Then the authority which the poet as a man of affairs never failed to put forth at need came to the front.
Whittier rose.
He wasted no strength in appeal to a patriotism overswept by avarice; but made his demands upon that avarice itself.
“If this sum needed,” he said, naming it, “is not raised by this meeting, I shall write to Salmon Chase [Secretary of the Treasury] to have your exemption money on the next draft of men put up to seven hundred dollars instead of three hundred, as it is now.”
That was all.
But it was enough. His audience looked at the speaker’s tall, erect figure, his flashing eyes, his resolute mouth—and decided not to take the risk. The required amount was immediately forthcoming.
All the world knows how in the poet’s early days he put aside the ambitions of youth and genius—ambitions which the early call of the world to him proved would have been richly fulfilled—and fought the hard battle for the slave, and endured its contumely.
His own words tell the story. In his poem, “Lines Written in the Book of a Friend,” he sings of himself:
“Founts gushed beside my pilgrim way,