The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography - Hardcover

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Elaine Showalter, Emeritus Professor of English at Princeton University, combines scholarly expertise in English and American literature with a passion for a wide range of cultural subjects. She has written ten books, most recently The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography and A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, which was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. Her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, People, and Vogue.

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The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe

THE PRINCESS IN THE CASTLE

Julia Ward grew up living like a princess in a fairy tale. The daughter of a wealthy New York banker, the oldest of three devoted sisters, and the pet of three energetic brothers, she spent her childhood in a splendid Manhattan mansion where the finest tutors instructed her in music and languages, and her summers with her grandmother and cousins in Newport. She was cherished, indulged, and praised; but, she confessed in her memoir, she also felt like “a young damsel of olden time, shut up within an enchanted castle. And I must say that my dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer.”1 The combination was paradoxical and prophetic. As she grew up, Julia would often relive the experience of the princess in the castle—loved and admired, but also restricted and confined.

An avid reader, she dreamed from an early age of becoming a great writer herself and tried to prepare herself intellectually for the role: “A vision of some important literary work which I should accomplish was present with me in my early life, and had much to do with habits of study acquired by me in youth, and never wholly relinquished.”2 Her family tolerated her literary dreams, and supported her habits of study, but expected her to become a belle first and a housewife after. Her brothers were educated to be successful professionals; the sisters were trained to have all the feminine accomplishments. At the height of their youth and beauty, they were known as the Three Graces. Julia, the most beautiful and accomplished of all, was called the Diva.

Julia’s father, Samuel Ward, had made his own way to riches. He went to work at fourteen as a clerk in the investment banking firm Prime and King, which had handled loans for the construction of the Erie Canal. Even then he knew that he wanted to become “one of the first bankers in the United States.”3 By the age of twenty-two, he became a partner in the renamed Prime, Ward, and King. Ward was a disciplined, purposeful, serious young man, but his marriage in 1812 to sixteen-year-old Julia Cutler was a passionate love match. First to please her, and then to make up for the hard work and long self-deprivation of his apprenticeship, he set up an expensive household. Despite his pious Low Church upbringing, and his wife’s even stricter Calvinist beliefs in hellfire, sin, and damnation, Ward had no guilt about his wealth. Spending money on the family was not sinful, he believed, but proper and spiritually sanctioned. Banking was a “lofty and ennobling” profession, valued “for the power it confers, of promoting liberal and beneficent enterprises.”4

Within a decade of their marriage, the Wards had six children: Samuel, born in 1814; Henry in 1817; Julia on May 27, 1819; Francis Marion in 1821; Louisa in 1823; and Annie in 1824. (Another daughter, also named Julia for her mother, had been born in 1816 and died of whooping cough at the age of three.) Somehow, in the intervals of repeated pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, Julia Cutler Ward did fund-raising for the Society for Promotion of Industry among the Poor, which helped to train impoverished mothers as seamstresses. She also wrote poems and published them anonymously in the newspapers. Although she joked that her husband was indifferent to her “effusions,” he expressed some pride when her poem on General Lafayette’s arrival in New York was published. In 1849, her poem “Si Je Te Perds, Je Suis Perdu” was included in Rufus Griswold’s anthology The Female Poets of America.5

By 1820, the Ward family was living in a big house at number 5 Bowling Green, at the tip of Manhattan, fast becoming the chicest address in the city and known as Nob’s Row. Ward enjoyed buying splendid furniture, gold cornices, and the grand pianoforte without which no society home was complete. He gave his wife extravagant gifts, most spectacularly a lemon-yellow carriage, which had bright blue cushions and a blue interior, and was pulled by a pair of bay horses with black manes. This luxurious vehicle, the Cadillac of coaches, cost $1,000 and was driven by a black coachman named Johnstone.

The young Wards had an active social life. In the winter, they went sleighing and entertained their friends at “caudle parties,” where steaming-hot whiskey punch was served and the guests got “red as roosters.”6 Samuel threw himself into the efforts to find husbands for his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Eliza and Louisa, hiring tutors and professors to train them in ladylike accomplishments and social graces, and buying them stylish gowns for their debuts. To inaugurate their Bowling Green home and introduce Louisa to eligible young men, the Wards invited seventy of the most fashionable people in New York, including Mrs. John Jacob Astor, wife of the richest man in the United States, to a lavish dinner dance. There Louisa met a suitable lawyer from Savannah named Matthew Hall McAllister and later married him. As Samuel Ward became richer and richer, he also worked harder and harder, and gave generously to New York universities and charities.

Bowling Green was a good place to raise small children. In 1823, the fort in New York Harbor protecting the city from invasion in the War of 1812 had been converted into a resort named Castle Garden, a popular destination for fireworks, picnics, and ice cream, with a big auditorium for celebrations and concerts. (It is now Castle Clinton National Monument, which gets three million visitors a year as the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty.) Every day, Julia’s Irish nurse took her for a walk to nearby Battery Park to watch other little girls playing, and every afternoon at three, Johnstone came to take the Ward children and their nurses for a sedate ride. Julia Cutler Ward tried to teach her little daughter to sew. Reflecting on the failure of her early indoctrination in needlework, especially her struggles with the use of a thimble, Julia Ward Howe blamed her own clumsiness; but she did not have memories of her mother as seamstress. She remembered her parents instead as a glamorous couple whose entertainments she was sometimes allowed to watch as a special treat, especially a night when they took her out of bed and dressed her in an embroidered cambric slip with a pink rosebud on the waist. Four-year-old Julia was taken down to the drawing rooms, “which had undergone a surprising transformation. The floors were bare, and from the ceiling of either room was suspended a circle of wax lights and artificial flowers. The orchestra included a double bass. I surveyed the company of the dancers, but soon curled myself up on a sofa, where one of the dowagers fed me with ice-cream.”7 This dreamlike party, with its illuminations, decorations, music, dancing, beautiful dresses, and sweet foods, was to remain her image of enchantment throughout her life.

The days of wine and roses were short. Julia Cutler Ward endured several bouts of inflammation of the lungs, or tuberculosis, was bled by leeches and blistered with poultices, and became so slender and pale that she drew...