The woman who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” what became an inspiring war song, later became antiwar after she saw the devastation of the Civil War. From Gary G. Kohls at lewrockwell.com:
An Anti-War Manifesto Lamenting the Dead, Dying and Soul-Sickened Soldiers Returning from the Killing Fields
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.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 