The question that Julia Ward Howe posed in 1899—“Why should we fear to pass from the Old Testament of our own liberties, to the New Testament of liberty for all the world?”—could serve as an epigraph for Walter McDougall's scholarship over the past 20 years.
Howe welcomed this New Testament revelation just months after America's decisive war with Spain, a war that ended one empire and launched another. Swift American victories in the Caribbean and the Pacific signaled for Howe a new era of humanitarian interventionism. Just a few months later, Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine, praised the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the “priestess of righteous war and holy peace.” No tribute could have more concisely summed up Howe's career as a crusader or more tellingly highlighted the amalgamation of spiritualized war and peace that marked the Progressive mind. Indeed, shortly after Gilder's birthday tribute, Howe was introduced to a Boston audience as “Saint Julia.”[1]
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