Julia Ward Howe

“Crown his blood-stained pillow”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) co-edited the Boston antislavery newspaper The Commonwealth in the early 1850s and published two volumes of poetry and a travel book about Cuba before the Civil War. Her most famous poem, “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” inspired by a visit to a Union army encampment near Washington, appeared in February 1862. Howe met Lincoln only once, when Senator Charles Sumner and Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew introduced her to the President at the White House in November 1862. Her poem honoring the slain President was published in the summer of 1865 in Poetical Tributes to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln.

 

Crown his blood-stained pillow

With a victor’s palm;

Life’s receding billow

Leaves eternal calm.

At the feet Almighty

Lay this gift sincere;

Of a purpose weighty,

And a record clear.

With deliverance freighted

Was this passive hand,

And this heart, high-fated,

Would with love command.

Let him rest serenely

In a Nation’s care,

Where her waters queenly

Make the West most fair.

In the greenest meadow

That the prairies show,

Let his marble’s shadow

Give all men to know:

“Our First Hero, living,

Made his country free;

Heed the Second’s giving,

Death for Liberty.”

1865