” interrupting their discussion, and “bringing her little narrow personality into a meeting occupied with business and heated with high enthusiasms.”16 If Julia was to recover her literary reputation and her ethical high ground, she had a fight ahead of her.
Despite this setback, she wrote new philosophical lectures, and in January 1864 told Chev that she intended to take them on the road to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and ask for honorariums. Chev was predictably outraged, and her promise to give her profits to the Sanitary Commission did not mollify him. On January 16, they had a bitter quarrel; she wrote in her journal that “some illusions left me today, giving place to unwholesome facts.” Did this cryptic message mean, as some Howe scholars surmise, that Chev had told her he was having an affair? Certainly she had been suspecting him of infidelity for years. He could also have been passing on sexual gossip, which would have disillusioned her almost as much. But not even unwholesome facts could stop her. A few days later, she read her lecture on “Duality of Character” in the vestry of James Freeman Clarke’s Indiana Place Church. There she introduced her white lace cap, which both covered her hair attractively and became her trademark. “Quite a full audience” showed up, including the steadfast Mary Ward Dorr.17
In the spring she went to Washington, where her friend the saloniste Fanny Eames had offered her parlor as a venue. Sumner not only refused to support the lectures but also wrote to women in the city to dissuade them from attending and refused to attend himself. On the subject of women’s rights, Sumner was yesterday’s man; in the 1860s, a decade of rapid social change, he could not keep up. Yet her confidence as a speaker was rising. Departing from Washington, she confided to her journal her determination to face the challenge. “I have no one to stand for me there, Sumner against me, Channing unknown to me, everyone else indifferent.” Nonetheless, she went “in obedience to a deep and strong impulse which I do not understand or explain, but whose bidding I cannot neglect.”18 Sumner did not show up, but William Henry Channing, Stephen Foster, and Salmon P. Chase were in her audience.
On November 6, 1864, against Chev’s usual fierce opposition, she went to the Century Club in New York to participate in the celebration of the seventieth birthday of William Cullen Bryant, the only woman invited to read. She knew that she was there as a token woman and “the author of the most stirring lyric of the war,” but she was proud to be included just the same. On the train, she sat next to Oliver Wendell Holmes, who apologized that he could not make conversation because he was saving his voice to read his poem for Bryant. Julia had the satisfaction of assuring him that she too had a poem to read. In the event, she was the star of the evening. The Chicago Tribune commented: “She has just the pathetic and well measured voice for oracular manifestations . . . and looks remarkably inspired. She was received with much applause.”19 On the train home, Holmes made lively conversation, and gave her the teasing nickname of “Madame Comment,” for all her questions and answers.
The first months of 1865 found her hard at work, and trying to juggle the care and chaperonage of her growing daughters with her reading and writing. She turned to philosophy, especially Kant, to calm her down and give her moral ammunition in her arguments with Chev, although domestic duties and the children’s demands cut maddeningly into study time. “Much tormented by interruptions,” she wrote in February; “could not get five quiet minutes at a time. Everybody torments me with every smallest errand. And I am trying to study philosophy!”20
Among the new essays was “Polarity,” a key to her views on relationships between men and women. In this lengthy unpublished essay, in the Julia Ward Howe Collection at the Library of Congress, she argued that the relations of men and women were not fixed and innate, but the product of social forces and customs. The polar opposition of masculine and feminine, of man and woman, did not rest upon the superiority of men. If society could come to understand that progress required the equal development and growth of both sexes, polarity and opposition could evolve towards complementarity and a “sublime unit” coming from the liberty of the individual. Although she was laboring to prove this intellectually in the 1860s, Julia made it the basis of a philosophy of gender that enabled and inspired her feminist actions for the rest of her life.
Julia Romana’s birthday in March led her to meditate on her oldest daughter’s reserve and the strains in their relationship: “Twenty-one years old, and almost a stranger to me.”21 Both Julia Romana and Flossy took Chev’s side in protesting against her public speaking and traveling away from home. When she insisted on giving a lecture that month despite his fury, he stomped off to Newport with Julia Romana.
The Howes called a temporary ceasefire on April 9, when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and there were flags, decorations, festivities, and parades in Boston. Less than a week later came the terrible news of Lincoln’s assassination. For Julia, the news brought personal pain as well as patriotic grief. Edwin Booth was a friend and neighbor; she had attended the funeral of his young wife. The whole family admired him as an actor and had often seen him on the stage, as well as his brother John Wilkes Booth. The week of the assassination, Edwin Booth was performing in Boston; the Howes had tickets to the Saturday matinee. All theatres closed, and it was rumored that Edwin would never act again. In her journal, Julia recorded her anguish and added, “this atrocious act, which was consummated in a very theatrical manner, is enough to ruin not the Booth family alone, but the theatrical profession.”22 The day of Lincoln’s funeral, April 19, she wrote a poem called “Parricide.” Then on April 27, she heard that John Wilkes Booth had been found and shot, refusing to give himself up—“the best thing that could have happened to himself and his family.”23 That day she wrote a second poem, “Pardon,” which some readers took as a premature forgiveness of Booth. It was her gesture of closure for the vengeful passions of the Civil War.
But the Howe truce was short-lived, and Julia’s domestic war was also coming to a head. April 23 was her wedding anniversary, often a day of sad solitary reflection. This year she announced her intention to spend the night of the anniversary giving a sermon to the inmates at the Charlestown Women’s Prison. First, Flossy tried to stop her, and then Chev erupted. He “attacked me with the utmost vehemence and temper, calling my undertaking a mere courting of publicity, would not argue, nor hear me at all.” Julia gave in for the last time; but in her diary she recorded a forceful repudiation of her marriage. “I have been married twenty-two years today. In the course of this time I have never known my husband to approve any act of mine which I myself valued. Books—poems—essays—everything has been contemptible or contraband in his eyes, because it was not his way of doing things.”24 Chev read this entry the next day—he may have been reading her diary all along—and demanded that she destroy the whole journal, which she absolutely refused to do. She did not get to preach at the prison, but, as Valarie Ziegler points out, “no one knew better than she what life governed by an unyielding warden could be . . . [she] had spent her entire life in confinement.”25
The marital civil war did not end with surrender, assassination, a jail break, or a funeral. From April 1865, however, it was in a new phase. Julia felt some loyalty towards Chev, but she was no longer dependent on his permission or support to do what she wished. If he occasionally behaved well, she was amazed that “he shows any kind of liking to me.”26 She would never break their marital vows, but she would follow her own conscience. The national conflict had enabled her to resolve the personal one. Despite all its tragic losses, she observed, the Civil War not only had emancipated the slaves but also had liberated women, who “found a new scope for their activities, and developed abilities hitherto unsuspected by themselves.”27
In the autumn, the Howes once more were searching for a new house and bought one at Boylston Place, where they bickered constantly over Chev’s insistence on keeping the rooms healthily cold and Julia’s complaints that she was freezing to death. At her cold desk, Julia was editing a collection of her poems called Later Lyrics, and she did not enjoy the task. “The labor of looking over the manuscript nearly made me ill . . . Had a new bad feeling of intense pressure in the right temple.” Still, “nearly disabled by headaches,” she pushed on.28 A group of war poems, including “The First Martyr,” on the execution of John Brown, were less dramatic than “The Battle Hymn,” with which the section concluded. She was still sniping at the Brownings; in “Kenyon’s Legacy,” named for John Kenyon, who had funded them in Italy, she made fun of the poets dwelling in Casa Guidi, who “yawn at common people,” and set a lofty table where
The chairs are queer and rotten,
The board is bare, the talk divine,
The teapot long forgotten.
In addition, Julia declared her difference from the advanced women of Boston, who supported “the woman’s standard, new unfurled,” by ventilating their anger against men. “I am not with you, sisters, in your talk,” she wrote in a poem called “The Tea-Party”; “My life has striven for broader scope than yours.” Advising them to keep to their own turf, she reminded them that “in carpet counsel ye may win the day; / But keep your limits—do not rule the world.” Their “pettish will,” she warned, would lead to strife and discord, “No lengthened wars of reason, but a rage, / Shown and repented twenty times a day.” She might have been talking about herself. In any case, she was not quite ready to join a movement for women’s rights.
She saw copies of her book at Tilton and Company in December, and although she liked its appearance, her expectations for its reception were very low. Her usual supporters were prudently noncommittal. Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed to be too busy to read it. Longfellow wrote a bland note of thanks for his copy, “declining to praise or criticize, most strangely, I think,” she observed.29 In the aftermath of the publication, Julia felt defeated by the silence: “Literary affairs confused, I have no market, Chev takes away my voice, and I do not see how or where to print.”30
Yet if the door of print was closing, speaking invitations were still expanding. A reading in September had been well attended and well received, and ended with a call to recite the “Battle Hymn.” In October, she had read some poems at the newly founded New England Hospital for Women and Children, and the next day was applauded by a crowd at the boys’ reform school in Westboro, as the woman who wrote “that Battle Hymn of the Republic.”31 These were humble venues, but proof that her voice had not been entirely taken away.
In 1866, she built on that foundation. February saw her in Washington giving a series of philosophical readings to small audiences. Uncle John Ward died in April, leaving a much smaller bequest to the Ward sisters than they had expected. “Dull, sad, and perplexed,” she reflected on her chances of earning some money and some reputation: “My uncle not having made me a rich woman, I feel more than ever impelled to make some great effort to realize the value of my mental capacities and acquisitions. I am as well entitled to an efficient literary position as any other woman in this country—perhaps better than any other. Still I hang by the way, picking up ten dollars here and there with great difficulty. I had as lief die unless I can be satisfied that I have delivered the whole value of my literary cargo.”32
Chev was also at an impasse and seeking a new direction. He had not been active at Perkins for years and had been trying to resign for almost a decade. Hearing that the Greeks in the Cretan Islands were rebelling against Turkish rule, Chev thought he could escape his disappointments by returning to the site of his heroic youth, as head of the American mission to Greece. Julia thought his chances were poor but kept her reservations to her journal: “Chev full of the Greek commission, which I think he cannot get. I wish he might, because he wishes it. Surely a man so modest and meritorious in his public career might claim so small an acknowledgment in life as this.”33 She went to Washington to plead his case with General Grant, President Johnson, Vice President Foster, and other officials. To her annoyance, Sumner, who had promised to support Chev’s application, did not come to see her at the hotel. He probably knew it was a hopeless cause; Chev was controversial enough in his own right, but the support of Sumner, one of Johnson’s chief antagonists in the Senate, could not have helped him. Johnson received her civilly, but his most notable remark was that she must be much younger than the Doctor.
Indeed, the nearly twenty-year age difference between Julia and Chev was now working to her advantage. On May 31, a few days after her forty-seventh birthday, Julia received a letter from Vice President Foster telling her that a younger man than Chev had been nominated for the Greek mission. “This gave me an unhappy hour. Chev was a good deal overcome by it for a time, but rallied and bears up bravely. The girls are rather glad. I am content, but I do not see what can take the place of this cherished object to Chev.”34 Sumner gave Chev the bad news and Julia wrote a sympathetic but pitying poem “To S.G.H. on his failure to receive the Grecian mission which he had been led to think might be offered to him, 1866.”
Let, then, the modern Embassy float by,
Nor one regret in thy high bosom lurk:
God’s mission called thy use to that soft sky;
Wait God’s dismissal where thou build’st His work.35
Wisely, she did not try to publish the poem; Chev would have been livid to see himself described by his wife as failing, especially when she seemed to be succeeding. He pretended not to mind his rejection, but he was wounded nonetheless. “Had either the Pres. or the Minister been persons of delicacy or generosity,” he griped to Sumner, they would have told him early on “that there would be no use in pressing the matter. That they lack delicacy & generosity is their misfortune.” He would seek solace once more in his work “in other fields, while my little of life remains.”36 He was reminded of his age that fall, when Sumner, then fifty-five, wed Alice Mason Hooper, a twenty-eight-year-old widow with a seven-year-old daughter. Sumner was beginning a new life; Chev was living out the old diminished one.
Julia called upon the newlyweds on her next visit to Washington. She also went to Mount Holyoke to read Passion-Flowers to the inmates of the lunatic asylum. They seemed to like it. And she took on a job as the editor of a weekly magazine,Northern Lights. She was hopeful that Henry James might contribute a story. Still, the end of the year found her uncertain about her readings. “The bitter opposition of my family renders this service a very difficult and painful one for me. I do not, therefore, seek occasions of performing it, not being quite clear as to the extent to which they ought to limit my efficiency; but when the word and the time come together I always try to give the one to the other and always shall.”37
Chev, meanwhile, was not ready to go gently into his retirement. He was as handsome as ever; why should he not make a last stand? In January 1867, he went to speak at the Boston Music Hall to raise funds for Crete, and he made a sensation, a star returning to the stage. According to his daughters, “he was sixty-six years old, but looked much younger. When, at the first meeting called by him, he rose and said, ‘Forty-five years ago I was much interested in the Greek Revolution,’ the audience was amazed. His hair was but lightly touched with silver; his eyes were as bright, his figure as erect and martial, as when, in 1826, he had fought and marched under the Greek banner and slept under the Greek stars.”38 Julia gave a cooler account: “In the evening attended meeting in behalf of Crete, at which Chev presided and spoke. Excellent as to matter, but always with a defective elocution, not sending his voice out.”39
Basking in the applause of his comeback, Chev decided he must go to Crete himself on an errand of mercy, and wanted Julia, Julia Romana, and Laura to join him as well. Julia had belatedly received a bequest from Uncle John giving her an annual income between $1,400 and $2,500. Out of habit, and sympathy, she handed most of it over to Chev; it would finance the trip. The timing seemed right for the family; Harry was an undergraduate at Harvard; Flossy was engaged to a young lawyer, David Hall. Julia convinced herself that the trip would be a turning point for her oldest daughter. Almost twenty-four, Julia Romana was shy, odd, unhappy, and single. On March 13, they all sailed on the Asia bearing $37,000 for Cretan relief.
Their first stop was in London, where Julia picked up her former social life. She went to parties, teas, and dinners; noticed the latest fashions—Lady Baker wore a necklace of lion’s teeth—and found herself seated next to Robert Browning at a dinner. He was gracious about her satiric poems, and she was grateful for his magnanimity. (He would be less magnanimous in years to come.) Then she and Laura headed to Rome for Easter with Louisa, now remarried to the American expatriate artist Luther Terry, and living in the enormous Palazzo Odescalchi, as big as a Boston square. Chev and Julia Romana went on alone to Greece, allegedly to save the expense of two more passages; but Julia understood his real concerns: “he objects . . . probably more to an indefinable fear of my predominance where he would wish to be the sole figure, which of course he would and ought to be.”40 Against Laura’s advice, she read one of her essays to the American colony in Rome, which included Charlotte Cushman. Then Chev unexpectedly invited them to join him in Athens in June. Once there, she was again popular and in demand, and gave two readings to the English-speaking colony. In Crete, she and her daughters attracted a huge crowd when they distributed the clothes made by Boston sewing circles for the refugees. Chev did not enjoy this competition for the spotlight.
Julia also made use of the seven-month trip to write another travel book, From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain Record of a Pleasant Journey, in which Chev is called “the veteran” and barely mentioned. Her journal gave some glimpses into her emotions on returning to Rome in middle age; there were ghosts in every square, including that of Horace Binney Wallace, but on this third visit she no longer felt haunted by them.
In at least one respect, the trip paid off handsomely. In Athens, Chev and Julia Romana met a bearded young Greek philosophy student, Michael Anagnostopolous, an ardent disciple who wished only to serve the great philhellene. He acted as Chev’s translator and secretary. When the Howes left, he accompanied them back to Boston, where he rapidly mastered English, changed his name to the more pronounceable Anagnos, and became the Doctor’s assistant at the Institution. He also continued to tutor Julia in Greek, a project they had begun in Athens.
Their homecoming in October was troubled, nevertheless. When they docked in Boston, they learned at once that Sumner’s marriage had scandalously broken up after Alice was seen in public with another man, the German aristocrat Friedrich von Holstein. She had gone off to Europe, and it was widely rumored that Sumner was impotent. Chev wrote letters of consolation to Sumner, blaming Alice. Then, five days later, John Andrew died, and the Howes were both bereft. Julia wrote a memorial poem about John Andrew and wanted to read it at his commemorative service, but Chev forbade her to go. Moreover, without consulting her, he had rented their homes on both Boylston Place and Lawton’s Valley; they had to move back to the gloomy Institution, where she spent another lonely winter.
Finally, she read a lacerating unsigned review of Later Lyrics in the North American Review, which had come out the April before. “Mrs. Howe’s prevailing fault is that she is too vague, too general, too lax; and it requires a more constant patience of fact, linear divisions, and of shades of meaning, than properly belongs to her genius, to call back into being phases of life and character so alien to our actual circumstances.”41 She was sure that James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, the editors of the NAR from 1864 to 1868, had commissioned the review, and she was outraged. “It seemed to me mean in motive and obliterating criticism. No one of real culture handles in that way a book which, whatever be its faults, is literature and not any ballad. Lowell and Norton are both of them responsible for this critique although I should have supposed it too stupid for the one and too bad hearted for the other.”42 She was still seething in November when she wrote a vengeful poem on theNAR, for her eyes only. “Please God,” she vowed, “the N. A. review, with all Ticknor and Field–dom to back it, shall not take away my office from me.”43
But there were also some pleasures. She loved the company and instruction of Michael Anagnos, “looked forward to her Greek lesson as girls do to a ball,” and referred to him in her journal as “a dear son to me.”44 To her surprise, she was invited to read a paper before the august Radical Club, which met monthly to discuss and debate, and included such luminaries as Emerson and Higginson. Elizabeth Peabody was among the handful of female members. Joining such an elite society made Julia feel that she had arrived as a Boston intellectual, and she believed that the Civil War had made it possible for people, even women, to break down barriers, share ideas, and argue with civility. They could also have fun. At a meeting of the Brain Club, a sociable women’s group Howe had started, she gave a comic narration of her Cretan trip:
Oh! Who were the people you saw, Mrs. Howe?
When you went where the Cretans were making a row?
Kalopathaki—Rodocanachi—
Paparpopoulos—Anagnostopoulos—
Nicolaides—Paraskevaides—
These were the people that saw Mrs. Howe
When she went where the Cretans were making a row.
Oh! Give us a specimen, dear Mrs. Howe,
Of the Greek that you learned and are mistress of now.
Potichomania—Mesopotamia.
Tatterdemalion—Episcopalian—
Megalotherium—monster inferium—
Scoulevon—auctrion—infant phenomenon.
Lyrie ticamete—what’s your calamity?
Pallas Atheneae Aun,
Favors no Fenian.
Such is the language that learned Mrs. Howe,
In the speech of the gods she is mistress of now.
Julia had long enjoyed the social opportunities of Boston clubland. After 1867, however, she replaced Chev’s all-male Five of Clubs, and all the men’s clubs that had excluded her for decades, with pioneering women’s clubs. Indeed, she started so many groups that she jokingly called herself the Mother of Clubs—“I have one every year.”45 In 1871, she became president of the New England Woman’s Club and remained in office until 1910.
Chev was not so resilient. In the fall of 1868, he learned that Julia intended to be a delegate at a New York Conference of Unitarians, and, much worse, to attend a women’s suffrage meeting at Boston Horticultural Hall. The letter of protest he wrote to her shows how obstinately and obtusely he interpreted her religious and political interests as vanity and narcissism. His letter obsessively repeated the word passion, to remind her of the crime of Passion-Flowers. “Your note of yesterday gives me new pain & sorrow, for it almost crushes the hope I had begin to form that you would yield to my most earnest entreaties & to the consideration of family wishes & interests, and forego further indulgence in your passion for public appearance & display.” In a crescendo of self-pity, he wildly hinted that one of their children might have another father: “When I reflect that only a few days ago I pleaded with you earnestly but tenderly, that I tried [to] set forth the consequence upon me & the family of another form of passion, my life long suffering, my blight of heart, my fear of family disgrace, the worst of my domestic happiness & hopes, the occasional inquiry of doubt about the paternity of offspring; when I imagined other sad effects upon our family, you seemed to be moved & changed of purpose. I had a right therefore to hope that you would yield to my request and to the wishes of the family and make no more engagements for public appearances.”
In a final blow, he invoked the tragedy of Sammy’s death to keep her in line: “By our old affection, by the memory of our dear dead boy, by the years of heart ache & misery which you acknowledge to have brought on me by your own indulgence in another form of passion, I entreat you to forego indulgence in this one.”46 He had gone too far. The letter was so extreme in its paranoia, self-pity, and manipulative tactics that Julia found it easy to resist, although very painful to read. Chev took out his frustration on his employees at Perkins: he found out that Miss McLane and Mr. Hallard were cohabiting, and he fired them. There, at least, his word was law.
Chev had the upper hand, but he understood the subtext of her activity and her determination. She was escaping from his control, and control was his major weapon of power. He had played his strongest hand, and it had failed. At the beginning of the war, Julia had felt useless. She wanted to serve, but her domestic circumstances prevented her from serving. She wanted to give inspiration but felt that her writing was unwanted and misunderstood. She wanted to act in a public role but was opposed and excluded. “There is nothing for you to do,” she heard from the world. Now at last, she was breaking out of the fixed orbit of the Mother Star. The word and the time and the need had come together, and she was about to take flight.