John Greenleaf Whittier: His Life, Genius, and Writings

by William Sloane Kennedy

In 1868 an institution called "Whittier College" was opened at Salem, Henry County, Iowa. It was founded in honor of the poet, and is conducted in accordance with the principles of the Society of Friends.

In 1871 Whittier edited "Child-Life: A Collection of Poems," by various home and foreign authors. In the same year he edited, with a long introduction, the "Journal of John Woolman."

The name John Woolman is not widely known to persons of the present generation; and yet, as Whittier says, it was this humble Quaker reformer of New Jersey who did more than any one else to inspire all the great modern movements for the emancipation of slaves, first in the West Indies, then in the United States, and in Russia. Warner Mifflin, Jean Pierre Brissot, Thomas Clarkson, Stephen Grellet, William Allen, and Benjamin Lundy,—all these philanthropists owed much of their impulse to labor for the freedom of the slave to humble John Woolman. His journal or autobiography was highly praised by Charles Lamb, Edward Irving, Crabb Robinson, and others. "The style is that of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language."

Woolman was born in Northampton, West Jersey, in 1720. One day, in the year 1742, while clerk in a store in the village of Mount Holly, township of Northampton, N. J., he was asked by his employer to make out the bill of sale of a negro. He drew up the instrument, but his conscience was awakened, and some years after he began his life-work as a pedestrian anti-slavery preacher. He refused to ride in, or have letters sent him by, the stage-coaches, because of the cruelty exercised toward the horses by the drivers. Neither would he accept hospitality from those who kept slaves, always paying either the owners or the slaves for his entertainment. Woolman was most gentle and kind in his appeals to slave-owners, and rarely met with any violent remonstrance. Much of his work was within the limits of his own sect, and Mr. Whittier's introduction gives a valuable and succinct historical résumé of the steps taken by the Friends to rid their sect of the stigma of slaveholding.

Mount Holly, in Woolman's day, says Whittier, "was almost entirely a settlement of Friends. A very few of the old houses with their quaint stoops or porches are left. That occupied by John Woolman was a small, plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each story in front, a four-barred fence enclosing the grounds, with the trees he planted and loved to cultivate. The house was not painted, but whitewashed. The name of the place is derived from the highest hill in the county, rising two hundred feet above the sea, and commanding a view of a rich and level country of cleared farms and woodlands."

Very amusing is the picture given by Mr. Whittier of the eccentric Benjamin Lay, once a member of the Society of Friends in England, and afterward an inhabitant for some time of the West Indies, whence he was driven away on account of the violence and extravagance of his denunciations of slavery. He was a contemporary of Woolman. He lived in a cave near Philadelphia, as a sort of Jonah or Elijah, prophesying woe against the city on account of its participation in the crime of slavery. He wore clothes made of vegetable fibre, and ate only vegetable food. "Issuing from his cave, on his mission of preaching 'deliverance to the captive,' he was in the habit of visiting the various meetings for worship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to their disgust and indignation. On one occasion he entered the Market Street Meeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out. A burly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate and thrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of the street. There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystanders that he did not feel free to rise himself. 'Let those who cast me here raise me up. It is their business, not mine.'

"His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentric life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunch-backed, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semicircle of beard falling low on his breast,—a figure to recall the old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold. Such was the irrepressible prophet who troubled the Israel of slaveholding Quakerism, clinging like a rough chestnut-burr to the skirts of its respectability, and settling like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.

"On one occasion, while the annual meeting was in session at Burlington, N. J., in the midst of the solemn silence of the great assembly, the unwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat, was seen passing up the aisle. Stopping midway, he exclaimed, 'You slaveholders! Why don't you throw off your Quaker coats as I do mine, and show yourselves as you are?' Casting off as he spoke his outer garment, he disclosed to the astonished assembly a military coat underneath, and a sword dangling at his heels. Holding in one hand a large book, he drew his sword with the other. 'In the sight of God,' he cried, 'you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, as I do this book!' suiting the action to the word, and piercing a small bladder filled with the juice of poke-weed (phytolacca decandra), which he had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh blood those who sat near him."

There is something overwhelmingly ludicrous about this bladder of poke-weed juice! And what a subject for a painter!—the portentous, white-bearded dwarf standing there in the midst of the church, in act to plunge his gigantic sword tragically into the innermost bowels of the crimson poke-juice bladder, and from all parts of the house the converging looks of the broad-brimmed and shovel-bonneted Quakers!

Mr. Whittier further says that "Lay was well acquainted with Dr. Franklin, who sometimes visited him. Among other schemes of reform he entertained the idea of converting all mankind to Christianity. This was to be done by three witnesses,—himself, Michael Lovell, and Abel Noble, assisted by Dr. Franklin. But, on their first meeting at the doctor's house, the three 'chosen vessels' got into a violent controversy on points of doctrine, and separated in ill-humor. The philosopher, who had been an amused listener, advised the three sages to give up the project of converting the world until they had learned to tolerate each other."