Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe was an American author, poet and social activist who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic as new words to the song John Brown's Body. She wrote them in November 1861 after visiting Washington, D.C., and meeting Abraham Lincoln; published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862, the song became one of the most popular of the Union during the American Civil War. She held that freeing the slaves was right but did not believe in racial equality. After the war she worked for pacifism and women's suffrage, co-leading the American Woman Suffrage Association with Lucy Stone from 1869, and her Mothers' Day Proclamation called on women around the world to unite for peace.