responsible government for Nova Scotia. This brought him into fierce conflict with the reigning oligarchy and with the lieutenant-governor, Lord Falkland (1803–1884), whom he forced to resign. Largely owing to Howe’s statesmanship responsible government was finally conceded in 1848 by the imperial authorities, and was thus gained without the bloodshed and confusion which marked its acquisition in Ontario and Quebec. In 1850 he was appointed a delegate to England on behalf of the Intercolonial railway, for which he obtained a large imperial guarantee. In 1854 he resigned from the cabinet, and was appointed chief commissioner of railways. In 1855 he was sent by the imperial government to the United States in connexion with the Foreign Enlistment Act, to raise soldiers for the war in the Crimea. Through the rashness of others he got into difficulties, and was attacked in the British House of Commons by Mr Gladstone, whom he compelled to apologize.
In 1855 he was defeated by Mr (afterwards Sir Charles) Tupper, but was elected by acclamation in the next year in Hants county, and was from 1860 to 1863 premier of Nova Scotia. In the latter years he was appointed by the imperial government fishery commissioner to the United States, and thus took no part in the negotiations for confederation. Though his eloquence had done more than anything else to make practicable a union of the British North American provinces, he opposed confederation, largely owing to wounded vanity; but on finding it impossible to obtain from the imperial authorities the repeal of the British North America Act, he refused to join his associates in the extreme measures which were advocated, and on the promise from the Canadian government of better financial terms to his native province, entered (on the 30th of January 1869) the cabinet of Sir John Macdonald as president of the council. This brought upon him a storm of obloquy, under which his health gradually gave way. In May 1873 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, but died suddenly on the 1st of June of the same year.
Howe’s eloquence, and still more his unfailing wit and high spirits, made him for many years the idol of his province. He is the finest orator whom Canada has produced, and also wrote poetry, which shows in places high merit. Many of his sayings are still current in Nova Scotia. In 1904 a statue in his honour was erected in Halifax.
His Letters and Speeches were published in 1858 in Boston, Mass., in 2 vols., edited nominally by William Annand, really by himself. See also Public Letters and Speeches of Joseph Howe (Halifax, 1909). The Life and Times by G. E. Fenety (1896) is poor. The Life by the Hon. James W. Longley (Toronto, 1904) is dispassionate, but otherwise mediocre. Joseph Howe, by George Monro Grant (reprinted Halifax, 1904), is a brilliant sketch. (W. L. G.)
HOWE, JULIA WARD (1819–1910), American author and
reformer, was born in New York City on the 27th of May 1819.
Her father, Samuel Ward, was a banker; her mother, Julia
Rush [Cutler] (1796–1824), a poet of some ability. When only
sixteen years old she had begun to contribute poems to New
York periodicals. In 1843 she married Dr Samuel Gridley Howe
(q.v.), with whom she spent the next year in England,
France, Germany and Italy. She assisted Dr Howe in editing
the Commonwealth in 1851–1853. The results of her study of
German philosophy were seen in philosophical essays; in
lectures on “Doubt and Belief,” “The Duality of Character,”
&c., delivered in 1860–1861 in her home in Boston, and later in
Washington; and in addresses before the Boston Radical Club
and the Concord school of philosophy. Samuel Longfellow,
his brother Henry, Wendell Phillips, W. L. Garrison, Charles
Sumner, Theodore Parker and James Freeman Clarke were
among her friends; she advocated abolition, and preached
occasionally from Unitarian pulpits. She was one of the
organizers of the American Woman-Suffrage Association and of
the Association for the Advancement of Women (1869), and in
1870 became one of the editors of the Woman’s Journal, and
in 1872 president of the New England Women’s Club. In the
same year she was a delegate to the Prison Reform Congress in
London, and founded there the Woman’s Peace Association,
one of the many ways in which she expressed her opposition
to war. She wrote The World’s Own (unsuccessfully played at
Wallack’s, New York, in 1855, published 1857), and in 1858, for
Edwin Booth, Hippolytus, never acted or published. Her lyric
poetry, thanks to her temperament, and possibly to her musical
training, was her highest literary form: she published Passion
Flowers (anonymously, 1854), Words for the Hour (1856), Later
Lyrics (1866), and From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New
(1898); her most popular poem is The Battle Hymn of the
Republic, written to the old folk-tune associated with the song
of “John Brown’s Body,” when Mrs Howe was at the front
in 1861, and published (Feb. 1862) in the Atlantic Monthly, to
which she frequently contributed. She edited Sex and Education
(1874), an answer to Sex in Education (1873) by Edward
Hammond Clarke (1820–1877); and wrote several books of travel,
Modern Society (1880) and Is Polite Society Polite? (1895),
collections of addresses, each taking its title from a lecture criticizing
the shallowness and falseness of society, the power of
money, &c., A Memoir of Dr Samuel G. Howe (1876), Life of
Margaret Fuller (1883), in the “Famous Women” series.
Sketches of Representative Women of New England (1905) and
her own Reminiscences (Boston, 1899). Her children were: Julia
Romana Anagnos (1844–1886), who, like her mother, wrote
verse and studied philosophy, and who taught in the Perkins
Institution, in the charge of which her husband, Michael Anagnos
(1837–1906), whose family name had been Anagnostopoulos,
succeeded her father; Henry Marion Howe (b. 1848), the
eminent metallurgist, and professor in Columbia University;
Laura Elizabeth Richards (b. 1850), and Maud Howe Elliott
(b. 1855), wife of John Elliott, the painter of a fine ceiling in the
Boston library,—both these daughters being contributors to
literature. Mrs Howe died on the 17th of October 1910.
HOWE, RICHARD HOWE, Earl (1726–1799), British admiral,
was born in London on the 8th of March 1726. He was the
second son of Emmanuel Scrope Howe, 2nd Viscount Howe,
who died governor of Barbadoes in March 1735, and of Mary
Sophia Charlotte, a daughter of the baroness Kilmansegge,
afterwards countess of Darlington, the mistress of George I.—a
relationship which does much to explain his early rise in the
navy. Richard Howe entered the navy in the “Severn,” one
of the squadron sent into the south seas with Anson in 1740.
The “Severn” failed to round the Horn and returned home.
Howe next served in the West Indies in the “Burford,” and
was present in her when she was very severely damaged, in the
unsuccessful attack on La Guayra on the 18th of February 1742.
He was made acting-lieutenant in the West Indies in the same
year, and the rank was confirmed in 1744. During the Jacobite
rising of 1745 he commanded the “Baltimore” sloop in the
North Sea, and was dangerously wounded in the head while
co-operating with a frigate in an engagement with two strong
French privateers. In 1746 he became post-captain, and commanded
the “Triton” (24) in the West Indies. As captain of
the “Cornwall” (80), the flagship of Sir Charles Knowles, he
was in the battle with the Spaniards off Havana on the 2nd of
October 1748. While the peace between the War of the Austrian
Succession and the Seven Years’ War lasted, Howe held commands
at home and on the west coast of Africa. In 1755 he
went with Boscawen to North America as captain of the “Dunkirk”
(60), and his seizure of the French “Alcide” (64) was the
first shot fired in the war. From this date till the peace of 1763
he served in the Channel in various more or less futile expeditions
against the coast of France, with a steady increase of reputation
as a firm and skilful officer. On the 20th of November 1759
he led Hawke’s fleet as captain of the “Magnanime” (64) in
the magnificent victory of Quiberon.
By the death of his elder brother, killed near Ticonderoga on the 6th of July 1758, he became Viscount Howe—an Irish peerage. In 1762 he was elected M.P. for Dartmouth, and held the seat till he received a title of Great Britain. During 1763 and 1765 he was a member of the Admiralty board, and from 1765 to 1770 was treasurer of the navy. In that year he was promoted rear-admiral, and in 1775 vice-admiral. In 1776 he was appointed to the command of the North American station. The rebellion
