John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and an advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He was born on December 17, 1807, at his family’s rural homestead in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and died on September 7, 1892. Often counted among the fireside poets, he is remembered especially for his anti-slavery writings and for his 1866 book Snow-Bound. His work belonged to an era when poetry, journalism, religion, and reform politics could meet on the same page.

Whittier grew up on a farm with his parents, John and Abigail Hussey Whittier, his brother and two sisters, a maternal aunt, a paternal uncle, and a steady stream of visitors and hired hands. The farm was not very profitable, and money was scarce. He had little formal education at first, and his health and physical frailty made hard farm labor difficult for him. Yet he read eagerly, studying his father’s six books on Quakerism until their teachings became the foundation of his ideas. The Quaker stress on humanitarianism, compassion, and social responsibility shaped both his poetry and his public life. He was also influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns.

A teacher first introduced Whittier to poetry. His sister Mary sent his poem “The Deity” to the Newburyport Free Press without his permission, and editor William Lloyd Garrison published it on June 8, 1826. Garrison and another local editor encouraged him to attend Haverhill Academy. To pay for school, Whittier worked for a time as a shoemaker, arranged to cover part of his tuition with food from the family farm, and taught in a one-room schoolhouse in what is now Merrimac, Massachusetts. He attended Haverhill Academy from 1827 to 1828 and completed a high school education in only two terms.

Whittier’s early career moved through newspapers and politics. Critic John Neal gave him substantial public praise in The Yankee in 1828, and Neal’s novel Rachel Dyer helped inspire Whittier to use New England witchcraft lore in stories and poems. Garrison later made him editor of the Boston temperance weekly National Philanthropist, and Whittier also edited the American Manufacturer in Boston. By 1830 he was editor of the New England Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, an influential Whig journal. In 1838 he published “The Song of the Vermonters, 1779” anonymously; it was wrongly attributed to Ethan Allen for nearly sixty years, until Whittier acknowledged it in 1858.

Abolition and Public Voice

The year 1833 marked a turn in Whittier’s life. After losing a congressional election at age 25 and suffering a nervous breakdown, he returned home, renewed his correspondence with Garrison, and joined the abolitionist cause. That same year he published the antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency, helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society, and signed the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833, an action he often considered the most significant of his life. For the next twenty years, he gave much of his energy to abolition. He traveled widely in the North, attended conventions, secured votes, spoke publicly, lobbied politicians, and faced mobs, stones, and being run out of town.

From 1838 to 1840, Whittier edited the Pennsylvania Freeman in Philadelphia, one of the leading antislavery papers in the North. Its office moved into Pennsylvania Hall shortly before that building was burned by a pro-slavery mob. Whittier kept writing, and nearly all of his poems during that period dealt with slavery. He believed moral action without political effort was futile, and he helped found the Liberty Party in 1839. His words still carry force because they came from a life in which belief, labor, risk, and art were closely joined.