John Greenleaf Whittier(1807-1892)

American poet and writer John Greenleaf Whittier was born on December 17, 1807, near Haverhill, Massachusetts. He grew up on a farm with an extended family, consisting of three siblings--two sisters and a brother--and his mother's sister and his father's brother. The farm was fairly large but not particularly profitable, and the family made just enough money to get by. Whittier was a rather sickly child, and couldn't help out with farm chores very often (among other problems, his color-blindness made it difficult for him to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruits) and his frailty and bad health were problems for him throughout his life.

His formal education was not particularly extensive--due to his family's ongoing financial problems and his own poor health--but he developed into an avid reader who studied his father's books on the Quaker religion so thoroughly that the theology became the guiding principles in his life. He was strongly influenced by the religion's emphasis on one's responsibility to one's fellow human beings, which contributed to his becoming a fervent abolitionist later in his adult life.

Introduced to poetry by a teacher, Whittier wrote his first poem, "The Exile's Departure", in 1826. His sister thought so highly of it that she sent it to a newspaper, the Newburyport Free Press, and its editor, the abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison, published it in the June 8 edition. Garrison was also impressed by the young boy's writing ability and urged him to attend the Haverhill Academy, a recently opened private school. Paying his tuition with money obtained from a variety of jobs--including shoemaker and teacher--he graduated from the Academy in 1828. Garrison hired him as editor of his weekly publication The American Manufacturer in Boston. Whittier soon developed into a fierce opponent of President Andrew Jackson, and in 1830 he was hired as the editor of the prestigious New England Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, which was one of the most prominent Whig publications in the region.

Whittier ran for Congress in 1832 but lost. The experience caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and he returned home to the family farm at Haverhill to recuperate. The next year he resumed his relationship with Garrison, and soon joined his mentor in the abolitionist cause. He published an anti-slavery pamphlet, "Justice and Expediency". The pamphlet earned him the wrath of Northern businessmen and Southern slaveowners, effectively ending any hopes he may have harbored for a political career, and he devoted the next 20 years of his life to helping rid the country of the cancer of slavery. He helped to found the American Anti-Slavery Society, and was a very effective lobbyist in Congress for the cause, helping to recruit quite a few congressmen to the abolitionist movement. His activities were not without consequences, though. He received more than a few death threats, was stoned by mobs in his travels around the country and was run out of town several times. This didn't stop his activities on behalf of the movement, however, and in 1838 he became editor of The Pennsylvania Freeman, an anti-slavery newspaper in Philadelphia, a position he held for the next two years (in that same year the newspaper moved to a new office, which was promptly burned down by a rioting pro-slavery mob). Unfortunately, he and Garrison developed differences over the direction of the abolitionist movement, and the two bitterly split in 1839.

Whittier went on to help form the Liberty Party, an abolitionist political group. However, the combination of his editorial duties, his poetry and prose writings, his activities in the abolitionist movement, the violence directed against it--and him--and his continuing health problems contributed to his having yet another nervous breakdown. He returned to his home in Amesbury, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Although that ended his active participation in the abolitionist movement, he was still a strong supporter of it, and helped the Liberty Party to evolve into the Free Soil Party. In 1847 Whittier became editor of The National Era, probably the most powerful and influential abolitionist paper in the North, a post he held for the next ten years, and contributed what many believe to be his best writing to the paper. With the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which outlawed slavery, Whittier ended his abolitionist activities and devoted himself to writing poetry. He was one of the founding members of The Atlantic Monthly--a publication that survives to this day--and in 1867 he met Charles Dickens while the renowned British author was on a visit to the U.S., an event that left a deep impression on him.

Although Whittier spent virtually his entire life in Massachusetts, he died at the home of a friend in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1892. Among his most famous works are the poems "Barbara Frietchie", "Snow-Bound" and "The Brewing of Soma". The city of Whittier, California--home of former US President Richard Nixon--is named after him.