§ 27. The Anti-Slavery Movement

Side by side with the transcendental movement was a second which strongly affected literature, the anti-slavery movement. The second was the logical companion of the first. "Let every man be free to live his own life," proclaimed the transcendentalists. "How can a man be free to live his own life if he is held in bondage?" retorted the anti-slavery advocates. After the struggle concerning the extension of slavery which resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the subject had been gradually dropped. To be sure, the Quakers were still unmoved in their opposition, but the masses of the people in the free States had come to feel that to attempt to break up slavery was to threaten the very existence of the Union. The revival of the question was due to William Lloyd Garrison, who took this ground. Slavery is wrong; therefore every slave should be freed at once, and God will take care of the consequences. This was a direct challenge to the conscience of every man in the nation. It was complicated by questions of social safety and of business and financial interests as well as by sympathetic and sectional feelings. There was no dearth of material for thought, discussion, and literature.

Among the many New England writers whose names will ever be associated with the emancipation of the slave are the poet Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

§ 28. John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807–1892

In a quiet Quaker farmhouse in the town of Haverhill, there lived a boy who longed for books and school, but had to stay at home and work on the farm. The family library consisted of about thirty volumes, chiefly the lives of prominent Quakers. The boy read these over and over and even made a catalogue of them in rhyme. One day the schoolmaster came to the house with a copy of Burns's poems in his pocket. He read aloud poem after poem, and the bright-eyed boy listened as if his mind had been starved. "Shall I lend it to you?" the master asked, and the boy took the book gratefully. After a while he paid a visit to Boston and came home happy but a little conscience-smitten, for he had bought a copy of Shakespeare, and he knew that Quakers did not approve of plays.

One day when the boy and his father were mending a stone wall, a man rode by distributing Garrison's Free Press to its subscribers. He tossed a paper to the boy, who glanced from page to page, looking especially, as was his wont, at the corner where the poetry was usually printed. He read there "The Exile's Departure." "Thee had better put up the paper and go to work," said his father; but still the boy gazed, for the poem was signed "W.," and it was his own! His older sister Mary had quietly sent it to the editor without saying anything to her brother. The next scene was like a fairy story. Not long afterwards a carriage stopped at the door. A young man, well dressed and with the easy manner of one used to society, inquired for his new contributor. "I can't go in," declared the shy poet. "Thee must," said the sister Mary. Mr. Garrison told the family that the son had "true poetic genius," and that he ought to have an education. "Don't thee put such notions into the boy's head," said the father, for he saw no way to afford even a single term at school. A way was arranged, however, by which the young man could pay his board; and he had one year at an academy. This was almost his only schooling, but he was an eager student all the days of his life.

Through Garrison's influence an opportunity to do editorial work was offered him. He became deeply interested in public matters. The very air was tingling with the question: Slavery or no slavery? He threw the whole force of his thought and his pen against slavery. From the peace-loving Quaker came lyrics that were like the clashing of swords.

The years passed swiftly, and Whittier gained reputation as a poet slowly. He published several early volumes of poems, but it was not until 1866 that he really touched the heart of the country, for then he published Snow-Bound. There are poems by scores that portray passing moods or tell interesting stories or describe beautiful scenes; but, save for The Cotter's Saturday Night, there is hardly another that gives so vivid a picture of home life. We almost feel the chill in the air before the coming storm; we fancy that we are with the group who sit "the clean-winged hearth about:" we listen to the "tales of witchcraft old," the stories of Indian attacks, of life in the logging camps; we see the schoolmaster, the Dartmouth boy who is teasing "the mitten-blinded cat" and telling of college pranks. The mother turns her wheel, and the days pass till the storm is over and the roads are open. The poem is true, simple, and vivid, and it is full of such phrases as "the sun, a snow-blown traveller;" "the great throat of the chimney laughed;" "between the andirons' straddling feet,"—phrases that outline a picture with the sure and certain touch of a master. The poem is "real," but with the reality given by the brush of an artist. Snow-Bound is Whittier's masterpiece; but The Eternal Goodness and some of his ballads, The Barefoot Boy, In School-Days, Among the Hills, Telling the Bees, and a few other poems, come so close to the heart that they can never be forgotten.

Whittier was always fond of children. The story is told that he came from the pine woods one day with his pet, Phebe, and said merrily, "Phebe is seventy, I am seven, and we both act like sixty." He lived to see his eighty-fifth birthday in the midst of love and honors. One who was near him when the end came tells us that among his last whispered words were "Love to the world."

§ 29. Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811–1896

When the future novelist was a child in school in Litchfield, Connecticut, her father, Dr. Beecher, one day went to visit the academy. Classes were called up to recite; then compositions were read. One of these was on this subject: "Can the Immortality of the Soul be proved from the Light of Nature?" It was remarkably well written, and Dr. Beecher asked quickly, "Who wrote that?" "Your daughter, sir," was the reply of the teacher. This daughter was then a girl of only twelve; and it is hardly surprising that when she was fourteen she was teaching a class in Butler's Analogy in her sister's school in Hartford. She taught and studied until she was twenty-four. She compiled a small geography, but the idea of writing a novel seems not to have entered her mind.

At twenty-four Harriet Beecher became Harriet Beecher Stowe by her marriage to Prof. C. E. Stowe. In their Cincinnati home they heard many stories from runaway slaves who had crossed the Ohio River to escape to a free State. After some years her husband was called to Bowdoin College, but the stories lingered in her mind; and in 1852 her Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form. It had received no special attention in coming out as a serial, but its sale as a book was astounding,—half a million copies in the United States alone within five years. The sale in other countries was enormous, and the work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

There were several reasons for this remarkable sale. To be sure, the book was carelessly written and is of unequal excellence; its plot is of small interest and is loosely connected. On the other hand, its humor is irresistible; its pathos is really pathetic; and some of its characters are so vividly painted that the names of two or three have become a part of everyday speech. Moreover, it came straight from the author's heart, for she believed every word that she wrote. Another reason, and the strongest reason, for its large immediate sales, was the condition of affairs in the United States at the time when it was issued. It was only nine years before the opening of the Civil War. The South protested, "This book is an utterly false representation of the life of the Southern States." The North retorted, "We believe that it is true." And meanwhile, every one wanted to read it. The feeling on both sides grew more and more intense. When President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe, he said, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?"

Mrs. Stowe wrote a number of other books. Her best literary success was in her New England stories, The Minister's Wooing, The Pearl of Orr's Island, and Oldtown Folks. She wrote in the midst of difficulties. One of her friends has given us an amusing account of her dictating a story in the kitchen, with the inkstand on the teakettle, the latest baby in the clothes basket, the table loaded with all the paraphernalia of cooking, and an unskilled servant making constant appeals for direction in her work. More than one of Mrs. Stowe's books were written in surroundings much like these. It is no wonder that she left punctuation to the printer.

§ 30. Oratory

It was in great degree the question of slavery that made the New England of this period so rich in orators. Feeling became more and more intense. The printed page could not express it; the man must come face to face with the people whom he was burning to convince. The power to move an audience is eloquence, and eloquence there was in the land in liberal measure. There was William Lloyd Garrison, with his scathing earnestness of conviction; there was Edward Everett, who used words as a painter uses his colors; there was Wendell Phillips, whose magnetism almost won over those who were scorched by his invective; there was Charles Sumner, brilliant, polished, logical, sometimes reaching the sublime; there was Rufus Choate, with his richness of vocabulary, his enchanting splendor of description, his thrilling appeals to the imagination; and there was Daniel Webster, greatest of them all in the impression that he gave of exhaustless power ever lying behind his sonorous phrases. Such was the oratory of New England. Eloquence, however, makes its appeal not only by words, but by voice, gesture, manner,—by personality. Its rewards are those of the moment. An hour after the delivery of the most brilliant oration, its glory is but a memory; in a few years it is but a tradition. Literature recognizes no tools but printed words. It often lacks immediate recognition, but whatever there is in it of merit cannot fail to win appreciation sooner or later. Oratory is not necessarily literature; but the orations of Webster lose little of their power when transferred to the printed page; they not only hear well  but read well.

Webster was a New Hampshire boy whose later home was Massachusetts. He won early fame as a lawyer and speaker, but his first great oratorical success was his oration delivered at Plymouth in 1820. He spoke at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bunker Hill monument, and again at its completion. As a man in public life, as a member of Congress, and as Secretary of State, many of his orations were of a political nature, the greatest of these being his reply to Hayne. His law practice was continued, and even some of his legal speeches have become classics. Perhaps the most noted among them is the one on the murder of Captain Joseph White, with its thrilling account of the deed of the assassin, of the horror of the possession of the "fatal secret," on to the famous climax, "It must be confessed; it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but in suicide,—and suicide is confession!"

Webster's words, spoken with his sonorous, melodious voice, and strengthened by the impression of power and immeasurable reserved force, might easily sway an audience; but what is it that has made them literature? How is it that while most speeches pale and fade in the reading, and lose the life and glow bestowed by the personality of the orator, Webster's are as mighty in the domain of literature as in that of oratory? It is because his thought is so clear, his argument so irresistible and so logical in arrangement, his style so dignified and vigorous and finished, and above all so perfectly adapted to the subject. When we read his words, we forget speaker, audience, and style, we forget to notice how he has spoken and think only on what he has spoken,—and such writings are literature.