It is interesting to note that among the many places where its author recited the “Battle Hymn,” at least one city in the heart of the South is included. Mrs. Howe spent the winter of 1884-85 in New Orleans, having been invited to preside over the woman’s department of the exposition held there in that year.
The experience involved much hard work, but also much pleasure. She made many friends in the Crescent City, whither she and I returned eleven years later for a congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women. We were the guests of her old friend, Mrs. King, the mother of Grace King, the novelist, and were entertained by mother and daughters with charming hospitality.
I confess that it surprised me when, at an afternoon reception in the King drawing-room, my mother was asked to repeat the “Battle Hymn,” and did so. This showed us how much the old ill-feeling between North and South had died out. It demonstrated also the universal and therefore non-sectional quality of the poem, of which more will be said in the following chapter.
The “Battle Hymn” may be called universal in still another sense, since it appeals to men and women of all religious creeds. When Mrs. Howe was especially requested to recite it before a council of Jewish women, it gave her “an unexpected thrill of satisfaction.” She was warmly received and welcomed, but felt some anxiety lest the verse beginning “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea” might disturb her hearers. The president assured her, however, that there was nothing in it to hurt their feelings.
My mother was so intimately associated with the woman movement that she was called upon to repeat her war lyric before many feminine audiences. We have spoken of her interest in women’s clubs. She was also interested in the patriotic societies, being a member of the D. A. R. and of the Colonial Dames of Rhode Island. One of the Boston chapters of the former is named in honor of the Old South Meeting-house, a venerated landmark of the city. When the congregation left their old place of worship and moved to the Back Bay, it required a tremendous effort on the part of the women of Boston to raise the necessary funds and to save the historic building from destruction. Here, in December, 1906, the Old South Chapter had a meeting where there was “much good speaking.” My mother recited her “Battle Hymn” and told them something of her Revolutionary ancestors. She remembered her forebears with affectionate pride as noble men and women whose example she strove to imitate.
A long life brings its penalties as well as its pleasures. Living to the age of nearly ninety-two years, my mother survived all the friends of her youth and most, if not all, of her contemporaries. Hence she was called upon to attend many funerals, considering this a duty, in accordance with old-fashioned ideas. A temporary lameness prevented her attending the obsequies of the poet Longfellow, an early friend of her husband’s, whom she also had known well for many years. She was able, however, to testify to her friendship for the gentle poet by giving her services for the Longfellow Memorial held at the Boston Museum. Here she took part in an authors’ reading, reciting the “Battle Hymn,” as well as some verses composed in honor of the poet.
That she should be invited to do so shows a great change in public opinion since the early years of their acquaintance. In the ’forties and ’fifties it was not thought fitting that a lady should even sign her name to a poem or a novel, much less read it in public. When my mother published some verses in a volume edited by Mr. Longfellow in those early days, they appeared as anonymous. By his advice, her first book of poems, Passion Flowers, bore no name upon the title-page.
VIII
TRIBUTES TO “THE BATTLE HYMN”
From Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells,[33] U. S. Senator George F. Hoar, Thomas Starr King, Ina Coolbrith, and others—The “Battle Hymn” and the “Marseillaise”—What Rudyard Kipling said of it in “The Light that Failed”—English reprints distributed among the soldiers of the present war.
THE appeal of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is so wide that it takes in all classes of mankind, all, at least, who love freedom.