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JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807–1892)

by Janice Stensrude

published in What Canst Thou Say? No. 107 (2), August 2020, p. 6.

Growing up on a farm that produced little more than enough to get by, John Greenleaf Whittier read again and again the six books that comprised his father's home library, each one a discourse on the tenets of the family's Quaker faith. A newspaper editor, seeing a poem written by the eighteen-year-old Whittier, encouraged him to enroll in nearby Haverhill Academy, where he managed to complete high school in only two terms. Tuition for the first term was paid with food from his parents' farm and earnings from his work as a shoemaker. His second term was financed by his earnings as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse.
With an unwavering belief in Quaker teachings on humanitarianism, compassion, and social responsibility, the young Whittier aspired to a career in politics. His controversial 1833 antislavery pamphlet, Justice and Expediency, which called for immediate emancipation of all slaves, alienated both Northern businessmen and Southern slaveholders, crushing the possibility of ever being elected to public office. As a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he turned his atteniton to public speaking and badgering congressional leaders into joining the abolitionist cause.
His public appearances sometimes resulted in being mobbed, stoned, and run out of town, and his lobbying activities were curtailed for six years, from 1838 to 1844, when Congress operated under a resolution that barred them from discussing petitions to bring slavery to an end. Whittier stubbornly stuck to his belief that moral action without political effort was an exercise in futility. It was about 1845 when stress from his work as a newspaper editor, declining health, and the constant threat of mob violence resulted in a physical breakdown that caused him to withdraw from public life and return to his Massachusetts home. Out of the limelight, he wrote more abolitionist poetry, continued to support his causes through his post as editor of an influential abolitionist newspaper, and became one of the founding contributors of The Atlantic Monthly.
Following the 1865 adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, Whittier's poetry turned to other topics. Snow-Bound—a book-length poem of his childhood home where his household embraced his parents, a brother and two sisters, a maternal aunt and paternal uncle, and a neverending train of visitors and hired hands—brought him $10,000 in earnings in its first edition. From that point until his death in 1892, he enjoyed a more peaceful and prosperous existence. Physically frail, with very little formal education, and suffering from poor health his entire life, John Greenleaf Whittier nonetheless had lived a long, productive, and distinguished life as a powerful human-rights lobbyist and a man of letters.