Chapter I: His Life

John Greenleaf Whittier was born at East Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807. His father, John Whittier, a farmer, was noted for probity, sound judgment, and great physical strength. A man of few words, he always spoke to the point, as when, in relation to public charities with which he had officially to do, he said: ‘There are the Lord’s poor and the Devil’s poor; there ought to be a distinction made between them by the overseers of the poor.’ He had imperfect sympathy with his son’s literary aspirations, but it were unjust to say that he was wholly opposed to them.

Whatever lack there may have been on this score was abundantly made up to the youth by his beautiful and saintly mother. Abigail (Hussey) Whittier was her husband’s junior by twenty-one years. From her the poet inherited his brilliant black eyes, a physical trait (mistakenly) supposed to have been derived from the old colonial minister, Stephen Bachiler, that enterprising and turbulent spirit who came to America at the age of seventy, founded cities, disputed the authority of the clergy, and finally astonished friend and enemy alike by marrying for the third time at the age of eighty-nine.

Young Whittier was apparently destined to the toilsome life of his farmer ancestors. He suffered under the ‘toughening process’ to which New England country lads were formerly subjected, and became in consequence a lifelong valetudinarian.

With his frail physique and uncertain health the ‘Quaker Poet’ affords a marked contrast, not alone to his own father, but to that mighty ancestor Thomas Whittier, founder of the American family, who at sixty-eight years of age was able to do his share in hewing the oak timbers for a new house in which he proposed to pass his declining days. The building was erected about 1688. Thomas Whittier enjoyed the use of it until his death in 1696. Five generations of Whittiers were harbored beneath its roof, and here the poet was born. Although not a Quaker himself, Thomas Whittier was a friend of the Friends, and for taking the part of certain unlicensed exhorters was for a time deprived of his rights as a freeman.

Whittier was early a reader and soon devoured the contents of his father’s slender library. So insatiable was his thirst for books that he would walk miles to borrow a volume of biography or travel. At the age of fourteen he became fascinated with the poems of Burns, and under their stimulus began to make rhymes himself.[35] On his first visit to Boston he bought a copy of Shakespeare. Scott’s novels he borrowed, to read them delightedly but with a troubled conscience.

His poetic aspirations were encouraged by his elder sister, Mary, who, without Whittier’s knowledge, sent the verses entitled ‘The Exile’s Departure’ to the Newburyport ‘Free Press,’ a short-lived journal edited by young William Lloyd Garrison. They appeared in the issue of June 8, 1826. Whittier has described his emotions on first seeing himself in print. The paper was thrown to him by the news-carrier. ‘My uncle and I were mending fences. I took up the sheet, and was surprised and overjoyed to see my lines in the “Poet’s Corner.” I stood gazing at them in wonder, and my uncle had to call me several times to my work before I could recover myself.’

Other poems were offered and accepted. Curious to see his contributor, Garrison drove over from Newburyport to the Whittier farm. The bashful country boy could with difficulty be persuaded to meet his guest. Then began a lifelong friendship not uncheckered by differences without which friendship itself lacks zest.

Garrison urged on Whittier’s parents the importance of giving the youth an education. Backed up by the influence of A. W. Thayer, editor of the Haverhill ‘Gazette,’ who offered to take the lad into his own home, Whittier got his father’s consent to his attending the newly established Haverhill Academy. He paid for one term of six months by making slippers, an art he learned from one of the farm hands, and for another term by teaching school, which seemed to him a less enviable mode of life than cobbling.

The favor accorded his verse stimulated invention. During 1827–28 he published, under assumed names, nearly a hundred poems in the Haverhill ‘Gazette’ alone. A plan for bringing out a collection of these fugitive pieces under the title of _Poems of Adrian_ came, however, to nothing.

Garrison, who had been doing editorial work in Boston for the Colliers, publishers of ‘The Philanthropist’ and ‘The American Manufacturer,’ advised their getting Whittier to take his place. Whittier edited the ‘Manufacturer’ from January to August, 1829, when he was summoned home by the illness of his father. But he had had a taste of journalism and politics, and relished both. From January to July, 1830, he edited the Haverhill ‘Gazette.’ His newspaper work made him acquainted with George Prentice of ‘The New England Review,’ published in Hartford. When Prentice left Connecticut for Kentucky, where he was to spend six months and write a campaign life of Henry Clay, he urged the owners of the ‘Review’ to engage Whittier as his substitute. Whittier was responsible for the conduct of the paper for a year and a half (July, 1830, to January, 1832). In spite of many drawbacks, his father’s death, his own illness, a disappointment in love, the period of his Hartford residence was the happiest and the most stimulating he had yet known. He printed his first volume, _Legends of New England_, a medley of prose and verse, edited _The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard_ (the sketch of Brainard’s life prefixed to the volume throws much light on Whittier’s reading), and brought out the narrative poem _Moll Pitcher_, a story of the once famous ‘Lynn Pythoness.’

On his return to Haverhill he played his part in local politics and was talked of for Congress. Somewhat later he was drawn into the anti-slavery movement and for the next twenty-seven years this was his life. He was a member of the legislature in 1835, and was reëlected the next year; but in general terms it may be said that in publishing _Justice and Expediency_, and in uniting himself with the small, unpopular, and exasperating party of Abolitionists, he sacrificed hope of political advancement. He gave to the cause time, health, reputation, and when he had it to give, money. In company with Abolitionist leaders and orators he encountered mobs and speculated philosophically on the chance of losing his life.

In 1837 he acted as a secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York. From 1838 to 1840 he edited ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ published in Philadelphia. During an Abolitionist convention, Pennsylvania Hall, in which were the offices of the ‘Freeman,’ was sacked and burned by a pro-slavery mob. Whittier, disguised in a wig and a long overcoat, mingled with the rioters and contrived to save a few of his papers. It was a more dangerous rabble than that he encountered during the George Thomson riot at Concord, New Hampshire, three years earlier. Whittier once remarked that he never really feared for his life, but that he had no mind to a coat of tar and feathers.

A true son of Essex, he soon wearied of city life. ‘I would rather live an obscure New England farmer,’ he said. ‘I would rather see the sunset light streaming through the valley of the Merrimac than to look out for many months upon brick walls, and Sam Weller’s “werry beautiful landscape of chimney-pots.”’

He really had no choice in the matter, having been warned to give up editorial work if he would keep his precarious hold on life. He obeyed the warning. But with Whittier journalism was a disease. He had a relapse in 1844, when he took charge of the ‘Middlesex Standard’ of Lowell, and again, in 1845–46, when he was virtual editor of the ‘Essex Transcript’ in Amesbury.

No restriction was placed on his doing work at home. He wrote unceasingly, prose and verse, reaching his literary audience through the ‘Democratic Review’ and his audience of reformers through Bailey’s paper, ‘The National Era,’ both published in Washington. Whittier was corresponding editor of the ‘Era’ from 1847 to 1850, and printed in its columns, besides political articles, such now famous poems as ‘Maud Muller,’ ‘Ichabod,’ ‘Tauler,’ and ‘The Chapel of the Hermits.’

The list of Whittier’s chief publications up to the year 1857 contains seventeen titles: _Legends of New England_, 1831; _Moll Pitcher_, 1832 (revised edition 1840); _Justice and Expediency_, 1833; _Mogg Megone_, 1836; _Poems written during the Progress of the Abolition Question_, etc., 1837 (unauthorized issue); _Poems_, 1838; _Lays of my Home and Other Poems_, 1843; _The Stranger in Lowell_, 1845; _Voices of Freedom_, 1846; _The Supernaturalism of New England_, 1847; _Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal_, 1849; _Poems_, 1849;[36] _Old Portraits and Modern Sketches_, 1850; _Songs of Labor and Other Poems_, 1850; _The Chapel of the Hermits and Other Poems_, 1853; _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_, 1854; _The Panorama and Other Poems_, 1856.

The founding of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ (1857) gave Whittier a more assured place. His work was sought and the pay was generous. He became an overseer of Harvard College in 1858. In 1860 the college made him a Master of Arts, and in 1866 a Doctor of Laws.

His home for many years was in Amesbury, the farm at East Haverhill having been sold in 1836. After the death of his mother and younger sister he passed much of his time with kinsfolk at the house known as ‘Oak Knoll,’ in Danvers. For all his admiration of women, Whittier never married. He enjoyed allusions to a supposititious Mrs. Whittier. Writing to his niece, Mrs. Pickard, about some friend who was unhappy over political defeat, Whittier said: ‘I told him I had been in the same predicament ... and got abused worse than he did, for I was charged with ill-treating my wife!’

Whittier was a birthright member of the Society of Friends and influential in their councils. His advice was much sought and freely given in terms of blended modesty, good sense, and humor.

During the last twenty years of his life Whittier published the following volumes: _Home Ballads and Poems_, 1860; _In War Time and Other Poems_, 1864; _National Lyrics_, 1865; _Snow-Bound_, 1866; _The Tent on the Beach and Other Poems_, 1867; _Among the Hills and Other Poems_, 1869; _Ballads of New England_, 1870; _Miriam and Other Poems_, 1871; _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim and Other Poems_, 1872; _Mabel Martin_, 1874; _Hazel-Blossoms_, 1875; _The Vision of Echard and Other Poems_, 1878; _The King’s Missive and Other Poems_, 1881; _The Bay of Seven Islands and Other Poems_, 1883; _Saint Gregory’s Guest and Recent Poems_, 1886; _At Sundown_, 1892.

The honors accorded him on his seventieth, eightieth, and eighty-fourth anniversaries gave Whittier much happiness. He was especially pleased to learn that the bells of St. Boniface, in Winnipeg, Manitoba (celebrated in his ‘Red River Voyageur’), were rung for him at midnight of December 17, 1891. Said the poet in his letter to Archbishop Tâché: ‘Such a delicate and beautiful tribute has deeply moved me. I shall never forget it.’

Nothing was left undone that the tenderest love and wisest solicitude could do for his comfort. His last illness was brief. He died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1892.