The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant appreciation from the literary critics of his country.
John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow up to be the Burns of New England; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices.
Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. You remember the sneer of the Tory critic—“Back to your gallipots, Mr. Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated.
But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his head in Philadelphia.
He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his propaganda. You recall Browning’s rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth, “The Lost Leader.” Here is Whittier’s “Ichabod,” rebuking Daniel Webster for his apostasy to the cause of freedom—
All else is gone, from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Whittier was not among the fanatics of the movement; on the contrary, he was a shrewd politician, interested in moving the minds of his fellows and in getting something done. He helped in the forming of the Abolition party, which later became the Free Soil party, and then the Republican party of Lincoln. As a Quaker he could not support the war, yet he managed to write verses about it—for example, when Stonewall Jackson was unwilling to kill old Barbara Frietchie for hanging out the Stars and Stripes in Frederick. It is probable that this incident never happened, but it made a very popular poem.
Whittier never went to college, he never traveled in Europe to acquire a foreign tone; he remained an American peasant. He voiced their thoughts in their own language, and they have cherished him, and will some day force the critics to give him his due place. If you are looking for ballads made out of native material, read the story of old Skipper Ireson, who roused the fury of his villagers by sailing away from a ship in distress:
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead.
If you are looking for American sentiment, for simple, untouched democracy, read “Maud Muller.” Above all, if you want the inner essence of New England farm life, the mingled harshness and beauty of its body, and the mingled sternness and charm of its spirit, read “Snow-Bound”