Julia Ward Howe – 1819-1910

A poet and, with her husband, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth, Howe composed the stirring “Battle Hymn of the Republic” during an 1861 visit to a military encampment near Washington, D.C. It was published in the February 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly and, set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” became the quasi-official anthem of the Union Army for the rest of the Civil War.