WHITTIER THE REFORMER.
"God said: 'Break thou these yokes; undo
These heavy burdens. I ordain
A work to last thy whole life through,
A ministry of strife and pain.
'Forego thy dreams of lettered ease,
Put thou the scholar's promise by,
The rights of man are more than these.'
He heard, and answered: 'Here am I!'"
Whittier, Sumner.
On New Year's day of 1831 William Lloyd Garrison issued the first number of the Liberator from his little attic room, No. 6 Merchants' Hall, Boston. Its clear bugle-notes sounded the onset of reform and the death-knell of slavery. It called for the buckling on of moral armor. Its words were the touchstone of wills, the shibboleth of souls. Cowards and time-servers quickly ranged themselves on one side, and heroes on the other. Before young Whittier,—editor, littérateur, and poet,—a career full of brilliant promise had opened up at Hartford. But through the high chambers of his soul the voice of duty rang in solemn and imperative tones. He heard and obeyed. The cost was counted, and his resolution taken. Upon his brow he placed the lustrous fire-wreath of the martyr, well assured of his power to endure unflinchingly to the end its sharpest pains. It was the most momentous act of his life; it formed the keystone in the arch of his destinies.
The first decided anti-slavery step taken by him was the publication of his fiery philippic, "Justice and Expediency." About this time also he began the writing of his stirring anti-slavery poems, many of them full of pathos, fierce invective, cutting irony and satire,—stirring the blood like a trumpet-call, giving impulse and enthusiasm to the despised and half-despairing Abolitionists of that day, and becoming a part of the very religion of thousands of households throughout the land.
It is almost impossible for those who were not participants in the anti-slavery conflict, or who have not read histories and memoirs of the struggle, to realize the deep opprobrium that attached to the word "Abolitionist." To avow one's self such meant in many cases suspicion, ostracism, hunger, blows, and sometimes death. It meant, in short, self-renunciation and social martyrdom. All this Whittier gladly took upon himself; and he knew that it was a long struggle upon which he was entering. As he says in one of his poems, he was
"Called from dream and song,
Thank God! so early to a strife so long,
That, ere it closed, the black, abundant hair
Of boyhood rested silver-sown and spare
On manhood's temples."
That the martyrdom was a severe one to all who took up the cross goes without saying. Mr. Whittier remarked to the writer that it was at some sacrifice of his ambition and plans for the future that he decided to throw in his lot with the opponents of slavery. He knew that it meant the annihilation of his hopes of literary preferment, and the exclusion of his articles from the pages of magazines and newspapers. "For twenty years," said he, "my name would have injured the circulation of any of the literary or political journals of the country."
When Whittier joined the ranks of the despised faction, Garrison had been imprisoned and fined in Baltimore for his arraignment of the slave traffic; Benjamin Lundy had been driven from the same city by threats of imprisonment and personal outrage; Prudence Crandall was waging her battle with the Philistinism of Canterbury, Conn.; and the Legislature of Georgia had offered a reward of five thousand dollars for "the arrest, prosecution, and trial to conviction under the laws of the State, of the editor or publisher of a certain paper called The Liberator, published in the town of Boston, and State of Massachusetts."
But it is not within the province of this biography to give an exhaustive résumé of the anti-slavery conflict, but only to speak of such of its episodes as were especially participated in by Mr. Whittier. How tailor John Woolman became a life-long itinerant preacher of his mild Quaker gospel of freedom; how honest saddler Lundy left his leather hammering, and walked his ten thousand miles, carrying his types and column-rules with him, and printing his "Genius of Universal Emancipation" as he went; in what way and to what extent the labors and writings of Lucretia Mott, Samuel J. May, Lydia Maria Child, George Thompson, James G. Birney, and Gerrit Smith helped on the noble cause,—to all these things only allusion can be made. For a full account of those perilous times one must go to the pages of Henry Wilson's "History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power," and to the fascinating "Recollections" of Samuel J. May. Let us now return to Whittier and consider his own writings, labors, and adventures in the service of the cause.
It was in the spring of 1833 that he published at his own expense "Justice and Expediency; or, Slavery Considered with a view to its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition." [Haverhill: C. P. Thayer and Co.] It is a polemical paper, full of exclamation points and italicized and capitalized sentences. The hyperbole speaks well for the author's heart, but betrays his juvenility. He shrieks like a temperance lecturer or a stump politician. The pamphlet, however, shows diligent and systematic study of the entire literature of the subject. Every statement is fortified by quotation or reference. He enumerates six reasons why the African Colonization Society's schemes were unworthy of good men's support, and buttresses up his theses by citations from the official literature of his opponents. A thorough familiarity with slavery in other lands and times is also manifested. As a specimen of the style of the book the following will serve:—
"But, it may be said that the miserable victims of the System have our sympathies.
"Sympathy!—the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering. Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing of those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lash from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread?
"Oh, my heart is sick—my very soul is weary of this sympathy—this heartless mockery of feeling....
"No—let the Truth on this subject—undisguised, naked, terrible as it is, stand out before us. Let us no longer seek to cover it—let us no longer strive to forget it—let us no more dare to palliate it."
In his sketch of Nathaniel P. Rogers, the anti-slavery editor, Whittier remarks incidentally that the voice of Rogers was one of the few which greeted him with words of encouragement and sympathy at the time of the publication of his "Justice and Expediency."[13]
On the fourth day of December, 1833, the Philadelphia Convention for the formation of the American Anti-slavery Society held its first sitting; Beriah Green, President, Lewis Tappan and John G. Whittier, Secretaries. This assembly, if not so famous as that which framed the Declaration of Independence in the same city some two generations previously, was at any rate as worthy of fame and respect as its illustrious predecessor. A deep solemnity and high consecration filled the heart of every man and woman in that little band. Heart answered unto heart in glowing sympathy. They did their work like men inspired. Perfect unanimity prevailed. They were too eagerly engaged to adjourn for dinner, and "baskets of crackers and pitchers of cold water supplied all the bodily refreshment." Among those who were present and spoke was Lucretia Mott, "a beautiful and graceful woman," says Whittier, "in the prime of life, with a face beneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland." She "offered some wise and valuable suggestions, in a clear sweet voice, the charm of which I have never forgotten."
A committee, of which Whittier was a member, with William Lloyd Garrison as chairman, was appointed to draw up a Declaration of Principles. Garrison sat up all night, in the small attic of a colored man, to draft this Declaration. The two other members of the committee, calling in the gray dawn of a December day, found him putting the last touches to this famous paper, while his lamp burned on unheeded into the daylight. His draft was accepted almost without amendment by the Convention, and, after it had been engrossed on parchment, was signed by the sixty-two members present.[14]
