I'd like to talk to you tonight about a great lady. And she was just that, a very great lady,

and a celebrity, which is something else, of course. A toast of society. On top of that,

she was a suffragette, a sort of great-grandmother of woman's lib, and one of the finest singers

in this country. Her name was Miss Julia Ward Howe.

Here she is in the happy autumn of her brilliant life.

Now, Miss Julia was born before photography was invented,

and though there were cameras by the time Miss Julia

had grown up to be beautiful,

and she was, you know, very beautiful.

If there is a photo made of her back in her youthful days as a breaker of hearts, I haven't

been able to find it.

Never mind.

After all this time, we still remember her with so much affection.

Because of some words she wrote for a song.

I don't think there's any argument that it's the greatest song ever to come out of America and

hers are the greatest lyrics.

The music started well ahead of the words.

It started in church and then moved out into the battlefield.

It began as a hymn and grew to be the most hot quickening, marching song in all history.

It's quite a story. Before the Civil War, there was an old man

named Brown who tried to start a civil war all on his own. An angry old man who reckoned it

wasn't enough just to say that slavery was wrong. Something had to be done about it. Slaves had to be set free.

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