Howe

indeed merited, general recognition, although
The World's Own was produced for a few per-
formances at Wallack's.

It was inevitable that the Abolitionist move-
ment 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 gath-
ered. 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 dark-
ness 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 mo-
ment; but the honors, public and private, show-
ered 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 com-
pleted 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 quick-
ness of repartee, her constructive power, the com-
pleteness of her conviction accompanied by a
balance of mind, and a sense of humor that dis-
armed 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 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 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,
for peace enlisted her fervid sup-

Howe

port, and in September 1870 she issued an "Ap-
peal to Womanhood throughout the World," call-
ing for a general congress of women to promote
the alliance of different nationalities, "the ami-
cable settlement of international questions," and
the general promotion of peace. It was trans-
lated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and
Swedish. On Dec. 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 follow-
ing 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 hold-
ing 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 re-
form congress. 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.
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 ad-
dresses 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); Remi-
niscences (1899); At Sunset (1910). She also
aided in editing numerous publications. Potent
though her message to her contemporaries un-
doubtedly was, her influence, so far as it con-
tinues, is due largely to the memory of her per-
sonality and to the operation of the organizations
which she was instrumental in founding and im-
pregnated with her spirit

Death came to her from pneumonia in her
ninety-second year, shortly after she had re-
ceived an hpnorary degree frgm Smith College.

293