[59] Harvard College Papers [MS.], 2d ser. xi. 153.
[60] Harvard College Papers [MS.], 2d ser. xi. 187.
CHAPTER XIV
ANTI-SLAVERY POEMS AND SECOND MARRIAGE
It is difficult now to realize what an event in Longfellow’s life was the fact of his writing a series of anti-slavery poems on board ship and publishing them in a thin pamphlet on his return. Parties on the subject were already strongly drawn; the anti-slavery party being itself divided into subdivisions which criticised each other sharply. Longfellow’s temperament was thoroughly gentle and shunned extremes, so that the little thin yellow-covered volume came upon the community with something like a shock. As a matter of fact, various influences had led him up to it. His father had been a subscriber to Benjamin Lundy’s “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” the precursor of Garrison’s “Liberator.” In his youth at Brunswick, Longfellow had thought of writing a drama on the subject of “Toussaint l’Ouverture,” his reason for it being thus given, “that thus I may do something in my humble way for the great cause of negro emancipation.”
Margaret Fuller, who could by no means be 164 called an abolitionist, described the volume as “the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow’s thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the subject would warrant a deeper tone.” On the other hand, the editors of “Graham’s Magazine” wrote to Mr. Longfellow that “the word slavery was never allowed to appear in a Philadelphia periodical,” and that “the publisher objected to have even the name of the book appear in his pages.” His friend Samuel Ward, always an agreeable man of the world, wrote from New York of the poems, “They excite a good deal of attention and sell rapidly. I have sent one copy to the South and others shall follow,” and includes Longfellow among “you abolitionists.” The effect of the poems was unquestionably to throw him on the right side of the great moral contest then rising to its climax, while he incurred, like his great compeers, Channing, Emerson, and Sumner, some criticism from the pioneers. Such differences are inevitable among reformers, whose internal contests are apt to be more strenuous and formidable than those incurred between opponents; and recall to mind that remark of Cosmo de Medici which Lord Bacon called “a desperate saying;” namely, that “Holy Writ bids us to forgive our enemies, but it is nowhere enjoined upon us that we should forgive our friends.”
To George Lunt, a poet whose rhymes Longfellow admired, but who bitterly opposed the anti-slavery movement, he writes his programme as follows:—
“I am sorry you find so much to gainsay in my Poems on Slavery. I shall not argue the point with you, however, but will simply state to you my belief.
“1. I believe slavery to be an unrighteous institution, based on the false maxim that Might makes Right.
“2. I have great faith in doing what is righteous, and fear no evil consequences.
“3. I believe that every one has a perfect right to express his opinion on the subject of Slavery, as on every other thing; that every one ought so to do, until the public opinion of all Christendom shall penetrate into and change the hearts of the Southerners on this subject.