John Greenleaf Whittier

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John Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892) was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

He was born to John and Abigail (Hussey) Whittier at the rural Whittier homestead in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He grew up on the farm in a household with his parents, a brother and two sisters, a maternal aunt and paternal uncle, and a constant flow of visitors and hired hands for the farm. During the winter term, he attended the district school, and was first introduced to poetry by a teacher. Whittier would become editor of a number of newspapers in Boston and Haverhill, as well as the New England Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, the most influential Whig journal in New England. In 1838, a mob burned Whittier out of his offices in the antislavery center of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia.

Highly regarded in his lifetime and for a period thereafter (several New England states had holidays in his honor), he is now remembered largely for the patriotic poem , as well as for a number of poems turned into hymns, some of which remain exceedingly popular. Although clearly Victorian in style, and capable of being sentimental, his hymns exhibit both imagination and universalism of spirit that set them beyond ordinary 19th century hymnody. Best known is probably Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, but Whittier's Quaker thought is better illustrated by the hymn that begins:

O Brother Man, fold to thy heart thy brother:

Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;

To worship rightly is to love each other,

Each smile a hymn, each kindly word a prayer.

It also shows in his poem "To Rönge" in honour of Johannes von Rönge the German Religious figure and Protestant rebel leader of the 1848 rebelion in Germany:

Thy work is to hew down. In God's name then:

Put nerve into thy task. Let other men;

Plant, as they may, that better tree whose fruit,

The wounded bosom of the Church shall heal.

His words still reverberate today, particularly through his poem "Maud Muller" with its famous line: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

Whittier died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and is buried in Amesbury, Massachusetts. His birthplace, the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead in Haverhill, is now a museum open to the public, as is the John Greenleaf Whittier Home in Amesbury, his residence for 56 years. Cheese was said to be his favorite food, along with applesauce and beer.

A bridge named for Whittier, built in the style of the Sagamore and Bourne Bridges spanning Cape Cod Canal, carries Interstate 95 from Amesbury to Newburyport over the Merrimack River. The city of Whittier, California and the town of Greenleaf, Idaho were named in his honor.

External links

[Whittier autobiography & poems]
[Whittier biography & hymns]
[Address on the Opening of Pennsylvania Hall], from the Antislavery Literature Project.
[John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, Haverhill, Massachusetts]
[John Greenleaf Whittier Home, Amesbury, Massachusetts]
[Quaker Meeting where Whittier was a member]

References

Jackson, Phyllis Wynn, Victorian Cinderella: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe; H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, New York, 1947.

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