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Biography of John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807-1892

Biographical Sketch by Donna-Jean Breckenridge

Imagine a birthday party whose guests included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell. The guest of honor was John Greenleaf Whittier, celebrating his 70th birthday. What prompted such company?

Whittier's life began in December of 1807, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family. He lived on a farm, and it's easy to imagine that it was from a real-life experience that he later wrote his lengthy and most famous poem, "Snow-bound."

Whittier's first published poem was entitled "The Exile's Departure," and it was printed in William Lloyd Garrison's Newburyport Free Press, in 1826. Thereafter, Garrison published a poem by Whittier every week. Whittier was a teacher and shoemaker by trade, and he carried out those occupations while continuing his writing. He was also an editor of several different newspapers during his lifetime.

While he was still a young man, Whittier's abolitionist views became well-known. He was involved in Massachusetts state politics, and then he lost a bid to become a United States Congressman. But along the way, he renewed his correspondence with Garrison and was greatly influenced by him. Garrison wrote, "My brother, there are upwards of two-million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of history. Whittier enlist! Your talents, zeal, influence--all are needed." Whittier heeded the call and was always very outspoken in the fight against slavery; in fact, his pamphlet "Justice and Expediency" likely destroyed any political aspirations he may have retained. But it did not matter to Whittier--the cause was too important. Whittier was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and he signed the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833.

While Whittier is best known for his poems about Barbara Frietchie ("Shoot if you must this old gray head"), a barefoot boy with cheek of tan, and a three-day snowstorm ("Snow-bound" was very successful financially, and it brought Whittier much acclaim), his poetry about slavery was also widely published. In fact, Paul Dunbar, one of the first African American poets to receive national recognition, wrote this of Whittier after his death,

"Great poets never die, for Earth
Doth count their lives of too great worth
To lose them from her treasured store;
So shalt thou live for evermore--
Though far thy form from mortal ken--
Deep in the hearts and minds of men."

In his lifetime, Whittier was known as The Quaker Poet, one of the Fireside Poets (along with Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Bryant, the first group of American poets to rival those of Britain in popularity, and some fine birthday dinner guests), and The Slave Poet. Lines from "The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to her Daughters Sold into Southern Slave Bondage" haunt us still today, and such poems prompted mobs to attack him on several occasions. In a twist of tragic irony from an uninformed populace, it was a statue of this fierce abolitionist that was defaced during a summer of violence in 2020.

John Greenleaf Whittier died in New Hampshire in 1892. He lived long enough to see slavery eradicated, the cause for which he gave so much of his life.