◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Mine Eyes Have Also Seen I was born in New York in 1819. My mother died when I was five. I taught myself five languages — how a girl got out of the house without leaving it. I married Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843, eighteen years my senior. He used the laws of marriage to command my inheritance, forbid my publishing, oppose my speaking in public. I had six children with him. I wrote anyway, anonymously, because his name carried a weight mine was not permitted to carry. In November 1861 I visited a Union camp near Washington. Soldiers were singing John Brown's Body. Reverend James Freeman Clarke said: write better lyrics. That night at the Willard Hotel I woke before dawn. No lamp without waking the children. I felt for a stub of pencil and wrote in the dark, the words coming faster than my hand could keep up: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on. The Atlantic Monthly published it in 1862 for five dollars and called it The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I spent the next forty-nine years trying to undo what that song is used to do. I do not regret it. The song outlived its war. The grapes of wrath are people. The winepress is divine judgment made bloodshed — the image sanctifies the killing, unmakes the killed, goes anywhere. Whoever the country decides is wicked fits in the winepress. I watched my words be conscripted. I could not call them home. In 1870 I wrote the Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World. Mothers were burying sons at the order of men they had not elected. The country calls it the Mother's Day Proclamation. Let me say it. Arise, then, women of this day. Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears. We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. That is what I wrote. I tried to establish a Mother's Peace Day on the second of June — an international congress of women refusing to send their sons. The country adopted a different Mother's Day, sentimentalized it, sold it to Hallmark. The radical content was removed. The greeting card was kept. Samuel died in 1876. I was fifty-seven. The last thirty-four years I lived as the woman I was. I died at ninety-one in a country that knew me only by the first half of my life. I am watching from where the dead watch. The hymn is sung at every funeral of a man who wanted to be God's instrument of trampling. The lightning is loosed again against enemies chosen by men I could never vote against. The proclamation is forgotten in May, when the country sells flowers to mothers for a holiday that began as a refusal to send sons to war. Find the proclamation. Read it aloud. Read it on the second of June in the public square. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn charity, mercy, and patience. Arise. Mine eyes have seen the glory. Mine eyes have also seen what comes after the glory. The boys who came back unable to teach their own sons charity. The boys who did not come back at all. My own boy. The proclamation is my answer to the hymn. The country kept the hymn. You keep the proclamation.