“I am an Abolitionist;
I glory in the name.”
The singing of such hymns and songs as these was like the bugle’s blast
to an army ready for battle. No one seemed unmoved. If there were any
faint hearts amongst us, they were hidden by the flush of excitement
and sympathy.
In 1838 or 1839 Mrs. Chapman, assisted by her sisters, the Misses
Weston, and Mrs. Child, commenced the publication of _The Liberty
Bell_. A volume with this title was issued annually by them for ten or
twelve years, especially for sale at the yearly antislavery fair. These
volumes were full of poetry in prose and verse. The editors levied
contributions upon the true-hearted of other countries besides our
own, and enriched their pages with articles from the pens of all the
above-named, and from Whittier, Pierpont, Lowell, Longfellow, Phillips,
Quincy, Clarke, Sewall, Adams, Channing, Bradburn, Pillsbury, Rogers,
Wright, Parker, Stowe, Emerson, Furness, Higginson, Sargent, Jackson,
Stone, Whipple, our own countrymen and women; and Bowring, Martineau,
Thompson, Browning, Combe, Sturge, Webb, Lady Byron, and others, of
England; and Arago, Michelet, Monod, Beaumont, Souvestre, Paschoud, and
others, of France. It would not be easy to find elsewhere so full a
treasury of mental and moral jewels.
The names of most of our illustrious American poets appear in The
_Liberty Bell_ more or less frequently. To all of them we were and are
much indebted. James Russell Lowell was never, I believe, a member of
the Antislavery Society. He was seldom seen at our meetings. But his
muse rendered us essential services. His poems--“The Present Crisis,”
“On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington,” “On the Death of
Charles T. Torrey,” “To John G. Palfrey,” and especially his “Lines
to William L. Garrison,” and his “Stanzas sung at the Antislavery
Picnic in Dedham, August 1, 1843”--committed him fully to the cause of
freedom,--the cause of our enslaved countrymen.
Rev. John Pierpont gave us his hand at an earlier day. He took upon
himself “our reproach” in 1836, when we most needed help. I have
already made grateful mention of his “Word from a Petitioner,” sent
to me by the hand of the heroic Francis Jackson in the midst of the
convention of the constituents of Hon. J. Q. Adams, called at Quincy to
assure their brave, invincible representative of their deep, admiring
sense of obligation to him for his persistent and almost single-handed
defence of the sacred right of petition on the floor of Congress.
Mr. Pierpont’s next was a _tocsin_ in deed as well as in name. He
was impelled to strike his lyre by the alarm he justly felt at the
tidings from Alton of the destruction of Mr. Lovejoy’s antislavery
printing-office, and the murder of the devoted proprietor. His
indignation was roused yet more by the burning of “Pennsylvania Hall”
in Philadelphia, and the shameful fact that at the same time, 1838,
no church or decent hall could be obtained in Boston for “love or
money,” in which to hold an antislavery meeting; but we were compelled
to resort to an inconvenient and insufficient room over the stable of
Marlborough Hotel.
His next powerful effusion was _The Gag_, a caustic and scathing
satire upon the Hon. C. G. Atherton, of New Hampshire, for his base
attempt in the House of Representatives at Washington to put an entire
stop to any discussion of the subject of slavery.
His next piece was _The Chain_, a most touching comparison of the
wrongs and sufferings of the slaves with other evils that injured men
have been made to endure.
Then followed _The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star_,
which showed how deeply he sympathized with the many hundreds of our
countrymen who, to escape from slavery, had toiled through dismal
swamps, thick-set canebrakes, deep rivers, tangled forests, alone, by
night, hungry, almost naked and penniless, guided only by the steady
light of the polar star, which some kind friend had taught them to
distinguish, and had assured them would be an unerring leader to a
land of liberty. They who have heard the narratives of such as have
so escaped need not be told that Mr. Pierpont must have had the tale
poured through his ear into his generous heart.[M]
But of all our American poets, John G. Whittier has from first to last
done most for the abolition of slavery. All my antislavery brethren,
I doubt not, will unite with me to crown him our laureate. From 1832
to the close of our dreadful war in 1865 his harp of liberty was never
hung up. Not an important occasion escaped him. Every significant
incident drew from his heart some pertinent and often very impressive
or rousing verses. His name appears in the first volume of _The
Liberator_, with high commendations of his poetry and his character.
As early as 1831 he was attracted to Mr. Garrison by sympathy with his
avowed purpose to abolish slavery. Their acquaintance soon ripened into
a heartfelt friendship, as he declared in the following lines, written
in 1833:--
“Champion of those who groan beneath
Oppression’s iron hand:
In view of penury, hate, and death,
I see thee fearless stand.
Still bearing up thy lofty brow,
In the steadfast strength of truth,
In manhood sealing well the vow
And promise of thy youth.
* * * * *
“I love thee with a brother’s love;
I feel my pulses thrill,
To mark thy spirit soar above
The cloud of human ill.
My heart hath leaped to answer thine,
And echo back thy words,
As leaps the warrior’s at the shine
And flash of kindred swords!
* * * * *
“Go on--the dagger’s point may glare
Amid thy pathway’s gloom,--
The fate which sternly threatens there
Is glorious martyrdom!
Then onward with a martyr’s zeal;
And wait thy sure reward,
When man to man no more shall kneel,
And God alone be Lord!”
Mr. Whittier proved the sincerity of these professions. He joined
the first antislavery society and became an active official.
Notwithstanding his dislike of public speaking, he sometimes lectured
at that early day, when so few were found willing to avow and advocate
the right of the enslaved to immediate liberation from bondage
without the condition of removal to Liberia. Mr. Whittier attended
the convention at Philadelphia in December, 1833, that formed the
American Antislavery Society. He was one of the secretaries of that
body, and a member, with Mr. Garrison, of the committee appointed to
prepare the “Declaration of our Sentiments and Purposes.” Although,
as I have elsewhere stated, Mr. Garrison wrote almost every sentence
of that admirable document just as it now stands, yet I well remember
the intense interest with which Mr. Whittier scrutinized it, and how
heartily he indorsed it.
In 1834, by his invitation I visited Haverhill, where he then resided.
I was his guest, and lectured under his auspices in explanation and
defence of our abolition doctrines and plans. Again the next year,
after the mob spirit had broken out, I went to Haverhill by his
invitation, and he shared with me in the perils which I have described
on a former page.
In January, 1836, Mr. Whittier attended the annual meeting of the
Massachusetts Antislavery Society, and boarded the while in the
house where I was living. He heard Dr. Follen’s great speech on that
occasion, and came home so much affected by it that, either that night
or the next morning, he wrote those “Stanzas for the Times,” which are
among the best of his productions:--
“Is this the land our fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the soil whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?
Are _we_ the sons by whom are borne
The mantles which the dead have worn?
“And shall we crouch above these graves
With craven soul and fettered lip?
Yoke in with marked and branded slaves,
And tremble at the driver’s whip?
Bend to the earth our pliant knees,
And speak but as our masters please?
* * * * *
“Shall tongues be mute when deeds are wrought
Which well might shame extremest hell?
Shall freemen lock the indignant thought?
Shall Pity’s bosom cease to swell?
Shall Honor bleed? Shall Truth succumb?
Shall pen and press and soul be dumb?
“No;--by each spot of haunted ground,
Where Freedom weeps her children’s fall,--
By Plymouth’s rock and Bunker’s mound,--
By Griswold’s stained and shattered wall,--
By Warren’s ghost,--by Langdon’s shade,--
By all the memories of our dead!
* * * * *
“By all above, around, below,
Be our indignant answer,--NO!”
I can hardly refrain from giving my readers the whole of these stanzas.
But I hope they all are, or will at once make themselves, familiar with
them. As I read them now, they revive in my bosom not the memory only,
but the glow they kindled there when I first pored over them. Then his
lines entitled “Massachusetts to Virginia,” and those he wrote on the
adoption of Pinckney’s Resolution, and the passage of Calhoun’s Bill,
excluding antislavery newspapers and pamphlets and letters from the
United States Mail,--indeed, all his antislavery poetry helped mightily
to keep us alive to our high duties, and fired us with holy resolution.
Let our laureate’s verses still be said and sung throughout the land,
for if the portents of the day be true, our conflict with the enemies
of liberty, the oppressors of humanity, is not yet ended.