Howe, Julia Ward (1819–1910)

US feminist and antislavery campaigner who wrote the poem ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ (1862); sung to the tune of ‘John Brown's Body’, it became associated with the Union side during the American Civil War. She wrote a biography (1883) of Margaret Fuller, a prominent literary figure and a member of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalists.

Born in New York City, she was an editor of Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper on which she worked with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. The couple were active in the abolition movement.