He liked the local news of the day; he liked social intercourse—especially when he could jump up from his chair, or his sugar barrel, or wherever he might have been seated and take his departure when he felt so disposed.
But there was more than this. He also had a purpose.
Three years previous to the moving of Whittier’s family to Amesbury had been held the Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia, in which Garrison, Whittier, Wright, Samuel J. May, and so many others whose names are familiar in the cause of freedom for the slave, had taken part.
But Whittier’s hopes of more active co-operation had been ended by his delicate health, his want of power to endure the fatigues of such a life as that to which scenes like the Boston mob, the Philadelphia mob, and convention work would have subjected him. Yet he still had work in abundance as Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, as an earnest and most important advocate of that political party which some of the anti-slavery reformers had determined to build up, the principle of which was inserted in the Albany Anti-Slavery Convention of 1839.
Whittier was one of the business committee of this National Convention of Abolitionists in which the formation of a political anti-slavery party was inaugurated. The opinion of the abolitionist, Abraham L. Pennock of Pennsylvania, made in the January of 1840, six months after the Convention, Whittier publicly endorsed the following year as his own opinion also.
“What an absurdity is moral action apart from political,” declared both these men who with others determined to use the legitimate weapon of their vote in the cause of freedom—not as a right only, but a duty, since it was in their hands.
Together with Sumner, Henry Wilson, and many others at the East, Whittier was working toward the growth of a political party, eventually to become one with the great party at the West where Abraham Lincoln’s “Lincoln-Stone protest” against the encroachment of the Slave Power had developed into his famous debates with Douglas upon slavery, under the guise of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and other measures. There had arisen in the country many forces which in different ways and places, but with the same object, had come to stand for opposition to the spread of slavery, and were assimilating. Forces moral, spiritual, political were uniting—unconsciously at first—for the great conflict under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln.
To Whittier’s insight political measures were to be the salvation of the country he loved and eventual destruction to the slavery he hated. To him therefore each man’s vote counted.