John Greenleaf Whittier: A sketch of his life, with selected poems

by Bliss Perry; John Greenleaf Whittier

Of Fancy skyward flying.”

He had already scribbled verses upon the beam of his mother’s loom, and like the boy Alfred Tennyson, only two years younger than himself, in the far-away Lincolnshire rectory, he had loved to fill his slate with rhymes. But from the moment that he read Burns this boyish delight in mere jingling sounds deepened into a sense that he, too, might become a poet. At sixteen he was composing with extraordinary fluency and with considerable skill. At eighteen he had written verses which his sister Mary thought good enough to be printed, and a poem which she sent surreptitiously to William Lloyd Garrison, the twenty-year-old editor of the “Newburyport Free Press,” was accepted and published on June 8, 1826. This printing of “The Exile’s Departure” in the poet’s corner of a struggling local newspaper was a fateful event for Whittier. Everybody knows the instant and generous interest aroused in the youthful editor: how he drove out to East Haverhill, unearthed his bashful poet,—who was at that moment crawling under the barn after a stolen hen’s nest,—and urged his father to give Greenleaf something better than a district schooling. “Sir, poetry will not give him bread!” exclaimed John Whittier, as sternly as Carlyle’s father might have said it. But the upshot was that the gaunt lad got his term at the Haverhill Academy, paying his way by making shoes.

He continued to write poems in astonishing profusion, taught school himself for a term in his native township, then took a final term at the Academy, and at twenty-one the ways were parting before his feet. A scheme for the publication of his poems by subscription had failed. His health seemed too frail for effective farm labor. His ignorance of the classics, as well as his lack of funds, barred the doors of a college course. He decided to earn his bread by journalism, and became at the end of his twenty-first year the editor of “The American Manufacturer” in Boston. The choice was significant. For three years he had been heralded as an unlettered “poet,” a sort of local phenomenon who was possibly destined, as Garrison had prophesied, to rank “among the bards of his country.” Yet here he was, turning, with a Yankee’s shrewd facility, to politics and affairs.

He was led, no doubt,—as in the more momentous crisis of 1833, when he obeyed Garrison’s call and turned Abolitionist,—by an instinct deeper than any conscious analysis of his powers. He knew that he had what he called a “knack of rhyming,” and he had learned from Burns to find material for poetry all about him. Yet he possessed at this time but a scanty equipment for the long road which a poet must travel. His physical endowment was impoverished. That full-blooded life of the senses, which taught Burns and Goethe at fourteen such secrets of human rapture and dismay, was impossible for the Quaker stripling. He was color-blind. His ear barely recognized a tune. The bodily sensations of odor, taste, and touch are scarcely to be felt in his poetry. He was indeed “no Greek,” as Whitman said of him long afterward; and at the outset of his career, as at its close, he cared but little for literature as an art. To conceive of any of the arts as a religion, or as an embodiment, for sense perception, of the highest potencies of the human spirit, would have seemed almost blasphemous to this follower of the “inward light.” He wrote to Lucy Hooper that a long poem, “unless consecrated to the sacred interests of religion and humanity, would be a criminal waste of life.” Parthenon and Pantheon were in his eyes less significant and memorable than Pennsylvania Hall, the Abolitionist headquarters in Philadelphia. In an editorial in “The Freeman” in 1838, prefacing a reprint of “A Psalm of Life,” which had just been published in the New York “Knickerbocker,” Whittier declared: “It is very seldom that we find an article of poetry so full of excellent philosophy and COMMON SENSE as the following. We know not who the author may be, but he or she is no common man or woman. These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live—the moral steam enginery of an age of action.”

One who could utter this amazing verdict upon the “Psalm of Life” certainly seems less fitted for poetry than for journalism and politics: and indeed Whittier’s aptitude for affairs, even at twenty-one, was extraordinary. His political editorials for the “Manufacturer”—a Clay journal which advocated a protective tariff—were skilfully written from the first. Subsequent editorial engagements in Haverhill, Hartford, and Philadelphia, although rendered brief by his wretched health, nevertheless widened his acquaintance and increased his self-confidence. His judgment was canny. His knowledge of local conditions, at first in his native town and county, and afterward throughout New England and the Eastern States, was singularly exact. He seemed to perceive, as by some actual visualization, how people were thinking and feeling in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other communities which he had observed at first hand; and he employed a correspondingly accurate and as it were topographical imagination when he wrote of affairs in Kansas, Paris, or Italy.

Men were never abstractions to him. They were concrete persons, with ambitions to be tempted, generosities to be wakened, weaknesses to be utilized. His own county of Essex was then, as now, noted for the adroitness of its politicians, but at twenty-five John Greenleaf Whittier could beat the best of them at their own game. He was tireless in personal persuasion, in secret correspondence, in fighting fire with fire. He read Burke, and was prompt to apply Burke’s principle: “When bad men combine, the good should associate.” A Whig himself until the formation of the Liberty party, he was willing, as his friend Garrison was not, to compromise on non-essentials for the sake of bringing things to pass. The hand of a master is revealed in his published letters to Caleb Cushing and to Henry Clay. It was he who devised the coalitions which sent Cushing, the Whig, and Rantoul, the Democrat, to Congress, which made Boutwell governor of Massachusetts and sent Sumner to the United States Senate. When Sumner was struck down in the Senate chamber and his indignant constituents held mass meetings to voice their horror, Whittier was self-controlled enough to declare: “It seems to me to be no time for the indulgence of mere emotions.... The North is not united for freedom as the South is for slavery.... We must forget, forgive, and UNITE.” No utterance could be more characteristic of the man. In public affairs he knew what he wanted to compass, and he was as willing to lobby or to trade votes as to write an editorial or a lyric, provided the good cause could be thereby made to prosper. Extremists thought that he yielded to considerations of mere expediency; but his was rather the versatility of the born political fighter, who can use more weapons than one. Underneath all questions of policy, lay his inherited democratic sympathy with the ordinary man. At the height of his fame he loved to sit upon a cracker barrel in the grocery store at Amesbury, and talk politics. “I am a man,” he wrote to his biographer Underwood in 1883, “and not a mere verse-maker.”

This glimpse at the later revelations of his character is essential to an understanding of the spiritual crisis which confronted him in 1833, when he was only twenty-six. He loved power, and had already exercised it in the congenial field of politics. The road to preferment lay that way. It is true that he had continued to compose abundantly, both in prose and in verse. His writings were favorably noticed. Yet he saw no career for himself as a man of letters. “I have done with poetry and literature,” he wrote to a friend in 1832. Repeated disappointments in love had darkened his spirit. The death of his father had forced him back to the old farm to support his mother and sisters. Black care sat very close behind him. Discouraged, lonely, with ambitions ungratified and great powers of which he was but half aware, he paused, like some knight who had lost his way in an enchanted forest. Then blew the clear unmistakable trumpet call which broke the spell and summoned him to action. Although an anti-slavery man by native instinct, Whittier had never given his adherence to the sect of Abolitionists. Now came a letter from Garrison (March 22, 1833): “My brother, there are upwards of two million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of history. There are one hundred thousand of their offspring kidnapped annually from their birth. The southern portion of our country is going down to destruction, physically and morally, with a swift descent, carrying other portions with her. This, then, is a time for the philanthropist—any friend of his country, to put forth his energies, in order to let the oppressed go free, and sustain the republic. The cause is worthy of Gabriel—yea, the God of hosts places himself at its head. Whittier, enlist! Your talents, zeal, influence—all are needed.”[^[1]]

The spirit of Burns, years before, had whispered to the boy that he, too, had the poet-soul, yet facile versifying was all that had seemed to come of it, and the young man had turned to politics. Now the living voice of Garrison called him away from partisan ambitions to enlist in a doubtful and perilous measure of moral reform. He obeyed, and—so strange are the mysteries of personality—found in that new service to humanity not only the inspiration which made him a genuine poet, but the popular recognition which set the seal upon his fame.

The immediate cost of obedience to his conscience was heavy. The generation of Americans born since the Civil War look back upon the Abolitionists as victors after thirty years of agitation, as the dictators of national policy. Their statues are in public places. Their theories have prevailed. But in the early thirties they suffered such ostracism and even martyrdom as only a few historical students now realize. Churches, colleges, and courts were against them, for reasons which were adequate enough. They were dangerous members of society. To-day we endeavor to exclude Anarchists from American soil; the leading Abolitionists, like the Russian Revolutionists of the present hour, preached Anarchy in the name of Humanity. Whittier, trained to quietism, non-resistance, and respect for law, and skilled as he had become in feeling the pulse of public opinion, knew perfectly well what company he was henceforth to keep. To be an active Abolitionist was to join the outcasts.

His first act of allegiance was to write and publish at his own expense a pamphlet entitled “Justice and Expediency,” which pleaded for immediate emancipation by peaceful means. In December, 1833, he was a delegate from Massachusetts at the founding in Philadelphia of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Whittier was the youngest member. Thirty years later he wrote to Garrison, who had been his companion upon that memorable journey: “I am not insensible to literary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.” No words could better illustrate his devotion to the cause of the slave. Yet he did not surrender his right of private judgment as to the best means to be employed. Garrison lost patience, ere long, with Whittier’s willingness to further the cause by compromise and concession, and the friends parted, to come together again in later years. The movement for emancipation needed both men and both methods; but Whittier’s method—less heroic than Garrison’s, less intolerant than Sumner’s, less virulent than that of Wendell Phillips—was like Abraham Lincoln’s in its patience, shrewdness, and sympathy.