Once more Garrison’s influence was to determine him. The general inclination toward humanitarian reform had stirred him to the establishment of the Liberator, and when he declared, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard,” he found a natural ally in Whittier. The great step came in 1833 with the poet’s publication at his own expense of the pamphlet “Justice and Expediency,” with its wider circulation through reprints by sympathizers, with the controversial sequels, and with his share in the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the years to come he said, “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.” It was the deepest test of courage. In the first place it meant that a sensitive young poet who had already felt the injustice of the conservative classes must lay himself open to their contempt and ridicule. It was a bitter time to do this, for never was a day when the miscellaneous inclination to reform offered so great an array of amusing causes and champions. Emerson’s derisive list, “Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers,” is evidence of the degree to which the general idea of reform had been discredited even in the most liberal minds. For there is no doubt that many of the projects were foolish or that the hopes reposed in them as social cure-alls were ridiculous. But the adoption of the abolition cause involved far more than ridicule—nothing less than the completest disapproval of most good citizens. Considered in the large, lawyers and clergymen are conservatives by profession, deeply committed to the past; and here was slavery sanctioned in the law and the gospel. The prosperous merchant and banker are never markedly eager for a change from the conditions which have fostered their prosperity; and here was a whole economic system, from the plantations of the South to the financial houses of Wall Street and State Street, erected on a foundation of slave labor. According to Emerson cotton thread held the Union together. Men might devote their lives to the substitution of hooks and eyes for buttons or the adoption of a vegetarian diet, and get their pay in laughter, but when they threatened to disturb the industrial system they were pelted and hated and cursed. All this Whittier foresaw when he followed his own counsel of later years, “My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.” The history of his participation in the abolition movement does not belong to such a chapter as this except for a record of how he used his literary powers for the good of the cause, and for a comment on the kind of poetry that inevitably resulted from such use.
Between 1831 and 1833 Whittier had become intelligently interested in politics; indeed, had he been a few months older in the autumn of 1832 it is possible that he might have been elected to Congress as a compromise candidate when Caleb Cushing was unable to secure the seat for himself, though strong enough to prevent the choice of an opponent. The young poet had thus learned a good deal about the value of public opinion and about the power of publicity in molding and wielding it. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed he had at his hand a great megaphone that could project his voice to the far districts of the country. As a writer of propagandist verse he was endowed with what in an orator would be a “natural speaking voice.” His convictions were deep and sincere, he had an easy command of simple rhythms, and he was used to thinking and speaking in the language of the people. He was in no danger of falling into academic subtlety or erudition. So, like his greatest American predecessor in this field—Freneau (see pp. 72–77)—he spoke again and again and always with telling effect.
As a good journalist and rhetorician he made his issues plain and simple—much simpler in fact than they really were, avoiding embarrassing qualifications. He appealed to the Northerners as a people unanimously opposed to human bondage and not as a half-hearted and divided group. In a generation when the sense of statehood was infinitely stronger than it is now he assumed a high level of altruism in Massachusetts, while he stimulated a sense of state resentment against Virginia or South Carolina. With the memories of the Revolution refreshed by a series of recent semicentennials, he employed the conventional language of protest against tyranny; the antislavery verses resound with vituperative allusions to chains, fetters, yokes, rods, manacles, and gyves, with Scriptural idiom and with scorn for the repudiation of Revolutionary principles of freedom. In the opening lines of “The Crisis” he was skillfully suggestive by his paraphrase of the missionary hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” and in the “Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Kansas to a Distinguished Politician” he turned to contempt the perversion of the Scriptures in defense of slavery.
“Go it, old hoss!” they cried, and cursed the niggers—
Fulfilling thus the word of prophecy,
“Cursed be Canaan.”
All this was justifiable, though it frequently was anything but high art. At times, however, the heat of passion led Whittier to write lines for which there was little or no excuse. His disappointment at Webster’s famous “Seventh of March” compromise speech in 1850 led him to the extreme of reproach which was felt by most of the North—an extreme from which he shared the common reaction of later years and for which he made the manly atonement of “The Lost Occasion,” moved by “the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness.” The lowest level of his war verse is reached in the most familiar “Barbara Frietchie.” This has all the attributes that are usually to be found in popular favorites. It is conventional in form, easily intelligible, a narrative of picturesque tableaux, and capped with an applied moral. The only charge that can be fairly brought against it is, however, a fundamental one—that it is essentially false to the facts. The middle third of the poem that has to do explicitly with Stonewall Jackson is partly libelous and partly ridiculous. Jackson was an honest and devoted man, but he is represented as coming through the town like a stock-melodrama villain, blushing with remorse at the challenge of Barbara and capping the climax with a burst of cheap and unsoldierly rhetoric. No doubt it expressed at the moment what the passions of war could lead even a gentle Quaker to believe; no doubt also it was good war journalism; but granting these concessions, it stands as a deplorable evidence of the depths to which noble talents can be degraded in the times that try men’s souls.
“The Waiting,” a poem of 1862, is in the loftier vein of one who does not reënforce himself through disparagement of his enemies. It is a lament of unfulfilled endeavor in behalf of an ideal cause. As a really great lyric should be, it is both personal and general in its application. It expresses the despondency of the enfeebled and aging poet that he could not join “the shining ones with plumes of snow” in the good fight; and in its reference to “the harder task of standing still” it alludes not only to his resignation at the moment but also to the patient policy which in former years had estranged the extremest abolitionists from him. It also must have been an immediate source of consolation to thousands who have been confronted by urgent duties they could not perform; while at the same time in a broader way it has expressed the faith of “Ulysses” and “Abt Vogler,” of “In Memoriam” and “Saul” and “Asolando,” that “good but wished with God is done.”
Like Freneau (see pp. 71–81), but to a more marked degree, Whittier was most popular at first for his journalistic, controversial poems, though his most permanent work has nothing to do with either noble or ignoble strife. He followed the example of Burns, who inspired his first literary passion, in writing simple lyrics and narratives of his own countryside. These included many of the legends of Boston, like “Cassandra Southwick,” of Hartford; like “Abraham Davenport,” or of his beloved district north of Boston; like “The Wreck of Rivermouth,” “The Garrison of Cape Ann,” and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” As a rule he was not inclined to tell stories without some clear moral implication, and all too often he expounded this implication, sermon-wise, at the end. Thus he tells with dignity and fine effect the story of the Indian specters of Cape Ann, who were finally driven away by the prayers of the devout garrison after repeated volleys from their musketry had failed. In eighty lines the tale is told; an added stanza calls attention to the fact that there is a moral in the ancient fiction; and two more in a sort of sub-postscript indulge in a final burst of poetical exegesis. “Skipper Ireson,” the best of Whittier’s ballads, is no less moralistic, but is done with more art, for the ethical point is developed within the account instead of being tacked on after it.
In poems such as “Hampton Beach,” “The Lakeside,” “The Last Walk in Autumn,” and “At Eventide” Whittier pictures the nature surroundings of his long lifetime; and in a generous succession, from “Memories” of 1841 to “In School-Days,” of nearly thirty years later, he takes his readers along the borderlands of autobiography. Preëminent among his recollections of persons and places is “Snow-Bound.” The snowstorm, which Emerson celebrated as a thing in itself, Whittier adopted as the background for a winter idyl. The “Flemish pictures of old days” which he drew of his Haverhill homestead were annotated in great detail by the poet, but their virtue lies not so much in the fact that they are true to a given set of conditions, as that they are essentially true to the rural life of Whittier’s New England—just as the pictures in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” are true to the Scotland of Burns, and the pictures of “The Deserted Village” to the landlord-ridden Ireland of Goldsmith. And to the attentive reader the contrasts between the peasant life of Great Britain and the nearest thing to it that can be found in America are abiding witnesses to the practical virtues of a democracy. In this simple idyl, written with “intimate knowledge and delight,” Whittier combined truth and beauty as in no other of his poems.