Women’s Rights and Social Justice: Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Anti-War Mother’s Day Proclamation, A Day of Peace
First published in May 2017
Mother’s Day, May 12, 2024
150 years ago, the disastrous human and economic consequences of the American Civil War were becoming increasingly apparent, especially to certain thoughtful wise women who had seen their testosterone-laden loved ones eagerly march off to that “inglorious” war 5 years earlier. Those men and women, as is still the case today, had no idea of the psychological and spiritual devastation that comes from killing fellow humans until it was too late. But the well-hidden truth hit them when they saw their loved ones come home, changed forever. Some came home dead, some were just physically wounded but all were spiritually deadened.
That “patriotic” war basically ended in mutual exhaustion in 1865. The Northern foot-soldiers (who were numerically stronger) did not feel gleeful over the hollow victory” – just relief. Many Civil War-era women, including Howe, had actually willingly participated in the flag-waving fervor that war–mongers and war-profiteers can easily manufacture. Pro-war propaganda has always been directed at poor and working class men who must be duped into doing the soul-damning dirty work of killing and being killed.
Julia Ward Howe, author of the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was a life-long abolitionist and therefore, early on, she was a supporter of the Union Army’s anti-slavery rationale for going to war to prevent the pro-slavery politicians and industrialists in the Confederate South from seceding from the union over the slavery issue.
Howe was a compassionate and well-educated middle child of an upper class family. She was also a poet who, in the early days of the Civil War, had written “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” using many biblically-based lyrics. Howe had intended her song to be sung as an abolitionist song; however, because of some of the militant-sounding lyrics and the eminently marchable tune, it was rapidly adopted by Union Army propagandists as its most inspiring war song, a reality that Howe likely regretted when the mass slaughter of the world’s first “total war” became clear to her.
Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn” in one sitting (in the early hours of November 18, 1861), but she soon became a pacifist and an antiwar activist. At the time she wrote the song, the Civil War was just starting and had not yet degenerated into the wholesale slaughter that was made possible by the technological advances in weaponry (mainly artillery and rifled muskets that were more accurate) that would make cavalry charges, the bayonet and the sword obsolete.
Back then the Press Didn’t Censor out ALL the Horrors of War
Howe’s evolution from cheerleader for war to anti-war activism came about after she witnessed the mutual mass slaughter of the War Between the States (1861 – 1865). By the time she proposed a national day of mourning for the victims of all wars, she had also become aware of the carnage that was occurring overseas in the Franco-Prussian War, which had started in July of 1870.
That war, won by Germany, was brief, but close to 100,000 soldiers were killed in action and another 100,000 were severely wounded. As is tragically normal for warrior nations of all historical eras, nobody thought to count up the psychological and spiritual casualties or either soldiers or civilians. But Howe understood. Her awareness of the realities of war was possible because war correspondents were allowed to write about the barbaric nature of modern war, which horrified sensitive humans like Howe.
It hadn’t taken too long for peace-loving, justice-oriented and compassionate observers to recognize that war was indeed, the equivalent of hell on earth. Howe understood what Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman had meant when he uttered his famous statement about the satanic nature of war. Sherman’s statement indicted his era’s “Chicken Hawks*”:
“I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.”
*Chicken Hawks are flag-waving war-mongering political or economic leaders who have never experienced the gruesome realities of combat war and yet have no problems promoting militarism and sending somebody else’s sons and daughters off “into harm’s way”. Recent examples include Republicans like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Condolezza Rice, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Fei
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