148 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865placed a “higher value” on his name appearing on the Anti-Slavery Declaration than
on the title page of any book. Beyond that, he also wanted to offer as an imaginative
alternative to such selfishness the kind of small and tightly knit community of
interests he describes in “First-Day Thoughts” (1857) and, perhaps his most famous
poem, Snow-Bound (1866). Whittier was born in Massachusetts to poor Quaker
parents, and the Quaker experience remained fundamental to him throughout his
life. It was this, in fact, which supplied him with his ideal: of a group of people held
together by common values and by the belief that each member of the group is
possessed of a certain “inner light.” During the long narrative of Snow-Bound, for
instance, the reader receives a strong sense of the particularity and individuality of
the characters presented; but he or she receives a strong sense of their “apartness” as
a group as well, and so a sense of their mutuality. Cut off from the rest of the world
by a snowstorm, the various members of his family and household that Whittier
remembers pass the time in recalling childhood memories; and as the memories
accumulate it becomes clear that an act of communion is being realized, comparable
to those moments in a Quaker meeting when various of those present recount and
share their spiritual experiences with their friends. More than this, the poem itself
gradually assumes the status of an act of communion. Since Whittier is describing a
particular winter of his childhood, he is also remembering and meditating and, in a
way, offering a part of himself to the individual reader; he also, is inviting others to
share in a separate peace.
Snow-Bound was not published until after the end of the Civil War. But it was from
the experiential basis it describes, a sense of genuine contact and community, that
Whittier’s poetic assault on slavery was launched. And it was an assault from several
directions. “The Hunters of Men” (1835), for instance, takes the path of bitter humor:
a parodic hunting song, it mocks in jaunty rhyme those “hunters of men” who go
“Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin / Is the curl of his hair and the hue
of his skin.” “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold into
Southern Bondage” (1838) takes, as its title indicates, the path of melodrama and
sentiment, as the mother of the title laments the loss of her daughters. “The Slave
Ship” (1846), describing the jettisoning of slaves who, having been blinded by sickness,
are no longer saleable, takes the direction of Gothic horror. And in “Massachusetts to
Virginia” (1843) Whittier opts for declamation, as he denounces any attempt to return
escaped slaves to the slave states. Recalling the war in which “the Bay State” and “the
Old Dominion” held common cause, and both Massachusetts and Virginia fought for
freedom, he ends by proclaiming that there will be “No slave-hunt in our borders, – no
pirate on our strand! / No fetters in the Bay State, – no slave upon our land!” What
Whittier sought in all such poems was to persuade the reader: he used whatever poetic
means lay at his disposal to draw him or her into examining their conscience. Out of
that, he hoped, would develop a clearer sense of personal and communal purpose. To
that extent, his antislavery pieces are just as clearly targeted as Snow-Bound is at
making the reader share in the experience of moral reexamination and collective
understanding. And they express, just as firmly as the Quaker poems do, his belief that
poetry should be no more than a means to a higher, spiritual end.GGray_c02.indd 148ray_c 02 .indd 148 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM