Poet John Greenleaf Whittier praised
NH for its abolitionist stand in 1846.
 But
did we deserve it?
For
commentary on Whittier
and Hale click here
Abolitionists
in NH
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote his short poem "New
Hampshire" to honor the Granite State's bold unique
stand against slavery in 1846, decades before the
Emancipation Proclamation. The final couplet, often
quoted, is a stirring call to arms against human
bondage with New Hampshire leading the battle:
Courage, then, Northern hearts!
Be firm, be true;
What one brave State hath done, can ye not also do?
The reality is less glorious. In
fact, New Hampshire's early track record
in opposing discrimination, like most of
the industrialized Yankee North would win
no gold metals.
Like its southern cousins, NH started
out as a slave state. Some of its stately
seaport homes were built from slave trade
profits. By the Revolution, African-American
slaves served white Seacoast owners in most
prestigious families -- the Cutts, the Whipples,
the Ladds, the Lears, the Langdons, the Wentworths.
Slave owning, North and South, was a sign
of affluence and power. Although the "business" of
slavery was outlawed in NH soon after the
Revolution, no formal emancipation was ever
issued.
Throughout most of the 1800s, NH's
anti-slavery efforts were tepid. Many early
abolitionists were clergymen opposed to the
immorality of bondage, rather than the inequality
of races. The state had its own abolitionist
newspaper, two of them in fact, but the issue
was mired in politics and infighting. Whigs,
Federalists, anti-Federalists, Independents,
Democrats, Democratic Independents and Democratic
Republicans tossed the abolition issue around
like a hot potato, defining and redefining
themselves around this key issue.
Meanwhile abolitionists argued over
just what they wanted to abolish. Slavery
was sometimes clustered with issues of temperance,
women's suffrage, state's rights, even the
abolition of all government. When a New England
abolitionist group allowed women to cast
votes, the NH Abolition Society simply formed
a separate group without women members. Although
the state counted 2,000 abolitionist voters,
only 126 NH men voted for their own Liberty
Party candidate for President in 1840. NH
was the only eastern state that did not send
candidates to a Buffalo abolitionist convention
in 1843.
Economics and deep-rooted discrimination
all too often reigned. As the Industrial
Era evolved, politicians did not want to
offend Seacoast merchants who did a lively
shipping trade with the South. New expanding
textile factories in NH needed cheap slave-picked
cotton. Despite the simplistic modern image
of open-minded Northerners, whites and "coloreds" were
unofficially segregated at restaurants and
hotels in New Hampshire, in some cases, well
into the middle of the 20th century.
So what made Whittier, a staunch
white abolitionist, praise NH so highly in
his poem? The answer -- Senator John P. Hale
of Dover. Hale is remembered today as the
first US Senator with an openly anti-slavery
platform. Hale eventually even ran for President
as the candidate for the Free Soil Party
which advocated the creation of no more slave
states.
Already 20 years into his own personal
battle against the "peculiar institution," John
Greenleaf Whittier saw Hale's arrival in
the Senate as a resounding victory for the
anti-slavery movement which was finally gaining
popular support among whites after only 200
years of black bondage. Hale's arrival also
widened the rift between North and South
that would lead the country into its horrific
Civil War. But in 1846, there was still hope
that the problem would be solved without
bloodshed.
Hearing of Hale's election, Whittier wrote
to a friend:
"He [Hale] has succeeded, and his
success has broken the spell which has hitherto
held Democracy in the embrace of slavery."
If only Whittier had been right.
African-Americans would wait another two
decades for a legislated end to slavery.
In fact, Hale's abolitionist-like position,
brave and bold as it was. shows how hopelessly
confounded Americans were over the issue
of slavery toward the middle of the 19th
century. Hale and his "Hale men" really started
out opposing, not slavery, but the spread
of slavery due to the annexation of Texas.
They could not reconcile the American takeover
of what was then a foreign land for the avowed
purpose of creating another slave state.
Hale first made headlines as a NH
legislator when he had the courage to defy
the infamous "Gag Rule" (created, ironically,
by a New Hampshire legislator) and discuss
the topic of slavery openly. In a political
campaign that foreshadowed the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates, Hale took on soon-to-be-President
Franklin Pierce, another New Hampshire man.
By even talking about slavery, Hale became
a magnet for praise and a target for hatred.
Later, one of his southern colleagues even
issued Hale a death threat while on the floor
of the US Senate.
As our expanding nation moved westward,
east coast politicians struggled to define
the country -- its political parties and
its freedoms. Thanks to Whittier and Hale,
for a moment in history, all eyes were on
New Hampshire. Still for blacks, all the
poems, politics and promises added up to
a lot of talk and very little action.
By J. Dennis Robinson
© 1998 SeacoastNH.com
Sources:
Historical New Hampshire, John Meyer, "The
Beginning of Antislavery Agencies in NH,
1832-1835, Fall, 1970
Historical New Hampshire, Irving Bell, "One
Hundred Years Ago in NH," Sept. 1946.
Historical New Hampshire, "The Liberty
Party in the Granite State 1840-1848
Whittier in NH
Undeniably a Massachusetts poet, threads of John
Greenleaf Whittier's life are still very visible
in the fabric of New Hampshire politics and
literature. The Whittier family farm, built
in Haverhill in 1688, is just over the Merrimack
River that divided the two colonies by royal
British decree. Before he was born there in
1807, his father John, Whittier, a Quaker farmer
and trader, had walked to the hills of New
Hampshire and beyond. Greenleaf's father warned
his talented son that poetry would not earn
him bread, and for the most part, his father
was right. Though he published his first poem
in the local paper as a teenager, Whittier's
national recognition and success didn't hit
until he was in his 60s, when the rise of the
Civil War brought his anti-slavery stance into
the spotlight.
For much of the interim, Whittier
was an editor, working for nearby North
Shore papers in Haverhill, Newburyport
and Essex where he also published his
poetry. AT age 27 he made a giant unpopular
leap into the abolitionist cause by self-publishing
a 23 page pamphlet calling for emancipation
of black slaves on moral grounds. Soon,
after an anti-slavery lecture in Plymouth,
NH, he and English abolitionist George
Thompson, were attacked by a mob in Concord,
pelted with rotten and eggs and Whittier
was wounded in the leg by a flying stone.
Often in ill health, Whittier
tried to run the family farm after his
father's death. When his brother moved
to Dover, NH, Whittier sold the farm,
moved his mother to Amesbury, MA and
struck out for Pennsylvania, founded
by Quakers and a center for abolitionist
activity. He was on the scene when the
newly dedicated Pennsylvania Hall was
trashed and burned by mobs, angry that
anti-slavery meetings there had included
blacks. Dressed in a borrowed wig and
white coat to disguise himself, Whittier
dashed into the burning building to save
his poems and the abolitionist newspaper
he was editing.
Unlike many whites who favored
abolition from a safe distance, Whittier
criss-crossed the eastern states inspecting
slave holding pens, housing, auction
sites. He talked to southerners, wrote
with journalistic accuracy and poetic
passion, argued with Quaker Friends and
anyone who would listen. He met with
government leaders including the aged
John Quincy Adams, current President
Tyler, with opponent Henry Clay, with
legislators, social groups, with blacks
and whites. He advocated, not just emancipation,
but schooling, job assistance, equality,
brotherhood and respect for African Americans.
Frequently sickly while traveling, he
wrote continuously, but his literary
work earned him little and his finances
were usually precarious.
To earn an income Whittier found
himself back on the Merrimack as editor
of a Lowell, MA newspaper at the rise
of the giant mill culture. He watched
the young women arriving in droves, free
of the farm, but tied to long hours at
hard labor. He documented the story from
both sides, saw the birth of the suffrage
movement, the rise of the manufacturing
economy, and the early demise of traditional
American family life.
As the slavery issue began to
split the country, Whittier turned his
literary rage and praise on two New Hampshire
men. He lauded Dover's John P. Hale,
the country's first anti-slavery Senator
who fought the Annexation of Texas and
the slavery "Gag Rule." He savaged Senator
Daniel Webster in a poem titled "Ichabod" when
the beloved orator came our in favor
of the Missouri Compromise and the Fugitive
Slave Act.
The creation of Harper's Weekly
in the 1850s gave Whittier a voice and
an income as the Civil War loomed His
Granite State poem "The Great Stone Face" had
already appeared. Among his new material
was a poem set just over the New Hampshire
border in Maine. :Maude Muller's Spring" is
still popular today.
A lifelong pacifist, Whittier
supported Lincoln's war, but with deep
sadness. He worried that, while the South
was united in favor of slavery, the North
was not of one mind. Most northerners,
he said, were still not passionate on
the slavery issue, and favored a united
country over an emancipated one. It was
at the height of the war in 1862 that
Whittier, through his sister Elizabeth
and his niece LIzzie, discovered the
Isles of Shoals. Like Hawthorne, Emerson
and others, Whittier would return again
and again for the solace of the rocky
islands and the artistic camaraderie
of Celia
Thaxter's salon. Ill, elderly, never
married, now famous and very much alone,
Whittier would sit for hours watching
Celia painting her teacups or walking
through her garden on Appledore Island.
With his sister and mother now dead,
Whittier wrote to Celia, to Harriet Beecher
Stowe, to Emily Dickinson and other literary
women.
Whittier was so shocked by the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln that
he could not write a word on the subject.
But out of the misery blossomed "Snow-Bound," nearly
800 lines in which he finally told the
story of his youth and his family. It
was an instant bestseller and a financial
success.
But John Greenleaf Whittier wasn't
finished with New Hampshire. He wrote
of a shipwreck and a witch from Hampton
in the poem "Wreck of Rivermouth." Then
he bundled years of visits to the mountains
there, the area his father had known
before him, and produced a volume called "Among
the Hills and Other Stories." The collected
poems paint scenes in Ossipee, Holderness,
Center Sandwich, Center Harbor and Intervale.
Mt. Whittier in the Sandwich Mountains
bears his name today.
At 70 John Greenleaf Whittier
was a national hero with the likes of
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow at birthday
party. A new writer with only two names,
Mark Twain, was also in attendance. Whittier
kept up his voluminous correspondence
and added a new favorite, Sarah Orne
Jewett of South Berwick, Maine to his
growing fan club. She was just into her
40s at the time and had yet to publish
her astonishing prose and poetry.
Until his death at age 84, Whittier
traveled from the Amesbury house to his
600 acre Newburyport homestead at Oak
Knoll, back to the hills of New Hampshire.
After his brother and Longfellow died,
he told his Portsmouth friend and Atlantic
Monthly editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich
that he could not write again. But he
did write again, right until the last.
Six hundred well-wishers attended
his 84th birthday party. Whittier didn't
visit his New Hampshire hills that summer,
but early that fall he stopped by to
see a relative and friends in Hampton
Falls, New Hampshire. He died at their
home overlooking the Hampton marsh on
September 7, 1892.
By J. Dennis Robinson
© 1998 SeacoastNH.com
Primary source:
Mr. Whittier, A Biography by Elizabeth Gray Vining,
Viking 1974
NEW HAMPSHIRE
By John Greenleaf Whittier
(1807-1892)
Published 1846
God bless New Hampshire! for her granite
peaks
Once more the voice of Stark and Langdon speaks.
The long-bound vassal of the exulting South
For very shame her self-forged chain has broken;
Torn the black seal of slavery from her mouth
And in the clear tones of her old time spoken!
Oh, all undreamed of, all unhoped for changes!
The tyrant's ally proves his sternest foe;
To all his biddings, from her mountain ranges,
New Hampshire thunders an indignant No!
Who is it now despairs? Oh, faint of heart,
Look upward to those Northern mountains cold,
Flouted by freedom's victor-flag unrolled,
And gather strength to bear a manlier part!
All is not lost. The angel of God's blessing
Encamps with Freedom on the field of fight;
Still to her banner, day by day, are pressing
Unlooked for allies, striking for the right!
Courage, then, Northern hearts! Be firm, be true;
What one brave State hath done, can ye not also
do?
For related articles:
Seacoast
NH Poems, Ballads & Songs
Seacoast
NH Black History
Celia
Thaxter & Friends theme site
As
I Please -- Hail Hale
Longfellow's "Lady
Wentworth"
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