Julia Ward was born in New York City in 1819 to a wealthy Wall Street banker and strict Calvinist; her poet mother died when she was five. Books her brother Samuel brought from Europe, and meetings with Charles Dickens and Margaret Fuller, opened a wider world, and after a run of family deaths around 1839 she became a Unitarian. In 1843 she married reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins School for the Blind, who opposed her writing and, under the law of coverture, controlled and lost much of her inheritance. Her children called her the Family Champagne, while in 1853 she anonymously published poems critical of marriage.

In November 1861, after meeting Lincoln in Washington and hearing troops sing the John Brown song, she wrote new lyrics in a single early morning, published in 1862 as the Union’s anthem. The episode also covers the outrage of William Lloyd Garrison over her 1860 Cuba travel book, which opposed slavery while voicing derogatory views of Black people, her support for the 15th Amendment through the American Woman Suffrage Association, and her 1870 appeal for a Mother’s Day for peace that never caught on.

• A Massachusetts court voided her appointment as justice of the peace, prompting a push for women’s right to hold office.
• Her split with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony over the 15th Amendment lasted for decades.
• She proposed June 2 as a peace day and by 1893 considered using July 4 instead.
• In 1908 she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• About 4,000 people sang her anthem at her memorial in 1910, and her children’s biography of her won a Pulitzer Prize.