The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography by Elaine Showalter

Author:Elaine Showalter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Women, Civil War Period (1850-1877), History
ISBN: 9781451645903
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE CIVIL WAR

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.

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