The poet's paternal grandmother was Sarah Greenleaf, of Newbury. The genealogist of the Greenleafs says: "From all that can be gathered it is believed that the ancestors of the Greenleaf family were Huguenots, who left France on account of their religious principles some time in the course of the sixteenth century, and settled in England. The name was probably translated from the French Feuillevert.[3] Edmund Greenleaf, the ancestor of the American Greenleafs, was born in the parish of Brixham, and county of Devonshire, near Torbay, in England, about the year 1600." He came to Newbury, Mass., in 1635. He was by trade a silk-dyer. Respecting the family coat-of-arms the genealogist gives, on page 116, the following interesting statement:—
"The Hon. William Greenleaf, once of Boston, and then of New Bedford, being in London about the year 1760, obtained from an office of heraldry a device, said to be the arms of the family, which he had painted, and the painting is now in the possession of his grand-daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, of Roxbury, Mass. The field is white (argent), bearing a chevron between three leaves (vert). The crest is a dove standing on a wreath of green and white, holding in its mouth three green leaves. The helmet is that of a warrior (visor down); a garter below, but no motto."
What more appropriate emblazonment for the escutcheon of our Martial Quaker poet than a warrior's helmet, and a dove holding in its mouth the emblem of peace!
Jonathan Greenleaf, born in Newbury, in 1723, is described as possessing a remarkably kind and conciliatory disposition. "Even the tones of his voice were gentle and persuasive, and he was very frequently resorted to as a peacemaker between contending parties. His dress was remarkably uniform, usually in his later years being deep blue or drab. He seldom walked fast, his gait being a measured and moderate step. His manners were plain, unassuming, but very polite. He was very religious, and a strict Calvinist. Nothing but absolute necessity kept him from public worship on the Sabbath, and he was scarce ever known to omit regular morning and evening worship."
Of Professor Simon Greenleaf, the Harvard Law Professor (1833-1845), the family genealogist says: "For the last thirty years of his life he was one of the most spiritually-minded of men, evidently intent on walking humbly with God, and doing good to the bodies and souls of his fellow-men; scarce ever writing a letter of friendship even, without breathing in it a prayer, or delivering in it some good message." Professor Greenleaf published some dozen works, both legal and religious. It is a curious fact that his son James married Mary Longfellow, a sister of the Cambridge poet, thus making Whittier and Longfellow distant kinsmen.[4]
Another English Greenleaf—contemporary with Edmund, being a silk-dyer as well as he, and in all probability a near kinsman—was a lieutenant under Oliver Cromwell, and served also under Richard Cromwell, and was in the army of the Protector under General Monk, at the time of the restoration of Charles II.
It is hardly necessary to call the reader's attention to the significant fact, elicited by the foregoing researches, that, in tracing down two hereditary lines of the poet's paternal ancestors, we discover that for many generations those ancestors suffered religious persecution for loyalty to their religious convictions, and that many of them were remarkable for their sensitive piety.
Turn we now to the maternal ancestry of Whittier.