Poet Hannah Flagg Gould

Newburyport, MA

Jun 11, 2024

[Part of my series on antislavery poets of Essex County. I have more poets to write about, but going forward I’ll alternate their stories with other non-poetry stories.]

Famous but female

After the poet Hannah Flagg Gould (1789-1865) died, a literary critic described her as “exceedingly angular,” “pronouncedly eccentric,” “abrupt,” and “strong-minded,” but added that “Newburyport easily forgave the fact of her ability to think for herself.” I rolled my eyes when I read that.

from the Christian Register and Boston Observer 1912

Instead, that literary critic could have said this: In her lifetime, the poet Hannah Flagg Gould was prolific, popular and widely celebrated. She published eleven books of poetry, for adults and for children. Newspapers from Maine to Louisiana reprinted her poems and advertised the sale of her latest volumes. Fellow author and editor Sarah Josepha Hale described Gould’s style: “She takes lowly and homely themes, but she turns them to the light of heaven, and they are beautified, and refined, and elevated.” Gould’s name appeared on an 1837 list of America’s 40 most popular poets, one of only five women listed.

For decades after her death, Gould’s works appeared in school readers and anthologies like “Poems That Every Child Should Know” and “The Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song.” If your grandparents recited poems from memory in their school days, they probably read some by Hannah Flagg Gould.

For my series on Essex County poets, I have two lists: poets who sometimes wrote about the evils of slavery, and antislavery activists who sometimes wrote poems for the cause. Harriet Flagg Gould was a poet first. She could turn into a poem her observations on almost any topic — the Fourth of July, the Topsfield town bicentennial, a shipwreck, frost, fossils, butterflies, hymns, Revolutionary War veterans, and also slavery.

Her life

Hannah Flagg Gould moved to Newburyport with her family as a girl and spent the rest of her life there. She did not marry. Her mother died when Hannah was young, and Hannah lived a quiet life on Charter Street with her father, a Revolutionary War veteran, until he died in 1841. William Lloyd Garrison, a generation younger, grew up two blocks away in Newburyport, and the two remained connected through the years.

Hannah passed away in September 1865, between the close of the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

Antislavery poems

From her earliest poems in 1829 — when as yet only a handful of radicals were talking of immediate emancipation — Gould wrote with passion on the plight of enslaved people and the duty of Americans to address the sin of slavery. Her first book, published in 1832 and cleverly titled Poems, included several on slavery that had been printed elsewhere, including “Who Is My Neighbor,” “Sunrise to the Slave,” “The Land of the Free,” and “The Slave Mother’s Prayer.”

The Slave Mother’s Prayer

Gould’s powerful poem “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” first appeared in 1829, in an early abolitionist paper titled The Genius of Universal Emancipation, published in Baltimore. William Lloyd Garrison got his start in abolitionist publishing by working on that paper. A few years later, when Garrison moved to Boston and launched The Liberator, he reprinted Gould’s “The Slave Mother’s Prayer” in his new paper.

Garrison recognized that Northern white women were taking interest in the antislavery cause, and they emotionally connected with the anguish of enslaved women. Below is an excerpt; read the full text at the bottom of this post.

In this poem, Gould wrote in the voice of a despairing enslaved woman, who “begs an early grave” for her baby, to spare him from the “tyrant’s rod.” The mother would rather see her baby die than see him grow up and suffer the atrocities of slavery.

In the final stanzas, the enslaved mother then asks God to pardon her cruel enslaver, to spare him from an eternity in hell. These stanzas at first surprised me - would this oppressed woman really have wanted mercy shown to her enslaver? But I realized that with these stanzas Hannah Flagg Gould was emphasizing that slavery was not simply wrong; it was a mortal sin and thus it inflicted harm on both the oppressed and their oppressors.

Some people today refer to slavery as the “original sin” of our country. Slavery as sin became a rallying cry for the movement in those religious times, and popular poets like Hannah Flagg Gould helped spread that message to a wider audience, through poems like “The Slave Mother’s Prayer.”