John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Background
John Greenleaf Whittier was born on December 17, 1807 in Haverhill, Massachussets, the son of Quaker parents. His father, John Whittier, was a stern, prosaic, but generous man, while his mother, Abigail (Hussey) Whittier, was a kindly soul, who to some extent sympathized with her son's literary leanings. Both parents influenced him considerably by their religious doctrines and tales of local history. On his father's side, he was descended from Thomas Whittier who came to Massachusetts from England in 1638. His youngest son, Joseph, married Mary Peasley, a Quakeress, and their youngest son, also named Joseph, married Sarah Greenleaf, member of a Puritan family believed to be of Huguenot origin. Spending his boyhood and youth on a farm, Whittier came close to nature, and later described the rural scene of his locality more faithfully than had any other writer up to that time. His "Barefoot Boy" has become a classic poem of New England farm life. Overexertion when he was about seventeen resulted in injuries from which he never fully recovered.
Education
His formal education was limited, but what he did not obtain from schools he learned from books. For a brief period he studied under Joshua Coffin, in the unfinished ell of a farmhouse, and at another time, in a school kept by a Newburyport woman.
Career
When he was about fourteen he became acquainted with the poems of Burns. He read them studiously and soon began writing poems himself, some of them in Scotch dialect. As time went on his reading came to include books of travel, and history, works on Quaker doctrine and martyrology, Thomas Ellwood's poem Davideis, and the writings of Milton, Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, and others. He also delved into colonial literature, becoming particularly familiar with Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. The sending of one of his poems, "The Exile's Departure, " by his older sister Mary to the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison, was an important event in young Whittier's life. The poem was published June 8, 1826, and Garrison was sufficiently interested in the unknown author to call upon him. He urged the father to send his son to some school for a further education, but the elder Whittier was averse to such a procedure. Though Garrison continued publishing poems by Whittier, it was Abijah W. Thayer, the editor of the Haverhill Gazette (later called the Essex Gazette), who made Whittier's work widely known, publishing poems by him weekly. Thayer, also, urged the elder Whittier to send his promising son to an academy and this time the father agreed to do so.
At the beginning of May 1827, Whittier entered the newly opened Haverhill Academy, where a poem of his was sung at the inauguration ceremonies. He remained here for about six months, taught school during the winter, and then returned to the academy for another term of six months. During this period he poured forth a steady stream of poems, which appeared not only in the Free Press and the Essex Gazette, but for a time in the Boston Statesman, edited by Nathaniel Greene. Thayer proposed the publication of Whittier's poems in book form by subscription, but the project was not carried out. Through the help of Garrison, Whittier, in January 1829, became editor of The American Manufacturer (Boston), serving as such for seven months and resigning in large part because he was needed at home. This was the first of the numerous editorial positions he held during his life.
In the early part of 1830 he edited the Essex Gazette. After the death of his father in June, he succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the New England Weekly Review, published in Hartford, Connecticut To this periodical he contributed many poems, stories, and sketches, most of which have remained uncollected. In February 1831 he published his first book, Legends of New England in Prose and Verse. Relinquishing the editorship of the Review in January 1832 on account of ill health, he issued that same year his Moll Pitcher, and edited The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard, With a Sketch of His Life. During these years he suffered a grievous disappointment because of the marriage to another of Mary Emerson Smith, a relative, for whom he had had a deep affection since boyhood. She is doubtless the heroine of many of his early uncollected love poems and of his famous "Memories" and "My Playmate. " His pathetic love letter to her, written May 23, 1829, is the only one of those that passed between them which has been published. A reading of Garrison's Thoughts on Colonization (1832), and a meeting with the author in the spring of 1833 made Whittier an abolitionist. For the next thirty years he devoted himself to the writing of Tyrtaen poems on subjects connected with slavery and its abolition. In December he was a delegate to the anti-slavery convention at Philadelphia, and was one of the signers of its declaration.
Prior to the elections of 1834, 1836, and 1838 he secured from Caleb Cushing pledges that he would support the demand of the abolitionists, and Cushing attributed his success in the elections largely to the support of his Quaker friend. He was practically ostracized socially because of his views and activities, but succeeded in being elected a member of the Massachusetts legislature from Haverhill for the year 1835. On September 4, 1835, he and George Thompson, the English lecturer, were mobbed in Concord, N. H. From May to December 1836 he was again in editorial charge of the Essex Gazette. Meanwhile, he sold his farm in Haverhill and moved, in July 1836, to his new home in Amesbury. His activities during the next few years were varied and his labors exacting; he spoke at an anti-slavery convention in Harrisburg, Pa. ; he lobbied in Boston in behalf of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; during the summer of 1837 he was employed in New York under the auspices of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
From March 1838 to February 1840 he edited the Pennsylvania Freeman, to which he contributed daring editorials. The office of the paper was in the new Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, when that building was burned to the ground by a mob in May 17, 1838. In November of that year he published a volume of fifty of his poems. Ill health compelled his resignation from the Freeman, and in 1840 he returned to Amesbury. He was much depressed by the disruption of the American Anti-Slavery Society in that year, but he sympathized with the political-action party, to which Garrison was opposed, and became an aggressive member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In the fall of 1842 he ran for Congress on the Liberty party ticket. The following year he published Lays of My Home and Other Poems, which contained some of his best work and placed him among the leading American poets.
From July 1844 to March 1845 he edited the Middlesex Standard, a Liberty-party paper published in Lowell, Massachussets, and in his editorials opposed the annexation of Texas. In this paper appeared serially "The Stranger in Lowell, " which was published separately in 1845. He also practically edited the Essex Transcript, an organ of the Liberty party, published in Amesbury. His anti-slavery poems were collected and published under the title Voices of Freedom, in 1846. In January of the following year he became corresponding editor of the National Era, published in Washington, and he contributed most of his poems and articles to it for the next thirteen years. In this periodical appeared his only lengthy work in fiction, "Stray Leaves from Margaret Smith's Diary, in the Colony of Massachusetts" (published in book form, under a slightly different title, in 1849) and most of the material in Old Portraits and Modern Sketches (1850) and Literary Recreations and Miscellanies (1854). Meanwhile, there was no relaxing of his political activities. He gave John P. Hale of New Hampshire much political advice, and thus indirectly helped elect him to the United States Senate; he attacked the administration bitterly for the Mexican War; and in the well known poem, "Ichabod, " which appeared in the National Era, May 2, 1850, he castigated Webster for the "Seventh of March speech. " He was instrumental in inducing Charles Sumner to run for the United States Senate in 1851 on a coalition ticket of Free-Soilers and Democrats, and he urged him to remain a candidate when he wished to retire during the long and bitter fight that ensued in the Massachusetts legislature before he was elected. He was one of the first to suggest the formation of the Republican party and always considered himself one of its founders. In the mid-fifties, though he wrote campaign songs, and poems on the happenings in Kansas, ill health compelled him to abandon some of his activities. His reputation as a poet had meanwhile greatly increased.
With the appearance of Songs of Labor (1850), The Chapel of the Hermits (1853), and The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), which contained his "Maud Muller" and the "Barefoot Boy, " he took rank with Longfellow and Bryant among the greatest American poets. From the beginning of the Civil War Whittier's life was uneventful. His fame as a poet increased by reason of his many contributions to the Atlantic Monthly, in the founding of which he had a part, and to the Independent.
The summit of his poetic career was reached in the decade of the sixties, during which appeared Home Ballads (1860); In War Time and Other Poems (1864), containing "Barbara Frietchie"; Snow-Bound (1866); The Tent on the Beach (1867); and Among the Hills (1869). In the summer of 1876 he moved to Danvers, where he lived with his cousins, the three daughters of Col. Edmund Johnson. Here he made his place of abode almost to the time of his death, with occasional visits to Amesbury, which always continued to be his legal residence. He received numerous honors in his later days, was surrounded by friends, and had many visitors. Republican politicians still consulted him. He died at Hampton Falls and was buried at Amesbury. In his poem, "The Problem, " published in 1877, the year of the great railroad strikes, he assailed the labor leaders who sought palliative reforms, as "demagogues" proffering their vain and evil counsels. In the late eighties he refused to aid William Dean Howells in endeavoring to obtain clemency for the convicted Chicago anarchists. Whittier's standing as a poet has somewhat declined since his day. "Snow-Bound" is still usually considered his masterpiece.
A few of his ballads, like "Skipper Iresons's Ride" and "Telling the Bees, " and religious poems like "The Eternal Goodness" are still much read and quoted. Critical schools differ as to which of his poems are superior - those treating of rural life or those dealing with colonial history. There is an increasing tendency, however, to regard him as a prophet and to emphasize the value of his abolition poems, in spite of the fact that the occasion that gave rise to them has passed, for the spirit that prompted them was the same spirit that inspired Milton and Shelley to battle against oppression and tyranny. "It is as a poet of human freedom that he must live if he is to hold his own with posterity. He has not a well-defined domain of mastery save perhaps in the verses inspired by the contest over slavery". While some of the abolition poems are still read and admired, notably "Massachusetts to Virginia, " there are others which deserve to be revived.
Religion
His religious spirit as expressed in his poems was such that not a few of them have found a permanent place in the hymnals of various denominations.
Views
With respect to industrial questions he was always extremely conservative, but he supported the operatives in the Amesbury-Salisbury strike of 1852 (T. F. Currier, in New England Quarterly, March 1935). As a means of settling the entire economic problem he recommended obedience to the Golden Rule and the saving of money. He tried to justify the existing system by showing that the laborer derived benefits from his poverty.
Personality
During his middle years he had several romances, two of which almost led to marriage. While living in New York, in the summer of 1837, he met Lucy Hooper, a young poetess residing in Brooklyn, and a warm friendship sprang up between them. In 1841 Lucy died of consumption. Whittier never realized to what extent she was attracted to him. When he learned from her surviving sisters the depth of her affection he wrote to them contritely and defensively: "God forgive me, if with no other than kind feelings I have done wrong. My feelings toward her were those of a Brother. I admired and loved her; yet felt myself compelled to crush every warmer feeling - poverty, protracted illness, and our separate faiths - the pledge that I had made of all the hopes and dreams of my younger years to the cause of freedom -compelled me to steel myself against everything which tended to attract me - the blessing of a woman's love and a home" (Albert Mordell, in New England Quarterly, June 1934). His most serious affair, however, was with Elizabeth Lloyd, the poetess, with whom he formed a friendship in Philadelphia when he was editing the Freeman. In 1853 she married Robert Howell, who died in 1856, and Whittier resumed his friendship with her in 1858. Both were looking forward to marriage when Mrs. Howell irritated the poet by attacking the Quaker creed, of which she herself was an adherent. On August 3, 1859, he wrote her a letter which was tantamount to withdrawing from the semi-engagement that existed between them. Their friendship drifted on for a year or two, and by the end of 1860 it was over.
Whittier was a tall man with piercing dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, and was somewhat vain with respect to his appearance. Although a genial person, he would occasionally flash out in anger when people did not agree with him. He resented the reputation he had of being a saint. That he was of heroic spirit is beyond question, for he sacrificed much, endured abuse, and faced physical perils in his devotion to the cause which he espoused. He had a fine sense of humor and was adept at telling amusing tales. Toward other people's beliefs he was in general tolerant, and he sympathized keenly with those who were persecuted on account of their race, color, or creed.
