As we celebrate the Fourth of July, I want to celebrate an Essex County man who tirelessly pressed our nation to adopt a truer vision of the declaration “All men are created equal.”
He was six foot three, with an intense look in his eyes.
If your knowledge of John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) is limited to a few homespun ballads skimmed in high school English, you’ve learned only about the popular poems that funded his retirement, and not about his fiery poems that inspired two generations of abolitionists, nor about his decades of political action.
Whittier was neither a poet dabbling in abolitionism nor an abolitionist dabbling in poetry; he distinguished himself both as poet and as abolitionist. In this two-part series, I’ll focus on the intersection: his work as antislavery poet.
A short bio - from “slave’s poet” to “poet of the people”
Whittier wasn’t a trust-fund poet, like some of his famous friends. He was born to a poor Quaker farming family in Haverhill, and had to scrape up funds to pay for his scant few years of high school there. He never married. In 1836 he moved with his mother and his sister Elizabeth to Amesbury, a short walk from their Quaker meeting house. Elizabeth was also a poet and abolitionist, and John’s close collaborator. After traveling around the East Coast for ten years working on various newspapers and political projects, John settled down with them in Amesbury and continued his prolific writing and activism “remotely,” as we’d say today.
From adulthood through the Civil War, Whittier spent his life working to abolish slavery, using every tool in his impressive toolkit: he wrote nearly a hundred antislavery poems and dozens of essays, was a founding member of the American Antislavery Society, edited several antislavery newspapers, wrote letters to editors, hosted antislavery lecturers, ran for office, and helped launch the abolitionist political parties that fed into the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.
Abolitionists deeply respected him; Frederick Douglass even referred to Whittier as “the slave’s poet.” But others either dismissed or despised him. Whittier was attacked twice by pro-slavery mobs, once in Concord, NH and once in Newburyport. And in 1838 a pro-slavery group in Philadelphia burned down the building that housed his abolitionist newspaper.
After slavery was abolished, Whittier’s later poems spoke to more personal topics. His folksy ballads like “Snowbound” (1866) suited the war-weary country’s nostalgia for the humble comforts of pre-industrial life. Late nineteenth-century Americans forgot or forgave his confrontational abolitionism and re-cast Whittier as their beloved “poet of the people.” They adopted many of his verses as hymn lyrics, and named towns, bridges, schools, and institutions in his honor.
In the late 19th century, John Greenleaf Whittier was one of America’s most popular poets, second only to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. When Whittier died at the age of 85, thousands of mourners filed past his coffin, Frederick Douglass and his wife among them. Whittier was buried in a family plot at Union Cemetery in Amesbury.
To learn more, I highly recommend you visit the Whittier Home in Amesbury, where Whittier spent his adult life.
Antislavery poems - 1830s
In this post I’ll share snippets from his more notable antislavery poems of the 1830s, in chronological order, with a few sentences about the context of each. Whittier wrote poems on every significant development in the antislavery movement and nearly every occasion. In the next post I’ll share some later poems.
“The Hunters of Men” (1834)
Dripping with sarcasm, this poem ridiculed the American Colonization Society, which for decades demanded that free Black people be sent to Africa, and opposed emancipation unless expatriation followed. The ACS enjoyed broad support in the North. In Whittier’s satire, men of influence from North and South engaged in a gentlemanly “hunt” for Black men.
“Our Countrymen in Chains” (1834)
In the 1830s, amid news of uprisings against despots in the aged kingdoms of Europe and Asia, Americans were congratulating themselves for having established a nation where the old oppression could not prevail. In sharp rebuke, emphasizing the word “our,” Whittier pointed out that America harbored its own brand of despotism.
“Lines on the Passage of Mr. Pinckney’s Resolutions” (1836) — The U. S. House of Representatives passed gag rules in 1836, refusing to receive or record — much less discuss — any petition on the subject of slavery, and the Senate passed rules with similar effect. The assault on free speech, in blatant violation of the First Amendment, inflamed abolitionists and spurred many more to join the cause.
“The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold Into Southern Bondage” (1838)
By the 1830s, states in the Upper South like Virginia and Tennessee had developed a lucrative export industry based on selling enslaved young people to rice and cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South. In “The Farewell,” Whittier depicted the agony of an enslaved mother, who knew the torments that awaited her “stolen daughters.” When Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography in 1845, he included an excerpt from the poem, because it captured his own grandmother’s lonely suffering.
“Lines Read at the Opening of Pennsylvania Hall” (1838)
On May 15, 1838, Whittier read this poem at the dedication of a building in Philadelphia built by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society to host gatherings for abolitionists and other reform groups, who were often barred from speaking at churches. Whittier was then editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman and had a new office on the ground floor.
But — just two days after Whittier’s exultant dedication, an organized pro-slavery group set fire to Pennsylvania Hall while an interracial group of women gathered there for the second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Despite advance warnings of arson, city firefighters refused to spray the hall; instead they worked to protect neighboring buildings, as depicted in the print below. Pennsylvania Hall burned down, and with it, Whittier’s office.
Up next
In the second half of this series, I’ll share some of Whittier’s antislavery poems of the 1840s and 1850s. He never gave up the fight.
Selected references
John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace in Haverhill, MA: https://www.whittierbirthplace.org
John Greenleaf Whittier Home and Museum in Amesbury, MA: https://whittierhome.org
Pickard, Samuel T. 1894. Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier Volume 1. https://archive.org/details/lifeletters01pickrich
Pickard, Samuel T. 1894. Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier Volume 2. https://archive.org/details/lifeandlettersof02pickrich
Pickard, John B. John Greenleaf Whittier: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1961. https://archive.org/details/johngreenleafwhi00pick
Whittier, John G. 1892. The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier in Seven Volumes. Volume III: Anti-Slavery Poems and Songs of Labor and Reform. https://archive.org/details/worksofjohngreen03whitiala
Whittier, John G. 1894. The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier. Horace E. Scudder, editor. https://archive.org/details/completepoetical0000john_w1v5