Julia Ward Howe had yearned for years for a more active role in public affairs. But her husband, Boston reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, insisted that she confine herself mostly to running their household. In the first year of the Civil War, however, she unwittingly turned herself into a public figure by writing the poem "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Composed during a visit to Washington, this martial celebration of the Union cause was soon set to the music of the battle song "John Brown's Body." By 1865 it had become the North's unofficial wartime anthem.

After the war, Howe finally broke through the constraints set by her husband to involve herself in the growing feminist movement. More often than not, her public appearances were marked by the singing of the "Battle Hymn," and in her later years, she had become the "Dearest Old Lady in America."

Howe's son-in-law, John Elliott, began this portrait in Howe's final years. But his intention was to portray her as she might have looked nearly fifty years earlier, writing the "Battle Hymn."