During the early days of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe visited hospitals and spoke with soldiers in their camps. She met President Lincoln. Early one morning, she awoke from her sleep and, with a stump of a pencil and in dim light, wrote out the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she published in The Atlantic in 1862. “I had learned to do this,” she recalled, “when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me during the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby.” The uplifting, sermonic, martial lyrics, set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” became the unofficial anthem of abolition and union.

Years ago, at James Mosher Elementary School in Baltimore, when we gathered in the linoleum-floored auditorium to rehearse the song for sixth-grade graduation, my classmates and I were directed to stand taller and prouder and sing with conviction, but the words, “His truth is marching on,” automatically evoked that from you anyway.

Howe was a poet, essayist, playwright, suffragist, peace activist, mother, and, despite her husband’s rebukes, a frequent public speaker. In 1977, a graduate student at Harvard discovered an unfinished novel by Howe in the Houghton Library. It was missing a title page and began in mid-sentence on the second page. Howe described the book, written in the 1840s, as “the history of a strange being.” Its main character, Laurence, is an intersex individual with many adventures, several of them tragic. The book was published in 2004 with the title “The Hermaphrodite.” Howe was before her time in innumerable ways, following a path of her own choosing despite what she knew was sometimes “public ridicule and private avoidance.”