Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now 1640140697, 9781640140691

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WHY ANTISLAVERY POETRY MATTERS NOW

0 BRIAN YOTHERS

Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now

Studies in American Literature and Culture

Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now

Brian Yothers

Copyright © 2023 Brian Yothers All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2023 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 9781640140691 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 9781800103368 (ePDF) ISBN-13: 9781800103375 (ePUB) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data is available from the Library of Congress. The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Flag of the USA at the time of the American Civil War with 34 stars. iStock Illustration ID 172315294.

For Maryse

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Present Valor

1

1: Anglo-American Poetry, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Haitian Revolution in United States Poetry

19

2: Antislavery Poetry in Public: George Moses Horton, John Pierpont, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

60

3: Witness against Slavery: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney

105

4: Present Valor and the Trauma of Slavery: James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

154

5: Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy

187

6: Aspects of America: James M. Whitfield, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

225

Epilogue: W. E. B. DuBois and the Legacy of Antislavery Poetry

270

Works Cited

283

Index 291

Illustrations Fig. 1.1. Toussaint Louverture. N.d. Library of Congress.

49

Fig. 1.2. Toussaint L’Ouverture / Corrie’s Detroit Chromo Lith. office. Chromolithograph by George DeBaptiste, n.d. Library of Congress.

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Fig. 3.1. John Greenleaf Whittier, November 25, 1885. Photo by Lamson. Library of Congress.

125

Fig. 5.1. Am I not a man and a brother? Image accompanying the broadside edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Our Countrymen in Chains”; Reproduction of Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 seal for the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Library of Congress.

189

Fig. 5.2. Frances E. W. Harper, 1898. Frontispiece to Frances E. W. Harper, Poems (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson, 1898). Library of Congress.

195

Fig. 5.3. “Mother can’t eat until you are safe.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s cabin. (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, 1900), 45. Library of Congress.

206

Fig. 6.1. Cinque The Chief of the Amistad captives / / painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn; engraved by J. Sartain (Philadelphia: n.p., 1840). Mezzotint, Library of Congress.

228

Fig. 6.2. Bust portrait of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, surrounded by scenes from his enslavement, escape, arrest, trial, and re-enslavement. Drawn by Barry from a daguerreotype by Whipple & Black; John Andrews, sc. Library of Congress.

249

Acknowledgments

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s always, the task of writing this book

has been rendered not only easier but possible, by the opportunity to exchange ideas with and learn from friends and colleagues. I would like to give special thanks to current and recent colleagues at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) who work on issues related to those discussed in this book: Charles Boehmer, Ezra Cappell, Ruben Espinosa, Bilge Firat, Andrew Fleck, Robert Gunn, DeLisa Hawkes, Deane Mansfield-Kelley, Lowry Martin, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Cristina Morales, Jonna Perrillo, Richard Pineda, Keith Polette, Marion Rohrleitner, Tom Schmid, Oishani Sengupta, Jeff Shepherd, Cigdem Sirin, Stacey Sowards, Jose Villalobos, Michael V. Williams, and Barbara Zimbalist for their kindness and collegiality. Much of this work was carried out while I was a pandemic-era chair of the Department of English at UTEP, so I am especially grateful that my outstanding colleague Joseph M. Ortiz agreed to take on the role of chair this fall, allowing me to have the time to finish this project. Patricia D. Witherspoon, Stephen Crites, Denis O’Hearn, and Anadeli Bencomo have served as Dean of Liberal Arts during the time I have worked on this book, and I am grateful for all of their support. The Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professorship in English has been an especially valuable source of funding support for this project. In the field of American literary studies, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, John Bryant, Dawn Coleman, Robert Evans, Jennifer Greiman, John Gruesser, Paul Hurh, Wyn Kelley, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Ohge, Steven Olsen-Smith, Samuel Otter, and Robert K. Wallace are consistently the best of interlocutors. I also had the moving experience while at work on this project of collaborating with an outstanding group of colleagues on the MLA ad hoc committee on the Public Humanities: Herman Beavers, Toby Benis, Araceli Hernandez-LaRoche, Roopika Risam, and Christian Rubio, with sage guidance from Dennis Looney and Janine Utell. This experience helped me to think about what it means for work from the past to matter now in the public arena. At Camden House, Jim Walker has been unfailingly encouraging, both on this project and on my previous work with the press, and I am deeply indebted to him for his professionalism, intellectual acuity, kindness, and patience. I am also grateful to Sue Martin for her careful attention to the manuscript in copyediting and to Jane Best for her guidance through the production process. Friends like Joanie Ericson, Bill and C. J. Moore, Anju and Kiron

xii A cknowledgments 

Master, Sadhana Chheda and Chetan Moorthy, Roy Mathew, James and Patty Lyons, Vinny Kaur, and Joseph Singh Mathew make every burden lighter. I am grateful as always to my family: Willard Yothers, Heather Maraldo, Yvonne Jayasuriya, Carmeline Jayasuriya, Rosanne and Roshan Weerackoon, and Ranil, Rochelle, and Rushika Weerackoon for all their love and support. My mother, Esther Yothers, and my father-in-law Leslie Jayasuriya have both been gone since long before I started work on this project, but I feel that they are always with me, and I feel confident that a great deal of whatever value this book has is attributable to them. Finally, Maryse Jayasuriya is, as always, the greatest source of encouragement and inspiration I could imagine, and this book, and so much more, is dedicated to her.

Introduction: Present Valor

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took shape late in 2016, when I found myself revisiting James Russell Lowell’s powerful poem “The Present Crisis,” which, although it was written in December 1844 (according to the Cambridge Edition of Lowell’s Collected Works), seemed to have acquired a new and compelling resonance (67). The sort of popular verse that had flourished in the nineteenth century seemed to be on an upswing throughout the year as a result of the enthusiastic response to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s widely beloved musical Hamilton. The fact that an especially fraught election for the presidency of the United States had just concluded made the young Lowell’s commitment to poetry that addresses the public good in a polemical form especially topical. The impetus for writing such poetry became all the more powerful in 2021, when after the defeat of a president who had offered encouragement to those nostalgic for the Confederate insurrection against the government of the United States, that president’s supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attack reminiscent, for example, of the attack on Charles Sumner in his Senate chambers in 1856. Two weeks after the horror of this attack, the inauguration of a new president unexpectedly found as much attention paid to poetry as ever before in US history—this despite the fact that previous inaugurations had featured poets as distinguished as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Alexander. The youthful poet Amanda Gorman read lines that reflected significant engagement with the US past even as it reached out to popular audiences at the present of January 2021. Gorman’s poem showed evidence of the sort of cataloguing and parallelism that defined the poetry of Walt Whitman at the same time that it incorporated rhythms, internal rhyme, and alliteration that associates more closely with contemporary hiphop—or with the experimentation with rhythm and sound that we might associate with Edgar Allan Poe or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century. Both tendencies are visible in the most Whitmanian moment in her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb”: he idea for this book

We will rise from the golden hills of the West. We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

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And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

The use of anaphora through the repetition of “We will rise” and the sweeping geographical scope of the poem speak to Whitman at his most radically egalitarian, even as the rhythms are tighter and quicker and call to mind hip-hop and Poe. Her larger collection, when it appeared, also included direct references to Herman Melville through her poem “Essex,” which invoked Moby-Dick as a figure for human struggle. More than the contrast between the elements of free verse and exuberant meter in the poem, the poem negotiated between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century understandings of poetry, and it provided an example of the tendency in recent years for poetry to take on something of the popular and affective quality that characterized the genre in the nineteenth century. It was a commonplace in the English-speaking world for much of the twentieth century that poetry (at least in its canonical forms) lived in a different sphere from the world of political maneuvering and sought to convey a different sort of truth from that conveyed in reports from human rights organizations, but as Gorman’s example suggests, the conventional wisdom seemed to be changing in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, and these changes seemed to mirror something of how poetry had been understood in the years leading up to the United States Civil War and in the years immediately following it. The idea that poetry as a genre tends toward the apolitical has often been associated, rather unfairly, with W. H. Auden’s aphorism in “In Memoriam W. B. Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden was himself a poet very interested in matters of justice, violence, and equality, and his meditation in his poem on Yeats is actually about the complexity of the position of the critic who admires a poet’s art while being troubled by his politics (248). Nonetheless, a simplified version of Auden’s dictum has often been taken to delineate the political limits of poetry, in ways that the poetry of the antislavery movement belies. As Karen L. Kilcup has recently shown in her study Who Killed American Poetry? (2019), American poetry has played a much more public role throughout the nation’s history than it has been presumed to do in recent decades. When Lowell wrote “The Present Crisis,” he was distraught by the election of James K. Polk and the looming war with Mexico that he believed both betrayed basic American values and would enshrine the practice of chattel slavery in perpetuity. “The Present Crisis” is Lowell’s answer to an appalling moment in the history of the United States from the very moment when the nation appeared on the verge of losing its way. It is noteworthy that in the face of a political and moral crisis, Lowell,

Introduction: Present Valor

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who would be an important figure in the history of American journalism, turned to poetry as a means of expressing his fear and anger at the present state of his society and as a means of responding to its ills. Indeed, Lowell’s strategy here seems not to be totally idiosyncratic, as his nineteenth-century biographer Horace Scudder relates that, as will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, Lowell was explicitly encouraged by editors to pursue poetry as the most efficacious means of changing minds about slavery and energizing those who opposed it (Scudder, 160). “The Present Crisis,” which I will discuss at length in chapter 4, offers a precis of sorts for the argument of this book. Lowell offers the poem as a resounding call to the nation to embrace a strenuous moral virtue that he associates in the past with the Puritan founders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but which he argues can only be realized in the present by those who have moved beyond the prejudices and failings of the forefathers they admire. For Lowell, what makes the early generations of New Englanders admirable models is that they were “men of present valor” who refused to be shaped by the tyranny of the past. Lowell begins with a fervent critique of slavery, but he extends his poetic argument into an assertion of the necessity of taking up today’s moral challenges today, rather than making patriotism and filial piety an excuse for evading those tasks. For Lowell, each generation has a “Present Crisis” to face, and no generation can shirk its responsibility to meet it. It is perhaps no accident that in the days following the 2020 presidential election, John Meacham fell back on Lowell’s words on Bill Maher’s Real Time: “Once to every man and nation, comes a moment to decide . . .” (Meacham interview). Lowell’s poem has a long history of being adopted as a rallying cry by the African American community, in the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation,” and in the title of W. E. B. DuBois’s periodical The Crisis, and in the early twenty-first century it seemed that Lowell was once again speaking powerfully to the nation at large, and with a special resonance for America’s long and incomplete history of racial discord and the struggle for racial justice. Jeffrey Insko has noted that Martin Luther King, Jr., when emphasizing the urgency of the present during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, drew directly on the strong, principled presentism in Lowell’s poetry (Insko, 54). As a poet who admired the British Romantics, Lowell was also positioning himself as part of a tradition that spoke directly and eloquently to questions of justice, equality, repression, and resistance. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” offers a rousing call to action that provided a model for the kind of voice that antislavery poetry would develop in the 1830s through 1850s in the United States, exhorting the oppressed to Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number—

4 I  ntroduction: Present Valor

Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you— Ye are many—they are few.  (400)

Shelley’s stirring words have been quoted across a wide range of historical and political contexts, but they are an especially resonant expression of the view that poetry can and must take sides, and that the proper place for poetry is on the side of the oppressed, that becomes developed and refined over the course of the long history of antislavery verse. When Lowell makes his argument for “present valor” in “The Present Crisis,” this is an extension of Shelley’s view that poetry takes sides, and need not do so in vain. It also is a statement that poetry’s virtues are not timeless, but must speak to the moment in which poetry is being written. This argument for the efficacy of poetry and the necessity of making it speak to our changing present has implications for how Lowell might ask us to read his poetry today. There is something remarkably easy from the standpoint of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in opposing the enslavement of human beings: the justice of this cause is inarguable for us, even as some people make the end of chattel slavery in the United States after the Civil War an alibi for continuing the very injustices that grew out of slavery. Antislavery poetry was largely concerned with the current events of the time. It not only responded to the news of the day; it also made news itself, not least by being published in newspapers and magazines dedicated to the antislavery cause. The news of the last five years has served to emphasize just how much the moral and ethical questions associated with the antislavery movement remain with us over a century and a half after the poems discussed in this volume were published. Some have to do with political violence, some with racial equality, and some with broad questions of human rights and the recognition of equality across boundaries of race, class, gender, religion, and nationality. Some relate to the linkages between equal rights for women and people of color, and some connect to questions of how specific questions of identity intersect with the broad principle of a shared humanity. To cite an instance close to home for me: my institution, the University of Texas at El Paso, hosted a remarkable exhibition in 2018. “Uncaged Art,” displayed at the university’s Centennial Museum and curated by Associate Professor of History Yolanda Leyva, preserved and shared the artwork of children who had been held at the Tornillo detention center. In viewing this exhibit, I was struck by the way in which, in our time as much as in those of Lowell and African American poets like George Moses Horton and Frances E. W. Harper, the arts have the capacity to stir our consciences and remind us of a shared humanity across racial, ethnic, and national lines.

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It would have been hard to imagine that 2020 could have offered more parallels to the moral questions raised by nineteenth-century abolitionist writers than the previous three years had, but the echoes of the poetry that I had been reading since 2016 only intensified. The COVID-­ 19 pandemic which emerged on a global level in the early months of 2020 and resulted in most universities being shut down for part or all of the year raised in stark terms the question of whether and to what degree we humans are our “brother’s keeper,” an obsession of much antislavery poetry that took its language from the biblical story of Cain and Abel in the King James Version of the Bible. The question of moral responsibility intensified further in May of 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who cell phone footage made clear had been treated as a threat even as he was losing his life. The image of Floyd struggling to breathe with a knee on his neck echoed the nineteenth-century defenses of slavery that justified violence against people of African descent by conjuring hypothetical instances of violence by enslaved people. The furious responses on the part of some white Americans to the protests that followed George Floyd’s death seemed to offer contemporary parallels to the vitriol and even violence directed at nineteenth-century abolitionists. The 2020 election campaign and the campaign after the election to overturn its results awakened still more echoes of the poetry of figures from Harper to Whittier to Lowell. As in 2016, something fundamental about the nation’s identity seemed to be at stake, and once again, the form and content of the debate over slavery in the nineteenth-century United Sates seemed more relevant than many in the United States might have imagined just a few years earlier. The rioters storming the halls of Congress seemed to echo something of both the rioters who attacked antislavery speakers like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and martyred the antislavery printer Elijah Lovejoy. The poetry that arose from the transatlantic movement to abolish slavery represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries, and it challenges the boundaries that we frequently maintain in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches to the field. The third decade of the twenty-first century seems a particularly appropriate moment for a thorough-going study of antislavery poetry on its own terms, as this generic and political configuration raises questions about the moral and ethical purpose of literary production, the relation between art and justice, the relation between the conventionally literary and the conventionally rhetorical, and the relation between ethical and aesthetic aspiration that seem especially compelling in our own fractured present. Indeed, in this volume I argue that the sort of poetry that can speak to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition,

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and artistic complexity mattered in the most fraught years of the mid nineteenth-century, and can and must continue to matter today. This study thus provides a literary history and taxonomy of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. The volume is thus concerned to consider the poetry that it examines within the context of recent scholarly treatments of the antislavery movement by historians, scholars in the broad fields of literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, political scientists, sociologists, African-Americanists, and scholars of race and gender studies, as well as scholars and theorists of poetics. The sweep of disciplinary cross-fertilization is mirrored by the range of writers considered: this volume considers writers who are regarded as centrally canonical today, like Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W. E. B. DuBois, and Herman Melville; writers who were immensely influential in their own times, but whose voices have since receded, notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell; and African American writers whose work has been rediscovered in recent decades, like James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, and Frances E. W. Harper. Each of the pairs and clusters of poets selected for the chapters that follow in this study illustrates distinct poles within antislavery discourse: Black and white, male and female, radical and at least apparently moderate, Garrisonian suspicion of politics and political radicalism, principled non-violence and principled physical resistance to the injustices of slavery. This study draws upon a substantial and compelling body of scholarship in antislavery writing in general, and poetry in particular, that has flourished over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Three volumes stand out as essential for the study of antislavery poetry as a genre: Monica Pelaez’s Lyrical Liberators: The American Antislavery Movement in Verse, 1831–1865 (2018); James G. Basker’s Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (2005); and Marcus Wood’s The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764–1865 (2004). Each of these impressive works of scholarship provides a significant resource for anyone studying antislavery poetry, and I am indebted to their insights. I find Pelaez’s Lyrical Liberators to be especially valuable, as it offers through the poems that Pelaez has collected a taxonomy of antislavery verse in its themes, topics, and occasions. Basker offers a compelling narrative of the British antislavery movement in verse through his anthology. Wood provides a usefully skeptical approach to writing about abolitionist verse, as he illuminates the racist and imperialist presuppositions that can appear even in outspokenly antislavery writing. As persuasive as Wood’s critique of much of this body of verse is, the weight of

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the materials that he gathers together, especially from the late eighteenthcentury antislavery movement in Britain, demonstrates the power of the chorus of voices that gathered around principled opposition to an atrocity that was not broadly understood as such at the time the poets he discusses were writing. Pelaez, Basker, and Wood all put together anthologies that allow us to read widely in antislavery poetry, and to some degree this choice seems to be one that is shaped by the materials themselves. Of necessity, antislavery poetry tends to repeat its central patterns and gain its power more by the cumulative extension of a tradition of thought and writing rather than by strokes of individual genius. As I wrote this volume, I found threads that initially appear in eighteenth-century British poets like William Cowper, James Montgomery, and Anne Yearsley, that recur on the other side of the Atlantic throughout the antebellum period in the United States. To make a somewhat controversial point: antislavery poetry matters historically because its authors took the right side of a historically consequential moral issue, but it can only really matter now if it still resonates as poetry. Given this question of its resonance as poetry, this body of verse, whatever its political, ethical, and moral virtues, must to some degree be judged in terms of its continuing interest by the quality of its literary form. For that reason, the chapters that follow in this volume are focused on close readings of individual poems by a selection of poets who published substantially on issues related to race, slavery, equality, and justice, with significant attention to how they made their case against slavery and racism in terms of literary form, as well as the moral and ethical substance of their case against the slavery system in the United States and beyond. The poets discussed here can easily be seen as overly conventional and didactic, but there is also a pattern of formal innovation that runs through these poems. Many of these poems adapt popular forms to polemical purposes, and many of them make adroit use of allusion, irony, parody, and paradox, along with sophisticated metrical and sonic arrangements. These poems are not “art for art’s sake,” but neither are they simple propaganda. Throughout readings presented here, I try to follow the argumentative and narrative curve of entire poems, some of them quite substantial, in order to show the artistry that underwrote the argumentation in these works. This approach means that I provide generous quotations from the poems analyzed, and that I devote space to considering both their prosody and their politics. In examining the broad field of antislavery poetry, I consider poets from a wide range of antislavery positions, including political antislavery figures, radical abolitionists, and even moderates who joined colonization societies but who held a principled belief in the wrongfulness of slavery and the moral necessity of an end to its practice. Thus a member of the American Colonization Society like Lydia Huntley Sigourney, a figure

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like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who could be so irenic as to appear milquetoast, a figure like George Moses Horton who was compelled by his own enslavement to strategize his approach to his pursuit of liberty cautiously and carefully, and a figure like Herman Melville, who never enlisted directly in any antislavery movement, still belong here based upon the fact that in their poetry each captured the sense that slavery, in Melville’s words, represented “the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.” The context for reading antislavery poetry is a rich one, including the studies of poetry in the nineteenth century broadly associated in the New Lyric Studies, studies of African American poetry, many of which move into the twentieth and twentieth centuries, but which are anchored by considerations of early work from the nineteenth century, and literary, cultural, and historical studies of the antislavery movement. In the field of cultural approaches to poetry, Michael C. Cohen’s The Social Life of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015) offers an understanding of how poems circulated within and shaped the public culture of the nineteenth-century United States. Cohen is concerned with how poems were read in the nineteenth century and the ways in which genre affected modes of reading, and he emphasizes how the reading of poetry helped to drive the abolition movement itself. For Cohen, a crucial moment in the development of antislavery verse emerged from the meeting of John Greenleaf Whittier, the most prolific antislavery poet in the United States, and William Lloyd Garrison, the extraordinary antislavery lecturer and editor of the Liberator who dominated the antislavery movement in the 1830s and 1840s. Cohen identifies a “poetics of reform” (60–99) that is enabled by the struggle to circulate antislavery texts in the face of congressional “gag rules” and violent attacks on the antislavery press (64). Cohen’s most distinctive argument is that context is crucial for understanding form, as he argues that “we can best understand the political efficacy of antislavery verse by detailing its production, distribution, and consumption: the newspaper, the pamphlet, the broadside, and the oration are not incidental sites for these poems, but are instead crucial to their form and meaning” (72). Acknowledging the force of this argument and of the importance that Pelaez also places on the embeddedness of poems in the newspapers and magazines in which they were published, this study makes a bet that extended close reading of individual poems, of a sort that has generally only been practiced in brief, can also contribute substantially to our understanding of their impact across the print contexts in which they appear. Cohen’s work points to the ways in which changes in how nineteenthcentury US poetry is studied have opened the door for more substantial attention to reformist and antislavery verse, and this work has dovetailed with the influential work comprehended under the label of the New Lyric

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Studies. The work of Virginia Jackson has been central to shaping the field of New Lyric Studies. Jackson’s work has highlighted the ways in which poems operate within networks of distribution and meaning, and underscores that a poem is often a much more intentional version of communication than might be understood from the over-identification of poetry with specifically lyric (and so to some degree private) modes, while at the same time unpacking the cultural work done by lyric poetry, often in sharply critical readings that expose racism even in poetry that voices or assumes opposition to slavery. Jackson has engaged the poetry of John Pierpont, one of the least frequently discussed authors examined below, showing how he adapts the lyric figure of the apostrophe in “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star” to create a “racist abolitionist poem that allowed a White public to disidentify with and perhaps even enjoy his subject’s suffering” modeled on blackface minstrelsy even as she acknowledges Frederick Douglass’s use of the poem to frame his newspaper The North Star. This argument extends Saidiya Hartman’s characterization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel where “Abolitionists’ politics allied with blackface techniques created an ambivalent portrait of slavery” (40). I am less certain than Jackson that minstrelsy is the best frame for understanding Pierpont’s antislavery verse, but it seems clear to me that her emphasis on reading poetic form in relation to cultural and political concerns is necessary if we are to understanding the continuing power as well as the problems of nineteenth-century verse crafted in opposition to slavery. Jackson and her coeditor Yopie Prins provide an outline for the field of lyrics studies in The Lyric Theory Reader, in which they collect approaches to the lyric as a genre from over the past century. Fundamentally, the argument here is that poetry that has a different aim than the expanded subjectivity associated with the lyric has value and meaning as poetry, and that studies of poetry that understand the genre only through the lyric mode are unnecessarily limited and limiting. This aligns closely with the goals of this study, as antislavery poetry is closely bound to a particular time and occasion, but speaks to a series of historical moments that have followed emancipation over more than a century and a half. A different role for Romanticism as a source for antislavery poetry emerges in Keith D. Leonard’s Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2019) and Matt Sandler’s The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery (2020), which explore the use and reworking of Romantic models in poetry written by Black writers, from George Moses Horton to Frances E. W. Harper and beyond. Like Jackson, Sandler emphasizes the ways in which Romanticism had to be reimagined by Black poets, noting that “Romanticism was a European-originating, cosmopolitan ideology which sometimes emphasized the local, Indigenous, and rooted, so diasporic

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Black artists and intellectuals had to make significant revisions to its basic components” (7). Both Leonard and Sandler show how Black writers specifically adapted Romantic modes in their writing, and this study attempts to trace the permutations of such adaptations across the poetry produced by the antislavery movement. A parallel line of argument appears in Julius S. Scott’s 2018 study The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, which adopts the closing flourish of William Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint L’Ouverture in its title, and argues for the reshaping power of the Haitian Revolution in intellectual currents across the Atlantic world. As lyric studies theorists would insist, poetry has a set of interrelated social roles that go far beyond the conventional notion, associated with John Stuart Mill, of poetry as “feeling confessing itself to itself” (qtd. Jackson and Prins, 4). Several recent studies have emphasized the profound embeddedness of the abolitionist movement in educational and religious context. Ben Wright’s 2020 study Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism explores the role of Christian missions in shaping abolitionism. Wright’s treatment of Christianity is especially significant to the context of abolitionist poetry as much of the verse discussed in this volume is deeply in conversation with both biblical citation and theological reflection. One aspect of antislavery poetry that demands attention is the way in which it weaves together political, religious, and aesthetic questions, and my understanding of how antislavery poetry functions as a response to the complexities of nineteenth-century religious, racial, and literary politics is informed by the complex relationship of abolitionism to Christianity as well as democracy. A major way in which Christianity was enmeshed in antislavery and abolition was through the educational institutions abolitionists both created and imagined. John Frederick Bell’s Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race (2022) tracks the role of colleges like Oberlin and Berea in supporting the abolitionist movement and training African American religious and civic leaders, and it also explores the equivocal way in which these institutions related to the developing politics of race. For Harper in particular, education is central to both the antislavery agenda that appears in her poetry and prose fiction alike, and this emphasis intensifies in her Reconstruction-era poetry. As with education, legal questions were crucial to shaping the institutional status of African Americans in the United States, and two recent studies have been particularly revealing in terms of how African Americans understood their legal status in the antebellum period: Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Natural Law (2016), which explored African American understandings of the relationship between the legal code and a natural or “higher” law, with particular focus on Frederick Douglass’s and Anna Julia Cooper’s roles in creating this tradition. As we will see, appeals to natural or higher law are

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frequently crucial in antislavery poetry by white and Black authors alike. Martha S. Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, meanwhile, dealt with the active engagement with the formal written law on the part of antebellum African American figures. The poetry discussed in this volume deals with both bold claims of adherence to a higher law and close attention to the existing law, in keeping with broader patterns among antislavery polemic. An important focus in studies of antislavery literature has been the way in which this body of work fits into the broader context of US literary and intellectual history. Kenyon Gradert has made a substantial contribution to this line of work in Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Literary Imagination (2020), in which Gradert traces the roots of abolitionist sentiment in the early history of Puritans in colonial British North America. That abolitionists and their opponents connected abolitionism to Puritanism has been well known: particularly in the battle over the historical memory of John Brown, reflections as early as Henry David Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” represented Brown as a latter-­ day Puritan. Thoreau found a continuity between Brown’s moral absolutism on the subject of slavery and the moral commitments of the New England Puritans that, as we shall see in chapter 4, was broadly affirmed in antislavery poetry well before the Harper’s Ferry raid. Thoreau wrote: “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.” In addition to associating Brown with Christ, he also affirmed that He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all,—the Puritans. It would be in vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers’ day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They were neither Democrats nor Republicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear God, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available candidates. (263)

If, as Gradert points out, Southern pro-slavery advocates attacked abolitionists for being the moral and spiritual heirs to the Puritans, it was possible for others to claim Puritanism as a noble heritage for a movement committed to a consistent moral purpose that could be justified rather than condemned for its unpopularity. Jeffrey Insko’s History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now (2018) pairs well with Gradert’s

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work as an account of how the moral challenges raised by abolition can be seen as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth-century US literary culture. An important model for studies of abolitionism and antislavery at large that showed how they were immersed in nineteenth-century New England culture was Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (1993), which made crucial links between the abolitionist movement and the emerging feminist movement, for both of which New England was a critical regional influence. Gradert’s argument is the most substantial treatment of the Puritan genealogy for abolitionism, but it has substantial precursors. Notably, Andrew Delbanco’s 2012 volume The Abolitionist Imagination presented the work of one of the most astute and influential interpreters of Puritanism in the late twentieth century in dialogue with major historians of abolition. In 2012, Delbanco offered a view of abolitionism from the standpoint of its more moderate contemporaries. Inspired in part by the upsurge of interest in Lincoln’s role in emancipation during the Obama era signified by the publication of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial (2010), James T. Oakes’s The Radical and the Republican (2008), and John Stauffer’s Giants (2008), Delbanco, using Gregg Crane’s work in Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (2002), identified abolitionism with the belief that “no matter how few and marginal truthtellers initially may be, their seed of truth, once sown, will take root and spread against all resistance” (Abolitionist Imagination, 48). Delbanco acknowledged the force of the impulse, and suggested that when we apply it to causes less self-evidently righteous than the abolition of slavery has become, we can understand the ambivalence with which abolitionism was treated by a literary figure like Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even by a writer more explicitly critical of slavery like Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville. Delbanco’s framing essay thus made a double motion, as he affirmed the nobility of abolitionist sentiments and questioned the degree to which abolitionism offers a compelling model for later movements toward social justice. Tellingly, his final reference to Melville in the essay is to Melville’s posthumously published Billy Budd, which, he had argued in his 2006 biography Melville: His World and Work, is a tragic account of competing and irreconcilable goods. Part of what makes Delbanco’s collection so useful is the debate between his opening essay and closing response and the arguments of three influential scholars who view abolitionism with considerably less ambivalence: John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, and Darryl Pinckney, each of whom argues strenuously for the continued significance of antislavery rhetoric and politics. In each case, their response to Delbanco points toward their distinctive contributions to our current understanding of the ongoing significance of the antislavery movement writ large.

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John Stauffer’s work has been particularly crucial to grasping the interdisciplinary scope of studies of antislavery discourse. Stauffer has offered a substantial dual study of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Giants, which can usefully be read in conversation with James T. Oakes’s The Radical and the Republican. Stauffer’s edited volume Prophets of Protest offered a valuable cross-section of scholarship on abolition and antislavery as of 2006. In The Abolitionist Imagination, Stauffer responds to Delbanco’s ambivalent reading of the abolitionist imagination with both an appreciation of Delbanco’s efforts in treating Abolitionism as a subject of inquiry for literary scholars and a critique of the ambivalence with which Delbanco (and many earlier scholars from a variety of standpoints) had approached abolitionism. For Stauffer, abolitionism was “a more humane fanaticism” that was required by the way that “slavery and totalitarianism . . . foreclose compromise and preclude the possibility of a middle way,” and Stauffer adduced the Quakers as the prototypical example of the abolitionists’ underlying hostility to violence, even as many of them came to believe that a violent response could be required by the enormity of slavery. This argument was in keeping with Stauffer’s wider role as a staunch advocate for the ongoing historical importance of abolitionism, as espoused in studies from The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) to The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid (2012), the latter of which he coedited with Zoe Trodd. While acknowledging the force of Delbanco’s concerns about abolitionism’s moral certainties and the potential for abolitionism to become a model for other, less admirable expressions of certainty, I find persuasive Stauffer’s argument that slavery is fundamentally different from most wrongs and that abolitionism offers an especially valuable model for thinking through when fundamental moral values are at stake. Similarly, Manisha Sinha, both in her response to Delbanco in The Abolitionist Imagination and in her extraordinary historical work in The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), regards abolition as a distinctively admirable movement in moral terms. For Sinha the supreme abolitionist insight was that slavery “was an extended state of war against slaves” (Abolitionist Imagination, 93). This recognition meant that even a movement inclined toward pacifism could find that there were things for which they must fight, and she invoked Gandhi as a figure who both detested violence and acknowledged its necessity in extreme instances as a parallel model to the nineteenth-century abolitionists: concluding “there is no such thing as a good war, as a majority of abolitionists from the early Quakers to bona fide members of the American Peace Society recognized, but some causes are worth fighting (107–8). Like Stauffer, and, earlier, Benjamin Quarles and David Brion Davis, Sinha stands in her scholarship for the idea that abolitionists represented a genuinely better alternative to

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politics as usual, and is skeptical of both conservative attempts to portray them as extremists and more left-leaning critiques that have seen them as committed to industrial capitalism rather than true egalitarianism. What I find in antislavery poetry tends to confirm, in my view, the position that Stauffer and Sinha stake out, and to suggest the value of making explicitly antislavery writing a large part of our study of literary history. Darryl Pinckney’s response to Delbanco in The Abolitionist Imagina­ tion points to a line of inquiry that Delbanco has himself taken up with spectacular effect in recent years, that of the role of African American abolitionists in their own emancipation. One of the premises of the present study is precisely that when we write about antislavery poetry, we are writing about a fundamentally interracial movement for justice, and so it makes sense to read white and Black poets of the antebellum period in relation to each other rather than in a vacuum. Pinckney regarded the legacy of abolition as a piece of “the understanding that black Americans were part of the country’s intellectual traditions” (Abolitionist Imagination 130). My hope is that the present study furthers precisely that understanding. Considerations of African American poetry as a distinctive literary tradition have increasingly highlighted form as well as content in recent years. Two recent studies are especially instructive. Hollis Robbins’s Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (2020) and Timo Muller’s The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018) both explore the development of African American poetry through the single, clearly defined genre of the sonnet. Although Robbins and Muller both focus primarily on post-Emancipation sonnets, their work is suggestive of the degree to which form has joined culture as a major focus in the long history of African American poetry, and this study aspires to contribute to the discussion of form in African American poetry. Related to this concern with form in African American poetry going back to the nineteenth century, a turn in the scholarship on slavery and aboliti on that seems especially crucial to me is the emphasis on the role of Black people and Black print culture in shaping the abolitionist movement that Timothy Patrick McCarthy has discussed in “‘To Plead Our Own Cause’: Black Print Culture and the Origins of Abolition.” McCarthy shows how Black writers reshaped the abolitionist movement through their own writing. Particularly, McCarthy describes the founding of periodicals like Freedom’s Journal that allowed Black people to publish in venues controlled by Black editors, rather than being limited to publishing in venues like Garrison’s Liberator. Foundational to this area of inquiry in Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists (1969), and it is noteworthy that Quarles’s emphasis on Black agency in liberation continues to generate substantial scholarship.

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An important part of understanding antislavery poetry is captured in the emphasis on print culture that appears in McCarthy’s essay, and critics like Meredith McGill, Lara Langer Cohen, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon offer perspectives on print culture that substantially illuminates our understanding of African American antislavery poetry in Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein’s Early African American Print Culture (2012). In particular, McGill reads Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in relation to “the difference an attention to format can make to our understanding of poetry, illuminating not only the field of circulation of particular works, but also the poems themselves” (55–56). McGill uses the methods of book history to show how we read Harper’s poetry differently when we consider the specific contexts in which it appeared. The degree to which African American interlocutors reshaped abolitionist fiction by white authors seems relevant to poetry as well. As Robert S. Levine has pointed out with regard to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), white antislavery writers whose work was initially paternalistic or condescending could grow in their understanding to the racial dynamics of slavery through their conversations with Black interlocutors and their reading of works by Black authors. One of the most valuable aspects of much of the writing produced by antislavery poets is the way in which it reveals the pressures that shape and reshape literary production in the attempt to give voice to the claims of justice in a context in which authors represent many different identities, ranging from white poets who opposed slavery but were not directly involved in the abolitionist movement to white and Black members of antislavery and abolition societies, from Black poets who were born free like Whitfield and Harper to those born into slavery—including both those who escaped slavery, like William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, and George Moses Horton, a poet who remained enslaved until Emancipation. The swing in scholarship on abolitionism from the early 2010s to the present is seen especially clearly in Andrew Delbanco’s trajectory from The Abolitionist Imagination to his most recent work, which emphasizes the centrality of fugitive slaves to the shaping of the antislavery movement and ultimately to the coming of the Civil War. In his 2018 study The War before the War: Fugitives Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, Delbanco focuses on how fugitive slaves helped to shape “a biracial antislavery movement,” considering how popular antislavery works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin were shaped by the writings of fugitives from slavery, and the ways in which Black antislavery voices ultimately became the most powerful and persuasive in the antislavery movement. The study of antislavery poetry also relies on some important readings of individual authors, especially in the form of the recovery of African

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American poets whose work had previously been overlooked. Notable examples include Joan R. Sherman’s The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry (1997), which provides a scholarly edition of texts by George Moses Horton that is illuminated by a critical framework for reading Horton’s poems, Ivy G. Wilson’s consideration of James Monroe Whitfield in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. (2011), and Melba Joyce Boyd’s Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994). In the case of William Wells Brown, most scholarship has been directed towards his prose work, but Geoffrey Sanborn’s Plagiariama (2016), for example, points to the way in which poetry is embedded in Brown’s prose fiction. As increasing attention is paid to figures like Horton, Whitfield, Brown, and Harper, all of whom are discussed at length below, the degree to which antislavery poetry was an interracial enterprise becomes increasingly clear. It is a well-worn commonplace at this point that white abolitionist could tend to reinforce the racial prejudices of their surrounding culture, and this commonplace has often been tied to the further observation that abolitionists could reinforce the existing inequities of the industrial North event as they made a compelling case against the injustices of the slave systems and so could be understood as a conservative rather than liberatory force, as in portions of Thomas Bender’s 1992 edited volume The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. The most interesting work investigating slavery and abolition, however, has emphasized the agency of formerly enslaved people and free Black people alike in shaping the abolitionist and broader antislavery movements. Some of the poets discussed in this volume were Black, and some were white, but what joins them all is a degree of commitment to equality that fell outside of the antebellum mainstream, even in the case of poets like Longfellow who wished to appeal the broad middle of society in the United States. Indeed, although Longfellow clearly falls toward the most moderate end of the antislavery writers discussed in this volume, he contemplated devoting an entire verse drama to the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture early in his career. Lydia Huntley Sigourney may have been a member of the American Colonization Society, a group tainted by racism and broadly rebuked by more radical abolitionists, but her critique of inequality across racial lines led her to write with prophetic fury on the subjects of both slavery and Indian Removal, crimes which she clearly regarded as being linked. Granting that solidarity is usually (maybe even always) imperfect and that the poets discussed below represent a range of positions on the nineteenth-century political spectrum, the ability to express calls for justice and equality through verse remains an important legacy of the poets discussed here.

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I begin in chapter 1 with the poetry that addresses slavery on a transatlantic and pan-American basis, and particularly the poetry that responses to slavery in the British Empire and the Caribbean, with a special focus on James Montgomery’s The West Indies, written to celebrate the banning of the slave trade in the British Empire and on John Greenleaf Whittier’s representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary leader who inspired Romantic poets on both side of the Atlantic. The second chapter deals with three varieties of public poetry: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s attempt to bring appeals to conscience into the mainstream, George Moses Horton’s writing from within his position as an enslaved poet, and John Pierpont’s scathing public indictment of the slave system. The third chapter turns to the most famous of antislavery poets, John Greenleaf Whitter, and the very popular Lydia Huntley Sigourney, to show how both of these writers made universal human dignity central to their poetic projects, as well as showing how William Wells Brown made the popularizing tendencies in his novels analogous to his work as an editor of poetry in The Anti-Slavery Harp. The fourth chapter explores two poets, one on each side of the Atlantic, James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who positioned their antislavery poetry in relation to the long history of developing freedoms in New England, calling on the descendants of New England Puritans to live up to ethical ideals in keeping with the times. Lowell in particular calls for a morality that adapts past principles to the demands of the present, rather than allowing reverence for the past to serve as a brake on moral reforms needed at the present. Chapter 5 pairs two influential women, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances E. W. Harper, both of whom reinterpreted their own religious inheritance in order to expand their concepts of rights and freedom. Stowe is not often thought of as a poet, but her poem “Caste and Christ” offers a recasting of traditional (non-Quaker) Christian theology that is consistently antislavery. Harper, meanwhile, represents a sort of culmination of religious antislavery poetry across an impressive range of poetic forms and topics, and her post–Civil War poetry also captures the way that antislavery poetry could adapt to the present of the Reconstruction era in order to bear witness to the continuing injustices associated with racial discrimination in the later nineteenth century. In chapter 6 I take up three poets who capture questions of equality and the arc of American history on a grand scale. The African American poet James Monroe Whitfield has been compared to Walt Whitman in the ambition of his poetic project, and Herman Melville’s collection Battle-Pieces provides a useful alternative to the nationalism of Whitman’s Drum-Taps, and so I consider how the issue of universal human dignity and equality provide a framework for one poet (Whitfield) whose work is centrally focused on race and poetry and two poets (Melville and Whitman) who are not often grouped with antislavery poetry, but who express deep affinities with the

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racial egalitarianism in antislavery work. I conclude with a discussion of how W. E. B. DuBois carried on and extended the antislavery tradition in verse with his own poetry of witness from the early twentieth century. Throughout, I explore how white and Black poets both drew upon a shared set of principles that emphasized both a perennial commitment to equality and the way in which this commitment must grow and develop with the times in order to manifest the “present valor” for which Lowell called in “The Present Crisis.” Antislavery poetry matters now, most fundamentally, because the injustices that this poetry was written to contest still have not been vanquished. This body of work also matters because it shows that poetry can speak to matters of morality and truth, a reality that has often been acknowledged but that runs counter to the way in which poetry has often been understood and taught since the Modernist period. In seeking to understand the function of antislavery poetry in the years running up to the US Civil War, we gain added insight into the role that poetry can continue to play in our own fraught reality. As Lowell argued, poetry’s power derives in part from its ability to speak to new time periods and situations, and this aspect of antislavery poetry in particular has become manifest in recent years.

1: Anglo-American Poetry, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Haitian Revolution in United States Poetry

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of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems in Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States (1837) and in the collection of antislavery verse in his collected works assembled in 1888 is about William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of The Liberator and perhaps the United States’ most influential white abolitionist, the second, and much longer, poem in the portion of Whittier’s collected works dedicated to antislavery poetry is devoted to the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. Especially given that Whittier was the most popular of antislavery poets from the 1830s to the 1850s in the United States, what Whittier’s poem on Toussaint indicates is how crucial poetry about the Caribbean is for understanding the development and form of antislavery poetry in the nineteenth-century United States. In this chapter I work across a range of transatlantic antislavery poetry as I examine the role that Haiti and the Caribbean played in the antislavery literary imagination. Beginning with poetry by William Cowper, Hannah More, and Ann Yearsley from the British side of the Atlantic and focusing particularly on James Montgomery’s antislavery epic The West Indies, the chapter proceeds through representations of slavery in the Caribbean in the poetry of Philip Freneau and John Greenleaf Whittier and shows how crucial the history and representation of slavery in the Caribbean is to understanding the US antislavery movement. Appropriately, given the transatlantic context for much antislavery discourse, this chapter takes as its primary focus James Montgomery, a British poet who has largely been neglected in canonical accounts of British literature, even as the words of his most popular poems are more broadly familiar than many of the most revered examples of canonical British Romantic poetry. Montgomery is especially important because of the association of his work in The West Indies with the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, thus forming a bridge between late eighteenth-century British antislavery poetry and the efflorescence of antislavery poetry in the United States from the 1830s on. lthough the first

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James Montgomery’s The West Indies: Slavery, Emancipation, Empire, and the Writing of History James Montgomery is nearly forgotten as a poet, but his verse remains with us. Although his name is not immediately familiar from literature classrooms, he is the author of one of the most frequently sung Christmas carols in the English-speaking world, “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” During his own life-time his commitment to the antislavery cause in Great Britain and his personal experience of life in the Caribbean led him to publish an ambitious piece of historical narrative verse, The West Indies, in celebration of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Montgomery is not traditionally thought of as an American writer, and he is certainly not a writer from the United States, but The West Indies captures something of the complexity of racialization in early nineteenth-century antislavery poetry and the importance of the Caribbean for understanding the struggle over slavery across the English-speaking world, including in the United States. Joselyn M. Almeida, one of the few critics to write about The West Indies, emphasizes that Montgomery offers a way to thinking of transatlantic Romanticism that goes beyond a simple exchange between England and North America, and Almeida argues that Montgomery in particular “attempts to circumvent epic conventions by not narrating the story from the conqueror’s point of view” (Almeida, 151). Cassidy Pickens, meanwhile, writing in 2017, explores how Montgomery uses slave motherhood as a means of framing the moral case against slavery and of outlining “the necroeconomic organization of Atlantic capital,” thus exposing the broader economic context in which slavery operated (Pickens, 603, 610). Montgomery also shared important commonalities in religious and cultural terms with early critics of slavery in the United States, as he was a devout Moravian as a result of having attended a Moravian school as an orphan (Ellis, 77–78). The Moravians, like other Protestants of German descent and Pietistic or Anabaptist religious inclination, were among the earliest white inhabitants of the Americas to speak out forcefully against slavery. This history of antislavery activity by Protestants of central European ancestry or of English adherents to beliefs associated with the continent has played a modest role in twenty-first-century discussions of the antislavery movement, but nineteenth-century figures like Lydia Huntley Sigourney (discussed in a later chapter) devoted considerable attention to the Moravian Church, its founder Count Zinzendorf, and its role in the antislavery movement and in the missionary movements that helped to shape the self-understanding of the early United States in Zinzendorf and Other Poems (1836). By the time Montgomery wrote his antislavery epic, there was already a significant body of antislavery protest poetry that had served as a verbal

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weapon in the fight against the slave trade, and there had also been a significant body of work that, while it criticized certain elements of the slave trade, ultimately defended slavery rather than rejecting it. Poetry as a genre was not always on the right side of the greatest moral questions of the time. Among the earliest poems to document slavery in the Caribbean was James Grainger’s long poem The Sugar Cane, which as Marcus Wood has noted, “has often been cited as the worst long poem in English” (Wood, 7). Rather than morally chastising the practice of slavery, Grainger offered advice on how to run an efficient slave plantation and where to find slaves well suited to the sugar industry: But, if the labours of the field demand Thy chief attention; and the ambrosial cane Thou long’st to see, with spiry frequence, shade Many an acre; planter, chuse the slave, Who sails from barren climes; where art alone, Offspring of rude necessity, compels The sturdy native, or to plant the soil, Or stem vast rivers for his daily food. Such are the children of the Golden Coast; Such the Papaws, of negroes far the best: And such the various tribes, that skirt the shore From rapid Volta to the distant Rey.  (Wood, 11–12)

Wood’s widely shared judgment of the poem’s lack of poetic quality seems more than apt given the plodding meter and tired diction, but the moral sentiments are still more repellent: rather than seeking to create empathy towards those who are suffering under slavery, the poem offers a how-to guide in support of the slave trade, advising planters which regions produce profitable slaves and which produce those who are likely to rebel. Notably, Grainger reinforces the idea, developed decades earlier in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, that people abducted from the Cormantyn region of Ghana were especially likely to revolt against their enslavers. Grainger offers no sense that such revolt might be justified, however, nor any sense of outrage at the violence and exploitation of the slave system in the West Indies. A different aspect of Behn’s Oroonoko is revisited in an early attack on the slave trade, Thomas Day’s and John Bicknell’s “The Dying Slave.” The poem offers the story of an African man who planned to marry a white woman, but was taken on board a slave ship in order to be forcibly shipped to the West Indies and sold. He committed suicide rather than allowing himself to be sent to the West Indies, and the poem is supposed to be the letter that he wrote to his intended wife to explain his

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actions. Here the emphasis is very much on the creation of empathy for the enslaved, and it is no wonder that Olaudah Equiano made use of the poem in his 1789 Interesting Narrative, which helped to establish the form of the slave narrative in the transatlantic world. The speaker makes a powerful case for why death is to be preferred to West Indian slavery: And better in th’ untimely grave to rot, The world and all its cruelties forgot, Than, dragged once more beyond the western main, To groan beneath some dastard planter’s chain, Where my poor countrymen in bondage wait The slow enfranchisement of the lingering fate. Oh! My heart sinks, my dying eyes o’erflow, When Memory paints the picture of their woe! For I have seen them, ere the dawn of day, Rous’d by the lash, begin their cheerless way; Greeting with groans unwelcome morn’s return, While rage and shame their gloomy bosoms burn; And, chiding every hour the slow-pac’d sun, Endure their toils till all his race was run; No eye to mark their sufferings with a tear, No friend to comfort and no hope to cheer.  (Wood, 38–39)

The poem is highly mannered, but it conveys genuine emotion as it describes the dehumanizing effects of slavery: the violence, the overwork, the hopelessness, and the lack of human sympathy that characterized the lives of the enslaved. As a result, it continued to be quoted and excerpted by antislavery writers for decades. William Cowper, who like Montgomery was a writer of hymns as well as more secular poetry, was perhaps the most influential of Montgomery’s predecessors among antislavery poets. As with Montgomery’s Christmas carol, many readers in later decades and centuries made their first acquaintance with Cowper via his hymn “There is a fountain fill’d with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins,” which is a meditation of the power of forgiveness as mediated through Christian (and specifically Calvinist) theological perspectives. Cowper was the author of multiple satirical antislavery poems along with his hymns. Notably, he wrote about slavery in his most ambitious and widely admired long poem in blank verse, The Task, where he takes slavery as the leading example of human selfishness and lack of sympathy for other human beings as part of a broader essayistic disquisition on human nature and experience. Cowper starts the second book of The Task, “The Time-Piece,” with a meditation on injustice that starts with war as a general metonym for human cruelty, and then quickly turns to slavery as the most representative particular instance of this cruelty:

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My soul is sick with ev’ry day’s report Of wrong and outrage with which the earth is filled, There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart, It does not feel for man. The natural bond Of brotherhood is sev’red as the flax The falls asunder at the touch of fire.  (Wood, 86–87)

This overview diagnoses a basic problem in human relations: a lack of fellow feeling is the source of war and of all sorts of “wrong and outrage,” and the ideal of human brotherhood and sisterhood, to which we pay lip service, is so fragile as to be meaningless. Cowper’s indictment here crosses the variety of ways in which humans fail to care for each other and so are prone to exploitation and violence, and Cowper than narrows this general complaint down to the specific instance of racialized slavery: He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not colored like his own, and, having pow’r T’inforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.  (Wood, 87)

It is notable that although Cowper moves from general violence and injustice to the specific injustices of slavery, he makes racialized slavery and the racial judgments that accompany it the epitome of such violence and injustice. This choice may not seem like a choice at all to us today, so closely have race and slavery become intertwined since the late eighteenth century, but Cowper could have taken other routes. There was in the Mediterranean world, for example, substantial practice of slavery that was less racialized than slavery in the Americas, as the North African Barbary States tied slavery more closely to religion than to race. In Russia, the practice of serfdom, which Herman Melville would tie closely to American practices of slavery in Moby-Dick, had family resemblances with chattel slavery that stopped with the matter of race, as in chapter 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” in Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Ishmael asks “What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law?” (397). And yet Cowper chose here to make the racial aspect of slavery in the European colonies in the Americas central to his discussion of human injustice writ large. For Cowper, the lack of ability to recognize the divine image in those of a different phenotype was the most representative instance of human injustice and inhumanity that he could identify. This sense of racialized slavery as crucial to Cowper’s sense of human injustice is sharpened a few lines later: Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys; And worse than all, and most to be deplor’d

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As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot, Chains him, tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.  (Wood, 86–87)

Cowper here stresses the physical violence of slavery and the way in which contempt for the bodies of the enslaver’s “brother[s]” becomes an excuse to torture those bodies in ways that would be unacceptable when applied to non-human animals. Cowper’s indignation here is evident, but there is also an insight into the fundamental constitution of racism, for which Cowper does not have a word; but he certainly has grasped the concept. Cowper’s usage here would help to shape later poetry, as Herman Melville’s reflection on “man’s foulest crime,” discussed in chapter 6, has a likely source here in Cowper, as John Bryant has pointed out in Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley, 2021). Cowper then turns to a direct appeal to conscience, rooted in fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and the centrality of brotherhood to his understanding of what humanity itself entails. He asks: Then what is man? And what man seeing this, And having human feelings, does not blush And hang his head to think himself a man?

Cowper answers the question directly with a statement of his own ethical position in response to the violent injustice he has just described: I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble while I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d. No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s Just estimation prized above all price, I had much rather be myself the slave, And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.  (Wood, 88)

The intense emotion in these lines suggests why Marcus Wood has characterized Cowper as having “an almost pathological desire to sympathize with victims” (81). Cowper’s religious investments as captured in his hymns certainly are allied to this desire, but there is also something more here than just an attempt to feel the right emotions: Cowper seems genuinely to be weighing the moral cost of being the perpetrator of an injustice against the pain of victimhood, and finding that he would prefer the latter.

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Cowper’s next turn is to a subject that would increasingly become a matter of self-congratulation for British poets over the next half-century (and particularly so in Montgomery’s reflections on slavery and freedom in The West Indies). Lord Mansfield’s judgment in the Somerset case had established in 1772 that an enslaved person who had come to England could not be forcibly returned to slavery, and so effectively, enslaved people who had come to England could be considered free as long as they remained within the country. Cowper celebrates this association of Britain with freedom, but he also suggests that this principle must be extended and cannot just be limited to the British homeland: We have no slaves at home.—Then why abroad? And they themselves once ferried o’er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loos’d. Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.  (Wood, 88)

Cowper blends patriotism with a sense of the universality of freedom here, advocating that Britain itself become an abolitionist power. This identity of Britain with freedom would become central to British abolitionist poetry, and the idea that slavery is legally impermissible in England would become grounds for Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, among others, to point to England as a land of freedom, as opposed to the persistence of slavery in the United States. Antislavery US poets would thus participate in a transatlantic antislavery poetic tradition that took in European empires in the Caribbean and slavery and freedom in European metropolitan centers of empire. Hannah More and Ann Yearsley were likewise among the poets who inveighed most powerfully against the slave trade in the years leading up to the abolition of the slave trade and Montgomery’s celebratory poem on the event. Like Day and Bicknell before her, More drew upon early representations of slavery in fiction and drama like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaptation of Behn’s prose romance. Despite the condescending racism that characterizes her work at large, More makes a notable argument for extending empathy across the color line in her poem “The Black Slave Trade”:

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Perish th’ illiberal thought which would debase The native genius of the sable race! Perish the proud philosophy, which sought To rob them of the pow’rs of equal thought! Does then th’ immortal principle within Change with the casual colour of the skin? Does Matter govern Spirit? or is mind Degraded by the form to which ’tis join’d?  (Wood, 103)

This opening rejects the racist belief that intellect tracks onto skin color, and although this rejection can feel like a fairly modest insight when viewed from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, in fact it states its case in resistance to broadly held norms among late-eighteenth-­century European philosophers. Figures as prominent as David Hume and Immanuel Kant had argued that African and Asian people were incapable of matching the intellectual capacity of Europeans, and Hume went so far as to argue that Africans and Europeans were of different species. More’s universalistic ethos, while falling short of a truly egalitarian understanding of race, nevertheless offered a genuine alternative to the dominant variants on the philosophy of race in her time. More’s argument continues on frankly affective grounds: No: they have heads to think, and hearts to feel, And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal For they have keen affections, kind desires, Love strong as death, and active patriot fires; All the rude energy, the fervid flame, Of high-soul’d passion, and ingenuous shame: Strong, but luxuriant virtues boldly shoot From the wild vigour of a savage root. Nor weak their sense of honour’s proud control, For Pride is virtue in a Pagan soul; A sense of worth, a conscience of desert, A high, unbroken haughtiness of heart; That self-same stuff which erst proud empires sway’d, Of which the conquerors of the world were made Capricious fate of men! that very pride In Afric scourg’d, in Rome was deify’d.  (Wood, 103)

There is clearly significant cultural chauvinism in these lines: More describes the “zeal” of Africans as “erring,” and her invocation of the “wild vigour of a savage root” is clearly patronizing. At the same time, there is a genuinely relativizing instinct at work here, as more makes comparisons between contemporary African culture and the Roman culture that provides models for the Neo-Classical movement in literature and

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the arts. This pattern holds through much antislavery writing: little of it represents a thoroughly egalitarian understanding of race and culture, but much of it depends on a comparative approach that calls attention to the shared humanity of Europeans and Africans. The moral implications of More’s abolitionism have been sharply contested by scholars: Kerry Sinanan has recently argued that the contradictions in More’s work “need to be viewed, not as evidence of hypocrisy which limits abolitionism with the interests of the ruling class, but as part of a historically specific, cultural shift when the antislavery movement of the Romantic period, as [Charles] Taylor argued, blended ‘theistic and secular moral sources’” (Sinanan, 139). In taking this position, Sinanan joined Ann K. Mellor and Ann Stott in their defense of More’s commitment to a genuine antislavery impulse informed by her evangelicalism, as opposed to Moira Ferguson’s critique of More’s religious abolitionist arguments. Sinanan’s line of argument, as she points out, is also congruent with David Brion Davis’s defense of British abolitionism in such studies as The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006) against Eric Williams’s critique of abolitionism as motivated primarily by economic self-interest in Capitalism and Slavery (1944). A similar impulse appears in Ann Yearsley’s antislavery “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,” with a particular emphasis on the irony inherent in Christian slave trading. Yearsley offers a premonition of what Frederick Douglass in the mid-nineteenth century would call “scorching irony,” as she pictures Christian slaveholders in truly diabolical terms: Behold that Christian! See what horrid joy Lights up his mood features, while he grasps The wished-for gold, purchase of human blood! Away thou seller of mankind! Bring on Thy daughter to this market! bring thy wife! Thine aged mother, though of little worth, With all thy ruddy boys!  (Wood, 123)

Yearsley offers a catalog that intensifies throughout in its bitter ironies: by starting with the suggestion that a Christian slaver would sell his daughter and wife in prostitution would seem to leave little room to heighten the rhetoric, but Yearsley presses her point throughout the poem, arguing that nothing prevents those who would sell the children of others from selling their own children. Her central point is a religious one, as she accuses those who participate in the slave trade, not just of condemning their victims to a hell on earth but also of literally condemning those they enslave to hell in the afterlife, but denying them the possibility of Christian conversion. Yearsley further emphasizes that British Protestants

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compare unfavorably to the Muslim rivals, in that conversion is grounds for emancipation in North Africa, whereas the British still enslave those who have converted to Christianity. Spanish Catholics share this trait with British Protestants, but Yearsley suggests that even they are more humane in terms of the next life than her compatriots, as they at least baptize enslaved people, rather than outright avoiding their conversion. Yearsley thus establishes an important strand to the religious critique of slavery: if profit is more important than conversion, the enslavement of non-­Christian peoples may be condemning them to hell both in this life and the next. As Brycchan Carey notes, Yearsley has rarely been read for her own sake, as opposed to being a foil for More, but Carey makes the case that “insofar as her depiction of violent resistance to slavery was concerned, it seems probable that close reading of the many hundreds of antislavery poems that followed hers will reveal that she did inspire others” (Carey, 104). It seems worthwhile to follow Carey’s lead in considering the ways in which Yearsley could shape the development of antislavery poetry, in the United States as well as Great Britain, rather than assuming that her work formed a dead end. This emphasis on the connection between enslavement and damnation begins to appear in US antislavery writing early on: Royall Tyler’s novel The Algerine Captive emphasizes the contrast between Muslim and Christian approaches to slavery when the title character, Updike Underhill, is confronted by a Muslim cleric who is himself a convert from Greek Orthodox Christianity: The Mussulmen never yet forced a man to adopt their faith. . . . It is true, they then and we now, when a slave pronounces the ineffable creed, immediately knock off his fetters and receive him as a brother. . . . We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert. (135)

This observation is so wounding to Underhill’s confidence in his own faith that he retreats from further conversations with the Mollah (as the cleric is titled in Tyler’s novel). For both Yearsley and Tyler, the Christian practice of slavery is experienced as an intolerable irony. In this way, patterns laid out in British antislavery poetry come to shape the basic design of antislavery writing in the United States, and nineteenth-century poets from George Moses Horton to Herman Melville would find models for their writing in earlier antislavery and anti-slave-trade movements. In terms of both scale and its location in the western hemisphere, James Montgomery’s The West Indies, written in celebration of the victory of early antislavery activism, would offer an anatomy of sorts of antislavery

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writing from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and model the complications that would emerge in later antislavery discourse. Taken as a whole, The West Indies conveys both moral indignation at the atrocity of slavery and a chauvinistic British nationalism that oozes self-satisfaction. The volume begins with an epigraph from St. Paul’s Epistle to Philemon, a hotly contested New Testament text, which was used by pro-slavery advocates as an instance of the toleration of slavery in the Christian scriptures, and by antislavery activists as a biblical brief for the abolition of slavery. The lines quoted capture something of Montgomery’s positioning throughout the volume: “Receive him forever, not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (1). The quotation clearly points to an end to slavery and a beginning to more egalitarian racial relations, but it also accommodates the idea that abolition was an idea the time for which had come: like many post–Civil War writers from the United States, the goal for Montgomery was to celebrate the ending of the slave trade without seeking too stern a justice for those who had been guilty of carrying it out and colluding in its maintenance. Montgomery’s long poem illustrates the centrality of the Caribbean in antislavery discourse, and it is no coincidence that one of the fiercest antislavery poems by a white writer from the United States, Philip Freneau’s “To Sir Toby” addresses the matter of slavery in the Caribbean and that writers across the Atlantic from William Wordsworth to John Greenleaf Whittier found in Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution a model for freedom and resistance. The opening of The West Indies is straightforwardly patriotic and triumphal. Great Britain is the hero of the piece, and the end of the slave trade is portrayed as a magnanimous gift from an empire once distinguished by its power and its morality. Montgomery writes in jubilant heroic couplets: “Thy chains are broken, Africa, be free!” Thus saith the island-empress of the sea; Thus saith Britannia—O, ye winds and wave! Waft the glad tidings to the land of slaves; Proclaim on Guinea’s coast, by Gambia’s side, And as far as Niger rolls his eastern tide, Through radiant realms, beneath the burning zone Where Europe’s curse is felt, her name unknown, Thus saith Britannia, empress of the sea, “Thy chains are broken, Africa, be free!”  (3–4)

For twenty-first century readers, this formula is easily recognizable: a dependable figure in discussions of race relations in the United States is that of the “white savior,” as described in academic studies of race and

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racism and social media posts alike. The model is of a figure raced as white bestowing liberty upon a presumably grateful Black recipient, and the effect is broadly offensive in its occlusion of Black agency. As of this writing, precisely this sort of condescension has provided the source for calls to remove memorials to Theodore Roosevelt in New York City and Abraham Lincoln in Washington DC, and the aversion that many twentyfirst century readers are likely to feel in reading Montgomery’s lines is fully justified. Readers who persist with Montgomery’s poem will find a more complicated, and interesting, approach to the antislavery cause than reflexive nationalistic self-satisfaction and self-celebration. Montgomery launches immediately into a narrative of New World history that, if it is presumptively pro-British, also calls attention forcefully and directly to the brutality of European colonization and of the slave trade. Montgomery begins by celebrating the technology that led to the growth of oceanic travel and trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries: Long lay the ocean paths from man conceal’d; Light came from heaven—the magnet was reveal’d, A surer star to guide the seaman’s eye, Than the pale glory of the northern sky.  (4)

Montgomery offers the technological progress that allowed sailors to navigate the oceans by day or night, in varying kinds of weather, as the moment that unifies the world, that for humanity “Makes the waves his heritage, the world his home.” This is recognizable as an early celebration of the geographical interconnectedness that in our own century is described as “globalization” and that offers both the promise of closer connections among nations and peoples and extended possibilities for exploitation and cruelty. In this context Christopher Columbus emerges as the sort of figure who will reappear in Walt Whitman’s “The Prayer of Columbus” later in the century: a heroic figure whose legacy has been distorted. More accurately, he is seen as the figure who inaugurates a history of dispossession and enslavement. Among Montgomery’s encomiums to Columbus are the following: His spirit brooded o’er the Atlantic main; When sudden, as creation burst from nought, Sprang a new world through his stupendous thought, Light, order, beauty!—while his mind explored The unveiling mystery, his heart adored; Where’er sublime imagination trod, He heard the voice, he saw the face of God.  (5)

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Columbus here becomes a consensus figure: because he does not belong specifically to the Spanish nationality, he avoids being tainted by the Black Legend, which vilified Spain as being a distinctively cruel imperial power, and which Montgomery espouses vigorously. Indeed, Columbus appears as a godlike figure in his own right, mirroring the activity of the creator deity in Genesis whose spirit moves over the face of the deep, before Montgomery’s speaker reassures his readers that Columbus devoutly worships the Christian deity. This near apotheosis of Columbus recalls the broader eighteenth-century tendency in the Anglophone world to imagine people who are considered explorers or scientific inventors as mirrors of a divine Creator: Alexander Pope famously wrote regarding Isaac Newton: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night:/ God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light” (Pope, 808). How much this model does indeed prefigure the apotheosis of Columbus can be seen in Walt Whitman’s dramatic monologue in Columbus’s voice, in “The Prayer of Columbus,” where Whitman ventriloquizes Columbus as he reflects: Thou knowest my years entire, my life, My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely; Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth, Thou knowest my manhood’s solemn and visionary meditations, Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to Thee, Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly kept them, Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee, In shackles, prison’d, in disgrace, repining not, Accepting all from Thee, as duly come from Thee. All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee, My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee, Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee.  (Whitman, 540)

Whitman’s poem illustrates the staying power of the version of Columbus that Montgomery embraces: a visionary Christian mystic who can be separated quite easily from the grisly history of New World conquest and the related legacy of African slavery through eighteenth and nineteenthcentury mythologizing. If Columbus appears as a heroic figure in Montgomery’s poem, he becomes a foil for the New World Spanish Empire, which is described in the most negative possible terms, reflecting the way in which for two centuries British colonizers defined their own endeavors against those of Spanish conquerors and Catholic missionaries. Columbus becomes an honorary Englishman in this account, valuing freedom, peace, and cultural

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exchange over the acquisition of territory and wealth (that neither Columbus nor the British Empire are described accurately in Mont­ gomery’s poem will be readily evident). Montgomery’s account of the violence of Spanish colonialism is scathing. Rejecting Columbus’s “visionary hope” of a peaceful world, . . . rapacious Spain Follow’d her hero’s triumph o’er the main, Her hardy sons by fields of battle tried, Where Moor and Christian desperately died, A rabid race, fanatically bold, And steel’d to cruelty by the lust of gold, Traversed the waves, the unknown world explored, The cross their standard, but their faith the sword; Their steps were graves, o’er prostrate lands they trod; They worshipp’d Mammon while they vow’d to God.  (Montgomery, 9)

Montgomery captures concisely the leading elements in the Black Legend here: Spanish perfidy and Catholic belief are tied together, and Montgomery makes clear that, at least in the case of the Spanish empire, he sees Christianity as a ruse to acquire material gain. Each description of the Spanish empire emphasizes that it constitutes a perversion of Christianity: the cross that appears on the flags of empire-builders only disguises the unchristian and underlying reality of the sword, a metonymic representation of brute force. In critiquing Spanish conquest, Montgomery can offer a rebuke of indigenous removal and African enslavement that parallels the denunciation by the Pequot orator William Apess of Indian Removal and slavery later in the century. Apess tied the expulsion of indigenous Americans to the enslavement of Africans in his biting speech, “An Indian’s Mirror for the White Man,” and Montgomery offers a similarly unified critique here: Give me to sing, in melancholy strains, Of Charib martyrdoms and Negro chains; One race by tyrants rooted from the earth, One doomed to slavery by taint of birth  (Montgomery, 10–11)

Montgomery thus highlights the connection between the genocide in the Caribbean of indigenous people and the enslavement of African people. In this way, even as he offers nationalistic propaganda for Great Britain and its empire, he also acknowledges fundamental injustices in the exploitation by European powers of Africa and the Americas. Intensifying this acknowledgment, Montgomery establishes a characteristically Romantic opposition between natural freedom and the unnatural condition of slavery, writing “NATURE FREE  / Proclaims that MAN was born for

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Liberty” (Montgomery, 11). In this way Montgomery makes nature the underlying source of shared human liberty and equality, across racial, national, and geographic lines. The conclusion of Montgomery’s account of the conquest of the Caribbean underscores the reality of genocide: “Down to the dust the Charib people pass’d; / Like autumn foliage withering in the blast: / The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor’s rod, / And left a blank among the works of God” (Montgomery, 15). Against this backdrop of genocide, Montgomery narrates the history of the enslavement of African men and women in the New World, again with an emphasis on Spain’s role as villain: Thus on the Charib shore the tyrant stood, Thus cast his eyes with fury o’er the tide, And far below the gloomy gulph descried Devoted Africa: he burst away, And with a yell of transport grasp’d his prey.  (Montgomery, 19)

Spanish tyranny and violence in the Caribbean thus become the foundation of New World slavery, and Montgomery is able to evade the responsibility that Britain has for New World slavery by focusing the blame on Spain. This shift is plainly ahistorical, as Britain and its Protestant co-­ religionists in the Netherlands were early and enthusiastic participants in the slave trade. Montgomery proceeds by means of a birds-eye tour of Africa, cataloguing fauna (giraffes, leopards, hyenas), landscape features (deserts, forest, and rivers), and the luxuriant “fruits and flowers” of the African continent (Montgomery, 20). Against this backdrop, Montgomery defines African people as being “wild” as a result of their surrounds, but also argues strenuously for a shared humanity: “Is he not Man, though knowledge never shed / Her quickening beams on his neglected head? / Is he not Man, though sweet religion’s voice / Ne’er bade the mourner in his God rejoice?” (Montgomery, 22). Montgomery’s argument cuts both ways: he accepts a racist depiction of Africa as wild and uncultured, but he argues for a fundamental shared humanity rather than for some sort of essential difference between African and European people. If his view that the difference between African and European society is one of education is condescending and ignores the rich civilizations of West Africa, it also suggests that the societies are likely to converge as they are exposed to common influences. This model: a bold acknowledgment of shared humanity marred by racist condescension, appears in a great deal of white-authored antislavery poetry in the Americas and beyond. Montgomery then offers a truly heart-rending catalogue of the means by which free African men and women were abducted into slavery, providing an array of horrors that can only be described as gothic:

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—The valiant seized, in peril-daring fight; The weak surprised in nakedness and night; Subjects by mercenary despots sold; Victims of justice prostitute for gold; Brothers by brothers; friends by friends betray’d; Snared in her lover’s arms the trusting maid; The faithful wife by her false lord estranged; For one wild cup of drunken bliss exchanged; From the brute-mother’s knee, the infant boy, The father resting at his father’s tree, Doom’d by the son to die beyond the sea: All bonds of kindred, law, alliance broke, All ranks, all nations crouching to the yoke.  (Montgomery, 25)

The picture here is of apocalyptic destruction and social disintegration: the equation of the value of human life and labor with the profit that can be extracted from it has divided families and societies, destroyed all bonds of trust and affection. Montgomery highlights here the damage done to African society by the slave trade as well as the anguish experienced by the abducted and enslaved. In formal terms, Montgomery’s use of the catalogue as his preferred means of documenting the cruelty of slavery resembles Walt Whitman’s use of the catalogue to create sweeping vistas that take in nearly the entirety of the North American continent in Leaves of Grass. Crucial to Montgomery’s narrative of slavery is the dehumanization of European nations, which he catalogues in the following stanzas. He has portrayed Spain as bearing the greatest responsibility for the slave trade, but he moves from there across the European continent: he begins with Portugal, Spain’s neighbor and initial competitor in the colonization of the globe, and then he proceeds through Holland, Denmark, and France, concluding with Britannia, she who scathed the crest of Spain, And won the trident scepter of the main, When to the wind and ravening tide, She gave the huge Armada’s scatter’d pride, Smit by the thunder-wielding hand that hurl’d Her vengeance round the wave-encircled world; Britannia shared the glory and the guilt, By her were slavery’s island-altars built, And fed with human victims, while the cries Of blood, demanding vengeance from the skies, Assail’d her traders groveling hearts in vain, —Hearts dead to sympathy, alive to gain,

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Hard from impunity, with avarice cold, Sordid as earth, insensible as gold.  (Montgomery, 28)

Montgomery’s turn to Britain here deserves some unpacking. He begins by celebrating a central event in England’s national mythos: its defeat of the Spanish Armada during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He then suggests that the military defeat of Spain transferred, with the glory of victory, the guilt of slavery and colonization to the victorious British, and he acknowledges that Britain has itself taken over Spain’s place as a builder of altars to slavery and human exploitation. Some of this self-flagellation is disingenuous, as British privateers like Sir Francis Drake had been deeply implicated in the slave trade before England overtook Spain as an imperial power, but it is noteworthy that Montgomery acknowledges Great Britain’s share of guilt for the slave trade, and he considers that slavery dehumanizes the master class even as it oppresses the enslaved. In part 3 of his poem, Montgomery builds on his recognition of a shared humanity between Africans and Europeans in part 2. He does so with a curious feint at the start of the section, as he lavishes praise upon a place, the superiority of which every person must recognize: There is a land, of every land the pride, Beloved by heaven o’er all the world beside; Where brighter suns dispense serener light, And milder moons emparadise the night.  (Montgomery, 31)

This opening would seem to be laying the groundwork for acknowledging the greatness of Montgomery’s own British homeland, but as he proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that Montgomery is arguing for a wider vision, concluding with his identification of the idyllic land of which he speaks: “Where shall that land, that spot of earth be found?” Art thou a man?—a patriot?—look around; O, thou shalt find, howe’er they footsteps roam, That land thy country, that spot thy home.  (Montgomery, 33)

Montgomery acknowledges that no narrative that suggests that the abducted Africans were better off in the Americas was tenable, and he does so by emphasizing a shared human devotion to the concept of home. After a tour of the world that parallels his tour of Africa in the previous section of the poem (concluding with his own home island “Albion”), he then focuses his attention on the love of African men and women for their home continent:

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And is the Negro outlaw’d from his birth? Is he alone a stranger upon the earth? Is there no shed, whose peeping roof appears So lovely that it fills his eyes with tears?  (Montgomery, 39)

This human devotion to home, Montgomery makes clear, applies to all human beings, African as well as European, and so those who have been removed from their ancestral homes and enslaved have experienced the same sort of indignity and violation that he himself would have experienced had he been abducted from his native Britain. The case that Montgomery builds throughout his poem is that beneath superficial differences in appearance, human beings from all continents share a fundamental brotherhood and sisterhood. Structurally, Montgomery uses core ideals, like that of home here, to build a sense of shared human experience, physical, emotional, and spiritual, throughout his poem. Montgomery’s indignation intensifies as he considers the Middle Passage, providing a catalogue of the violent means of death that enslaved Africans experienced on the transatlantic voyage, and then reflecting on the bitter irony that those who had died could reasonably be described as being lucky. Montgomery first described, in painful detail, the sufferings of those who died as sea: Myriads of slave, that perish’d on the way, From age to age the shark’s appointed prey, By livid plagues, by lingering tortures slain, Or headlong plunged alive into the main Shall rise in judgment from their gloomy beds, And call down judgment on their murderers heads.  (Montgomery, 39)

The horror of being food for sharks intensifies as Montgomery details the tortures and plagues experienced before death, and he emphatically insists that these are crimes that cry out for justice. Here Montgomery’s language mirrors that of one of the most influential early narratives of slavery and freedom, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, where Equiano writes about the desire of the enslaved to escape to death at sea, reflecting “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs” (Equiano, 73) and it prefigures Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, with its Gothic reflections on relationship between sharks and slave ships: Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt

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down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. (Melville, 293)

Melville’s treatment of sharks and the slave trade here is part of a larger comment on the violence that can be found in nature, but it appears right in the middle of a passage that leads into a larger consideration of race in the nineteenth-century United States: the second mate Stubb’s dialogue with the African American cook Fleece. In addition to the direct reference to the slave trade, Melville presents the sharks themselves as counterparts in the animal world to the inequality and violence driven by the slave trade in the Atlantic world. Montgomery is not so much a direct influence on Melville here as he is a compiler of antislavery rhetoric from the anti-slave trade movement: along with Equiano, Anthony Benezet called attention to sharks in his antislavery writings (Foner, 19; see also Benezet). Having established the brutality of the voyage itself, Montgomery offered the dark truth that those who survived were still less fortunate, emphasizing that death at sea would have been a release compared to the hellish environment experienced by the enslaved on land once they were delivered to the West Indian colonies: Yet small the number, and of fortune blest, Of those who on the stormy deep found rest, Weighed with unremember’d millions more, That ‘scaped the sea, to perish on the shore, By the slow pangs of solitary care, The earth-devouring anguish of despair, The broken heart, which kindness never heals The home-sick passion which the negro feels

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When toiling, fainting in the land of canes, His spirit wanders to his native plains.  (Montgomery, 39–40)

Montgomery’s argument in these lines is that death is preferable to the loss of liberty, and that the sense of being torn from one’s home and forcibly relocated can be a still more brutal torture than that faced by enslaved people on the Middle Passage. Crucially, Montgomery builds his indictment of slavery around affect: Black and white people share the same sentiments and yearnings, and so emotional suffering that would be unbearable for British subjects who were forcibly exiled and enslaved are similarly unbearable for enslaved Africans. As if to underscore this point, Montgomery turns to the enslavement of European Christians in North Africa, which he presents as a divine judgment on the sins of slavery that European Christians were committing: “No, thou hast thy vengeance—From thy northern shores  / Sallied the lawless corsairs of the Moors,  / And back on Europe’s guilty nations hurl’d  / Thy wrongs and sufferings in the sister world.” (Montgomery, 45). Drawing upon the Yearsley’s religious comparisons discussed above, Montgomery’s argument here resembles those made by Benjamin Franklin and Royall Tyler at the end of the eighteenth century. Tyler’s The Algerine Captive provides a bitingly ironic picture of a North American ship’s doctor, Updike Underhill, who goes from serving on a slave ship transporting Africans to the Americas to being enslaved himself in North Africa, coming to realize that the violence that he experienced when he was enslaved by the Barbary Pirates was a less inhuman reflection of the slavery that he was complicit in supporting. The enslavement of Europeans in North Africa has also been used at times in defense of slavery (on the grounds that it is a universal human practice), so when Montgomery uses it to attack the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans, he is making a considered strategic choice. The Haitian Revolution appears only briefly in Montgomery’s poem, but it constitutes the climactic moment in part 3. Despite Montgomery’s broad statements in support of the shared humanity and desire for liberty of Africans and Europeans, his treatment of the Haitian Revolution and of Jamaican resistance to British enslavers is disappointing for twentyfirst-century readers. Montgomery represents resistance to enslavement as a just punishment for the enslavers, but he does little to humanize those who resisted: Tremble, Britannia, while thine islands tell, The appalling mysteries of Obi’s spell, The wild Maroons, impregnable and free, Among the mountain holds of liberty, Sudden as lightning darted on their foe, Seen like the flash, remembered like the blow.

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When Gallia boasts of dread Marengo’s fight, And Hohenlinden’s slaughter-deluged night, Her spirit sinks;—the sinews of the brave, That crippled Europe, sunk before the Slave; The demon-spectres of Domingo rise, And all her triumphs vanish from her eyes.  (Montgomery, 46–47)

Montgomery’s description of the Haitian revolutionaries as demonic and vengeful captures an ongoing problem with many white allies of Black people: as long as the enslaved people of the Caribbean can be described as victims, Montgomery writes about them with exemplary sympathy, but when they take up arms in their own defense, he seems unable to assimilate the reality of African agency. This tendency appears in a great deal of the literature of slavery and freedom, and it is particularly pronounced in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, which blends criticisms of the French and Creole slave systems with dehumanization of formerly enslaved rebels based on the violence of their insurrection. It is noteworthy that this discomfort with violent resistance to enslavement persists in works of the 1850s ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” a tale of slave revolt that functions in part as a critique of a sentimental antislavery stance that sympathizes only with passive victims of slavery, not with canny and valiant rebels against enslavement. Stowe revisited her initial unwillingness to countenance violent resistance to slavery in her second novel Dred, but when she wrote the most influential antislavery novel of her century, she was still unprepared to allow George Harris to fight for his freedom. Montgomery’s empathy with the enslaved is insufficient to allow him to imagine their right to resistance to their oppression. Among the more significant discussions of slave resistance in a British context is William Earle’s Obi, or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, which relates the story of a particularly memorable antislavery revolt in Jamaica with considerable sympathy for the title character. Part 4 of The West Indies turns to a triumphalist narrative of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. Montgomery starts this section of the poem, however, not with a celebration of British legal doctrine or political or military action, but with an account of Moravian missionaries in the Caribbean. A Moravian himself, Montgomery presents the Moravian brethren as the alternative to the violent enslavement of Africans in the New World, as a truly benevolent influence arising from European Protestant Christendom. Montgomery begins part 4 with the plaintive query Was there no mercy, mother of the slave! No friendly hand to succor and to save, While Commerce thus thy captive tribes oppress’d, And lowering Vengeance lingered o’er the west?  (Montgomery, 49)

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An answer comes quickly: enslaved Africans have been graced with “the freedom of the sons of God” from an unlikely source, the story of which Montgomery proceeds to narrate. Montgomery begins his account of the virtues of the Moravians with a narrative of the history of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which he presents as a precursor to the end of slavery. Deploring the “ghostly tyranny of Rome” as expressed in the institutions of the medieval Catholic Church, Montgomery relates that in the midst of persecution “A Christian Israel in the desert fed” (Montgomery, 50). According to Montgomery’s version of Christian history, this “little flock” of gentle believers antedated Martin Luther’s more combative reformation, and they remained as a “faithful remnant” in the midst of the bloody early modern wars of religion. Montgomery shows the Moravians emerging from the period of reformation and religious war as neither Lutheran nor Catholic, but rather as non-violent (and, importantly, non-racist) missionaries to the indigenous peoples of North America and enslaved Africans and their descendants alike. As with later figures like William Apess, Montgomery closely connected the plight of the indigenous peoples of the Americas with the enslaved peoples abducted from Africa: Where roll Ohio’s streams, Missouri’s floods, Beneath the umbrage of eternal woods, The Red Man roam’d, a hunter-warrior wild; On him the everlasting Gospel smiled; His heart was awed, confounded, pierced, subdued, Divinely melted, molded, and renew’d; The bold base Savage, nature’s harshest clod, Rose from the dust, the image of his God. And thou, poor Negro! Scorn’d of all mankind; Thou dumb and impotent, and deaf and blind; Thou dead in spirit, toil-degraded slave, Crush’d by the curse of Adam to the grave! The messengers of peace, o’er land and sea, That sought the sons of sorrow, stoop’d to thee. —The captive raised his slow and sullen eye; He knew no friend, nor deem’d a friend was nigh, Till the sweet tones of Pity touch’d his ears, And mercy bathed his bosom with her tears; Strange were those tones, to him those tears were strange, He wept and wonder’d at the mighty change, Felt the quick pang of keen compunction dart, And heard a small, still whisper in his heart, A voice from heaven that bade the outcast rise, From shame on earth to glory in the skies.  (Montgomery, 52–53)

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The picture that Montgomery paints here is of Moravian missionaries rescuing indigenous and African peoples from ignorance of the Christian faith, and so offering them redemption and glory. The emphasis on Christian conversion, paired with some rather condescending remarks about indigenous peoples being “Nature’s harshest clod” and enslaved Africans being “scorn’d,” “toil-degraded,” and “sullen,” falls well short of the full acknowledgment of their humanity that Montgomery had seemed to forecast earlier in the poem. At the same time, the emphasis on shared Christian belief serves as grounds for ultimate brotherhood and sisterhood. When Montgomery writes that following his conversion “the slave that heard them started into man,” he establishes a pattern that would appear in many nineteenth-century slave narratives, notably Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, where he associates resistance to slavery with the regeneration of his manhood. When he refers to St. Peter’s chains falling off in prison, he participates in a long tradition of associating the freeing of the enslaved with salvation in the biblical narrative of the New Testament. The description Montgomery offers of the outcome of this conversion both works toward the idea of Africans and Europeans being joined in Christian brotherhood and sisterhood and offers a disturbingly negative account of indigenous African religions: No more to Demon-Gods, in hideous forms, He prayed for earthquakes, pestilence, and storms, In secret agony devour’d the earth, And, while he spared his mother, cursed his birth, To heaven the Christian Negro sent his sighs, In morning vows and evening sacrifice.  (Montgomery, 54)

Here conversion to Christianity and movement toward freedom, as in the case of St. Peter in prison, are intertwined. Montgomery accepts the commonly shared idea that non-Christian faiths are inherently demonic along with the misleading idea that Christianity was new to Africa, when in fact some of the earliest Christian civilizations in the world, notably Ethiopia, were African. He does, however, emphasize the parallel between slavery and sin and salvation and freedom in a way that will ultimately help to make his case for the end of slavery. Montgomery thus moves over the course of The West Indies from an indignant affirmation of the shared humanity of Africans and Europeans to a more paternalistic tone, where the Moravian missionary effort gilds the British decision to abolish the slave trade in the empire. The Moravians themselves are unlikely partners for the British Empire and for the project of asserting unique national virtue for England. Their roots, as

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Montgomery points out, are Central European, and their activities were notably transnational. As Patrick Erben details, the Moravians function as counterparts to the Jesuit missionaries within Catholicism, as they were significantly more likely than most Protestant missionaries to embrace positive views of indigenous religious and cultural traditions. The Moravians also play a significant role in the prose fiction of the early nineteenth century, as the Moravian missionaries provide a foil for Leatherstocking’s warlike views in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers. Leatherstocking characterizes the Moravian mode of missionary work when he discusses the transition of the warlike Chingachgook to the Christian Indian John: “It was my duty to keep my ranks, and to stand or fall by the baggonet or lead,” returned the veteran. “I was then in the fort, and seldom leaving my place, saw but little of the savages, who kept on the flanks or in front, skrimmaging. I remember, howsomever, to have heard mention made of the ‘Great Snake,’ as he was called, for he was a chief of renown; but little did I ever expect to see him enlisted in the cause of Christianity, and civilized like old John.” “Oh! he was Christianized by the Moravians, who were always over-intimate with the Delawares,” said Leather-Stocking. “It’s my opinion that, had they been left to themselves, there would be no such doings now about the head-waters of the two rivers, and that these hills mought have been kept as good hunting-ground by their right owner, who is not too old to carry a rifle, and whose sight is as true as a fish-hawk hovering—” (Cooper, 134)

While Leatherstocking is critical of the Moravians and the change that they had made in his friend’s character through his conversion, he also offers a fair characterization of the relationships that Moravians established with indigenous people in the Americas, and particularly in the northeast of British North America. Montgomery’s status as an English-speaking member of the Moravians would set a pattern for future antislavery and pro-indigenous poetry. Although not herself a Moravian, Lydia Huntley Sigourney would write at length about Moravian missionaries in the Americas in her book of poetry Zinzendorff and Other Poems. Sigourney would herself become an important voice in antislavery poetry, particularly insofar as she connected the enslavement of Black Africans to the exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, as discussed in chapter 3. Montgomery next turns from Moravian missionaries back to the British nationalism that he had previewed earlier in the poem. If earlier in the poem he had expressed alarm when enslaved people engaged in resistance on their own behalf, he shows no such ambivalence when praising “The matchless race of Albion”:

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Champions arose to plead the Negro’s cause; In the wide breach of violated laws, Through which the torrent of injustice roll’d, They stood:—with zeal unconquerably bold, They raised their voices, stretch’d their hands to save From chains the freeman, from despair the slave, The exile’s heart-sick anguish to assuage, And rescue Afric from the spoiler’s rage.  (Montgomery, 55)

For Montgomery the movement to end the slave trade serves as an instance of British virtue, courage, and love of freedom. Montgomery introduces a pantheon of British heroes: Sharpe, Wilberforce, Pitt, and Fox all become distinguished first and foremost by their resistance to the slave trade as British orators and politicians. Notably, Montgomery pursues this matter in an extended footnote on Bartolome de Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas who spoke out vehemently against the violent destruction of native peoples and cultures, but who also has been implicated in the emergence of the slave trade among Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Montgomery describes William Wilberforce, the outspoken British evangelical opponent of slavery, as the “new Las Casas of a ruin’d race,” and he uses his epic footnote as a way to justify the comparison. Montgomery brings Las Casas into his poem as a witness against Spanish colonialism in the Americas, praising Las Casas for his impassioned critique of the enslavement and slaughter of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Moreover, Montgomery defends Las Casas forcefully against the charge that he was the author of the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. In his extended footnote on Las Casas, Montgomery argues that in fact Las Casas had been libeled: Las Casas has been accused of being a promoter, if not the original projector, of the Negro Slave Trade to the West Indies. The Abbé Gregoire some years ago published a defense of this great and good man against the degrading imputation. . . . . The Slave Trade between Africa and the West Indies commenced, according to Herrera himself, the first and indeed the only accuser of Las Casas, nineteen years before the epoch of this pretended project. (Montgomery, 79)

I quote Montgomery’s defense of Las Casas at length because it illustrates the centrality of historical memory to the antislavery cause in Montgomery’s verse. If Montgomery polishes England’s virtues and emphasizes Spain’s vices, he also is deeply concerned that he not malign a figure whom he regards as morally admirable from the Spanish colonial period in the Caribbean.

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This curious emphasis on the Catholic Las Casas’s innocence in relation to the violence practiced against both the indigenous peoples of the Caribbeans and Africans can perhaps be connected to Montgomery’s own commitment to celebrating Moravian interventions in the Caribbean, as he moves back and forth between emphasizing the hypocrisy of most Christians in relation to slavery but also seeks to preserve models of benevolent Christian intervention in the Americas. Las Casas and the Moravians, although on different sides of the Reformation divide in Western Christianity, both offer alternatives the straightforward exploitation and violence of many Christian interactions with sub-Saharan Africans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The West Indies, then, presents us with a curious mix of strident British nationalism and Moravian transnationalism. By pointing to the crucial role that the Moravians played in the abolition of the slave trade, Montgomery shows that an international movement emphasizing shared moral values and an ethic of love can effect change even in the face of intense opposition. By grounding the antislavery activism of Montgomery’s own contemporaries in the antislavery witness of Las Casas, Montgomery works to establish a genealogy of antislavery activism that is not limited by English or British nationalism. Montgomery is not, of course, remembered today primarily for his antislavery poetry, but rather for his status as the author of one of the English-speaking world’s more beloved Christmas carols: “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” It is worth reflecting on what it means that Montgomery was distinguished both by his hymnody and by his writing of antislavery verse. “Angels from the Realms of Glory” rather emphatically refrains from engaging with political or social questions, and Montgomery, like many other antislavery poets, wrote apolitical nature and religious poetry alongside his antislavery writings, but his verse in The West Indies provides us with a central moral focus as we read his work at large. Whatever Montgomery’s shortcomings, his verse reveals that the moral content of poetry can serve as the foundation of a poetic career, and the conscience that drives such verse can also have profound artistic implications.

Philip Freneau and Caribbean Antislavery Verse in the United States Montgomery’s broadly celebratory approach to Britain’s abolition of the slave trade finds a bracing counterpart in the verse of one of his contemporaries in the United States, Philip Freneau. Freneau was a more radical figure in his political beliefs and his commitment to Deism than was Montgomery, but their poetry shares a devotion to a common human experience. Freneau was a friend and acolyte of Thomas Jefferson, and his

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poetry is shaped by a pervading egalitarian ethos. The bulk of his verse celebrated large concepts like freedom and nature in ways that reinforced the nation-building efforts of the early US republic in ways that will be familiar to readers of Montgomery. Freneau’s Jeffersonianism exceeds that of Jefferson, in that Freneau’s devotion to human equality caused him to oppose slavery, a subject on which Jefferson vacillated between occasional moral condemnations and a practical refusal to liberate enslaved people when he had the power to do so. Considering Freneau’s “To Sir Toby” offers us a vantage point on the way in which transatlantic antislavery discourse took the Caribbean as its focal point at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Philip Gould has pointed out, however, Freneau tended to avoid confronting slavery in the United States in favor of confronting it in the Caribbean (55). Freneau’s most famous and frequently anthologized antislavery poem is “To Sir Toby, A Sugar Planter in the Interior Parts of Jamaica, Near the City of San Jago de la Vega, (Spanish Town), 1784,” in which he excoriates the titular figure for his mistreatment of the people whom he enslaved. Freneau begins with the suggestion that the lives of those Sir Toby has enslaved is a kind of hell on earth, and he proceeds to suggest the likelihood that Sir Toby will himself face his just deserts. If there exists a hell—the case is clear— Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here: Here are no blazing brimstone lakes—’tis true; But kindled rum too often burns as blue, In which some fiend, (whom nature must detest) Steeps Toby’s name, and bands poor Cudjoe’s breast. Here, whips on whips excite a thousand fears, And mingled howlings vibrate on my ears: Here Nature’s plagues abound, of all degrees, Snakes, scorpions, despots, lizards, centipedes— No art, no care escapes the busy lash, All have their dues, and all are paid in cash:— The lengthy cart-whip guards this tyrant’s reign And cracks like pistols from the fields of cane.  (Wood, 416)

Freneau presents slavery in the Caribbean as a hellscape that is distinguished by an extraordinary range of ways to harm and torture the human body. Branding, forced labor, and especially whipping are catalogued as vicious affronts to human dignity. Notably, Freneau uses the neo-classical form of the heroic couplet (paired lines of rhymed iambic pentameter), emphasizing the weight and significance of his topic through his prosody. The violence of whipping and branding merge with the violence of exposure to “Nature’s plagues,” meaning that human cruelty is compounded by the use of the natural environment to torment the enslaved.

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Freneau turns from this catalog of horrors to the question of theodicy: given the evident evil and cruelty of slavery, how can such a horror exist? Freneau asks Ye powers! who form’d these wretched tribes, relate, What had they done, to merit such a fate? Why were they brought from Eboe’s sultry waste To see that plenty which they must not taste— Food, which they cannot buy, and dare not steal, Yams and potatoes!—many a scanty meal!—  (Wood, 416)

The question of why such suffering occurs leads quite directly into the physical anguish of starvation. Freneau bears witness here to one of the most frequent causes of death among enslaved people: the combination of exposure and malnutrition could kill those who were enslaved far more quickly than even the brutalities of branding and whipping could. From here, Freneau turns to the terrors of slavery that were directly induced by human agency. One, with a gibbet wakes his negro’s fears, One to the wind-mill nails him by the ears; One keeps his slave in dismal dens, unfed, One puts the wretch in pickle, ere he’s dead: This, from a tree suspends him by the thumbs, That, from his table grudges even the crumbs!  (Wood, 417)

Freneau offers a catalogue of the forms that the physical suffering of the enslaved could take. Starvation and malnutrition form part of a continuum that inevitably ends in torture, and Freneau emphasizes that the denial of nourishment is part of the machinery of slavery. For Freneau, cataloguing the violence of slavery is a central requirement for antislavery poetry. At the same time, he acknowledges that hell itself is presented within the Christian tradition as punishment for some sort of sin or crime, and he emphasizes that the suffering of the enslaved is wholly undeserved. The closing couplet in the passage quoted above is especially powerful: “This, from a tree suspends him by the thumbs, / That, from his table grudges even the crumbs” (Wood, 417). Freneau makes use of a potent biblical allusion here, as “grudges even the crumbs” recalls Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus from John 5:39–47 in the New Testament, which I quote from the King James Version of the Bible, the standard English language version in Freneau’s time: There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, And

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desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

I quote the parable to emphasize the power of the allusion. Like an enslaved person in the Caribbean, Lazarus is denied even the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich man, and the punishment that the rich man receives for this cruelty is damnation. Just as Lazarus has endured a temporary hell on earth, the rich man will endure eternal punishment. In this way, the present sufferings of the enslaved suggest a future, more permanent damnation for the slave owners. The lines contain a definition of the enslavers as barbarous and the enslaved as redeemed: Lazarus ultimately experiences the joys of heaven while the rich man is condemned to the pains of hell. From here, Freneau turns to a direct address to his candidate for damnation, Sir Toby himself: Is wealth, thus got, Sir Toby, worth your pains— Who would that wealth, on terms like these, possess, Where all we see is pregnant with distress; Angola’s natives scourg’d by hireling hands, And toil’s hard earn gains shipp’d to foreign lands?  (Wood, 417)

The query points to two crucial ways in which the scene is “pregnant with distress”: first the violence against “Angola’s natives” and secondly, the exploitation of their labor that sends the fruits of their labors to be enjoyed by others. The phrase “Angola’s natives” deserves some

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unpacking, as it takes us back to one of James Montgomery’s crucial points in The West Indies: the universal human longing for home. In this highly concentrated phrase, Freneau reminds his readers that an ocean lies between the enslaved and their homeland. This condemnation of the violation of the touching human desire for home sets the stage for the next hellish image in Freneau’s poem. Using images of Hades from classical mythology, Freneau writes: Here, surly Charons make their annual trip, And ghosts arrive in every Guinea ship, To find what hells this western world affords, Plutonian scourges, and despotic lords;— Where they who pine, and languish to be free Must climb the rude cliffs of the Liguanee; Beyond the clouds in sculking haste repair, And hardly safe from brother traitors there!  (Wood, 417)

Here Freneau leads his readers back into the central violations of the slave trade: the combination of separation from the homeland with the experience of treachery by one’s own “brothers.” He emphasizes the corrupting force of a system that enlists people from Africa as well as Europe in the exploitation of people from Africa, and he suggests that slavery corrupts the morals of any people who are drawn to prioritize material selfinterest over the demands of loving one’s neighbor.

Finding Toussaint in English and American Poetry: William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier If Montgomery seeks to define the Caribbean at large, and Freneau focuses on the Anglophone Caribbean, poets like William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier found the role of the Haitian revolution in striking for freedom to be of special interest. John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem on Toussaint L’Ouverture probes the complexities of Toussaint’s role in the US antislavery imagination, and it offers a valuable extension of and point of contrast to William Wordsworth’s more famous poem on Toussaint. As Wordsworth’s and Whittier’s poems illustrate, Toussaint captured the imagination of people drawn to ideals of freedom and equality on both sides of the Atlantic, and his appeal can also be seen in his representations in the visual arts, including portraits of Toussaint in full military regalia and in a red liberty cap (figs. 1 and 2). The first of these images is suggestive of Toussaint’s military prowess, and the second shows him as a Romantic rebel who is looking upward in response to a call to lead.

Figure 1.1. Toussaint Louverture. No date. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2003665096/.

Figure 1.2. Toussaint L’Ouverture / Corrie’s Detroit Chromo Lith. office. Chromolithograph by George DeBaptiste, n.d. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2014645197/.

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William Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint L’Ouverture is perhaps the most famous canonical depiction of Toussaint in English-language poetry. Wordsworth addresses Toussaint directly: Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men! Whether the rural Milk-maid by her Cow Sing in thy hearing, or thou liest now Alone in some deep dungeon’s earless den, O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow: Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again, Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.  (Basker, 583–84)

Wordsworth offers Toussaint as a representative figure for human equality, giving form and substance to “Man’s unconquerable mind.” Wordsworth embraces a broad humanism predicated on universal human experiences: all people have experienced the “breathing of the common wind,” and so Toussaint and his fellow Black Haitians represent universally heroic figures. An interesting parallel between Wordsworth’s poem on Toussaint and Freneau’s on Sir Toby emerges through precisely this correspondence between the natural and human worlds. Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint has been subjected to considerable critique for its paternalism, but it also offers a vision of slave revolt as being an expression of Romantic genius and a universal human urge for freedom. When the antislavery Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier wanted to capture an image of Black heroism to oppose to the dehumanization of enslaved people in the United States, he also turned to the Caribbean and to Toussaint. Whittier’s poem is substantially longer and more involved than Wordsworth’s (and also less readily quotable), and he offers a response to Toussaint that blends travelogue with narrative, all in the service of eloquent protest. Whittier begins with a long headnote that explains why he sees Toussaint as a figure worthy of “the remark of Godwin, in his Lectures, that the West India Islands, since their first discovery by Columbus, could not boast of a single name which deserves comparison with that of Toussaint L’Ouverture” (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 11). Whittier begins with conventional romantic imagery of the island of Hispaniola, which includes Haiti:

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Fair island of the Western Sea! Lavish of beauty, even when Thy brutes were happier than thy men, For they, at least, were free! Regardless of thy glorious clime, Unmindful of thy soil of flowers, The toiling negro sighed, that Time No faster sped his hours. For, by the dewy moonlight still, He fed the weary-turning mill, Or bent him in the chill morass, To pluck the long and tangled grass, And hear above his scar-worn back The heavy slave-whip’s frequent crack: While in his heart one evil thought In solitary madness wrought, One baleful fire surviving still The quenching of the immortal mind, One sterner passion of his kind, Which even fetters could not kill, The savage hope, to deal, erelong, A vengeance bitterer than his wrong! (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 11–12)

These opening lines offer elements that should by now be familiar: the juxtaposition of Romantic pastoralism with the extreme violence of slavery, and the suggestion that there will ultimately be retribution for the wrongs of slavery. Here, rather than the oblique reference to Lazarus that we see in “To Sir Toby,” with its suggestion of divine retribution in the afterlife, there is a much more direct sense that those who enslave others are placing their temporal, as well as their spiritual, lives at risk. Whittier suggests that revenge is an inevitable outcome of a circumstance where no hope is provided to those who are suffering and the basic humanity of the sufferers is denied. As a Quaker and a pacifist, Whittier does not approve of violence of any kind, but he makes clear that he empathizes with the desire for retribution for the wrongs that he describes. Whittier then turns to the revolution itself, imagining it as the expression of a revolutionary sublime: Hark to that cry! long, loud, and shrill, From field and forest, rock and hill, Thrilling and horrible it rang, Around, beneath, above; The wild beast from his cavern sprang, The wild bird from her grove!

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Nor fear, nor joy, nor agony Were mingled in that midnight cry; But like the lion’s growl of wrath, When falls that hunter in his path Whose barbed arrow, deeply set, Is rankling in his bosom yet, It told of hate, full, deep, and strong, Of vengeance kindling out of wrong; It was as if the crimes of years— The unrequited toil, the tears, The shame and hate, which liken well Earth’s garden to the nether hell— Had found in nature’s self a tongue, On which the gathered horror hung; As if from cliff, and stream, and glen Burst on the startled ears of men That voice which rises unto God, Solemn and stern,—the cry of blood! (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 13)

Notably, the pacifist Quaker Whittier is here able to show considerable sympathy for Toussaint’s position and those of enslaved people rebelling against their enslavement in general: violence would appear to be a rational response to the oppression that Toussaint and other enslaved Haitians have faced. At the same time, Whittier offers a sense of the terror that would accompany such a revolt on the part of those who had been guilty of the oppression of those now rising up. The “midnight cry” of “vengeance kindling out of wrong” can both be justified for those who have been wronged, and terrifying for those who are responsible for the crimes of slavery. The concluding couplet in this passage suggests both that “the cry of blood” will be answered in this life and that, through the “voice which rises unto God,” there will be punishment in the afterlife. Frequently enough, vivid portrayals of slave revolution served to support slavery; here the effect is to make its end a matter of temporal and eternal self-interest to those engaged in its practice. Whitter follows this initial blending of slave revolt as Gothic horror and divine justice with a more specific catalog of crime, here acknowledging one of the elements of the slave system that most appalled those opposed to slavery and which the defenders of slavery most vehemently denied: the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Using the Haitian Revolution as his text, Whittier imagines the violence that had been visited on enslaved women being turned on white women, identifying it as an exact return for the wrongs that had been committed under slavery:

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Then, injured Afric! for the shame Of thy own daughters, vengeance came Full on the scornful hearts of those, Who mocked thee in thy nameless woes, And to thy hapless children gave One choice,—pollution or the grave! (Whittier, Antislavery Poems,14)

Whittier’s imagery here again comes close to the imagery from slave revolution that would be used by proslavery writers as a justification for draconian laws suppressing the ability of enslaved people to rise up, and that would also be used as a rationale for lynching in the post-Reconstruction period: the specter of sexual violence against white women. Here again, Whittier is careful to contextualize this possibility, emphasizing the sexual violence of slavery itself. The violence of the response to slavery raises questions for Whittier about the hero of his own poem: how could Toussaint, with all of his virtues and talents, countenance a violent rebellion that could itself exercise cruelty? That is, if violence is the price for violence, how does one come to terms with the acts of vengeance that meet the initial violence of enslavement itself. Whittier proceeds to raise precisely these difficult questions in the stanzas that follow: Where then was he whose fiery zeal Had taught the trampled heart to feel, Until despair itself grew strong, And vengeance fed its torch from wrong? Now, when the thunderbolt is speeding; Now, when oppression’s heart is bleeding; Now, when the latent curse of Time Is raining down in fire and blood, That curse which, through long years of crime, Has gathered, drop by drop, its flood,— Why strikes he not, the foremost one, Where murder’s sternest deeds are done? (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 14–15)

This series of rhetorical questions undergirds a substantial tradition in the nineteenth-century United States of grappling with the moral complexity of revolution. Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” offered in 1855 a picture of revolution on board the suggestively named San Dominick (Melville had explicitly chosen to revise the actual name of the vessel in the source materials for the story, the Tryal) that both provides reasons to

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understand the violence of the leader Babo and his co-conspirators after they had taken command of the vessel and to experience something of the terror that the titular character and the Spanish crew of the vessel would have experienced at the execution of their compatriots. Still later in the century, Mark Twain’s character Hank Morgan, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, would offer this reflection on the relative violence of the French Revolution and what came before: THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. (Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 127)

Mark Twain’s reflection here seems particularly apt when applied to the revolution in Haiti, which after all had its roots in the French Revolution itself. The question of how to view violence against Europeans and Creoles in Haiti during the revolution recurred for the influential Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James during the twentieth century, when in writing The Black Jacobins, he reflected on the mistakes of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in particular: “The massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these slave-owners, who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink” (373). Rather, James suggested, the violence that was carried out under Dessalines after Toussaint’s death was a tragedy for the new nation, as it contributed to its isolation in the world. James, like Whittier, was suspicious of violence, but he also acknowledged the role that the long history of slavery had in driving the violence that was ultimately, in his view, damaging to the Haitian cause. It is striking that Whittier, lifelong pacifist that he was, similarly acknowledged the necessity of resistance to a system that was itself based in violence.

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In keeping with the long history of ambivalence toward the massacres that blighted the revolution, Whittier works to come to terms with the psychology of retribution that often accompanies revolution. He reflects: What marvel that a fierce delight Smiled grimly o’er his brow of night, As groan and shout and bursting flame Told where the midnight tempest came, With blood and fire along its van, And death behind! he was a Man! Yes, dark-souled chieftain! if the light Of mild Religion’s heavenly ray Unveiled not to thy mental sight The lowlier and the purer way, In which the Holy Sufferer trod, Meekly amidst the sons of crime; That calm reliance upon God For justice in His own good time; That gentleness to which belongs Forgiveness for its many wrongs, Even as the primal martyr, kneeling For mercy on the evil-dealing; Let not the favored white man name Thy stern appeal, with words of blame. (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 15)

Whittier’s lines point to a fundamental contradiction in the relationship between Christian non-violence and non-resistance and the system of slavery. The slave system depended on imposed pacifism for enslaved people and tolerated violence for their enslavers. If white men are appalled by the violence of a slave insurrection, they must adopt a similar rigor in responding to the violence of slavery itself. Whittier then moves from reflection on Toussaint to actually attempting to inhabit Toussaint’s own voice. “What, ho, Toussaint!” A moment more, His shadow crossed the lighted floor. “Away!” he shouted; “fly with me, The white man’s bark is on the sea; Her sails must catch the seaward wind, For sudden vengeance sweeps behind. Our brethren from their graves have spoken, The yoke is spurned, the chain is broken; On all the hills our fires are glowing, Through all the vales red blood is flowing! No more the mocking White shall rest

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His foot upon the Negro’s breast; No more, at morn or eve, shall drip The warm blood from the driver’s whip: Yet, though Toussaint has vengeance sworn For all the wrongs his race have borne, Though for each drop of Negro blood The white man’s veins shall pour a flood; Not all alone the sense of ill Around his heart is lingering still, Nor deeper can the white man feel The generous warmth of grateful zeal. Friends of the Negro! fly with me, The path is open to the sea: Away, for life!” He spoke, and pressed The young child to his manly breast, As, headlong, through the cracking cane, Down swept the dark insurgent train, Drunken and grim, with shout and yell Howled through the dark, like sounds from hell. (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 17)

Whittier’s profound ambivalence about violence as a practicing Quaker meets his even deeper aversion to slavery in these lines. Nonviolence is central to Whittier’s creed, but Whittier refuses to allow nonviolence to become a tool of oppression. As a result, his admiration for Toussaint is unequivocal, even as his discomfort with revolutionary violence is palpable: Sleep calmly in thy dungeon-tomb, Beneath Besançon’s alien sky, Dark Haytien! for the time shall come, Yea, even now is nigh, When, everywhere, thy name shall be Redeemed from color’s infamy; And men shall learn to speak of thee As one of earth’s great spirits, born In servitude, and nursed in scorn, Casting aside the weary weight And fetters of its low estate, In that strong majesty of soul Which knows no color, tongue, or clime (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 18)

These lines function as an epitaph of sorts for Toussaint, and they emphasize that he is a figure to be admired rather than condemned. Here Whittier echoes Wordsworth’s vision of Toussaint as a universally

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representative figure, and his language comes close to Wordsworth’s poem even as his conclusion is more explicitly a critique of white racism. Central to this conclusion is the broad humanism that Whittier inherits from writers like Montgomery, who condemned the slave trade earlier in the century: Toussaint’s “majesty of soul” transcends “color, tongue, or clime.” Be mine the better task to find A tribute for thy lofty mind, Amidst whose gloomy vengeance shone Some milder virtues all thine own, Some gleams of feeling pure and warm, Like sunshine on a sky of storm, Proofs that the Negro’s heart retains Some nobleness amid its chains,— That kindness to the wronged is never Without its excellent reward, Holy to human-kind and ever Acceptable to God.  (Whittier, Antislavery Poems, 19)

This closing stanza brings Whittier’s Quaker convictions together with his powerful denunciation of slavery: even as Whittier has justified Toussaint’s vengeance, he also offers the possibility that if the original violence of slavery can be destroyed, revolutionaries like Toussaint can find reconciliation and embrace non-violence. This conversion to non-violence, Whittier makes clear, can only really occur once the violence of slavery has been overthrown, and insisting on non-violence for the enslaved while allowing violence for the enslavers is inconsistent with Whittier’s own Quaker understanding of the value of peacemaking. In keeping with Whittier’s impassioned engagement with Toussaint’s story, the early African-American novelist Frank J. Webb’s discussion of Toussaint’s picture in his novel The Garies and Their Friends suggests the degree to which the image of Toussaint served to strengthen both antislavery efforts and an egalitarian view of race in the 1850s. In a striking scene, Mr. Garie, a white southern man who has moved to Philadelphia in order to be able to live as a married couple with his mixed-race wife and children, is taken by the nobility of an image that he sees at the house of Mr. Walters, a prominent and wealthy Black businessman. Mr. Walters explains that this picture is of Toussaint L’Ouverture: “That is Toussaint Louverture,” replied Mr. Walters, “and I have every reason to believe it to be a correct likeness. It was presented to an American merchant by Toussaint himself—a present in return for some kindness shown him. This merchant’s son, not having the regard for this picture that his father entertained for it, sold it to me. That,” continued Mr. Walters, “looks like a man of intelligence. It is

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entirely different from any likeness I ever saw of him. The portraits generally present him as a monkey-faced person, with a handkerchief about his head.” “This,” said Mr. Garie, “gives me an idea of the man that accords with his actions.” (Webb, 145)

Toussaint’s humanity, intelligence, and talent become a ground for acknowledging the shared humanity of people of African and European descent. In Webb’s novel, Toussaint becomes a model for what resistance to racism and violence and full African American citizenship might look like in the fraught context of antebellum Philadelphia, where the African American community could flourish but was also consistently threatened by racist violence that would undo this flourishing. The strands discussed in this chapter: the transatlantic British antislavery movement, the varieties of West Indian slavery, and the ambivalent reaction of antislavery campaigners to slave revolt all help shape the poetry that follows in the mid-nineteenth century, both that of Whittier, who writes directly about Toussaint, and that of many other poets who opposed slavery in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. If Montgomery offers a taxonomy of antislavery tropes in a transatlantic Anglophone context, the poets in the chapters that follow adapted these tropes to the context of the United States and the particular forms that slavery took in the antebellum south. In the chapters that follow I consider the antislavery verse of some of the most popular of nineteenthcentury US poets and work my way through a series of white and Black writers who fought slavery with their verse.

2: Antislavery Poetry in Public: George Moses Horton, John Pierpont, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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in the United States brought together a cast of characters who might seem to share little aside from their opposition to slavery. When we look at poets as different as an enslaved man from North Carolina, a white radical Unitarian minister from Connecticut, and an irenic Harvard professor of languages whose poetry was wildly popular around the English-speaking world, we see the range of the community that developed under the rubric of antislavery poetry. Juxtaposing these very different figures suggests how the moral impulses associated with the antislavery movement could find expression in a variety of aesthetic modes. In all three cases, we see examples of a poetry and a poetics that is unabashedly public in its aims: Longfellow gave voice throughout his career to this desire to write the kind of poetry that ordinary people could share around the fireside, a desire that is eloquently expressed in his frequently anthologized (and sometimes parodied) poem “Day Is Done.” Pierpont wrote for antislavery journals like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, constructing a poetic dialogue with the headlines of his time as they related to slavery. Horton’s aims are perhaps the most public of those of all three of the poets, as he draws attention to the affective experience of slavery and gives voice to his desire for freedom in the sorts of public forums to which most enslaved people were denied access, even as his status as an enslaved person limited the explicitness with which he could write on antislavery topics. This chapter thus brings together one of the nineteenth-century’s most celebrated poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and, arguably, one of its most marginal and marginalized, George Moses Horton, along with John Pierpont, a figure of considerable renown in his own time who has virtually disappeared from American literary studies today (aside from one recent essay by Virginia Jackson discussed in the introduction to this volume and Monica Pelaez’s inclusion of Pierpont in Lyrical Liberators). Horton’s status as a poet who published as an enslaved man pairs usefully both with the verse of one of the most famous and widely praised Americans of his time (Longfellow) and that of a celebrated antislavery agitator (Pierpont) whose work has only recently started to be recovered. he development of antislavery poetry

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After the premonitions of antislavery poetry in the antebellum United States discussed in chapter 1, Horton can reasonably be viewed as the foundational figure for antislavery poetry within the United States and its contribution to the emerging struggle between slavery and freedom.

“Manumission sung”: George Moses Horton and the Poetic Voice of the Enslaved George Moses Horton is a remarkable figure in African American literary history, in that the bulk of his poetry was not only written but published while he was still enslaved. As such, it conveys powerfully the devotion to freedom and his own dignity as a human being under the most appalling of circumstances. Horton’s poetry occupied a curious place relative to slavery and freedom: he wrote with the explicit aim of gaining his freedom, but his enslaver sponsored his publications without taking any steps to set him free. Horton thus had a long and varied career as an enslaved poet, and he was able to reflect on his freedom only as a man of advanced years. Keith D. Leonard has identified Horton as the seminal “African American bardic poet,” reflecting that in his work we are able to see how “the cultural assimilation of poetic mastery was the abolitionist poet’s greatest act of resistance” (21). Matt Sandler poignantly reflects that “the irony at the heart of Horton’s work stemmed from the fact that he was recognized as a genius from early on, and yet this recognition did not yield his liberty” (Sandler, Black Romantic Revolution, 60). Horton is available to twenty-first-century readers most importantly through the work of Joan R. Sherman, who published a selection of Horton’s poems in The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry in 1997 and through the electronic resource Documenting the American South, published by the University of North Carolina. Most recently, Faith Barrett has reflected in 2019 on Horton’s work in relation to Emily Dickinson’s, noting that both poets “juxtapose images of freedom of movement with images of physical immobility” (Barrett, 204), and Virginia Jackson, writing in 2020, has considered the tension between Horton’s position as an enslaved poet and his use of the Romantic form of the apostrophe (Jackson, “Historical Poetics”), drawing on Meredith McGill’s 2016 essay “What Is a Ballad” to consider the distance between Horton’s life story and his poetry. What is striking about Horton’s poetry in general is the way that his expert use of Romantic tropes enables him to put forward a plea for liberty as a sort of representative Romantic hero even as his adroit use of biblical citation permits him to speak within the traditions of evangelical Christianity that shaped both antislavery and proslavery discourse in the United States. Horton’s first book of poetry, Poems by a Slave, was published in 1829, when he was thirty-two years old. The introduction to the volume

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(titled an “explanation”) oscillates between empathy for his plight as an enslaved man and an unwillingness to challenge too directly the institution of slavery itself: None will imagine it possible that pieces produced as these have been, should be free from blemish in composition or taste. The author is now 32 years of age, and has always laboured in the field on his master’s farm, promiscuously with the few others which Mr. Horton owns, in circumstances of the greatest possible simplicity. His master says he knew nothing of his poetry, but as he heard of it from others. GEORGE knows how to read, and is now learning to write. All his pieces are written down by others; and his reading, which is done at night, and at the usual intervals allowed to slaves, has been much employed on poetry, such as he could procure, this being the species of composition most interesting to him. It is thought best to print his productions without correction, that the mind of the reader may be in no uncertainty as to the originality and genuineness of every part. We shall conclude this account of GEORGE, with an assurance that he has been ever a faithful, honest and industrious slave. That his heart has felt deeply and sensitively in this lowest possible condition of human nature, will easily be believed, and is impressively confirmed by one of his stanzas, Come, melting Pity, from afar, And break this vast enormous bar Between a wretch and thee; Purchase a few short days of time, And bid a vassal soar sublime, On wings of Liberty. (Horton, Poems by a Slave, 1)

The introduction performs a curious balancing act, moving as it does between expressions of admiration for the depth and sensitivity of his poetic feeling and reassurances that “he has ever been a faithful, honest, and industrious slave.” Horton has a voice to speak against slavery, but at the same time the threat that a literate, eloquent man who is nonetheless enslaved poses to the slave system is downplayed. In an early poem, “On Liberty and Slavery,” Horton offered a heartbreaking picture of the affective aspects of life as an enslaved person. He begins with a reflection on his misfortune: Alas! and am I born for this, To wear this slavish chain? Deprived of all created bliss, Through hardship, toil and pain!  (Horton, Black Bard, 75)

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Horton uses a common public form for the early nineteenth century, writing in ballad meter (rhymed verse with alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter), a form associated with poetry that was adapted to music, including hymns. Horton’s rhetorical question “Am I born for this” confronts the pro-slavery argument that people of African descent were condemned to slavery by immutable natural and biblical laws. Given that the proslavery argument was based on the idea that Africans were somehow divinely and naturally adapted to enslavement, the very poignancy of Horton’s tone constitutes an argument against the idea that some people were born for enslavement. The phrase “Deprived of all created bliss” reflects on the unnatural deprivation of natural human pleasures that occurs under slavery. Although Horton is in no position to express anger or outrage about his plight, his expression of the sentiments associated with the love of liberty itself constitutes an implicit rebuke to the practice of slavery. Horton then intensifies his lament over the next two stanzas. The emphasis throughout these lines is on a commonplace reflected in patriotic narratives from the American Revolution: that death is preferable to the loss of liberty. The words attributed to Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death!” serve as an implicit backdrop to these lines. Horton also builds empathy through his emphasis on the passage of time, and what the loss of liberty over time means to an enslaved person: How long have I in bondage lain, And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain— Deprived of liberty. Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief This side the silent grave— To soothe the pain—to quell the grief And anguish of a slave?  (Horton, Black Bard, 75)

These lines derive their power from the language of sentiment, which provides the emotional power in most nineteenth-century novels. Liberty and the grave, for Horton as for Henry, are the two poles around which human existence must revolve, and his repetition of affective language make clear that he feels the sensations and emotions that appear as staples of the poetry of the Romantic period. Horton next invokes a personified Liberty as a muse of sorts: Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound, Roll through my ravished ears!

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Come, let my grief in joys be drowned, And drive away my fears.  (Horton, Black Bard, 75)

Liberty offers the only possible respite to his suffering in the face of slavery, suggesting that slavery is itself radically incompatible with the human dignity that Horton’s speaker claims. Again, claiming the sentiment and sensibility of Romantic poetry serves as an affirmation of Horton’s fundamental claim to equal human dignity. Horton next brings together the language of Romantic revolt with the language of American democracy, when he rebukes “foul oppression” in its various forms: Say unto foul oppression, Cease: Ye tyrants rage no more, And let the joyful trump of peace, Now bid the vassal soar. Soar on the pinions of that dove Which long has cooed for thee, And breathed her notes from Afric’s grove, The sound of Liberty.  (Horton, Black Bard, 75)

Horton makes use of conventional bird imagery here that brings together the language of poetry and the language of freedom: the ability to fly makes birds free, and the ability to sing makes birds useful analogues to the poetic vocation. Here Horton parallels the use of birds in the major British Romantics: Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge all address birds in ways that connect poetry and freedom, and he anticipates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim in “The Poet” that the poets are “liberating god[s]” (Emerson, Essays: Second Series, 32). If Romantic poetry and implicit citation of the origin myths of the United States shape the early portions of Horton’s poem, his allusions to the American Revolution become far more explicit in the concluding stanzas of Horton’s poem: Oh, Liberty! thou golden prize, So often sought by blood— We crave thy sacred sun to rise, The gift of nature’s God!  (Horton, Black Bard, 76)

The reference to “the gift of nature’s God” is of course a direct reference to Thomas Jefferson’s language in The Declaration of Independence, and the blood that has been sacrificed in the pursuit of liberty directly connects Horton’s cause to the American Revolution and so to the existence of the United States itself.

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The rising language of Revolution, liberty, and even implied equality via the Declaration builds to a crescendo as Horton collapses the distance between his cause and that of the Revolutionary generation. Bid Slavery hide her haggard face, And barbarism fly: I scorn to see the sad disgrace In which enslaved I lie.  (Horton, Black Bard, 76)

Slavery and barbarism are paired, and the expression of scorn for his current state emphasizes that Horton is disgraced by slavery and can restore his honor precisely by gaining his liberty. He returns to a personified Liberty as muse and lover in the final two stanzas: Dear Liberty! upon thy breast, I languish to respire; And like the Swan unto her nest, I’d like to thy smiles retire. Oh, blest asylum—heavenly balm! Unto thy boughs I flee— And in thy shades the storm shall calm, With songs of Liberty!  (Horton, Black Bard, 76)

Here Horton presents liberty, his own and that sought in the American founding, as a seamless whole, and by closing with a winsome vision of liberty as a paradise that could erase the wounds of slavery, he presents a vision of the American future that celebrates the erasure of slavery with only the slightest hint that the stains of slavery must be washed away in blood. This poem represents the early phase of Horton’s career. In his first book of poetry, Horton writes poems about many topics that do not touch on his enslaved condition: the volume starts with “Praise of Creation,” which blends Christian piety with a Romantic sense of the sublime, reveling in volcanos and cataracts. The poems that follow are also notably silent on Horton’s enslaved condition: “On the Silence of a Young Lady, on Account of the Imaginary Flight of Her Suitor,” which offers a sentimental view of feminine devotion, and “The Lover’s Farewell,” which offers the despair of a rejected suitor. That “On Liberty and Slavery” appears after these conventional and deracinated poems comes as a surprise to twenty-first century students who are assigned Horton’s volume as a whole. The next three poems after “On Liberty and Slavery”: “To Eliza,” “Love,” and “On the Death of an Infant,” compound their perplexity.

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Horton returns to the subject of slavery with “The Slave’s Complaint,” which parallels “On Liberty and Slavery” with its expression of the affective losses associated with the loss of freedom. Am I sadly cast aside, On misfortune’s rugged tide? Will the world my pains deride For ever? Must I dwell in Slavery’s night, And all pleasure take its flight, Far beyond my feeble sight, For ever?  (Horton, Black Bard, 79)

The opening two stanzas, which announce slavery as the topic of Horton’s poem, resemble “On Liberty and Slavery” in that they take the form of a complaint against the constraints that slavery imposes on the speaker’s soul as well as body. Horton makes use of “forever” as a refrain in a way that suggests Edgar Allan Poe’s later use of “nevermore” in “The Raven.” As with “On Liberty and Slavery,” Horton presents himself as a melancholy person of sensibility, whose enslavement is particularly wounding because he feels it so keenly. This emphasis on the affective intensifies as the poem moves along: Worst of all, must Hope grow dim, And withhold her cheering beam? Rather let me sleep and dream For ever! Something still my heart surveys, Groping through this dreary maze; Is it Hope?—then burn and blaze For ever!  (Horton, Black Bard, 79)

Here the cruelty of enslavement appears especially in its denial of hope to those who are enslaved. Horton makes use of a sophisticated form of chiasmus here, as he begins stanza three with hope growing dim, and then finds his way back to brightly blazing hope at the end of stanza four. Thus Horton shows that Leave me not a wretch confined, Altogether lame and blind— Unto gross despair consigned, For ever!

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Heaven! in whom can I confide? Canst thou not for all provide? Condescend to be my guide For ever: And when this transient life shall end, Oh, may some kind, eternal friend Bid me from servitude ascend, For ever!  (Horton, Black Bard, 79)

As in “On Liberty and Slavery,” Horton blends Romantic affect with Christian piety. Horton takes up the relation of his status as a poet to his enslavement most directly in “Lines, On hearing of the intention of a gentleman to purchase the Poet’s freedom.” Horton begins with a large-scale accounting for his life thus far: When on life’s ocean first I spread my sail, I then implored a mild auspicious gale; And from the slippery strand I took my flight, And sought the peaceful haven of delight.  (Horton, Black Bard, 90)

Horton begins the poem by establishing the conceit of himself as a sailor: he is the captain of the ship of his life, spreading sail on an ocean of boundless possibility. He hopes for smooth sailing, with a wind strong enough that he will be blown along easily, but mild enough that he will not encounter choppy waters. The poem is written in heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter), which move along as easily as his vision of the life that awaits him. His journey to a “peaceful haven of delight” is disrupted, however, as he encounters the storms of enslavement. Here Horton expresses metaphorically what many eighteenth and nineteenthcentury slave narratives expressed literally: the shattering moment when a child realizes that he or she is enslaved, with the accompanying sensations of terror and despair. This sense of terror and despair comes to the fore in Horton’s second stanza, even as he continues to avoid mentioning his enslavement directly: Tyrannic storms arose upon my soul, And dreadful did their mad’ning thunders roll; The pensive muse was shaken from her sphere, And hope, it vanish’d in the clouds of fear.  (Horton, Black Bard, 90)

Horton continues to develop the conceit of life as a sea voyage in a way that could apply to the writing of any free person, white or Black, as well as other enslaved persons like himself. He records the “storms” of life,

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which are connected to slavery by implication via the word “tyrannic,” but only by implication. He foregrounds his identity as a poet much more explicitly through his reference to a “pensive muse” shaken by these storms. Still avoiding direct reference to slavery, Horton continues his conceit of life as a voyage characterized by alternate storm and calm. Here he engages in a longstanding poetic tradition: the fulsome flattery of a patron, writing, At length a golden sun broke through the gloom, And from his smiles arose a sweet perfume— A calm ensued, and birds began to sing, And lo! the sacred muse resumed her wing.  (Horton, Black Bard, 90)

Because of the title of the poem, we know that Horton’s patron is the man who has said that he will purchase his freedom, but this assumption would not be required by the content of the poem. Readers familiar with Shakespeare’s sonnets, in Horton’s time and our own, could readily identify the note that Horton is striking in relation to an offstage but essential patron. Here, the patron’s gesture in offering to pay for Horton’s freedom allows Horton’s poetic vocation to resume. The poem then turns to the activity of Horton’s muse: With frantic joy she chaunted as she flew, And kiss’d the clement hand that bore her through; Her envious foes did from her sight retreat, Or prostrate fall beneath her burning feet. ’Twas like a proselyte, allied to Heaven— Or rising spirits’ boast of sins forgiven, Whose shout dissolves the adamant away, Whose melting voice the stubborn rocks obey. ’Twas like the salutation of the dove, Borne on the zephyr through some lonesome grove, When Spring returns, and Winter’s chill is past, And vegetation smiles above the blast. ’Twas like the evening of a nuptial pair, When love pervades the hour of sad despair— ’Twas like fair Helen’s sweet return to Troy, When every Grecian bosom swell’d with joy.  (Horton, Black Bard, 90)

Throughout these stanzas, Horton offers a catalogue of simile, to provide a means of understanding the joy that his poem expresses and his muse

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experiences: victory in battle, religious conversion and forgiveness, the coming of spring and new life, marriage, and the return from exile of someone who has been abducted, with the last pressing more closely on Horton’s own status as an enslaved person. Horton finally brings his celebration of his muse and his patron together in the next stanza, where it becomes clear that the song that his poetic harp plays is that of freedom: The silent harp which on the osiers hung, Was then attuned, and manumission sung: Away by hope the clouds of fear were driven, And music breathed my gratitude to Heaven.  (Horton, Black Bard, 91)

“Manumission sung” captures the blending of Horton’s identity as an enslaved person seeking freedom and his identity as a poet, the guiding force in both this poem and his wider body of work. Notably, up through this point, Horton’s role in all this seems to be that of a passive recipient of a patron’s largesse, but the poem shifts in the next stanza: Hard was the race to reach the distant goal, The needle oft was shaken from the pole; In such distress who could forbear to weep? Toss’d by the headlong billows of the deep!  (Horton, Black Bard, 91)

Here the initial conceit of Horton as a narrator negotiating the billows of life returns, but now with an emphasis on the terrible effort require to attempt to seize agency when one’s liberty has been taken away. The race for freedom is both hard and uncertain: even the compass cannot provide a reliable guide in the midst of these trials. This emphasis on uncertainty with regard to direction dovetails with the frequently use of the North Star as the one reliable guide for those escaping slavery in the work of other antislavery poets and in the initial title of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, even though Horton’s efforts to gain his freedom constitute a metaphorical rather than a literal journey. After his exaltation at the prospect of freedom, Horton has to face the betrayal of his hopes. His plans for freedom and the possibility that the liberty of his body will also liberate his muse prove to be illusory: The tantalizing beams which shone so plain, Which turned my former pleasures into pain— Which falsely promised all the joys of fame, Gave way, and to a more substantial flame.  (Horton, Black Bard, 91)

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After building the prospect of manumission into a seeming certainty, Horton now must admit that his hopes have been betrayed, and the experience is hellish in the intensity of his disappointment. The conclusion of Horton’s poem is necessarily anticlimactic, as his seeming certainty of freedom has now melted away. Without a seemingly all-powerful patron, Horton is thrown back on the kindness of a group of fairly indefinite strangers. The “philanthropic souls” of the following stanza, with their well-meaning but ineffectual gestures, cannot offer the sense of possibility that his earlier reflection on his patron had afforded him. Nonetheless, Horton conveys gratitude even as he is forced to forgo hope: Some philanthropic souls as from afar, With pity strove to break the slavish bar; To whom my floods of gratitude shall roll, And yield with pleasure to their soft control.  (Horton, Black Bard, 91)

The possibility that all is not lost provides Horton with a level of determination to persevere even if the exultant hopes expressed earlier in the poem have been dashed. And sure of Providence this work begun— He shod my feet this rugged race to run; And in despite of all the swelling tide, Along the dismal path will prove my guide. Thus on the dusky verge of deep despair, Eternal Providence was with me there; When pleasure seemed to fade on life’s gay dawn, And the last beam of hope was almost gone.  (Horton, Black Bard, 91)

As the poem concludes, it is no longer the story of the poet’s inevitable trajectory toward freedom, but it expresses a determination to press on in a situation that could easily lead to despair. Poignantly, Horton’s longings for freedom would be deferred for decades, as he only became a free man during the US Civil War, after the emancipation of enslaved people in the south by Abraham Lincoln on the grounds of military necessity. Horton offers one of the most unusual instances of the practice of writing antislavery poetry, as he wrote his verse from the inside of his enslavement, rather than from the perspective of an achieved freedom. Horton’s work highlights the ways in which enslaved people persevered in seeking justice even in the midst of the most extraordinarily painful and unjust circumstances. The fact that his is not a straightforward account of a movement from slavery to freedom makes it all the more valuable, and ensures that it

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continues to speak to our own time of perplexing steps forward and backward relative to freedom and human rights.

John Pierpont’s Antislavery Radicalism John Pierpont comes very near to being an utterly forgotten poet. Instructors looking to teach his work should be prepared to assign online archives rather than scholarly editions of poetry, as Pierpont’s work is lightly represented, if at all, in anthologies of American poetry, aside from a brief appearance in John Hollander’s Library of America anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry. That Monica Pelaez has included a generous selection of his poems in Lyrical Liberators points to a heartening change in Pierpont’s reception, and although Virginia Jackson’s reading of Pierpont in her 2022 essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Racism” is a largely negative account of what Jackson regards as Pierpont’s use of apostrophe by an enslaved speaker as a kind of poetic version of blackface, the fact that Jackson mentions Pierpont at all is a change from the last half-century of scholarship, which has rarely investigated this prolific figure. Pierpont was a Unitarian minister and a forcefully outspoken opponent of slavery who distinguished himself both by his vehemence and by his acknowledgment of the cultural, political, and economic forces that supported the slave system in the North as well as the South. Pierpont is at his most outspoken in “The Tocsin,” a substantial poem that he published in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, and later in The Colored American and The Herald of Freedom (see Pelaez, 21), as well as in the collected volume of his antislavery poems, from which I quote here. This poem is fiercely confrontational, and it challenges its readers to live up to the founding vision of the United States. A tocsin is an alarm bell, and the poem makes it clear from the beginning that Pierpont is energetically raising an alarm. The poem proceeds in swift and only occasionally variable iambic tetrameter. Pierpont begins with a direct reference to the American Revolution: WAKE! Children of the men who said, ‘All are born free!’—Their spirits come Back to the places where they bled In Freedom’s holy martyrdom, And find you sleeping on their graves, And hugging there your chains,—ye slaves! Ay,—slaves of slaves! What, sleep ye yet, And dream of Freedom, while ye sleep?  (Pierpont, 15)

This opening invokes the Declaration of Independence’s endorsement of the idea that “all men are created equal” and conflates it with the

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“inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” via the line “All are born free!” In the manner of a Puritan jeremiad, Pierpont puts forward the revolutionary generation as constituting the virtuous past from which the vicious present has declined. The revolutionary generation function here as “martyrs” in a way that echoes the function of the early Protestant martyrs in England under Henry VIII and Mary I for earlier generations of New Englanders, meaning that the devotion to freedom that is attributed to the founding generation takes on a religious cast, even as it represents a secular value. This approach is in keeping with Pierpont’s Unitarianism, a liberal, rational mode of Protestant thought and worship with a strong moral focus. The current generation has fallen away, Pierpont suggests, from the founders’ ideal of freedom in such a dramatic way that it has itself become enslaved. The slavery of the present generation of white Americans is for Pierpont a form of moral slavery, presaging that which Henry David Thoreau identified in his impassioned speech “Slavery in Massachusetts.” The descendants of the revolutionary generation have become “slaves of slaves”—morally subject to the slave system—so much so that they can only dream of freedom, but do not experience it in waking life. This concept of life within a political system shaped and determined by slavery as a delusion is reinforced in the lines that follow: Ay,—dream, while Slavery’s foot is set So firmly on your necks,—while deep The chain, her quivering flesh endures, Gnaws, like a cancer, into yours?  (Pierpont, 15)

Slavery as a system functions as an absolute taskmaster to those who believe themselves to be free as well as those who are explicitly enslaved. At the same time, it functions as a hidden disease, killing an entire society from within. It is easy to read these impassioned lines and see them as representative of sectionalism, in which a free North is contrasted to an enslaved South, but this is not Pierpont’s suggestion here. Rather, Pierpont suggests that slavery, and the oppression and brutality that it both enables and relies upon, is so deeply rooted in American society, North and South, that it cannot be eliminated without major surgery. As numerous historians of the antebellum period have noted, slavery was inextricably a part of nearly every sector of the US economy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and part of Pierpont’s alarm here is to call Americans to wake up to the fact that none of them were unaffected by living in the midst of slavery. In keeping with the rhetorical construction of antislavery poetry at large, Pierpont turns next to a refutation of his doubters, explaining that his charge that Americans at large are morally enslaved by the slave system

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that physically enslaves Black Americans is neither hyperbole nor easily refutable: Hah! say ye that I’ve falsely spoken, Calling you slaves?—Then prove ye’re not; Work a free press!—ye’ll see it broken; Stand to defend it!—ye’ll be shot.—  (Pierpont, 16)

Pierpont emphasizes that fundamental First Amendment values cannot be observed in a nation controlled by its system of slavery: a truly free press, one that speaks without fear or favor on the subject of slavery, is directly threatened by mob violence. The case of Elijah Lovejoy comes into sight here: Lovejoy was an antislavery editor who was harassed, attacked, and ultimately murdered for standing up for the freedom of the press in the Antebellum US. Lovejoy was, as Pierpont’s poem states, shot down dead as he fought to defend his own freedom of speech. Pierpont turns to the vilification of abolitionists in the lines that follow, and when he does this, he is not merely parroting proslavery views, but quoting also the position of many antislavery “moderates,” including at that time Ralph Waldo Emerson, who scoffed at the extremism of outright abolitionists in his essays of the early 1840s. More pointedly, this “moderation” represented the position of many of the nation’s Protestant churches, as Pierpont makes clear with his reference to “the brotherhood.” As such, Pierpont shifts from the secular piety of freedom of the press to the Hebrew and Christian Bible itself: O yes! but people should not dare Print what “the brotherhood” won’t bear! Then from your lips let words of grace, Gleaned from the Holy Bible’s pages, Fall, while ye’re pleading for a race Whose blood has flowed through chains for ages; And pray,—‘Lord, let thy kingdom come!’ And see if ye’re not stricken dumb. Yes, men of God! ye may not speak, As, by the Word of God, ye’re bidden; By the pressed lip,—the blanching cheek, Ye feel yourselves rebuked and chidden;  (Pierpont, 16)

Here the jeremiad is directed explicitly at the clergy of the United States and its privileging of ecclesiastical and national unity over the moral values that for Pierpont are at the center of the sacred texts that they all claim to honor. If antislavery radicals like Lovejoy are silenced, then ministers have the responsibility to preach against slavery directly from the Bible. If they fail in this religious duty, then their prayers are ineffectual and even

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blasphemous: God may strike moderate ministers dumb if they presume to say the words that conclude the Lord’s Prayer. The cowardice of the ministry is precisely what prevents them from speaking with moral vigor against slavery, Pierpont argues: And if ye’re not cast out, ye fear it;— And why?—“The brethren” will not hear it. Since, then, through pulpit, or through press, To prove your freedom ye’re not able, Go,—like the Sun of Righteousness, By wise men honored,—to a stable! Bend there to Liberty your knee! Say there that God made all men free! Even there,—ere Freedom’s vows ye’ve plighted, Ere of her form ye’ve caught a glimpse, Even there are fires infernal lighted, And ye’re driven out by Slavery’s imps.*  (Pierpont, 17)

Here Pierpont parallels his redirection of present-day Americans to the values of their forbears to a redirection of the Christian ministry to the founding values of their faith: if they cannot occupy the public square in opposition to slavery, at least they can stand up in private and in places that sit on the margins of society. If Jesus could be born in a stable, so also the antislavery impulse could be cultivated away from the centers of power. The nature of the enforcement of the slave system by mob violence, however, means that even in these marginal settings, the demonic power of slavery can drive out well-intentioned ministers. From here, Pierpont digs still more deeply into the past: he started with the way in which the nineteenth-century United States had fallen away from the founding values of the Republic, then he proceeded to relate how the Protestant ministry was failing to endorse the creed of the Protestant Reformation. Next he moves back to Christ as the source of Christianity, and his own invocation of the persecution of Old Testament prophets in the Gospels of the Christian New Testament: Ah, well!—”so persecuted they The prophets” of a former day! Go, then, and build yourselves a hall, To prove ye are not slaves, but men! Write “FREEDOM,” on its towering wall! Baptize it in the name of PENN; And give it to her holy cause, Beneath the Ægis of her laws;— Within let Freedom’s anthem swell;—  (Pierpont, 18)

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He imagines ministers reclaiming their moral purpose by standing up against the slave system in public, enlisting a blend of the moral authority of Christianity and the civic authority of the law, with William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Pennsylvania colony serving to represent both. Here as well, the moral courage of antislavery Christians, Quaker and otherwise, is met by brute force in the following lines: And, while your hearts begin to throb, And burn within you——Hark! the yell,— The torch,—the torrent of the Mob!— They’re Slavery’s troops that round you sweep, And leave your hall a smouldering heap! At Slavery’s beck, the prayers ye urge On your own servants, through the door Of your own Senate,—that the scourge May gash your brother’s back no more,— Are trampled underneath their feet, While ye stand praying in the street!  (Pierpont, 18–19)

Mob violence serves the purposes of slavery, and those who attack the slave system are at perpetual risk of being murdered as a result of their stance. Notably, the role that mob violence and the mobilization of extrajudicial killing plays in maintaining the slave society presages the role that apparently spontaneous attacks on minorities and dissidents played in the development of Fascist dictatorships in the 1930s and in the episodes of communal violence and ethnic cleansing that took place in societies ranging from South Asia to Africa and to the former Yugoslavia in the later twentieth century. Pierpont’s next move is to link the violence of slavery to the violence of Indian Removal and the Seminole Wars. This linkage is an instance of how intersectionality avant la lettre functions as an organizing feature of antislavery poetry. Pierpont makes clear that the genocide against Indigenous people is not, fundamentally, a separate issue from the violence of the slave system: At Slavery’s beck, ye send your sons To hunt down Indian wives or maids, Doomed to the lash!—Yes, and their bones, Whitening ’mid swamps and everglades, Where no friend goes to give them graves, Prove that ye are not Slavery’s slaves! At Slavery’s beck, the very hands Ye lift to Heaven, to swear ye’re free, Will break a truce, to seize the lands Of Seminole or Cherokee!

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Yes,—tear a flag, that Tartar hordes Respect, and shield it with their swords!  (Pierpont, 19)

Pierpont’s tone becomes increasingly fierce in its “scorching irony,” to use Frederick Douglass’s phrase from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” (Douglass, Great Speeches, 36). Here as before, he reminds Americans from all sections of the country that they have become “Slavery’s slaves,” and he points out that their acts of violence, which might seem like expressions of agency, in fact merely illustrate the profundity of their moral enslavement to the slave system itself. Pierpont now reaches a crescendo of sorts in his invocation of the wrath of God, a centerpiece of the jeremiad as a genre. Vengeance is thine, Almighty God! To pay it hath thy justice bound thee; Even now, I see thee take thy rod,— Thy thunders, leashed and growling round thee; Slip them not yet, in mercy!—Deign Thy wrath yet longer to restrain!—  (Pierpont, 19–20)

Given the failure of all civic and religious institutions to restrain slavery, all that is left is the prospect of divine intervention. The judgment of God offers the prospect of the end of slavery, but even here, Pierpont paints a bleak picture of the prospects: Or,—let thy kingdom, Slavery, come! Let Church, let State, receive thy chain! Let pulpit, press, and hall be dumb, If so “the brotherhood” ordain!  (Pierpont, 20)

Pierpont considers the blasphemous possibility that God’s own kingdom, in the words of the Lord’s prayer, can be conflated with slavery, and that God’s intervention may ultimately be withheld. Where then, can those who oppose slavery turn? Here Pierpont invokes poetry itself as a response to the slave power: The MUSE her own indignant spirit Will yet speak out;—and men shall hear it. Yes;—while, at Concord, there’s a stone That she can strike her fire from still; While there’s a shaft at Lexington, Or half a one on Bunker’s Hill, There shall she stand and strike her lyre, And Truth and Freedom shall stand by her. But, should she thence by mobs be driven,

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For purer heights she’ll plume her wing;— Spurning a land of slaves, to heaven She’ll soar, where she can safely sing. God of our fathers, speed her thither! God of the free, let me go with her!  (Pierpont, 20)

For Pierpont, freedom is the essence of poetry, and if politics and religion both prove impotent to offer a response to slavery, then the poetic vision may offer a solution. This view of poetry chimes, of course, with the fervent endorsement of poetry as a source of resistance in British Romantic poets like Blake, Shelley, and the early Wordsworth and Coleridge. Poetry can rescue the civic virtues associated with Bunker Hill, and poetry is the means by which the intervention of the “God of our fathers” can be invoked. Even though Pierpont seems to be positioning himself as a witness to despair in his poem, acknowledging as it does the utter breakdown of political, civic, and religious institutions in the face of slavery, he ultimately posits the act of writing poetry itself as a ground for hope. Pierpont’s approach in “The Tocsin” is to embrace what Frederick Douglass would come to call “scorching irony,” offering a fierce and biting rebuke of the behavior of slave-owners and their supporter, and reframing the term “slavery” to express the moral abjection of those who fail to stand by their own moral convictions. It is also, however, to offer poetry itself as source as well as an expression of moral passion, and to suggest that poetry can become part of the answer to the enslavement of the human mind and conscience. Although “The Tocsin” is Pierpont’s most emblematic poem, his other poems on slavery expand his response to the political, moral, religious, and humanitarian issues at stake. In two paired poems, “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star” and “The Slaveholder’s Apostrophe to the North Star,” Pierpont offers a compressed version of the irony and outrage on display in “The Tocsin,” along with a touchingly empathetic attempt to understand the movement to freedom from slavery. In “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star,” the poem that Jackson critiques for its use of apostrophe, Pierpont attempts to understand the feelings of a man who is escaping from slavery. The enslaved man who is on his way north is the speaker, and the North Star, which provided a potent symbol of liberty for the enslaved and formerly enslaved, as well as for a time providing a name, to the newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass, is the addressee. The man fleeing north pauses to reflect: STAR of the North! though night-winds drift The fleecy drapery of the sky,

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Between thy lamp and me, I lift, Yea, lift with hope, my sleepless eye, To the blue heights wherein thou dwellest, And of a land of freedom tellest.  (Pelaez, 63–64)

The opening address to the start identifies it as a locus of aspiration. The start points toward freedom, and so it serves as an inspiration for the traveler escaping from slavery as well as a guide. By using the form of the apostrophe, Pierpont is employing a staple of Romantic poetry, of which late Romantics in Britain like Keats and Shelley were particularly fond. He creates a powerfully dramatic scene, with the speaker set theatrically against the night sky. The lines that follow this opening highlight the visual drama of the scene by shifting the context to daylight: Star of the North! while blazing day Pours round me its full tide of light. And hides thy pale but faithful ray, I, too, lie hid, and long for night: For night;—I dare not walk at noon,  (Pelaez, 64)

The fugitive makes a comparison between his state and that of the star with deep pathos. Like the star that is eclipsed by the sun at day, the speaker can only appear under the cover of night, and so his condition is tied to that of the star whose path he follows. He expresses the grandeur of the star’s association with liberty with an extended biblical reference: Nor dare I trust the faithless moon,— Nor faithless man, whose burning lust For gold hath riveted my chain; No other leader can I trust, But thee, of even the starry train; For, all the host around thee burning, Like faithless man, keep turning, turning. I may not follow where they go: Star of the North, I look to thee, While on I press; for well I know Thy light and truth shall set me free;— Thy light, that no poor slave deceiveth; Thy truth, that all my soul believeth. They of the East beheld the star That over Bethlehem’s manger glowed; With joy they hailed it from afar, And followed where it marked the road, Till, where its rays directly fell,

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They found the hope of Israel. Wise were the men, who followed thus The star that sets man free from sin!  (Pelaez, 64)

The North Star became a counterpart in the western hemisphere to the star that in the Gospel of Matthew led worshippers to the infant Jesus, and the moral rebuke of sin and the moral rebuke of slavery in the poem become joined through the image of the star. Pierpont intensifies the connection between the star, physical freedom, and spiritual salvation in the lines that follow: Star of the North! thou art to us,— Who’re slaves because we wear a skin Dark as is night’s protecting wing,— Thou art to us a holy thing. And we are wise to follow thee! I trust thy steady light alone: Star of the North! thou seem’st to me To burn before the Almighty’s throne, To guide me, through these forests dim And vast, to liberty and HIM.  (Pelaez, 64–65)

The visual logic of these lines is rich: it connects the darkness of the speaker’s skin and the racism that oppresses him because of his skin to the night sky against which the star is set, and it pairs liberty from enslavement with the mystical vision of the Christian deity. As the start leads the fugitive to the north and political liberty, it is also leading him to God. Pierpont’s next turn is to nature, using imagery that echoes the Romantic nature imagery of nineteenth-century American poet William Cullen Bryant in “To a Water-Fowl”: Thy beam is on the glassy breast Of the still spring, upon whose brink I lay my weary limbs to rest, And bow my parching lips to drink. Guide of the friendless negro’s way, I bless thee for this quiet ray!  (Pelaez, 65)

Bryant’s apostrophe to the waterfowl in his broadly popular poem imagines the bird conveying a divine message to him about the nature of providence and his own human destiny; the role of the waterfowl is taken here by the star. It might be easy to think of this sort of passage as mere conventional filler, but it also expresses something of the expansive humanism that Gerald Vizenor has identified as being central to Indigenous

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thought: the point here is that the formerly enslaved speaker has the same spiritual yearning and sense of union with the natural world that the presumptively white speaker of Bryant’s poem has. More than mere conventional poetizing, this passage constitutes a powerful appeal for and to empathy. That Pierpont is seeking to overwhelm the obstacles to empathy that had become ubiquitous among nineteenth-century white Americans toward those who had been enslaved becomes evident in the lines that follow, as the fugitive narrates the story of his own escape: In the dark top of southern pines I nestled, when the driver’s horn Called to the field, in lengthening lines, My fellows, at the break of morn. And there I lay, till thy sweet face Looked in upon “my hiding-place.”  (Pelaez, 65)

Pierpont’s fugitive is hidden in the tree-tops when the work day begins at the plantation where he is enslaved, meaning, by implication, that he will need to hide in or near the tree all day before continuing his escape. He makes his way from the tree-tops to [T]he tangled cane-brake,—where I crept, For shelter from the heat of noon, And where, while others toiled, I slept, Till wakened by the rising moon,— As its stalks felt the night-wind free, Gave me to catch a glimpse of thee. Star of the North! in bright array, The constellations round thee sweep, Each holding on its nightly way, Rising, or sinking in the deep, And, as it hangs in mid heaven flaming, The homage of some nation claiming.  (Pelaez, 65)

The fact that the fugitive has hidden in a cane-brake suggests that he is enslaved on a sugar plantation, in particularly brutal circumstances. His turn to the image of the North Star in the sky leads him to reflect on the question of nationality. By definition the star transcends nationality and looks down over multiple nations. Reflecting on this leads the fugitive to compare the national symbols of the United States, in the territory of which he is always vulnerable to being returned to slavery, to those of Great Britain, which as the nation that rules Canada becomes associated with freedom. The fugitive reflects:

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This nation to the Eagle cowers; Fit ensign! she’s a bird of spoil;— Like worships like! for each devours The earnings of another’s toil.  (Pelaez, 65)

The bald eagle as an image of the United States seems appropriate to this man who is escaping from slavery, as the eagle steals the food that others have made or killed. The United States becomes imagined as a carrion fowl because of its association with slavery, and the fugitive reflects that he has experienced the pains of dispossession that are the lot of the eagle’s victims: I’ve felt her talons and her beak, And now the gentler Lion seek. The Lion, at the Virgin’s feet, Couches, and lays his mighty paw Into her lap!—an emblem meet Of England’s Queen and English law:— Queen, that hath made her Islands free! Law that holds out its shield to me! Star of the North! upon that shield Thou shinest!—O, for ever shine! The negro, from the cotton-field, Shall then beneath its orb recline, And feed the Lion couched before it, Nor heed the Eagle screaming o’er it!  (Pelaez, 65–66)

Pierpont here reverses the rhetoric of the American revolution: Britain, not America, is the image of freedom. If “The Tocsin” took the form of a jeremiad calling the United States back to a foundational commitment to freedom, “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star” questions the exceptional character of the United States altogether, and he does so in a way that asks for his readers to embrace true empathy with the enslaved. In the companion poem, Pierpont reverses the perspective from which the North Star is used. Here, a brutal and depraved slave-owner bellicosely confronts the star that he blames for the loss of his human property: STAR of the North, thou art not bigger Than is the diamond in my ring; Yet every black, star-gazing nigger Stares at thee, as at some great thing! Yes, gazes at thee, till the lazy

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And thankless rascal is half crazy. Some Quaker scoundrel must have told ’em That, if they take their flight tow’rd thee, They’d get where ‘massa’ cannot hold ’em; And, therefore, to the North they flee.  (Pelaez, 66)

The vileness of the speaker’s language reflects the vileness of his personality. He immediately uses the most offensive of racial epithets (then and now) to refer to enslaved people who seek their freedom. He blames Quakers and other abolitionists for the impulses toward liberty that the enslaved feel, and he refuses to acknowledge any sort of agency on the part of the enslaved. Unlike the fugitive’s touching address to the North Star, the slave-owner’s address captures what is a central point for Pierpont: that the practice of slavery utterly corrupts those who benefit from it materially. The slave-owner dismisses those escaping from slavery as, paradoxically, passive instruments of the aims of others, and he engages in the conventional pro-slavery polemical trope of expressing sympathy for fugitives “deceived” by abolitionists and the North Star alike: Fools! to be led off, where they can’t earn Their living, by thy lying lantern. Thou’rt a cold water star, I reckon, Although I’ve never seen thee, yet, When to the bath thy sisters beckon, Get even thy golden sandals wet; Nor in the wave have known thee dip, In our hot nights, thy finger’s tip. If thou wouldst, nightly, leave the pole, To enjoy a regular ablution In the North Sea, or Symmes’s hole, Our ‘Patriarchal Institution,’ From which thou findest many a ransom, Would, doubtless, give thee something handsome. Although thou’rt a cold water star, As I have said, I think, already, Thou’rt hailed, by many a tipsy tar, Who likes thee just because thou’rt steady, And hold’st the candle for the rover, When he is more than “half seas over.”  (Pelaez, 66–67)

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He resents the star in particular because the star is so reliable: if only the star would abandon its moral principles and get drunk, it would make less trouble. This attack on the consistency and rectitude of the star serves to parallel the attacks that pro-slavery advocates frequently made on abolitionists, who were associated in pro-slavery minds with Puritan inflexibility. Pierpont also highlights here the connection between abolition and temperance as moral movements. The speaker suggests that the moral enervation that the personified star would experience if it could only bring itself to drink would enable it to compromise with slavery, and the suggestion is that the moral compromises involved in alcohol abuse also lead to the moral insensitivity that allows one man to enslave another. Symmes Hole refers to the undersea tunnel between the North and South Pole that Edgar Allan Poe had recently invoked in his racially charged Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which reflected similar racist anxieties to those in the lines that follow: But, while Ham’s seed, our land to bless, “Increase and multiply” like rabbits, We like thee, Yankee Star, the less, For thy bright eye, and steady habits. Pray waltz with Venus, star of love, Or take a bout with reeling Jove. Thou art an abolition star, And to my wench wilt be of use, if her Dark eye should find thee, ere the car Of our true old slave-catcher, “Lucifer, Star of the morning,” upward rolls, And, with its light, puts out the pole’s.  (Pelaez, 67)

Pierpont makes a move in the lines above that would become increasingly common in abolitionist literature in the 1840s and 1850s. He specifies that the enslaved person (“my wench,” in the slave-owner’s coarse usage) is a woman, and that she is likely to wish to escape. Although Pierpont does not make the fact of sexual violence against enslaved women explicit here, it is certainly implicit. The slave-owner’s reference to her “dark eye” reflects the tendency to catalogue women’s physical appearance in erotic poetry, and the fact that he uses “my wench” to refer possessively to her only reinforces the implication, as does the likelihood, based on earlier lines in the poem, that the slave-owner is frequently drunk. The slave-owner next turns to the possibility that those who are laborers in the field may also follow the star to freedom, imagining the star, ironically, as an overseer of sorts, and then, less ironically, as an abolitionist polemicist and poet in its own right:

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On our field hands thou lookest, too— A sort of nightly overseer— Canst find no other work to do? I tell thee, thou’rt not wanted here; So, pray, shine only on the oceans, Thou number one of “Northern notions.” Yes, northern notions,—northern lights! As hates the devil holy water, So hate I all that Rogers writes, Or Weld, that married Grimkè’s daughter:— So hate I all these northern curses, From Birney’s prose to Whittier’s verses.  (Pelaez, 67–68)

The slave-owner’s conceit that the star is an “abolition star” is now developed into a catalogue of figures who have opposed slavery in the North, all of whom he links to the star. Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom, Theodore Dwight Weld and his wife Angelina (Grimke) Weld, James G. Birney, and John Greenleaf Whittier are all mentioned as recipients of the speaker’s hatred. Angelina Grimke and James G. Birney, as antislavery Southerners, no doubt are particularly hard antagonists for the slave-owner to acknowledge. Perhaps the literature marriage of Northern and Southern antislavery individuals leads the slave-owner to his next point, which is his diatribe against “amalgamation” or the intermarriage of people of European and African descent. He begins with Shakespeare’s Othello, and then proceeds to an assertion that liberty leads to intermarriage between the formerly enslaved and white people. This, as his earlier reference to “his wench” reminds us, is in fact a highly ironic basis on which to attack those who oppose slavery. It is also gendered to play on fears of Black male violence against white women while obscuring the much more common practice of white male violence against Black women: “Put out the light!” exclaimed the Moor— I think they call his name Othello— When opening his wife’s chamber door To cut her throat—the princely fellow! Noblest of all the nigger nation! File leader in amalgamation!  (Pelaez, 68)

Othello kills Desdemona in a jealous rage in the play that bears his name, and the speaker’s attack is both an appeal to white antagonism to intermarriage and to white fears of insurrection. The North Star’s message of freedom will ultimately result, the speaker implies, in a war between the races in which white people, including women, will die.

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By this point, fueled by alcohol as well as rage and hate, the slaveowner clearly believes he has made his case against the North Star: “Put out the light!” and so say I. Could “I quench thee, thou flaming minister,” No longer, in the northern sky, Should blaze thy beacon-fire so sinister. North Star, thy light’s unwelcome—very— We’ll vote thee “an incendiary.” And, to our “natural allies”— Our veteran Kinderhook Invincibles, Who do our bidding, in the guise Of “northern men, with southern principles,”— Men who have faces firm as dough, And, as we set their noses, go— To these, we’ll get some scribe to write, And tell them not to let thee shine— Excepting of a cloudy night— Any where, south of Dixon’s line.  (Pelaez, 68)

The slave-owner confirms that he and his pro-slavery allies in the North believe that they have the power to blot out the light of a star, via their political machinations. The slave-owner praises the Northern dough-faces who are scorned by abolitionists for their moral cowardice, and he uses his punning characterization of the star as “an incendiary” to launch a final threat at the “abolition star”: If, beyond that, thou shin’st, an inch, We’ll have thee up before Judge Lynch:— And when, thou abolition star, Who preachest freedom, in all weathers, Thou hast got on a coat of tar, And, over that, a cloak of feathers, That thou art “fixed” shalt none deny, If there’s a fixed star in the sky.  (Pelaez, 68)

Hyperbolically, the slave owner threatens to tar, feather, and even lynch the star. The vulgarity of the poem, along with its length and numerous references that may be opaque to twenty-first century readers, prevents it from being as frequently anthologized as even “The Fugitive Slave’s Address to the North Star,” but it remains worthy of careful attention. It serves as an example of the “scorching irony” that Frederick Douglass

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would prescribe as the proper response to pro-slavery ideology, and it offers a detailed analysis and implicit rebuttal of the psychology of racism and slaveholding, and it offers a few of the complex ecology of reform and anti-reform movements in the 1840s United States. Pierpont’s poem “Prayer of the Abolitionist” offers his most concise statement of the aims of the abolitionist movement in the early 1840s. Speaking for the abolitionist movement as a whole, Pierpont writes: WE ask not that the slave should lie, As lies his master, at his ease, Beneath a silken canopy, Or in the shade of blooming trees. We mourn not that the man should toil; ’T is nature’s need—’t is God’s decree; But, let the hand that tills the soil, Be, like the wind that fans it, free.  (Pierpont, 53)

These opening lines offer a rebuttal to common attacks on abolitionists. They are not abandoning the Protestant work ethic that insists that labor is necessary; rather, they are insisting that labor only has its divinely imputed dignity when people are free. Indeed, the phrase “As lies his master . . .” suggest that the reverse is the case: slavery itself undermines the possibility of a work ethic by creating a class of idle rich people who do not engage in work and so do not experience its redemptive possibilities. Turning to the next major charge against abolitionists, Pierpont disavows the claim that the abolition of slavery meant taking revenge for the violence of slavery: as an abolitionist, he does not recommend enslaving or brutalizing the enslavers, even though they have clearly done this to those they enslaved. We ask not “eye for eye”—that all, Who forge the chain and ply the whip, Should feel their torture—that the thrall Should wield the scourge of mastership— We only ask, O God, that they, Who bind a brother, may relent: But, GREAT AVENGER, we do pray That the wrong-doer may repent.  (Pierpont, 53–54)

Acknowledging God’s status as the “GREAT AVENGER,” a descriptive that also appears in James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis,” Pierpont explicitly disavows vengeance for slavery or a mere reversal of the roles of master and slave. As with “The Tocsin,” Pierpont uses the religious language of sin and repentance to define the aims of abolitionists in this poem. Pierpont’s own status as a public figure and Unitarian minister

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comes into view as he issues a manifesto for abolition. He responds to charges that would become particularly strident in the 1850s and 1860s that the goal of abolitionists is simply to make the masters and those they enslaved change places. Rather, he asserts, the aim of abolition is a fundamental sort of justice: the exploitation of human beings through slavery is a moral wrong, and what is required to reverse this moral wrong is repentance, understood as the act of ceasing to continue in moral evil and to turn towards justice. If the “wrong-doer[s]” who hold others in slavery repent, that will be a sufficient solution to the problem of the slave system, in that it will break the cycle of violence without instituting a new one. Pierpont’s plea for repentance is especially poignant because, at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century, nearly 180 years after Pierpont wrote his poem, it is painfully evident that no such universal repentance has ever taken place. Individuals have rejected racism and slavery; the nation as a whole abolished slavery after the Civil War and made Jim Crow illegal in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but the structures of racial inequality and violence against which Pierpont fought have not been finally renounced as he certainly might have hoped. The fact that Pierpont is engaged in his poetry with large structures of racist violence and oppression continue to make him an important poet to read today, despite the fact that he has been too frequently ignored by the makers of anthologies and curricula.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Mild Radicalism That the most widely beloved poet in the nineteenth-century United States was also among the earliest to compose a full volume of antislavery poetry might seem surprising. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow courted the widest possible audience for his poetry on both sides of the Atlantic, and the result was that he seemed to transcend region and even nation in his readership. As measured by sales, he was more popular in England than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the English poet laureate. He had a remarkable ability to speak to readers across regional, class, and ideological lines, and from the 1840s until the early twentieth century, he was the poet whom Americans of all backgrounds were most likely to have encountered. The majority of Longfellow’s work, and certainly of his most popular work, did not deal with slavery, but his interest in making his poetry a meeting place of various cultures, languages, and nationalities is reflected throughout his body of work. His most popular long work, The Song of Hiawatha, attempted to show the richness of Indigenous cultures even as it often blurred the boundaries between, for example, Iroquois and Ojibwe people and attributed European verse forms to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Throughout Longfellow’s work, there is an

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insistence on valuing the diversity in human cultures and finding commonalities among human cultures. As widely beloved as Longfellow was, his contemporaries noted that he could seem almost too kindly and pacific to be valued, and he was the subject of fierce attacks by Edgar Allan Poe and energetic defenses by James Russell Lowell, among others. Given Longfellow’s interest in creating a broad readership, it is perhaps surprising that one of his earliest volumes of poetry was entirely devoted to the antislavery cause, a cause that was opposed by many readers around the United States who otherwise might form a portion of Longfellow’s audience. Longfellow’s approach to writing this poetry was characteristically conciliatory, in that in a letter to Isaac Appleton Jewett he described the poems as “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast” (qtd. Irmscher, 112). This statement certainly exaggerated both the mildness of Longfellow’s poems and the willingness of slaveholders to accept criticism of their practices, but it is suggestive of how much Longfellow desired to persuade as well as critique in his writing. We might be tempted to doubt based on Longfellow’s description of the volume in his letter to Jewett whether Longfellow’s poems about slavery qualify as being antislavery at all, but when we take the time to read both the poems themselves and the vitriolic response from Poe, it becomes evident that Longfellow’s poetry served the antislavery cause, even if it was not directly associated with it as the sort of movement poetry that Pierpont or John Greenleaf Whittier was writing. As irenic as Longfellow’s temperament was, his antislavery poetry was forceful and powerfully affecting, and it is hard to imagine that ardent proslavery ideologues could enjoy a comfortable meal after reading them. Indeed, what we know about their reception history suggests the opposite. As Longfellow biographer Charles C. Calhoun notes, “Poems on Slavery immensely pleased the abolitionists, still regarded as a radical fringe by most Bostonians; John Greenleaf Whittier even invited Longfellow to run for Congress on the new antislavery Liberty Part ticket” (Calhoun, 157). Meanwhile, the Southern response can be seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s scathing review of the volume, where Poe dismissed the book as being of primary interest to “negrophilic old ladies” (qtd. Calhoun, 157). The introductory note to the Houghton Mifflin edition of Longfellow’s Poetical Works that was published in 1886 offers the background for Longfellow’s poems, which were written on shipboard during a stormy fifteen-day voyage from England to the United States. Notably, the initial source of Longfellow’s inspiration for writing these poems came from the Caribbean, as Samuel Longfellow reported in his biography of the poet: “While in Brunswick [Longfellow] had conceived of the idea of writing a drama on the subject of Touissant L’Ouverture, ‘that I thus may do something in my own humble way for the cause of Negro emancipation’” (qtd. Longfellow, 84). Samuel Longfellow noted that the poet was not a

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part of the Abolitionist movement at the time when he wrote the poems, and that his “pacific temper” made it difficult for him to associate himself directly with activism. Despite Longfellow’s lack of formal attachment to the Abolitionist cause, the poems serve to emphasize the humanity and dignity of enslaved people and allow Longfellow’s readers to empathize with their suffering and their desire for freedom (Longfellow, 84–85). As far removed from Pierpont’s radicalism as Longfellow might seem to be, reading their poetry together reveals certain commonalities, and finding these commonalities suggests that when we are reading antislavery poetry, we are not merely reading a disconnected catalogue of polemics, but rather a coherent tradition of literary expression with its own formal qualities and conventional uses of metaphor and versification. If Pierpont represents the activist fringe among white antislavery writers, and Horton is remarkable in his ability to negotiate his ability to publish antislavery verse while still enslaved, Longfellow gives us an idea of what the broad middle of antislavery verse could look like, and how close it could come to the work of Longfellow’s more remarkable contemporaries. The volume opens with a poem that highlights the relationship between the antislavery movement and nineteenth-century religious liberalism. Longfellow’s opening dedicatory verse was addressed to the most influential liberal clergyman of Longfellow’s time, William Ellery Channing, who was the leading figure in shaping Unitarian theology in the nineteenth-century United States. As Longfellow ruefully noted, Channing died too soon to see the epistle that was dedicated to him, but nonetheless, Channing’s sense of human moral responsibility informs the entire volume. Longfellow expresses the confrontation between slavery and those seeking its abolition in apocalyptic terms, imagining Channing as a latter-day apostle: My heart responding, ever said, Servant of God, well done! Well done! Thy words are great and bold; At times they seem to me, Like Luther’s in the days of old, Half-battles for the free. Go on, until this land revokes The old and charter’d Lie, The feudal curse, whose whips and yokes, Insult humanity. A voice is ever at thy side, Speaking in tones of might,

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Like the prophetic voice, that cried To John in Patmos, “Write!” Write! And tell out this bloody tale, Record this dire eclipse, This Day of Wrath, this Endless Wail, This dread Apocalypse!  (Longfellow, 87)

This opening might seem unlikely as praise proceeding from one man known for his rational moderation to another, but it underscores the moral stakes that Longfellow saw in the anti-slavery struggle. The invocation of Martin Luther suggests that Longfellow views the slavery question as a definitional one for Christianity: Luther had rejected his ancestral Catholic faith on the grounds that Christian doctrine had been irremediably distorted by the attribution of salvation to human effort, and while nineteenth-century Protestants were moving away from the more extreme excesses of early Protestant anti-Catholicism, they viewed themselves as being on a trajectory of continuous reform dating back to Luther himself. The next reference intensifies Longfellow’s sense of the stakes in the debate over slavery, as the biblical John had written the final book of the Christian New Testament on Patmos, and this book concerned with the ultimate destruction of this temporal world and the redemption of an eternal New Jerusalem. Longfellow builds on this apocalyptic vision throughout Poems on Slavery. The second poem in the slender volume, “The Slave’s Dream,” offers a narrative that in its structure prefigures Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been a standby for decades in teaching students at the high school level how to understand plot structures. The poem begins with an image of an enslaved man dreaming, Beside the ungathered rice he lay, His sickle in his hand; His breast was bare, his matted hair Was buried in the sand. And in the midst of sorrow and sleep, He saw his Native Land.  (Longfellow, 88)

Longfellow uses a standard ballad meter here (alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter), and his hero is caught at a moment of ambiguous peril. He appears to be sleeping, but the fact that he seems to be in the middle of a task suggests that his condition is significantly worse than the used of the term sleep implies. That he is dreaming of Africa reflects a standard device in antislavery poetry that appears frequently in Montgomery’s The

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West Indies, which as I have suggested in the first chapter is an important precursor text for antislavery poetry in the United States, as the longing for a homeland is presented as a means of combatting the dehumanization of enslaved people. His physical description indicates that he is forced to work in rice fields, either in the Southern United States or the Caribbean, a task associated with early death among enslaved people. Longfellow turns to a panoramic image of the enslaved man’s dream, revealing that his current position contrasts sharply with his earlier life: Wide through the landscape of his dreams The lordly Niger flowed; Beneath the palm-trees on the plain Once more a king he strode; And heard the tinkling caravans Descend the mountain road.  (Longfellow, 88)

Longfellow here invokes a trope that goes back at least through Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688): that of the “royal slave,” as Behn describes her titular character in the subtitle of her narrative, which is sometimes described as the earliest British novel, antedating even Robinson Crusoe and Clarissa. The image of the royal slave persists in antislavery literature, and it receives a new twist in the 1850s, when William Wells Brown invokes his character Clotel’s descent from Thomas Jefferson in Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1854) and when Melville offers an ironic reversal of the tradition in “Benito Cereno,” with the royal Atufal playing a secondary role to Babo, who was enslaved in Africa before being sold into New World slavery (1855). Clearly this is a departure from realism, as presumably a relatively small number of enslaved people actually held royal status in their homelands, and for many enslaved people, their place of birth was the colony, state, or nation in which they were enslaved. As with the suggestion of homesickness, however, this trope has the effect of emphasizing the humanity of enslaved people. Although the idea of any person’s being treated as property should be horrifying, the ironic reversal of the king as slave served as a particularly shocking instance of the indignities of slavery for seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenthcentury readers. Longfellow raises the stakes in the next stanza by revealing that not only has the enslaved dreamer been of royal stature within his homeland, but he has also been a husband and a father, and his response to the affection of his children is that of a sentimental nineteenth-century family man. Longfellow assures his readers that “[a] tear burst from the sleeper’s lids  / And fell into the sand.” (88) The next step in the man’s dream presents the idea that freedom and agency are equally eminent among the enslaved dreamer’s sentiments, as he sees himself riding “at furious

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speed” by the Niger River and taking in the flora and fauna of the African continent as he rides. The genre of the travelogue was extraordinarily popular in the 1830s and 1840s, and Longfellow captures something of this tradition of travel writing as vicarious experience in these lines. Poems on Slavery moves between the experiences of enslaved people and the experiences of their advocates, and the next poem, “The Good Part,” focuses on the moral choice faced by those who have profited from slavery without having chosen to do so. Again using ballad meter and narrative verse, Longfellow introduces his readers to a schoolteacher who is living a life of Christ-like “decent poverty” in rural Virginia near the Kenhawa River, a tributary of the Ohio (now spelled Kanawha, and in West Virginia), devoted her time and talent to the education of young children. Longfellow begins by noting: “All her hope and all her pride / Are in the village school” (89). It might appear that this woman’s virtues are such that she has never known the possibility of avarice or temptation: Her soul, like the transparent air That robes the hills above, Though not of earth, encircles there All things with arms of love.  (90)

It seems as if this paragon of feminine virtue is as angelic as the looks she uses to “subdu[e] e’en rude village churls.” Her virtue reveals itself in particular in her devotion to the cause of the enslaved: the girls she teaches learn “Of One who came to save; / To cast the captive’s chains aside / And liberate the slave.” Here Christ’s role in saving sinners within the Christian faith is wedded to the liberation of those enslaved in the nineteenth century, and the teacher looks forward to a millennial time “When all men shall be free / And musical, as silver bells, / Their falling chains shall be.” Her “decent poverty” is a form of imitatio Christi, and her entire life is “one sweet record / And deed of charity” (90). Longfellow saves a crucial bit of information for the turn in the concluding three stanzas of the poem, when he reveals that the teacher was not born to this lifestyle, nor did she fall into it as a matter of happenstance. Rather, she was born into a wealthy slave-owning family, and she has made the moral choice to give up all her wealth by setting the enslaved free: “For she was rich, and gave up all  / To break the iron bands  / Of those who waited in her hall  / And Labored in her lands” (90). Relinquishing her possession of others is not an inexpensive expression of benevolence for the teacher: she has willingly surrendered wealth and privilege, and her refusal to live off the labor of others means that she must labor herself. This might seem like an unhappy ending for a lady born to privilege: she would have never needed to work for her living, but now “she, in meek humility / Now earns her daily bread.” It is

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noteworthy here that Longfellow acknowledges the allure that the privileges that slaveholders have can hold for them. The fact that the teacher could have avoided earning her “daily bread” means that she has been exempted from the curse inflicted on Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Bible when they are expelled from Eden: she can live the lifestyle of paradise, as long as she is willing to condemn some of her fellow human beings to the deeper curse of forced labor and the indignity of being owned by another. Thus the teacher’s moral choice is portrayed in stark terms. She surrenders her wealth and chooses poverty, but this voluntarily chosen poverty is finally her salvation, as the seal of her sanctity is the prayer of those whom she has set free: It is their prayers, which never cease, That clothe her which such grace; Their blessing is the light of peace That shines upon her face.  (91)

Especially noteworthy here is the direction that Longfellow gives to agency in this poem. Obviously, the Christ-like schoolteacher who surrenders her wealth to free the enslaved is being presented as having great agency through her sacrifice, but the agency here does not flow in one direction. The formerly enslaved make her the object of their prayers, and so the sanctity that her students admire and the village churls cannot quite bring themselves to challenge is the gift of others. Although Longfellow’s poem certainly has something in common with the “white savior” trope that has been forcefully criticized in the early twenty-first century, there is a sort of reciprocity here that undermines condescending narratives in which white people free those who are enslaved or otherwise marginalized and confidently await gratitude. Rather, the schoolteacher’s admirable qualities are nourished by a moral relationship to the formerly enslaved, even though she and they are now in different parts of the world. This reciprocity highlights both the ways in which Longfellow succeeds in recognizing the shared humanity and agency of the woman and the people her family had enslaved and a kind of attenuated vision. He imagines the formerly enslaved people leaving North America and returning to Africa to achieve freedom, but he does not really imagine an interracial society in which the reciprocity between the schoolteacher and those whom she has freed can play out in person. Longfellow’s collection proceeds with “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” a piece that refers to the history of escape and resistance using Virginia’s Dismal Swamp. The Dismal Swamp has a significant history of literary allusion, as it appears in the “Try-Works” chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick and also as the crucial location for resistance to slavery in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second and more radical antislavery novel,

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Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856). Here Longfellow imagines an enslaved man being pursued into the swamp. Longfellow uses a modified form of the ballad meter that he uses in the earlier poems, peppering his iambic lines with anapests. The poem begins with the point of view of a “hunted Negro” who is lying in “the dark fens of the Dismal Swamp.” His terror is increased by the evidence of his senses that he is being pursued: “He saw the fire of the midnight camp, / And heard at times a horse’s tramp  / And a bloodhound’s distant bay” (91). The emphasis here is on the affective experience of terror that a lone human being faces when society and nature alike seem to be conspiring against his freedom. Not only is he pursued by men riding horses and tracked by bloodhounds, but he also finds that he is hiding among “poisonous vine[s]” that are “spotted like the snake” (91). After conveying his emotions of terror and desperation, Longfellow offers his readers a portrait of the man himself: A poor old slave, infirm and lame; Great scars deformed his face; On his forehead he bore the brand of shame, And the rags, that hid his mangled frame, Were the livery of disgrace.  (91)

The man who is fleeing is not, as is often the case in antislavery narratives, a handsome young man like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s George Harris, who is able to disguise himself as a Spaniard and escape his identity as well as his bonds. His appearance sets him apart through his suffering and his long experience of enslavement, and he resembles Christ as the Man of Sorrows more than he does a romantic (and Romantic) lead like George Harris. The description of the suffering servant in Isaiah, important to both Judaism and Christianity, and within the Christian tradition closely associated with Jesus, emphasizes the lack of appeal that the sufferer might have to those who look on him with a casual eye: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? 2

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. 3

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

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But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. 6

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. (Isaiah, 53:1–7)

The man escaping from slavery in the Dismal Swamp bears more than a passing relationship to the sufferer in Isaiah 53: his scars mean that he is unlikely to be appealing to any third parties who might view him, and he is marked with shame on his forehead and in his clothes. He is visually off-putting, but precisely in a way that implicitly associates him with the most sacred and central figure in the Christian tradition. Longfellow’s most effective and affecting poems are not those that narrate the flight and the pursuit of the enslaved, however, but rather those that present the enslaved as artists in their own right. “A Slave Singing at Midnight” conveys powerfully the significance of the music created by enslaved people that would be taken up in later decades by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois. Longfellow begins this poem with a powerful image of an enslaved man singing that connects the enslavement of Africans in the United States directly with the enslavement of the children of Israel in Egypt and the Babylonian exile: Loud he sang the psalm of David! He a Negro and enslaved, Sang of Israel’s victory, Sang of Zion, bright and free.  (92)

The religious significance of the scene for an audience immersed in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is clear, and Longfellow weds this to an aesthetic contemplation of the man’s song. He shows the man singing “In a voice so sweet and clear,  / That I could not choose but hear.” The man’s reason for identifying with the songs he sings so beautifully becomes clear: Songs of triumphs and ascriptions, Such as reached the swart Egyptians, When upon the Red Sea coast, Perished Pharoah and his host.  (92)

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Following a pattern that dates back at least to Phillis Wheatley’s reference to “our modern Egyptians” in her letter to the Indigenous minister Samson Occom, Longfellow uses the song to put the enslaved and those who defend them on the side of the protagonists in the biblical narrative, and to identify those who pursue people escaping from slavery on the side of those punished for resisting divine commands. Longfellow again turns to the aesthetic qualities of the enslaved man’s singing in the next stanza, emphasizing the affective power of his song. His singing works powerfully on the listening poet: And the voice of his devotion Filled my soul with strange emotion; For its tones by turns were glad, Sweetly solemn, wildly sad.  (92)

The emotional qualities that Longfellow attributes to the nocturnal singer parallel closely the mix of sorrow and exultation that appeared in the work of the British Romantics who helped shape Longfellow’s own poetry. The “sweetly solemn, wildly sad” notes that the speaker describes the enslaved man as striking point towards the qualities that led W. E. B. DuBois to refer to Black spirituals as the “Sorrow songs” in The Souls of Black Folk, and it parallels Frederick Douglass’s contention, in the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, that enslaved people sang most frequently out of sorrow, not the joy that was attributed to them by defenders of slavery. We see in Longfellow, as in Horton and Pierpont, an emphasis on the arts as a central element in the antislavery cause. In the penultimate stanza, Longfellow turns from the Old Testament to the New Testament with the songs of Paul and Silas in prison. As his readers, immersed as they were in the biblical narrative, would know, Paul and Silas’s song had the effect of setting both the apostles themselves and their fellow prisoners free. Music and aesthetic delight become in this passage the material of freedom itself, as it is Paul and Silas’s song that led to the earthquake that “Broke their dungeon-gates at night” (93). The final stanza turns to a poignant question that reflects on the connection Longfellow has made between the enslaved singer and Paul and Silas in prison: But alas! What holy angel Brings the Slave this glad evangel? And what earthquake’s hand of might Breaks his dungeon-gates at night?  (93)

Here Longfellow acknowledges that the song of the enslaved man, powerful as it is, is thwarted by material circumstances. The first couplet reminds

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readers that the Christian gospel itself was frequently rendered inaccessible to those who were enslaved, and the second suggests that the required earthquake must employ power as well as moral suasion. The poem’s conclusion suggests that good feelings and empathy will not be enough to end slavery, however beautiful the songs of freedom may be. Longfellow takes up this grimmer note when he reflects on the violence and incalculable loss of life represented by the slave trade and the Middle Passage. Taking a panoramic view, Longfellow surveys the hidden memorials to the slave trade that exist in the form of the bodies of murdered people who were transported the Americas under slavery and perished along the way: In Ocean’s wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise.  (93)

These opening two stanzas, written in tightly compressed iambic trimeter, move from the individual bodies in chains that have washed up on shores around the world to the entire ships that have sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Notably, as Longfellow was writing these words, he was himself traveling across the Atlantic, and so the possibility of death at sea might have seemed especially real to him. Longfellow tightens his focus on slavery and the myriads of deaths caused by the slave trade in the following stanzas: There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the sport of storms.  (93)

The scene here is one of Gothic horror: the “Slave-ship” functions as a Gothic interior, and human bodies decaying under the waves constitute the macabre furniture of the sunken ship. These corpses are not, however, merely a source of horror, as they also have a message for Longfellow’s readers in the nineteenth-century United States: These are the bones of Slaves; They gleam from the abyss;

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They cry, from yawning waves, “We are the Witnesses!”  (93)

This cry, “We are the Witnesses!” captures Longfellow’s own goals in this poem: to bear witness to slavery, and to shock the consciences of his readers. These witnesses recall the language of the Christian apocalypse, as with in the Revelation of St. John the Christian martyrs in the last days whose souls are said to reside “under the altar” and to cry “with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10, King James Version). The message that these modern-day martyrs share is a bracing one, delineating both the scope and the atrocities of human slavery: Within Earth’s wide domains Are markets for men’s lives; Their necks are galled with chains, Their wrists are cramped with gyves.  (94)

The witnesses describe the stages of the slave-trade, taking in land around the globe in the same way that Longfellow’s speakers have surveyed the world’s oceans. They begin with an image of the slave markets, whether in Africa or the Americas, and focus on the suffering and indignity caused by the chains that are imposed upon the enslaved. From here, Longfellow steps back to consider the violence that brings enslaved people to the slave markets to begin with: the wars that have been encouraged and supported in Africa by European traderHs. The battlefields that have produced the trade in human bodies are also marked by Dead bodies, that the kite In deserts makes its prey; Murders, that with affright Scare school-boys from their play!  (94)

From the catalogues of bodies that have constituted the core of each of the stanzas so far, Longfellow builds to a universal vision of human cruelty and greed that lies behind the carnage on sea and land that he has described: All evil thoughts and deeds; Anger, and lust, and pride; The foulest, rankest weeds, That choke Life’s groaning tide!

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These are the woes of Slaves; They glare from the abyss; They cry, from unknown graves, “We are the Witnesses!”  (94)

Longfellow ends the poem by repeating that the bodies of enslaved people distributed around the world bear witness to the violence that cost them their lives. The mute witnesses who lie on beaches, on battlefields, and at the bottom of the sea each cry out against the crime of their slaughter. The task of the poet, then, becomes that of serving as a conduit for the cries of justice that is rising from each of these unknown witnesses. The intensity of this poem belies the idea that Longfellow’s apparent moderation indicates moral neutrality on the subject of slavery on his part. Rather, although his tone is far less acerbic than is Pierpont’s, Longfellow’s commitment to bearing witness to slavery and morning the bodies of those who have lost their lives conveys considerable moral commitment and passion. The penultimate poem in Longfellow’s collection, “The Quadroon Girl,” takes up a subject that constituted a central abolitionist moral appeal against slavery: the rape of enslaved women by their enslavers. Longfellow sets up a scene that would become a staple in the sentimental antislavery novels of the 1850s, and he departs from the emphasis on the slave trade that characterizes both “The Witnesses” and much early antislavery poetry in general to focus on the internal slave trade and the sexual violence that accompanied slavery. Using a conventional ballad meter, he opens with a scene that could come out of an adventure story on piracy: The Slaver in the broad lagoon Lay moored with idle sail; He waited for the rising moon, And for the evening gale. Under the shore his boat was tied, And all her listless crew Watched the gray alligator slide Into the still bayou.  (94)

The scene that Longfellow sets here is of the internal slave trade along the Mississippi river, and the image of the alligator sliding “Into the still bayou” indicates that this transaction is taking place in Louisiana. The “Slaver” is clearly a menacing figure placed against the foreground of this exotic environment, and from the “idle sail” to the “listless crew” to the alligator itself, the scene is fraught with menace.

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Longfellow heightens the exoticism of the scene in the lines that follow, a passage that foreshadows his own later work in Evangeline, where after starting in the North of British America, the scene shifts to the lower Mississippi. Longfellow offers a sensuous view of the beauty of the scene and its contrast with the menace of the slave vessel: Odors of orange-flowers, and spice, Reached them from time to time, Like airs that breathe from Paradise Upon a world of crime.  (94–95)

The scent of the orange-flowers and spice conveys the sort of idyllic vision that appears in descriptions of tropical and sub-tropical climates in much nineteenth-century travel writing, and the poem suggests that the beauty of the natural scenery serves only to emphasize the cruelty of a “world of crime.” The “Slaver” is the representative of the “world of crime” in this otherwise Edenic setting, and so the reader is observing a reprise of the fall of humanity, played out in the socioeconomic context of the nineteenth century. The scene shifts from the contrast between the slave ship and its idyllic surroundings to the image of a planter who is confronted with a moral choice: whether to sell a young woman into what will almost certainly be a form of sexual slavery with full knowledge of what he is doing. Over the next five stanzas, the reader realizes with growing horror that the sexual trafficking of a young woman is the prospect that is being considered: The Planter, under his roof of thatch, Smoked thoughtfully and slow; The Slaver’s thumb was on the latch, He seemed in haste to go. He said, “My ship at anchor rides In yonder broad lagoon; I only wait the evening tides, And the rising of the moon.” Before them, with her face upraised, In timid attitude, Like one half curious, half amazed, A Quadroon maiden stood. Her eyes were large, and full of light, Her arms and neck were bare; No garment she wore save a kirtle bright, And her own long, raven hair.

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And on her lips there played a smile As holy, meek, and faint, As lights in some cathedral aisle The features of a saint.  (95)

The young woman is described in terms that emphasize both her vulnerability to the slave trader’s plans and her innocence: she is young, beautiful, and only lightly clothed, and at the same time she is obviously unaware of the stakes in the negotiation that is taking place. The theatrical contrast between her innocence and virtue and the slave trader’s rapacity and cynicism is clearly defined and heartbreaking, and this makes the moral stakes of the planter’s decision all the starker. This intensely moral decision is also a very practical economic decision for the planter. He does not attempt to pretend that there is a moral case for what he is about to do, but he observes his own hardship, and makes his decision on that basis: “The soil is barren,—the farm is old,” The thoughtful planter said; Then looked upon the Slaver’s gold, And then upon the maid. His heart within him was at strife With such accurséd gains: For he knew whose passions gave her life, Whose blood ran in her veins.  (95–96)

The moral stakes of the planter’s decision rise considerably in these stanzas. Longfellow leaves no doubt that it is the planter himself “whose passions gave her life” and “whose blood ran in her veins.” Thus the planter has fathered this young woman, possibly through what would have been identified even in the 1840s as rape, but certainly in a situation in which genuine consent would have been impossible. The moral question that faces him, then, is whether to sell his own child for financial gain. By the time the young woman’s father has made the decision to sell her into sexual slavery, the decision seems a foregone conclusion: But the voice of nature was too weak; He took the glittering gold! Then pale as death grew the maiden’s cheek, Her hands as icy cold. The Slaver led her from the door, He led her by the hand,

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To be his slave and paramour In a strange and distant land!  (96)

The sexual abuse of enslaved people was a crucial issue in abolitionist literature through the 1840s and 1850s, from non-fiction slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to the plight of enslaved women on Simon Legree’s plantation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the title character in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Or the President’s Daughter. It was also, as W. E. B. DuBois pointed out in 1935 in Black Reconstruction and a host of scholars since have noted, a fact that apologists for slavery outspokenly denied despite overwhelming and indisputable evidence in the form of people of European and African descent. Although this poem does not contain editorial denunciations of the practices it describes, it does not need to, as the only defense that pro-slavery advocates were able to muster was an utterly implausible denial. Longfellow’s closing poem in Poems on Slavery turns to the sort of prophetic denunciation that we might associate more with a radical like Pierpont than with the irenic Harvard professor who wrote poems like “The Day is Done” and “The Psalm of Life.” In “The Warning,” Longfellow offers the possibility that the moral catastrophe of slavery can lead to the catastrophic destruction of the United States itself: Beware! The Israelite of old, who tore The lion in his path,—when, poor and blind, He saw the blessed light of heaven no more, Shorn of his noble strength and forced to grind In prison, and at last led forth to be A pander to Philistine revelry,— Upon the pillars of the temple laid His desperate hands, and in its overthrow Destroyed himself, and with him those who made A cruel mockery of his sightless woe; The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all, Expired, and thousands perished in the fall! There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, Till the vast Temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.  (96–97)

The poem is a direct importation of a biblical story into a nineteenth-­ century context. Samson was among the most morally ambiguous of judges from the book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, and he also is distinguished by the pathos of his movement from power to enslavement. At

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the point where Longfellow, writing in iambic pentameter with alternating lines in rhyme, begins Samson’s story, he has already been enslaved: previously he could defeat a lion in single combat; now he is poor and blind. He clearly stands in as a biblical counterpart to enslaved people in the United States, and the Philistines who are mocking him and who are incapable of empathizing with his distress are white Americans who either support or are unwilling to oppose slavery. Just as a repentant Samson’s power was used to destroy his oppressors, the power of the enslaved, which undergirded the economy of the United Sates in the 1840s, could also serve to overthrow those who exploited them. The poem closes with a strong and prophetic warning. The violence of slavery against the enslaved is not only morally repellent, but it represents an absolute threat to the republic itself. Longfellow’s speaker exhorts his readers to acknowledge that “There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, / . . . / Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand / And shake the pillar of this Commonweal.” The outcome of this occurrence, which is suggestive of a slave revolt, but also seemingly of an unspecified variety of divine judgment, could be the destruction of the nation itself, an outcome in which “[t]he vast Temple of our liberties  / a shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.” (97) As a whole then, the volume has moved from an opening celebration of Channing as an antislavery leader through a series of narratives that highlight the humanity of the enslaved, the inhumanity of the enslaver, and the grave threat to the republic that is posed by the continuation of this injustice. Longfellow’s antislavery poetry captures something of the sense of poetry as a politically efficacious genre that appears in Horton’s and Pierpont’s poetry, and it points to the capacity of poetry to change the angle of vision that Longfellow’s contemporaries might bring to the debate over slavery. Longfellow provides an important counterpoint to both Horton’s lived experience of enslavement and Pierpont’s antislavery radicalism. Longfellow stands out as a consensus figure in nineteenth-century American literary culture, and so his poetry indicates both the degree to which a moral stance against slavery could coexist with broad transatlantic popularity. This is not to say that Longfellow’s critique of slavery in verse did not generate vigorous opposition. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, seemed especially outraged by Longfellow’s abolitionist tendencies, and he reacted to Longfellow’s antislavery verse with attacks on both Longfellow’s talent and his integrity. Poe furiously attacked “The Quadroon Girl” in particular, writing that “The Quadroon Girl,” is the old abolitionist story—worn threadbare—of a slaveholder selling his own child—a thing which may be as common in the South as in the East, is the infinitely worse crime of making matrimonial merchandise—or even less legitimate merchandise—of one’s daughter. (Poe, 763)

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For Poe, Longfellow’s antislavery poetry was a slander against the South, and as such, it led to broader questions that he raised about Longfellow’s integrity, including direct charges of plagiarism. We might also ask whether Longfellow’s complicated posthumous career owes something to the moral clarity with which he wrote about slavery. As anyone who has labored through the early history of twentieth-century literary criticism in the United States knows, the critics who helped to shape the contours of American literary studies in the 1930s and the techniques of close reading poetry to extract meaning from layers of irony and paradox were in many cases Southerners, and partisans of a distinctive Southern regional identity. There are reasons enough for an aesthetics that is directed toward paradox, tension, and irony to find Longfellow a peripheral poet. Likewise, there are ample reasons for twentieth-century readers of poetry to find Longfellow’s use of poetic form conventional and uninspiring compared to the innovations of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. And yet Longfellow was an accomplished poetic craftsman, and compression, paradox, and irony are not absent from his poetry. Neither is the expansive sense of poetic possibility for which Whitman and Dickinson are so frequently praised. We may have reason, then, to think that Longfellow’s posthumous reputation may have been a casualty of his willingness to take such a clear and public stand on the great moral issue of his day early in his career. Considered together, Longfellow, Pierpont, and Horton serve to illustrate the stakes of the antislavery debate and the complicated maneuvers in which a poet who addressed slavery had to engage. For Longfellow, his choice to take on the issue of slavery had implications for his ability to speak to a broad national and international audience, and while his popularity survived his early volume of antislavery poetry, it is also clear that the volume made enemies for Longfellow. Pierpont’s reflections on the physical hazards that faced antislavery poets parallel the fate of his own poetry, in that he is rarely remembered in accounts of nineteenth-century US poetry, despite the early success and circulation of his collection Airs of Palestine. Horton, meanwhile, wrestled with the real hazards of slavery in his own life and body as an enslaved man. All three poets are joined by their belief in the efficacy of poetry as a genre that can contribute to moral and political action and change and that can persuade as well as provide material for contemplation.

3: Witness against Slavery: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney

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orton,

Pierpont, and Longfellow offer a version of nineteenthcentury antislavery poetry as an emerging genre: Pierpont did not have the national visibility of Longfellow; Horton wrote from within the confines of his enslavement; and Longfellow’s quest for a broad audience meant that antislavery poetry played a relatively limited role in his career even as it provided the subject matter for one of his earliest collections of poetry. It was possible, however, for poets to be broadly popular and national in their appeal and to write and collect antislavery verse as a major component of their poetic mission, and in this chapter I will consider three examples of how popular poets and anthologists could be defined in meaningful ways by their antislavery sensibilities, and particularly, in Whittier’s case, by writing poetry aimed directly at abolition in the years in which the abolition movement was gaining momentum. In this chapter I consider two of the nineteenth-century’s most popular poets, the Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, known to contemporaries as “the slave’s poet,” and the “sweet singer of Hartford,” Lydia Huntley Sigourney, along with a figure who is better known as a novelist (indeed the author of Clotel, Or The President’s Daughter, the first full-length African American novel), William Wells Brown. I consider the array of poetic forms that Whittier and Sigourney used in their antislavery verse and that Brown anthologized in his important collection of antislavery poetry, The Anti-Slavery Harp, and I suggest that their antislavery verse can be illuminated by surveying broader patterns in their bodies of work. Notably, the positions that Sigourney and Whittier took on slavery were distinct, as Sigourney was an early supporter of the American Colonization Society, which advocated the emigration of enslaved people to Africa, and Whittier was a sharp critic of colonizationism, and the percentage of Sigourney’s poetry devoted to slavery was relative low, while Whittier’s percentage of poems about slavery in the antebellum period was notably high, but they shared a common emphasis on human fraternity and sorority and equality that mean that there are important continuities between the moderate from Hartford and the fierce abolitionist. Brown, meanwhile, writing as a formerly enslaved person himself, offered

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a heartrendingly personal version of the affective elements and calls for empathy that appeared in Sigourney’s and Whittier’s poetry. All three of these authors are distinguished by their ability to command and address a wide audience using a variety of forms and topics. Whittier, who by the end of his career was probably second only to Longfellow as a poet who was both beloved by the general populace and revered by the elite in the nineteenth-century United States, used a dazzling array of literary forms in his antislavery poetry: ballads, hymns, long narrative poems, satirical poems, and dramatic poems all appear in over 100 pages worth of antislavery poetry in his final edition of antislavery poems. His tone ranges from expressions of brotherly love to scathing rebuke, and his geographical context ranges across the United States and Caribbean. Sigourney, who was as popular a poet as Whittier, even if she lacked his cachet among literary elites of the later nineteenth century, connected her antislavery poetry to a broader antiracist impulse, writing with great fervor about indigenous North Americans as well as enslaved African Americans. Although they came from different religious traditions, both Sigourney and Whittier shaped their antislavery poetry in keeping with a fervently held Christian faith, which they understood as racially egalitarian. Brown, meanwhile, had a remarkable ability to weave together literary forms across his career, and although poetry was not his personal métier, he was both an important editor and compiler of antislavery verse and a writer of prose who could integrate poetry into his own prose fiction.

“The Sweet Singer of Hartford” and the Antislavery Cause: Lydia Huntley Sigourney Few nineteenth-century poets have been as underestimated in the time following their death as Lydia Huntley Sigourney. In her own lifetime, Sigourney was a central figure in American poetry, and she wrote for a large audience on a diverse array of topics. The best-known portion of her poetic production was devoted to memorializing death on behalf of the grieving. Her very most moving poems are those that commemorate the loss of children and infants. Sigourney had an uncanny ability to convey the feelings of her contemporaries. Her theological beliefs were less liberal than those of many antislavery poets, as she was a Trinitarian Congregationalist in her upbringing, and like Harriet Beecher Stowe, later an Episcopalian (Haight, 149), and not a Unitarian or a Quaker, but she shared a broad commitment to universal human values and fraternity with Unitarian poets like Pierpont, Longfellow, and Lowell, and a Quaker poet like Whittier. Sigourney, like Longfellow in my previous chapter and Melville and Whitman in my final chapter, provides a limit case of sorts for the concept

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of antislavery poetry, in that she was not a movement poet in the way that Pierpont, Whittier, Brown, Lowell, Stowe, Harper, or Whitfield were, but she expressed her hatred of slavery openly and directly in poems like “Difference of Color” and “The First Slave Ship” alongside her hatred of Indian Removal and the racism that undergirded both Indian Removal and chattel slavery. Sigourney belonged to the American Colonization Society in the 1820s, before the emergence of a fully formed Abolitionist movement, and late in life she seemed, as her early twentieth-century biographer Gordon Haight pointed out, to embrace “the conviction that war of any kind was wrong” in the face of the Civil War (Haight, 170). Haight went so far as to claim that “Abolition, the greatest humanitarian movement of the century, had surprisingly little effect on Mrs. Sigourney’s poetry” (170), and her twenty-first century editor Gary Kelly has identified her as being “relatively conservative on the abolition of slavery” (Kelly, 30). Slavery plays a relative minor role as well in the most recent collection of scholarly essays on Sigourney, Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino’s Lydian Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views (2018). Although it is certainly true that antislavery verse makes up a small percentage of Sigourney’s overall work, it is also noteworthy that her poems attacking slavery are both outspoken and reflective of broader themes in her work, and that they circulated among abolitionists and even in African American periodicals (Kelly, 30). And it is noteworthy that a poet of her exceptional popularity was prepared over several decades to speak out on topics like slavery and Indian Removal, which are linked for her by the underlying prejudice that we would today describe as racism. It is worth considering the connection between Sigourney’s antislavery verse and the work for which she was best known: the poetry of grief and loss. Sigourney wrote poems for grieving families, and her poems about death in childbirth still resonate with students today. Her most frequently anthologized poem in our own century, “The Death of an Infant,” captures her careful balancing of tragedy and consolation in her poetry: Death found strange beauty on that cherub brow, And dash’d it out.—There was a tint of rose O’er cheek and lip;—he touch’d the veins with ice, And the rose faded.—Forth from those blue eyes There spake a wistful tenderness,—a doubt Whether to grieve or sleep, which Innocence Alone can wear.—With ruthless haste he bound The silken fringes of their curtaining lids Forever.—There had been a murmuring sound With which the babe would claim its mother’s ear, Charming her even to tears.—The spoiler set

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His seal of silence.—But there beam’d a smile, So fix’d and holy from that marble brow, — Death gazed and left it there;—he dared not steal The signet-ring of Heaven.  (Sigourney, 82–83)

This poem evidently lacks the political valences that defined her work on slavery and indigenous rights, but it shows how her deceptively simple poetic method functions. She begins the poem with a catalog of loss, a blazon of misery, in which she states all the beauties of childhood that have been stolen by a personified Death: the “strange beauty” of the forehead, the “tint of rose o’er cheek and lip,” even the eyes themselves are closed in death. Sigourney acknowledges and reveres the pain of loss that the parents of the infant have experienced, but at the same time, she points to the oddly placed “smile” that remains on the baby’s “brow”— this quality of the infant cannot be destroyed, as offers a promise of eternal bliss, described by Sigourney as “the signet-ring of heaven.” As distinctive as this piece is from her antislavery pieces, it illustrates the unobtrusively dialectical quality of her poetry: she tends to pair descriptions of suffering and loss with hints of redemption or justice that gather forcefulness the longer one looks at the seemingly simple poems that she writes, whether her topic is infant and maternal mortality, or slavery, or Indian Removal. Sigourney’s most direct statement on racism on an international scale was her poem “Difference of Color,” which appeared in the Colored American in 1838. She begins the poem by cataloguing peoples around the world whose color defines them as being other than white: God gave to Afric’s sons A brow of sable dye, And spread the country of their birth Beneath a burning sky, And with a cheek of olive, made The little Hindoo child, And darkly stained the forest tribes That roam our western wild.  (Sigourney in Kelly, 140–41)

The opening, written in Sigourney’s characteristic ballad meter, connects people of color from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and although Sigourney does not say so directly, it also connects people who are at the center of colonial exploitation in the English speaking world: Africans via the slave trade, India and Ceylon through the East India Company’s empire in South Asia, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas through a concerted policy of Indian Removal and genocidal violence in the United States and elsewhere throughout the Americas.

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Sigourney’s next stanza rings awkwardly for a twenty-first century reader, as it evidently reflects a level of prejudice in favor of white skin that means that the antislavery poet is not immune to the allure of the privileges associated with light skin, even as she rejects the idea that such privileges ought in principle to exist: To me he gave a form Of fairer, whiter clay; But am I therefore in his sight Respected more than they? No—’tis the hue of deeds and hearts, He traces in his book— ’Tis the complexion of the heart, On which he deigns to look.  (141)

The expression “fairer, whiter clay” seems to make a disappointing assumption about the relative physical beauty of the races, but even this troubling phrase reflects something of Sigourney’s universalist outlook: by referring to her own body as “clay,” she makes direct reference to the biblical book of Genesis, with its creation story that implies that all human beings share the same ancestry, and are said to have been formed directly by the deity out of the “dust of the ground,” or as it has frequently been understood within the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, out of clay. The assumption here is that all human bodies are fundamentally constructed out of the same materials and share the same source, and this acknowledgement underlies her turn to the question of whether God as the common parent of Sigourney herself, “Afric’s sons,” the “Hindoo child,” and the “forest tribes” of Indigenous America evinces any preference for one over the other based on skin color. Sigourney’s answer is a forceful no, as she invokes and slightly revises the prophet Samuel’s statement to the future King David that “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart.” Sigourney adds the word “complexion” to this formula, to show that divine favor is not dependent on skin color, but rather on inward moral, ethical, and spiritual qualities. Sigourney thus emphasizes that skin color cannot be understood as corresponding to divine favor or disfavor, and so enlists Christian theology on behalf of equality, even as it has been enlisted on behalf of inequality by ministers in the antebellum South. This feint on Sigourney’s part in the direction of the widely held racialist beliefs used to subordinate people of color swings hard in the opposite direction, and this swing has affinities with her use of a dialectic structure in the service of comfort in “The Death of an Infant.” Sigourney’s final stanza follows logically from the point of biblical and theological interpretation: if she claims superiority based on the color of her skin, she will be judged by the Christian deity whom she worships:

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Not by the tinted cheek That fades away so fast— But by the color of the soul We shall be judged at last. And God, the Judge, will look at me With anger in his eyes, If I my brother’s darker brow, Should ever dare despise.  (141)

This conclusion gestures toward Jesus’s warning in the Sermon on the Mount that if one says “Raca” or “thou fool” to one’s brother, one is in danger of judgment and even damnation, and Sigourney’s conclusion appears to withdraw even the earlier concession to white primacy implied by the phrase “fairer, whiter clay.” Here she suggests that any bigotry based on skin color is inherently sinful and will summon the wrath of God. As Monica Pelaez points out, Sigourney’s case against racism ultimately points to the “day of judgment,” and suggests that racism imperils her readers’ very souls (154). Sigourney’s poems on slavery, Indian Removal, and even India all reflect the sense of the moral necessity of racial equality expressed in this poem. Indeed, the fact that Sigourney refers to Africa, Asia, and Indigenous America in her poem points toward the distinctiveness of her approach to antislavery verse: her attacks on the slave trade and the practice of slavery are tied closely to her broader critiques of racial bigotry based on skin color, and so her poems that protest the enslavement of Africans have significant parallels to her poems that protest Indian Removal, and her attempts to support both Black and Indigenous people are tied to her sense that people of all colors are her family, her brothers and sisters (potentially at least), in the Christian faith. Central to Sigourney’s poetic project was her lifelong fascination with Indigenous people and her concern with the forms that contact between Indigenous people and Americans of European descent took. Perhaps her most frequently anthologized poem in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was “Indian Names,” which reflected on the persistence of native peoples in the face of persecution and suffering. This poem has in recent decades become a staple in American literature anthologies, and the reasons are evident: it speaks directly to one of the great moral questions of the early decades of the history of the United States as a republic by taking on the issue of Indian Removal, and it does so artfully around the memorable conceit of the persistence of Indian languages in the midst of a nation that has been trying to erase and disavow the Indigenous inhabitants of the land it occupies, in a way that parallels the erasure of the humanity of the enslaved in support of the institution of chattel slavery. A careful reading of this poem and of Sigourney’s poetry about native peoples in general suggests important affinities between her

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views on Indigenous displacement and on the institution of racialized chattel slavery. The rhetorical question with which the poem starts calls attention to the ways in which American Indian languages continue to provide and underlying structure for life in the United States: ‘How can the red men be forgotten, while so many of our states and territories, bays, lakes, and rivers, are indelibly stamped by names of their giving?’ (Sigourney in Kelly, 149– 51) In addressing the question of whether the “red men” who comprise the Native inhabitants of the eastern United States can be “forgotten,” Sigourney addresses a conventional trope in nineteenth-century American literature, that of the “vanishing Indian,” which suggests that the displacement and destruction of Indigenous cultures is a sort of inevitable natural phenomenon, perhaps to be regretted, but ultimately not the fault of anyone in particular, and certainly not of the settlers who have actively participated in displacing them. Sigourney makes an argument in the poem both for the persistence of Indigenous people and for acknowledging and condemning the violence that has been the actual, human-made, cause of their displacement. In the body of her poem, Sigourney does not so much offer an answer to her own query as continue the query with a direct rebuttal of claims that Indigenous people had vanished from the territories occupied by the United States and an affirmation of a continuing Indigenous presence in North American life. Addressing those who would dismiss American Indians as vanished people directly, Sigourney writes: Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave, That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That ’mid the forests where they roamed There rings no hunter shout, But their name is on your waters, Ye may not wash it out.  (149)

Using ballad meter, Sigourney frames her opening stanza as a confrontational response to those who dismiss the presence of native peoples or embrace the myth of the “Vanishing Indian.” The “ye” of the opening stanza constitutes the white majority in the eastern United States who believe that they have banished indigenous people entirely through Indian Removal. Sigourney provides a forceful reminder that the violence that has been practiced against Indigenous peoples has obscured but not erased their legitimate claims to sovereignty. Indeed, Sigourney points out, every time North Americans of European descent say the names of the waterways on which they travel and trade and the sources of water for their agriculture and industry, they bear unconscious witness to Native

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priority on the land and to a continuing Native presence that cannot be “wash[ed]” away. Sigourney’s clever and paradoxical play on the association of water with washing highlights the degree to which the elimination of Native traces from the North American landscape is a logical impossibility, and this very impossibility bears witness against the violence and oppression associated with Indian Removal. As Sigourney’s poem progresses, she reminds her readers that the natural landscape of what is now the United States is marked by indigenous language every time that the names of the major waterways of the nation are named: ’Tis where Ontario’s billow Like Ocean’s surge is curled, Where strong Niagara’s thunders wake The echo of the world. Where red Missouri bringeth Rich tribute from the west, And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps On green Virginia’s breast.  (150)

Although “Virginia” is derived from European sources, all the other place names in the poem are emphatically indigenous, and Sigourney makes the point that one cannot talk of the topography of North America without invoking its Indigenous history. This ongoing presence of Indigenous language and voices offers a rebuke to the genocidal effects and intentions of both the colonial violence perpetrated by white Americans on Indigenous peoples and the discourse of the inevitability of the destruction of Native ways of life that enables that violence. In the third stanza, the “ye” of Sigourney’s poem attempt to claim that Indian nations have vanished almost without human agency: the dwelling places of the first peoples of North America have been dispersed and destroyed like so many dead leaves. Here again, Sigourney emphasizes that the durable connection between language and landscape gives the lie to the narrative that suggests that Indians have vanished and that no one in particular is culpable. Ye say their cone-like cabins, That clustered o’er the vale, Have fled away like withered leaves Before the autumn gale, But their memory liveth on your hills, Their baptism on your shore, Your everlasting rivers speak Their dialect of yore.  (150)

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This assertion of the power and persistence of Indian languages leads to a catalog of the ways in which Indian names continue to define the landscape, and here Sigourney deftly shows the connection between the topographical and the political: Old Massachusetts wears it, Within her lordly crown, And broad Ohio bears it, Amid his young renown; Connecticut hath wreathed it Where her quiet foliage waves, And bold Kentucky breathed it hoarse Through all her ancient caves.  (150)

Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut, and Kentucky are not only places: as states in the Union, they represent the ongoing life of the body politic in the United States, establishing that even American democracy cannot be accounted for without recourse to Indigenous languages. From waterways and political entities, Sigourney turns to the most recalcitrant portion of the physical landscape on land: the immovable mountains that, like the rivers and lakes she has catalogued above, are known primarily or even solely by Indigenous names: Wachuset hides its lingering voice Within his rocky heart, And Alleghany graves its tone Throughout his lofty chart; Monadnock on his forehead hoar Doth seal the sacred trust, Your mountains build their monument, Though ye destroy their dust.  (151)

With the conclusion to this stanza, Sigourney makes a direct connection between the perennial presence of Indians in the United Sates and the ruthless violence that has displaced them: Ye call these red-browed brethren The insects of an hour, Crushed like the noteless worm amid The regions of their power; Ye drive them from their father’s lands, Ye break of faith the seal, But can ye from the court of Heaven Exclude their last appeal?  (151)

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Sigourney engages directly in a critique of racism here, pointing out the dehumanizing language that, at the time of her writing, had become to norm rather than the exception for Americans of European descent when talking about the Indigenous nations they had displaced. The description that Sigourney attributes to the “ye” of her poem of Indigenous people as “insects of an hour” and “worm[s]” highlights the ways in which this sort of language not only contains genocidal desires but makes genocidal actions possible. In her final stanza, Sigourney makes Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal the explicit focus of her poem’s critique, beginning with a heart-rending image of Creek and Cherokee nations’ displacement from the southeastern portion of the United States: Ye see their unresisting tribes, With toilsome step and slow, On through the trackless desert pass A caravan of woe; Think ye the Eternal’s ear is deaf? His sleepless vision dim? Think ye the soul’s blood may not cry From that far land to him?  (151)

The “caravan of woe” that Sigourney describes here has become known to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with US history as the “trail of tears,” and she suggests that the displacement of Indigenous peoples carries with it, not just the risk but the moral certainty of divine judgment. Like the biblical character of Abel, whose “blood cried out” from the earth after his murder at the hands of his brother Cain, the people murdered through the fratricidal violence of Indian Removal will ultimately receive justice in a higher court than that constituted by the governing institutions of the United States in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Notably, the language that Sigourney uses here to rebuke Indian Removal echoes the prophetic language of antislavery verse discussed in the previous chapters. While “Indian Names” does not mention slavery or anti-African racism directly, it does connect directly with the claim in “Difference of Color” that racism is both sinful in itself and an invitation to divine wrath. It is also worth noting that there are substantial continuities between calls for justice for Indigenous peoples and calls for justice for enslaved people of African descent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To cite just two examples, both Phillis Wheatley’s letters to the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” explicitly connect the injustices faced by African and Indigenous North American peoples. Thus the linkage between the violence of slavery and the violence of the

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dispossession of Indigenous people is neither a twenty-first century imposition nor an imposition that Sigourney makes, but rather something that has been noted explicitly by both African American and Native American people during both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Phillis Wheatley, whose talent for irony and critique are too often neglected by readers who dismiss her “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as an expression of assimilation and self-hatred, wrote to Samson Occom: I have this Day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reign’d so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and [r]eveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably Limited, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one Without the other: Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,— I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine. (Wheatley, 152)

Wheatley finds an ally in Occom, and she also uses the occasion of his letter to launch a critique of the disconnection between American ideals of liberty and the practice of slavery that anticipated the rise of an organized antislavery movement built around the ideals of liberty and equality in the nineteenth century. In a premonition of one of the central tropes of antislavery poetry from the 1830s to the 1850s, Wheatley identifies those who enslave her people with the Egyptians who hold the children of Israel captive in the biblical book of Exodus, and so by implication identifies the enslaved people of eighteenth-century British North America with the chosen people themselves. Wheatley sees Occom as an ally both because of his statements on behalf of the “natural rights” of the enslaved, and,

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implicitly, because of his status as a person who has likewise been dispossessed by “our modern Egyptians.” In the Israelite/Egyptian dichotomy that Wheatley develops, Occom is, like Wheatley herself, on the same side of the equations as the Israelites suffering slavery in Egypt. William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” draws a particularly direct connection between the violence of slavery and the violence of expansionism and Indian Removal: Now let me ask you, white man, if it is a disgrace for to eat, drink and sleep with the image of God, or sit, or walk and talk with them? Or have you the folly to think that the white man, being one in fifteen or sixteen, are the only beloved images of God? Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated amongst them, and then let us look for the whites, and I doubt not it would be hard finding them; for to the rest of the nations, they are still but a handful. Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it—which skin do you think would have the greatest? I will ask one question more. Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole Continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds, and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun? I should look at all the skins, and 1 know that when I cast my eye upon that white skin, and if 1 saw those crimes written upon it, I should enter my protest against it immediately, and cleave to that which is more honorable. And I can tell you that I am satisfied with the manner of my creation, fully—whether others are or not. (Apess, 97)

Apess’s argument gets directly to the heart of the matter by attacking racism and white supremacy, and he directly links the dispossession of native peoples to the enslavement of people of African descent. Like Sigourney, he connects the African American and Native American experience through the phenomenon of racism itself. He begins by emphasizing that, by nineteenth-century understandings of race and whiteness, which tended to restrict whiteness to people not just of European, but of northern European descent, white people make up a small minority of human beings, rendering absurd the idea that all other human beings were secondary in value to this small minority. Apess and Occom were both Christian ministers, and Sigourney’s critique of anti-Indigenous racism is built in no small part around the fact that racism against Indigenous people in many cases involved hatred for fellow Christians. Examples of Indigenous Christian communities thus came to play a major role in her poetry, as the example of a poem entitled

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“The Mohegan Church” shows. In this poem Sigourney presents the Mohegan people to her white Christian readers as co-religionists rather than as either rivals for the land that her readers coveted or as potential future converts. Sigourney’s poem begins with a fairly conventional narrative of vanishing Indians: she surveys a landscape previously populated by native peoples and marks their absence while extolling the beauty of the North American landscape: Amid those hills, with verdure spread, The red-brow’d hunter’s arrow sped,— And o’er those waters, sheen and blue, He boldly launched his bark canoe, While through the forests glanc’d like light The flying wild deer’s antler bright.— (Sigourney, “Mohegan,” 323)

Using standard nineteenth-century signifiers for indigeneity like the pursuit of game with bow and arrows and travel by canoe, Sigourney offers a conventionally idealized view of a pre-contact native culture that has vanished: as such, this poem can easily resemble a work like William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies” or Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burial Ground.” Sigourney makes a turn toward the Mohegan community’s status as a living culture in the next stanza, however. Ask ye for hamlet’s peopled bound, With cone-roofed cabins circled round? For chieftain brave? for warrior proud, In nature’s majesty unbowed? You’ve seen the fleeting shadow fly, The foam upon the billows die,— The floating vapour leave no trace,— Such was their path—that fated race. Say ye, that kings, with lofty port, Here held their stern and simple court?— That here, with gestures rudely bold Stern orators the throng controll’d?— Methinks, even now, on tempest wings, The thunder of their war-shout rings, (Sigourney, “Mohegan,” 323–24)

As in “Indian Names,” Sigourney stresses the resilience of Native peoples, suggesting that the sounds of Indigenous oratory and the cultures of Indigenous America, which she labels being heroic, have not vanished despite a campaign of displacement that appears to have removed them

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from the land. By emphasizing Indigenous survival, she offers a subtle but meaningful critique of the conventional myth of the vanishing Indian. This critique continues as Sigourney notes the ways in which precontact traditions have developed into distinctive Indigenous forms of Christianity. In the following lines, Sigourney draws a connection between spaces that have been sites of military valor and the spiritual uses to which they have since been put: Methinks again with reddening spire The groves reflect their council fire.— No!—No!—in darkness rest the throng, Despair hath checked the tide of song,— Dust dimm’d their glory’s ray. But can these staunch their bleeding wrong, Or quell remembrance fierce and strong? Recording angel, say! I mark’d where once a fortress frown’d, High o’er the blood-cemented ground, And many a deed that savage tower Might tell, to chill the midnight hour;— But now, its ruins strangely bear Fruits, that the gentlest hand might share; For there, a hallowed dome imparts The lore of Heaven to listening hearts; And forms like those which lingering staid, Latest ’neath Calvary’s awful shade, And earliest pierced the gathered gloom To watch a Saviour’s lowly tomb, Such forms have soothed the Indian’s ire, And bade for him, that dome aspire. (Sigourney, “Mohegan,” 324)

Here Sigourney reveals that the sites of Native culture have not been deserted: a church sits on the site of a former fortress, and Sigourney reflects on both the changes that conversion to Christian has entailed and the way in which the presence of the church indicates a continuation of older Indigenous traditions. Now, where tradition, ghostly pale, With ancient horrors loads the vale, And shuddering weaves, in crimson loom Ambush, and snare, and torture-doom, There shall the Saviour’s ritual rise, And peaceful hymns invoke the skies.— Crushed race!—so long condemned to moan, Scorned,—rifled,—spiritless, and lone,

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From pagan rites, from sorrow’s maze, Turn to these temple-gates with praise: Yes, turn and bless the usurping band That rent away your fathers’ land; Forgive the wrong—suppress the blame, And view with Faith’s fraternal claim, Your God—your hope—your heaven the same. (Sigourney, “Mohegan,” 325)

The politics of “The Mohegan Church” are complicated by the fact that the very reason that Sigourney gives for recognizing shared humanity between people of European and Indigenous descent—a shared commitment to Christianity—is also being invoked as a reason for the Mohegan people to forgive those who the poem forthrightly admits have stolen their ancestral lands. The role of Christianity here is thus equivocal, as it both affirms the dignity of Indigenous people and tempers their claims for justice. Sigourney imagines the relation between white and Indigenous Christians as a missionary relation, meaning that on the one hand, she imagines Christianity as a profound source of equality across racial lines, but on the other she largely imagines Native peoples assimilating to European models, and she elides the possibility that justice requires more than reconciliation through a shared faith. Sigourney’s antislavery poetry is less extensive and less well known than her poetry on Native American topics, but as “Difference of Color” makes clear, it shares a common conceptual shape. Sigourney’s most explicit and most frequently anthologized statement on slavery appears in her poem “To the First Slave Ship” an apostrophe, as its titles suggests, to the first ship to transport Africans to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Considering the ship and its destructive influence on generations of Africans and on the shape that colonial cultures in the Americas would take, Sigourney’s speaker offers a stinging rebuke to the effects of slavery in both the Americas and Africa: First of that train which cursed the wave, And from the rifled cabin bore, Inheritor of wo,—the slave To bless his palm-tree’s shade no more. Dire engine!—o’er the troubled main Borne on in unresisted state,— Know’st thou within thy dark domain The secrets of thy prison’d freight?— (Sigourney, “Slave Ship,” 176)

In addressing the slave ship itself, Sigourney uses the form of the apostrophe to reflect on the material and moral consequences of slavery.

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As with earlier antislavery verse, Sigourney reflects on the destruction of the concept of home for those who have been forcibly removed from the only home that they had known. She offers a stark contrast between the status of the enslaved people in the slave ship’s hold as thinking feeling people capable of memory and a sense of loss and their legal status as “freight”—dehumanized commodities being shipped across the ocean. Her indignation toward the slave ship makes the ship itself a synecdoche for the dehumanizing system of economic relations given form by the transatlantic slave trade, and a major goal of her poem is to restore, in the minds of her readers, the humanity of those who have been abducted from their homes and converted into human commodities with the founding of the slave trade. Sigourney’s apostrophe to the ship is more directly an attempt to sensitize readers who are listening in to her address to the ship to the affective wounds that the slave trade caused: Hear’st thou their moans whom hope hath fled?— Wild cries, in agonizing starts?— Know’st thou thy humid sails are spread With ceaseless sighs from broken hearts?—  (176)

The ship, as an inanimate object, does not of course understand the consequence of its voyage, and it lacks the ability to empathize with the pain that its mission cause, but this is all the more reason for the readers of Sigourney’s poem, who presumably do possess the capacity for empathy, to consider the human cost of the trade. The fetter’d chieftain’s burning tear,— The parted lover’s mute despair,— The childless mother’s pang severe,— The orphan’s misery, are there.  (176)

Sigourney offers a catalog of the miseries associated with the slave ship, moving from the defiance of the “royal slave” who since Aphra Behn’s seventeenth-century prose romance Oroonoko had provided a central model for acknowledging African and European shared humanity, to the tragic parting of lovers (another standard convention of prose romance), to the agony of a mother whose child has been taken away, and finally to the catastrophe that has been visited on the stolen child herself. These figures, Sigourney makes clear, will provide a set of models for the inhumanity that will perpetuate itself again and again over the centuries through the slave trade, and she turns again to an apostrophe to the ship itself to chronicle the catastrophe that impends as a result of this ship’s initial voyage:

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Ah!—could’st thou from the scroll of fate The annal read of future years, Stripes,—tortures,—unrelenting hate. And death-gasps drown’d in slavery’s tears.  (176)

The violence of the first slave ship’s voyage will become a model for a subsequent history of violence through the slave trade itself and through the practice of slavery in the Americas that will grow out of the slave trade. Imagining the ship itself as a person with a conscience, Sigourney decides that the only reasonable response of the ship to this foreknowledge of what its voyage impends for humanity at large and particularly for the enslaved people transported from Africa to the Americas is for the ship to commit suicide: Down,—down,—beneath the cleaving main Thou fain would’st plunge where monsters lie, Rather than ope the gates of pain For time and for Eternity.—  (177)

The first slave ship has opened up a damnable legacy, one that can only be averted by the ship’s own self-destruction. Sigourney’s suggestion that the only response to foreknowledge of the crimes of the slave trade for the ship would be for the vessel to preemptively destroy itself chimes with reports of the reaction of the enslaved to their plight. Many of the Africans who were being transported from Africa to the Americas chose, when they were able, to leap into the sea rather than to continue to be transported into slavery. Olaudah Equiano recorded the anguish of those who attempted to escape slavery through death and were denied the opportunity by force in his Interesting Narrative: I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and, besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water: and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. (Equiano, 71)

Had the ship, Sigourney implies, chosen to sink itself, the cognate need to drown oneself in order to escape enslavement, and the violence that prevented even this means of escape, could have been avoided. From her extended apostrophe to the ship, Sigourney turns to an apostrophe to Africa itself, seeking reasons for the atrocities of slavery and the slave trade in the continent from which the enslaved were transported:

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Oh Afric!—what has been thy crime?— That thus like Eden’s fratricide, A mark is set upon thy clime, And every brother shuns thy side.—  (Sigourney, “Slave Ship,” 177)

This turn to addressing Africa may seem to reinforce certain proslavery narratives: the reference to “Eden’s fratricide” is a reference to the curse upon Cain for his murder of his brother Abel, which was used by proslavery Christians, along with the curse pronounced by Noah upon Canaan later in Genesis, as a justification for the enslavement of Africans. But here Sigourney’s point is different: the import of the rhetorical question “what has been thy crime?” is not to justify slavery, but rather to emphasize the pathos of the isolation of sub-Saharan Africans in a world in which others are unwilling to speak out against their enslavement. Sigourney points out that “every brother shuns thy side,” thus noting that that, in her theological conception of humanity, Africans and Europeans are brothers with filial responsibilities to each other and a common divine father, and ironically inverting the role that proslavery apologists had Africans play in the story of Cain and Abel. In the biblical narrative, Cain asks “Am I my brother’s keeper”; in the slave trade, it is European Christians who deny their fraternal responsibilities to humanity at large. Sigourney underscores this point in the next stanza, where she shows that “Afric” represents those who are wronged themselves, not those who are being punished for some past crime, and she emphasizes that even if other people are not willing to acknowledge the wrongs that Africans have experienced, they have an ally in Christ himself: Yet are thy wrongs, thou long-distrest!— Thy burdens, by the world unweigh’d, Safe in that Unforgetful Breast Where all the sins of earth are laid.—  (177)

Even if the world fails to acknowledge the injustice faced by enslaved people, they have a witness to their sufferings in Christ. The fact that Christ has acknowledged the suffering of the enslaved carries with it a further implication, which is that those who have enslaved them are culpable and at risk of divine judgment. In support of this point, Sigourney turns from the abstraction of a personified “Afric” to the bodies of enslaved people themselves. She addresses an enslaved person directly in the next stanza: Poor outcast slave!—Our guilty land Should tremble while she drinks thy tears, Or sees in vengeful silence stand,

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The beacon of thy shorten’d years;— Should shrink to hear her sons proclaim The sacred truth that heaven is just,— Shrink even at her Judge’s name,— “Jehovah,—Saviour of the opprest.”  (177)

Sigourney returns to her characteristic theme of divine wrath and justice as the inevitable result of slavery. The land that is guilty of crimes in this scenario is not Africa but the United States, and the judgment God promises to murderers is liable to be visited on those who oppress their brothers. Sigourney’s conclusion offers a contrast between human denial of the bonds of kinship and the ideal of a fatherly God who does not show favoritism based on race: The Sun upon thy forehead frown’d, But Man more cruel far than he, Dark fetters on thy spirit bound:— Look to the mansions of the free! Look to that realm where chains unbind,— Where the pale tyrant drops his rod, And where the patient sufferers find A friend,—a father in their God.  (177)

Sigourney’s central point here takes us back to her fundamental understanding of both slavery and Indian Removal as forms of fratricide. If the “patient sufferers” have God as their father, then it is clear that they are being tortured by their brothers, a point that directs her readers both to empathy and to fear of divine judgement. Perhaps the poem that best sums up Sigourney’s method of attacking slavery is her Fourth of July poem, in which she takes an approach that would become increasingly common in antislavery literature, with the most famous example appearing in Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” where Douglass calls for “scorching irony” as a response to the disconnect between theory and practice in a republic supposedly founded on liberty and equality. Entitled simply “Slavery,” Sigourney’s poem tracks the ironies that had become central to the identity of her country: she begins with an epigraph from the Marquis de Lafayette, “Slavery is a dark shade on the map of the United States” (Sigourney, Slavery, 147) and she teases out the implications of the quotation using a mode of reasoning similar to that in “Indian Names.” She begins with a conventionally patriotic boast about the “goodly clime” of the United States and its protection by “Old Ocean,” but closes her stanza with a countervailing image of the blight

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of slavery: “But a dark shade is gathering here / What can its blackness mean?” (147). Sigourney continues to move back and forth between patriotic affirmation and foreboding throughout the early stanzas of the poem. As she moves toward her conclusion, she builds to an increasingly powerful statement of her characteristic theme of the contrast between human cruelty and divine justice, with the Fourth of July itself pointing to the disjuncture between the two: This day doth music rare Swell through our nation’s bound, But Afric’s wailing mingles there, And Heaven doth hear the sound: Oh God of power we turn In penitence to thee, Bid our loved land the lesson learn— To bid the slave be free.  (147)

Sigourney concludes the poem with the lesson that the end of slavery is a logical conclusion of the independence of the United States, and she uses the language of the jeremiad to call her readers, on the occasion of a feast of secular patriotism dedicated to freedom and equality, to the unavoidable conclusion that only an end to slavery can fulfill the ideals that the Fourth of July celebrates. To be clear, Sigourney was not herself a radical poet, and her proximity to political abolitionism was less even that of Longfellow, but she provides an example of how a relatively conservative writer in the mid-nineteenth century could acknowledge the crime against human fraternity encompassed by slavery. She offers a suggestion of how a moral movement like antislavery can draw together people of conflicting political and social tendencies, conservatives and moderates as well as radicals, when fundamental principles of human equity and decency are at stake. Like Longfellow, Sigourney made a case against slavery in the United States that turns the nation’s political, cultural, and religious traditions against a cornerstone of the nation’s economy on moral and affective grounds, even as she did not place slavery and abolition at the core of her poetry as John Greenleaf Whittier did. At the same time, the constellation of ethical ideas that drive Sigourney’s small number of antislavery poems were to be vastly expanded in Whittier’s exploration of their implications.

“The Slave’s Poet”: John Greenleaf Whittier No single poet wrote a more substantial range of publicly accessible verse in support of the antislavery cause than the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier’s antislavery poems were published and republished

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Figure 3.1. John Greenleaf Whittier, November 25, 1885. Photo by Lamson. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3a00271.

over the course of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and he embraced a wider range of poetic forms in making his case against slavery than any of his contemporaries. Whittier’s topics are often taken from the headlines, and his forms provide a cross-section of nineteenth-century public poetry: occasional poems, ballads, scathing satiric pieces, dramatic monologues, hymns, elegies on figures he admired, and in one especially famous case, on a figure for whom he had lost all respect. If form is secondary to content and context in antislavery poetry in general, it plays an important role in Whittier’s case because of the diversity of forms he used and the range of the audience he sought to persuade, inspire, and motivate. As David Grant has noted, Whittier was both an impassioned and indefatigable advocate for the antislavery cause and a politically savvy persuader of those who might have otherwise held back: “Though a committed

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abolitionist, he was far removed from the type of the zealot so caught up in the purity of his position as to be blind to the need for reconciling his beliefs with the conditions for political action” (Grant, 65). Michael C. Cohen, meanwhile, has shown that Whittier was perhaps the most paradigmatic embodiment of “the ease with which authors could borrow airs, meters, or stanza forms from recognizable sources in order to adapt familiar poems and songs for new times and circumstances” among antislavery poets (Michael Cohen, 95). Whittier’s pragmatism in politics is thus paralleled by his formal pragmatism, and his ability to adapt a flexible array of forms in the service of his central message. As Perry Miller noted in 1957, Whittier brings together an admiration for Burkean conservatism in other matters and a truly radical instance of “the ferocity of the Quaker conscience” on the issue of slavery (Miller, 211, 220). Whittier has continued to speak to defenders of human dignity and opponents of slavery in the years following Emancipation. For example, in her 1913 biography of Whittier, the British writer Georgina King Lewis devoted her final chapter to arguing “the curse of slavery has not ceased” and noting the ways in which the British Empire was still enmeshed in the practice of slavery in the twentieth century despite the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself in the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, concluding that Whittier’s spirit would be required for a universal abolition of slavery (Lewis, 12, 217). Early biographies of Whittier tended to emphasize the centrality of Whittier’s abolitionism to his identities, with W. J. Linton’s 1893 biography devoting most of its middle chapters to Whittier’s commitment to the abolition of slavery, including his admiration (ambivalent because of his own Quaker pacifism) for figures like John Brown who fought for the freedom of the enslaved before the Civil War itself (Linton, 132–34). Still more focused on the antislavery dimension of Whittier’s work was William Sloane Kennedy, who devoted a third of his 1881 biography of Whittier to a chapter entitled “The Anti-Slavery Contest” (Kennedy, 58–170). Following in Kennedy’s and Linton’s footsteps, George Rice Carpenter identified Whittier’s abolitionism as the fulcrum of his career, arguing that “The crisis in Whittier’s life was the moment when, throwing aside his Byronic passion for fame, his selfish zeal for political preferment, he identified himself with the abolitionist movement, then the most forlorn of forlorn hopes” (Carpenter, 103). Only in later studies was Whittier’s abolitionism downplayed, as Edward Wagenknecht, for example, stressed a moderation on the topic that is hard to find in his poetry (Wagenknecht, 59). Whittier’s antislavery passion may seem unexpected, given that he grew up on a rural Massachusetts farm, far from the centers of the slave trade. The ethical commitments that he absorbed from his Quaker faith, however, help to explain his lifelong commitment to the antislavery cause. Quakers historically were distinguished by their devotion to

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social and religious egalitarianism, and they were among the earliest participants in the antislavery movement in the English-speaking world. The first antislavery document in British North America was composed by a group of German speaking Quakers who likely came to Quakerism through the Anabaptist movements in continental Europe. In the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, German Quakers in Pennsylvania made a case against slavery that drew heavily on their understanding of Christian ethics: These are the reasons why we are against the traffick of men-body, as foloweth. Is there any that would be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life? How fearful and faint-hearted are many on sea, when they see a strange vessel,—being afraid it should be a Turk, and they should be taken, and sold for slaves into Turkey. Now what is this better done, as Turks doe? Yea, rather it is worse for them, which say they are Christians; for we hear that ye most part of such negers are brought hither against their will and consent, and that many of them are stolen. Now, tho they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty to have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones. There is a saying that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? Here is liberty of conscience wch is right and reasonable; here ought to be liberty of ye body, except of evil-doers, wch is an other case. But to bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against. In Europe there are many oppressed for conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed wh are of a black colour. And we who know than men must not comitt adultery,—some do committ adultery, in separating wives from their husbands and giving them to others; and some sell the children of these poor creatures to other men. Ah! doe consider will this thing, you who doe it, if you would be done at this manner? And if it is done according to Christianity? You surpass Holland and Germany in this thing. This makes an ill report in all those countries of Europe, where they hear of, that ye Quakers doe here handel men as they handel there ye cattle. And for that reason some have no mind or inclination to come hither. And who shall maintain this your cause, or pleid for it. Truly we can not do so, except you shall inform us better hereof, viz., that Christians have liberty to practise these things. (Germantown Petition, n.p.)

Francis Daniel Pastorius, the lead drafter of the document, has recently come to be seen as a literary figure in his own right, especially through the scholarly work of Patrick Erben, but the early resistance to slavery based

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on ethical principles adduced from the New Testament would have a more direct line of influence through the work of such Quaker abolitionists as Anthony Benezet and John Woolman in the eighteenth century. Woolman has been a staple of early American literature classes for decades now, and Benezet has recently been recovered as a subject of discussion in the field by Manisha Sinha’s magisterial study The Slave’s Cause, which emphasizes Benezet’s writing as a source and model for much later abolitionist work. With Pastorius, Woolman, Benezet, and their successors in the background of his religious life, Whittier had good reason to occupy the radical leading edge of the antislavery movement from an early age. A more secular source for Whittier’s political commitments was his reading of the great Scottish egalitarian poet Robert Burns, and his enthusiasm for Burns was shared by Abraham Lincoln, among others. Burns had written in favor of equality in some of his most famous poems, notably in “A Man’s a Man for A’ That”: What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; A Man’s a Man for a’ that: For a’ that, and a’ that, Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that; The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, Is king o’ men for a’ that.  (Burns, 207)

Burns offers a counterpoint to the idea that wealth and status can differentiate among human beings: Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a’ that, That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that. For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin yet for a’ that, That Man to Man the warld o’er Shall brithers be for a’ that.  (207)

This ideal of universal human brotherhood fits well with the sensibility of the antislavery movement: Whittier could read here both a model for poetry as an expression of common people’s aspirations in common speech and as a stirring statement rejecting inequality between human beings around the world. Whittier’s collection of antislavery poems, as it appears in the 1899 Riverside Edition of his Complete Poems, begins with a conventional move: an encomium on a major figure in the antislavery movement.

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Whittier praises William Lloyd Garrison, the most visible figure in the antislavery movement in the 1840s, for his courage in standing up for his convictions in the face of calumny and even threats of violence. Central to Whittier’s praise of Garrison is the kinship that he feels with his fellow antislavery activist: I love thee with a brother’s love I feel my pulses thrill, To mark thy spirit soar above, The cloud of human ill. My heart hath leaped to answer thine, And answer back thy words, As leaps the warrior’s at the shine And flash of kindred swords!  (Whittier, 347–48)

For Whittier, the antislavery movement has the power to bring together people of similar moral impulses, and in an unexpected way, the poetry of antislavery becomes the poetry of love here. Whittier recognizes the moral courage that he values in Garrison, and he loves him like a brother as a result. The use of martial metaphor here is especially telling, as both Whittier as a Quaker and Garrison were convinced pacifists. Despites their rejection of physical violence, they have found a cause comparable to war in the movement to end slavery in the United States. Whittier’s devotion to Garrison was personal as well as political. His first published poem “The Exile’s Complaint,” was published by Garrison in 1826, and Garrison was a hero as much as a mentor to Whittier. In addition to his moral courage, Garrison also provided a model of how a young man could flourish in literary society and an advocate for the benefits of a career in writing despite the skepticism of Whittier’s family. Whittier’s poem highlights that the antislavery movement and the poetry it produced has a very substantial affective component. Whittier’s final poem in the collection’s final form returns to Garrison on the occasion of his death. Whittier celebrates the lifelong commitment that Garrison showed toward liberty, and he suggests that Garrison’s legacy will continue long after his death: Go, leave behind thee all that mars The work below of man for man: With the white legions of the stars Do service such as angels can. Whenever wrong shall right deny Or suffering spirits urge their plea, Be thine a voice to smite the lie, A hand to set the captive free!  (348)

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This tension between pacifism and a cause that may justify violence even for those who usually reject it is treated with particular intensity in Whittier’s poem on Toussaint L’Ouverture, which has been discussed in the first chapter of this study. Whittier’s poetry consistently addresses the conflicting imperatives of justice and peace, and for authors who regarded war and slavery as related evils, especially Whittier as a Quaker and Melville as a writer who early in his career expressed a commitment to pacifism, this conflict would become increasing fraught with the onset of the US Civil War. Whittier’s treatment of Toussaint points to a repeated pattern in his poetry, where he uses historical figures and events or representative stories of the atrocities associated with slavery to stir his readers to resistance against the slave system in the same way that Garrison has stirred up him. The most celebrated of Whittier’s poems on an individual figure was of course his biting critique of Daniel Webster’s endorsement of the Compromise of 1850. In “Ichabod!” Whittier mourns the collapse of the moral judgment of a figure whom he had revered. Daniel Webster had been one of the three dominant figures in the Senate in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the three towering figures was an outright villain for anyone who opposed slavery: John C. Calhoun explicitly defended slavery as not just a necessary evil, but as a positive good, and he maintained the right of any state to “nullify” antislavery laws that were passed at the federal level. Herman Melville offered a thinly veiled portrait of Calhoun as “Nulli” in his third novel, Mardi, describing Nulli as “a cadaverous, ghost-like man; with a low ridge of forehead; hair, steelgray; and wondrous eyes;—bright, nimble, as the twin Corposant balls, playing about the ends of ships’ royal-yards in gales” (532). The second member of the senatorial triumvirate, Henry Clay, while not a forceful advocate of the expansion of slavery like Calhoun, was nonetheless a slave owner himself whose instincts clearly cut against abolition. That left the figure nineteenth-century abolitionists like Whittier most admired: Daniel Webster, who was the public figure most admired by mid-century abolitionists, and so the figure whose betrayal in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 caused them the most pain. Whittier titled his poem on Webster’s betrayal “Ichabod,” which translates as “inglorious,” or as the King James Version of the Bible put it, “the glory has departed.” Rather than approach his poem as a polemic, Whittier framed it as an elegy, opening with a straightforward statement of the sense of loss that those who trusted Webster must feel after the passage of the Compromise of 1850: So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his gray hairs gone Forevermore!  (Whittier, 249)

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Webster is fallen and lost, the poem implies, in a theological sense. He is one of those who, in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, having gained the whole world, has lost his soul. The idea that Webster’s “light” has “withdrawn” reflects something of Whittier’s Quaker background, as the ultimate moral guide for Quakers was and is not, as for some other Protestant denominations, the text of the Bible, but rather the inner light imparted to the soul directly by God. The collapse of Webster’s moral being implied by the Fugitive Slave Law is comparable to the loss of one’s eternal soul. The third and fourth lines, “The glory from his gray hairs gone  / Forevermore!” expresses the special tragedy that occurs when a man who has lived his entire life with integrity has now forfeited this integrity. As harsh as this opening is, the compassion that the second stanza shows toward Webster increases rather than diminishing the sense of his shame. The speaker implores readers to refrain from harsh judgment even as it suggests that Webster has become a fit subject for pity: Revile him not, the Tempter hath A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, Befit his fall!  (Whittier, 249)

In disavowing scorn and wrath, the speaker suggests that the fallen hero has forfeited the admiration that he merited before, but even the sympathy expressed her underscores the depths of his fall. Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage, When he who might Have lighted up and led his age, Falls back in night. Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark A bright soul driven, Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark, From hope and heaven!  (Whittier, 249)

Whittier’s plea to respond with compassion rather than wrath to Webster’s failings has an edge to it. If he rejects scorn and laughter as morally unworthy of his audience, he envisions Webster as a lost soul and his crime in embracing the Fugitive Slave Law as one that is worthy of damnation. The most promising public figure of his generation is condemned to hell for his failure to stand by his principles, and in this way Whittier’s plea for compassion only heightens one’s sense that Webster’s offense has been unpardonable.

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In his next two stanzas, Whittier underscores the loss of Webster’s reputation, even as he apparently pleads for sorrow rather than rage as the appropriate response to Webster’s moral failure: Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, Dishonored brow. But let its humbled sons, instead, From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead, In sadness make.  (249)

Each plea on Webster’s behalf deepens the strength of Whittier’s condemnation of his betrayal. The plea to abstain from insult only serves to emphasize that Webster’s compatriots who have the necessary moral compass to reject slavery can no longer take any pride in him at all. The injunction not to “brand with deeper shame  / His dim, dishonored brow” serves to call attention to the fact that Webster has already been branded by his failure to stand up against the slave power, and it does so in a way that calls to mind the very means by which slavery degrades the human form: branding, as Whittier’s abolitionist readers would well know, was a form of torture and control that was characteristic of slavery in the southern United States. Webster has in his own way become a slave, not to the cruelty of other men, but to his own moral failings. This comparison of the compromises made by those who putatively opposed slavery to the acceptance of a form of moral slavery would become especially central to antislavery eloquence in the 1850s, notably Henry David Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts,” where Thoreau wrote: Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime? I do not know whether the Boston Herald is still in existence, but I remember to have seen it about the streets when Sims was carried off. Did it not act its part well-serve its master faithfully! How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his head his lower extremity? When I have taken up this paper with my cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the Merchants’ Exchange. (Thoreau, 188)

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Thoreau’s point, and Whittier’s, is that the shame associated with forcible enslavement would be much more accurately directed at those who have chosen not to exercise the moral freedom of which they have not been physically deprived. A person who has been forcibly enslaved is the victim of a crime; the person who has chosen not to exercise his or her own moral capacity is a co-conspirator in his or her on moral degradation. This insight leads Whittier to a final, heartbreaking, statement of loss: Of all we loved and honored, naught Save power remains; A fallen angel’s pride of thought, Still strong in chains. All else is gone; from those great eyes The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead!  (Whittier 249)

Webster has experienced moral death, and, Whittier implies, damnation as a result of his unwillingness to prioritize standing against slavery. Because his personal honor has died through his moral compromises, he himself is dead, and insofar as “only power remains,” Webster has become a Satanic figure: a fallen angel, like those cast out of heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Whittier’s conclusion offers a telling twist on conventional religious justifications of slavery, as he admonishes his readers to “pay the reverence of old days / To his dead fame; / Walk backward, with averted gaze, / And hide the shame!” (Whittier 249). This passage may need unpacking for twenty-first century readers, but the biting irony would have registered for Whittier’s nineteenth-century audience: the biblical hero of the flood narrative in the Book of Genesis, Noah, becomes drunk after the end of the flood, and one of his sons, Ham, sees him, naked and in a drunken stupor, and reports it to his brothers, Shem and Japheth. Shem and Japheth walk backwards to cover their father’s humiliation, and when he regains his confidence, he blesses them and curses Ham’s lineage as a result. The passage in which Noah does this would become a proslavery prooftext in the nineteenth century: 24

And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25

And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 26

And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

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God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. (Gen. 9:24–7, King James Version)

This “curse of Canaan” was made into a central justification of why slavery could be regarded by its Christian apologists, not merely as a necessary evil, but as a clear expression of divine will. If God had condemned Canaan to servitude, then not only was there no need to condemn slavery, it was actually possible to celebrate it as an expression of divinely ordained hierarchy. Thus, when choosing this particular passage to shape his closing stanza, Whittier was employed an especially acerbic form of irony: here Webster becomes the drunken, humiliated Noah, and those who recognize the depths of his moral degradation are exhorted to cover his shame gently in recognition of his past service. The passage is thus repurposed: rather than functioning as a justification for slavery, it instead comes to stand for the necessary forbearance that humans owe each other, so matter how grievous the failings of the guilty party might be. Whittier’s conclusion is thus especially powerful as an alternative vision of how humans might treat each other: with dignity and respect as essential components of human society, rather than vengeance and particularly the sort of scorn that might allow one human being to enslave another. By re-writing Noah in the poem, Whittier actually put forward a mode for human relations that would preclude slavery. As “Ichabod” indicates, Whittier was capable of irony that was both pointed and multi-faceted. One of his most substantial performances of irony in his antislavery verse appears in his poem “Hunters of Men.” In an epigraph, Whittier established that “These lines were written when the orators of the American Colonization Society were demanding that the free blacks should be sent to Africa, and opposing Emancipation unless expatriation followed. See the report of the proceedings of the society at its annual meeting in 1834.” Notably, the target of Whittier’s irony in the poem, according to this epigraph, is the allegedly moderate antislavery position of colonization: by juxtaposing the epigraph with the poem, Whittier suggested a continuity between the racism of colonization societies and the racism of those who were explicitly pro-slavery. Whittier’s opening in the poem reads like a celebration of the hunt for human prey that he describes: HAVE ye heard of our hunting, o’er mountain and glen, Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men? The lords of our land to this hunting have gone, As the fox-hunter follows the sound of the horn; Hark! the cheer and the hallo! the crack of the whip, And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip! All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match, Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.

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So speed to their hunting, o’er mountain and glen, Through cane-brake and forest,—the hunting of men! Gay luck to our hunters! how nobly they ride In the glow of their zeal, and the strength of their pride! (Whittier, 357–58)

Here Whittier imagines the slave hunters in the antebellum United States as a collection of aristocrats who, like fox-hunters in Britain, can take pleasure in the sport of hunting. The “crack of the whip” that drives the horses of the huntsman to pursue the fox is the same whip crack that is used to punish enslaved human bodies, and the nobility of the prey—as human beings made in the divine image—shifts from a celebration of the pleasures of the hunt to an acknowledgment of the blasphemous nature of slavery itself once those who are enslaved are acknowledged to be child of the same deity as their enslavers. The epigraph complicates the poem by causing Whittier’s readers to reflect on why the colonization societies might be considered to be “hunters of men” in the same way that slave catchers from the South might be described in this way. A moment of reflection suggests the reason for the comparison: like the obviously depraved people who accept pay in order to track down and coerce other human beings to return to slavery, the colonization societies’ plans depend on massive coercion, and the small-scale hunting of individual enslaved people who escape is destined to become a larger scale hunting of people of African descent if the colonization societies win. This realization points to why Whittier frames the hunting of men as an elite activity, and not just a practice of those who are so immiserated themselves that they turn to the hunting of other humans to survive: The priest with his cassock flung back on the wind, Just screening the politic statesman behind; The saint and the sinner, with cursing and prayer, The drunk and the sober, ride merrily there. And woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid, For the good of the hunted, is lending her aid: Her foot’s in the stirrup, her hand on the rein, How blithely she rides to the hunting of men! Oh, goodly and grand is our hunting to see, In this “land of the brave and this home of the free.” Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine, All mounting the saddle, all grasping the rein; Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin Is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin!  (358)

The passage’s conclusion reveals that Whittier’s ultimate target is not merely slavery itself, but the racism that enables both slavery as a practice

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and colonization as a goal to exist. The “Priest, warrior, and statesman, from Georgia to Maine” and even the “woman, kind woman, wife, widow, and maid” who participate so enthusiastically in the hunt do so precisely because of their failure to acknowledge a shared humanity between people of European and African descent, and so the logic of colonization ultimately takes us to the same place as the logic of slavery itself. Whittier turns next to the subject of resistance on the part of the enslaved, here as elsewhere contemplating the possibility of that violent resistance may be a necessary response to the injustices the enslaved face. Notably, Whittier does not condemn the act of resistance itself, despite his own pacifist leanings, but rather meditates on the ruthlessness of the hunters: Woe, now, to the hunted who turns him at bay! Will our hunters be turned from their purpose and prey? Will their hearts fail within them? their nerves tremble, when All roughly they ride to the hunting of men? Ho! alms for our hunters! all weary and faint, Wax the curse of the sinner and prayer of the saint. The horn is wound faintly, the echoes are still, Over cane-brake and river, and forest and hill. Haste, alms for our hunters! the hunted once more Have turned from their flight with their backs to the shore: What right have they here in the home of the white, Shadowed o’er by our banner of Freedom and Right?  (358)

Here Whittier reveals explicitly the reason that he considers the colonizationists to be part and parcel of the slave system to which they ostensibly, if mildly, object. The hunters of the slave system seek to return the enslaved to their slavery, but the hunter of the colonization project would exclude people of color from the “home of the white” altogether, thus replacing brutal exploitation with something near to our modern concepts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The logic of Whittier’s own position is such that his response to colonization is necessarily uncompromising. The expulsion of people of African descent from the United States is not a gentler variant on the racism of the slave system, but rather the logical conclusion to failing to recognize God’s image in other human beings because of the color of their skin. Whittier gives the knife of his poem’s irony a further twist in the lines that follow. Recognizing that the colonization societies’ position reads as philanthropy for many of his contemporaries, Whittier calls for “alms” to support the privileged “hunters”: Ho! alms for the hunters! or never again Will they ride in their pomp to the hunting of men!

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Alms, alms for our hunters! why will ye delay, When their pride and their glory are melting away? The parson has turned; for, on charge of his own, Who goeth a warfare, or hunting, alone? The politic statesman looks back with a sigh, There is doubt in his heart, there is fear in his eye. Oh, haste, lest that doubting and fear shall prevail, And the head of his steed take the place of the tail. Oh, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then, For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men?  (358) .

Whittier imagines his hunters here as mercenaries who require bribery to follow even the dictates of their warped consciences. If colonization is not funded by philanthropy—if there is no profit in this allegedly virtuous project, then, as in Whittier’s coming image of the hunter’s horse, the promoters of the project will turn tail and flee. The immorality of both slavery and colonization and the racist logic that undergird both is shown in all its absurdity and horror here. The failure that Whittier has diagnosed in his society to recognize humans as humans means that his contemporaries not only take pleasure in the abomination of hunting their fellow human beings, but require bribery via the profit motive. This pattern was decisive for Whittier’s antislavery verse as a whole: he would consistently find a means of exposing the extraordinary perversity of the system he protested.

Christian Slaves and Clerical Oppressors If Whittier’s considerations of individuals and their contributions to and betrayals of the antislavery movement offer an intensity of focus that few other antislavery poets find (and exception is the sharp focus on individual enslaved people that appears in Frances E. W. Harper’s “The Slave Mother,” to be discussed in the next chapter), he also created sweeping visions of slavery and its opponents through historical narratives, geographical panoramas, and thematically connected reflections. Of the third category, the most striking poems are those that cluster around the issue of Christian hypocrisy in relation to slavery and the toleration of slaveholding within the Christian churches. Perhaps the central piece in this cluster of meditations on slavery and Christianity is his poem “The Christian Slave,” where Whittier reflects on precisely what it means for a co-religionist to be sold as a commodity in Whittier’s own country. “The Christian Slave” invokes a tradition far removed from slavery in the Americas through its title: in 1844, Hiram Powers’s sculpture “The Greek Slave” had been notable both for its portrayal of female nudity, as the titular slave was a naked woman, and for the sympathy that it

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invoked for the cause of the Greeks who were fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire. In fact, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who as we have seen above had written eloquently against both the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation and oppression of Indigenous Americans, offered a poem that captured the sympathetic and somewhat myopic reaction that many Americans had to Powers’s sculpture in the 1840s. Sigourney mused: Yet errs he not who calleth thee a slave, Thou Christian maiden? Gyves are on thy wrists; But in thy soul a might of sanctity That foils the oppressor, making to itself A hiding place from the sore ills of time. What is chain to thee, who has the power To bind in admiration all who gaze Upon thine eloquent brow and matchless form? We are ourselves thy slaves, most Beautiful!  (Sigourney, 244)

Sigourney’s poem both engenders sympathy with the enslaved white Christian woman of the title and suggests that her enslavement itself is an illusion of sorts: she holds sway over others through her beauty, and so she becomes the mistress of her viewers in the conventional sense in which male lovers often described themselves as slaves of their beloved in chivalric verse. This strange erasure of the material conditions of slavery and of the evident connection between slavery in the Mediterranean and slavery in the Caribbean and the US South becomes all the stranger when we consider that Sigourney was herself an outspoken critic of slavery and the slave trade. As Timothy Marr has discussed, Powers’s sculpture was read in a complex set of ways by nineteenth-century US viewers, allowing it to become “a dynamic symbolic expression through which antebellum audiences negotiated their anxieties about female sexuality, male power, racial identity, and religious purity” (274). Viewers were asked to sympathize with the suffering and exposure of the woman in Powers’s sculpture, but it remained a specifically abolitionist move to connect her pain directly with that of enslaved women in the South—as Marr points out, an 1847 essay in the abolitionist National Era decried the sympathy for this enslaved woman from those who “never yet breathed a sigh for their sable sisters in the South!” (278). Earlier in the nineteenth century and in the later eighteenth century, there had been a vigorous subgenre of fictional and non-fictional narratives associated with the enslavement of Christians by Muslims in North Africa. On the fictional side, this included most prominently Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, one of the earlier contributions to fiction in the US

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literary canon. The idea, then of enslaved Christians would be a familiar one for Whittier’s readers in the context of presumably white Americans and European enslaved by North Africans and Turks, not necessarily in the context of Black Christians enslaved by their fellow Christians. Some chroniclers of Algerine captivity, notably Benjamin Franklin and Royall Tyler, addressed the parallels between the North African enslavement of Christians and the practice of slavery in the Americas directly; most others did not. In Tyler’s case, as in the editorial from the National Era that Marr quotes, the connection between Algerine captivity and American slavery is mediated through sympathy: I cannot reflect upon this transaction yet without shuddering . . . and I pray to a merciful God, the common parent of the great family of the universe, who hath made of one flesh and one blood all the nations of the earth, that the miseries, the insults, and cruel woundings that I afterwards received when a slave myself, may expiate for the inhumanity I was necessitated to use towards these MY BROTHERS OF THE HUMAN RACE [emphasis in original]. (Tyler, 110)

Here Tyler links the sufferings that his narrator, Updike Underhill experiences in his time in slavery in North Africa with the violence of the transatlantic slave trade in which Underhill was engaged prior to his captivity. By contrast with Tyler’s linking of North Africa and the US South through sympathy, many of the non-fiction narratives of slavery in North Africa that Whittier’s readers could have encountered were focused primarily on the sufferings of their white protagonists with little reference to what their experiences might imply about their own societies. Whittier takes the trope of the white Christian slave from the Barbary captivity narratives and Powers’s Greek slave and applies it very directly to the antebellum US. The opening of Whittier’s poem is ambiguous, as it is not entirely clear from the opening lines whether he is describing a white woman enslaved in a non-Christian country like Powers’s subject or a Black Christian woman enslaved in the United States: A Christian! going, gone! Who bids for God’s own image? For his grace, Which that poor victim of the Market-place, Hath in her suffering won?  (383)

Whittier’s opening establishes both the invocation of the divine image and the particularly shocking effect achieved by the auctioning of a young woman. The woman who is being sold is made in the image of God, and yet she has been reduced to a commodity in the public market-place, and Whittier’s audience is being asked to feel her suffering directly.

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Whittier’s address next turns to the Christian deity, making the poem a meditation on theodicy and divine justice as well as on the failings of human justice: My God! can such things be? Hast Thou not said that whatsoe’er is done Unto Thy weakest and Thy humblest one Is even done to Thee?  (383)

Whittier follows a pattern familiar to readers of the Psalms and to the patriarchs’ debates with God in the Hebrew Bible: he reminds the deity of his own character, in this case also reminding his Christian audience of Matthew 25, where Jesus distinguishes among the saved and the damned—the sheep and the goats—on the basis of what “you have done to the least of these, my brethren” (Matthew 25. King James Version). The first half of the stanza appeals to divine justice, and the second half suggests that those who have failed to render that justice to those who are oppressed in their own society face the prospect of the most severe condemnation. The next stanza identifies the Christian slave of the title directly with Christ himself: In that sad victim, then Child of Thy pitying love, I see Thee stand; Once more the jest-word of a mocking band, Bound, sold, and scourged again!  (283)

The addressee for the stanza continues to be the Christian deity, now in the form of Christ on the verge of his crucifixion: in the Gospel account, Christ is bound when he is arrested, sold for thirty pieces of silver via Judas’s betrayal, and scourged at the command of Pontius Pilate. In this way, those who are being sold into slavery in the nineteenth century are experiencing a modern version of the crucifixion, and the Christian sellers of these Christian slaves are recapitulating the offense of crucifying the innocent. The stanzas that follow emphasize both the gendered brutality of striking a woman in a way that parallels Frederick Douglass’s wrenching account of his Aunt Hester being whipped in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the superior Christlikeness of her response: A Christian up for sale! Wet with her blood your whips, o’er -task her frame, Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame, Her patience shall not fail!

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A heathen hand might deal Back on your heads the gathered wrong of years: But her low, broken prayer and nightly tears, Ye neither heed nor feel.  (283)

The rebuke that Whittier directs at Christian slavers here suggests that the Christian slave is being punished precisely because of her Christ-like qualities. She can be depended on to forgive her persecutors, like the founder of her religion himself, and therefore her very Christianity is being blasphemously abused by the violence of her abuse. Whittier proceeds to observe that the Christianity she has been taught has been attenuated: the message of obedience is made central, whereas the message of Christian liberty that US Protestants claim is central to their faith is withheld from her even as she follows the tenets of Christianity that she is taught. Having established the enslaved women’s superior claim to Christian virtue relative to the nominally Christian culture that has enslaved her, Whittier moves to the tack of comparing US Christianity negatively to North African Islam in relation to the comparative practice of slavery: Oh, shame! the Moslem thrall, Who, with his master, to the Prophet kneels, While turning to the sacred Kebla feels His fetter break and fall. Cheers for the turbaned Bey Of robber-peopled Tunis! he hath torn The dark slave-dungeons open, and hath born Their inmates into day: But our poor slave in vain Turns to the Christian shrine his aching eyes; It rites will only swell his market price, And rivet on his chain.  (283)

In Muslim nations, conversion leads to freedom, Whittier observes, whereas in the United States Christianity itself has become a commodity within the slave system. The negative contrast of Christianity in the United States with Christianity’s great global monotheistic competitor is biting, and the idea that Christian faith itself can be reduced to a commodity for profit is still more striking: independent of its failings relative to Islam, Christianity in the United States is rendered a blasphemous parody of itself insofar as it reduces the bodies and souls of men and women to opportunities for gain. Whittier’s poem “Moloch on State Street” gives a biblical name to this elevation of gain over faith: the proscribed practice of child sacrifice

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in ancient Canaanite religions. In this poem Whittier makes the irony of the adoption of slavery in a nominally Christian society the central element in a truly fierce jeremiad that in its emphasis on the failure of the United States to live up to the ideals of the original New England settlers mirrors James Russell Lowell’s call for “present valor” in response to the moral questions of one’s own day in “The Present Crisis” (discussed in chapter 4). As with Lowell’s poem, Whittier’s “Moloch on State Street” is a response to a specific event: for Whittier, the seizure of Thomas Sims and his return to slavery after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law provides the occasion for this stirring denunciation of Northern complicity in the slave system. He begins the poem with the following note: In a foot-note of the Report of the Senate of Massachusetts on the case of the arrest and return to bondage of the fugitive slave Thomas Sims it is stated that— “It would have been impossible for the U.S. marshal thus successfully to have resisted the law of the State, without the assistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and the countenance and support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerful body of citizens. It was in evidence that 1500 of the most wealthy and respectable citizens—merchants, bankers, and others—volunteered their services to aid the marshal on this occasion. . . . No watch was kept upon the doings of the marshal, and while the State officers slept, after the moon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused was taken out of our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city of Boston.”

For Whittier, the crucial point here is that both the Fugitive Slave Law itself and its execution require the active participation of people who regard themselves as disconnected from the broader injustices of slavery in the United States. When he sees the return of an enslaved man to bondage being enabled by powerful citizens in an ostensibly free state, this complicity suggests to him that the slave states and free states alike are part of a system that undermines human dignity. Throughout, Whittier’s tone is that of impassioned denunciation, as he identifies the system of slavery in the United States with the ancient Canaanite religion of Moloch, which is denounced in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Leviticus: 2

Again, thou shalt say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones. 3

And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech,

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to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. (Lev. 20:2–3, King James Version)

The rationale for this strong denunciation of Moloch is that giving one’s “seed” to Moloch was an act of child sacrifice, so “Moloch” serves as a figure for a transgression of our most fundamental moral intuitions: if we are unable to avoid the transgression of natural piety implied by causing children to “pass through the fire to Moloch,” (Lev. 18:21. King James Version), then there is no responsibility to the wider human family that we can be trusted to observe. It is precisely this sort of abdication of his society’s responsibilities to the wider human family that Whittier sees in “Moloch on State Street.” This identification of slavery with violations of natural piety within the family sphere sets the tone for a great deal of later antislavery literature, particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depictions of the violation of George and Eliza Harris’s family and the titular Uncle Tom’s own family in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It also illustrates the ability of one event, in this case the connivance in the return of Thomas Sims to slavery on the part of civic and business leader in Boston, to galvanize an immediate circle of activists and at the same time shock the conscience of a nation. Sims’s return to slavery made visible the offense of slavery against natural piety in the way that the murder of George Floyd made visible the offense of police violence against the bodies of Black people in the twenty-first century. Whittier offered in this poem a model for bearing witness to such offenses. Whittier begins the poem with the scene of Sims’s midnight kidnapping, emphasizing the way in which the event is taking place in hours of the morning when resistance is least likely to be organized: THE moon has set: while yet the dawn Breaks cold and gray, Between the midnight and the morn Bear off your prey!  (415)

The opening of the poem both sets a Gothic mood—the raid just before sunrise is as terrifying in this scenario as it would become in accounts of twentieth-century police states—and suggests the cowardice of those who carried Sims back into slavery, and also brings to mind the way in which the Roman soldiers came for Jesus just before dawn in the Garden of Gethsemane in gospel accounts of Christ’s crucifixion. They know that many citizens of Boston will oppose this act, by force if necessary, and they are avoiding confrontation by carrying out the handover of Sims at this time. The shape of the lines corresponds to the unsettling content of the poem. Rather than the standard alternation of tetrameter and trimeter in ballad meter, the even-numbered lines in these stanzas consist of just

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four syllables, making a jarring contrast between the odd and even numbered lines throughout the poem. Whittier narrates the story of Sims’s arrest and handover with increasing drama and intensity in the stanzas that follow: On, swift and still! the conscious street Is panged and stirred; Tread light! that fall of serried feet The dead have heard! The first drawn blood of Freedom’s veins Gushed where ye tread; Lo! through the dusk the martyr-stains Blush darkly red!  (415)

Crucial to these stanzas is the idea that Moloch, the violation of sacred familial ties, has not only happened through the return of an enslaved person to slavery relative to his own familial and interpersonal connections, but also relative to the connection of New England with its past. This element is particularly explicit in Lowell’s “The Present Crisis,” but it is striking that a Quaker like Whittier, who would have reason to view the Puritan past of New England and the military history of the American Revolution with some skepticism, also invokes this same sort of filial piety that Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch regarded as crucial to the Puritan influence on the longer arc of US literary history. The “dead” who have “heard” the sound of Sims’s abduction are also those whose blood “gushed” as part of the Boston Massacre, thus providing the “first martyr-stains” of the American revolt against British tyranny. Sims’s abduction and rendition (to use a term more familiar to twenty-first century ears) back into slavery defiles the blood of the secular martyrs who laid the framework for American freedom. And yet Whittier does not stop with the American Revolution and the Boston Massacre, but rather proceeds deeper into the history of New England: Beneath the slowly waning stars And whitening day, What stern and awful presence bars That sacred way? What faces frown upon ye, dark With shame and pain? Come these from Plymouth’s Pilgrim bark? Is that young Vane?

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Who, dimly beckoning, speed ye on With mocking cheer? Lo! spectral Andros, Hutchinson, And Gage are here!  (Whittier, 215–16)

Whittier lines up the heroes and the villains of New England’s revolutionary and colonial history, suggesting that those who have resisted tyranny, from the pilgrims on the Mayflower at Plymouth to Henry Vane the Younger as the defender of Anne Hutchinson, have been enlisted in the antislavery cause, and those who opposed American independence (Andros, Hutchinson, and Gage) are spectrally supporting Sims’s return. This emphasis on a filial connection to the New England history of resistance to colonial domination is both savvy and less obvious than it might appear to us today. As a Quaker, Whittier’s direct filial connections were with the victims of the early Puritan colonists’ religious intolerance rather than with the Puritans themselves, as the Puritans who held places of power in early New England regarded Quakerism as a demonic heresy, punishable by public floggings or even death, and the early New England commitment to some forms of freedom did not extend to opposition to slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing explores the relatively recent development of a conscience on issues of slavery in New England, as Samuel Hopkins, the minister alluded to in the title, gradually realizes that his theology is inconsistent with neutrality on the issue, but this is a transition that takes place within less than a half century before Whittier began writing his antislavery verse. We can see that Whittier is embracing implicitly a principle that Lowell would make explicit: valuing freedom will ultimately and necessarily be incompatible with slavery, and in order to appropriately honor the heroes of the past, it becomes necessary to move beyond their levels of moral insight. This invocation of the history of early New England turns to a direct invocation of the Bible and the worship of Moloch to which Whittier alludes in the title of the poem: For ready mart or favoring blast Through Moloch’s fire, Flesh of his flesh, unsparing, passed The Tyrian sire. Ye make that ancient sacrifice Of Man to Gain, Your traffic thrives, where freedom dies, Beneath the chain.  (Whittier, 416)

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Here the connection between the biblical injunction against child sacrifice and the violation of dignity and decency in the return of Sims to slavery becomes powerfully explicit: Whittier compares the shock of conscience that we feel when contemplating the willful sacrifice of a child by means of fire to the shock of conscience we ought to feel at any recurrence of the “ancient sacrifice / Of Many to Gain.” Whittier’s presentism in this case can serve as a model for our own, in that the logic of his denunciation of slavery is built on the assumption that neither Canaanite child-sacrifices nor antebellum slavery are sui generis, but rather represent a continuing human tendency to sacrifice moral values to profit, which must be resisted in each generation, whatever form it takes. This use of Moloch looks forward to Allen Ginsberg’s invocation of Moloch in Howl a century later, when Ginsberg uses the biblical injunctions against the practice of child sacrifice to rebuke a wide range of behaviors associated with militarism and capitalism. We tend to trace the genealogy of poetry like Ginsberg’s through the Modernists and Walt Whitman, and justifiably so, but it is noteworthy that Ginsberg’s noisy protest is also presaged here. As with any good sermon, Whittier’s poem moves from scathing rebuke to action, calling upon his readers to realize their own heritage in responding to the moral crises of their time. He begins this portion of the poem by offering an image of the judgment that awaits those who continue to submit to the rule of the slave system: Ye sow to-day; your harvest, scorn And hate, is near; How think ye freemen, mountain-born, The tale will hear? Thank God! our mother State can yet Her fame retrieve; To you and to your children let The scandal cleave.  (Whittier, 416)

Those who support actions like the abduction of Sims have disgraced themselves and their children, and without repentance and a change of behavior, they will bear the shame of this violation of conscience, and Whittier spells out the actions that will ensure that Massachusetts citizens will be permanently tainted by their complicity with slavery in the stanzas below: Chain Hall and Pulpit, Court and Press, Make gods of gold; Let honor, truth, and manliness Like wares be sold.

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Your hoards are great, your walls are strong, But God is just; The gilded chambers built by wrong Invite the rust. What! know ye not the gains of Crime Are dust and dross; Its ventures on the waves of time Foredoomed to loss!  (Whittier, 416)

The centers of democratic and religious deliberation can be nothing more than sites of enslavement and the perpetuation of slavery, but allowing this desecration to take place will come at a heavy price. The choice to prioritize profit over humanity will come at the ineluctable price of divine punishment, Whittier suggests. Further, he implies that protection of the press and of spaces for democratic deliberation come with divine sanction. Authoritarianism is a form of idolatry for Whittier, and in this he is able to merge his own Quaker heritage with the more democratic aspects of the broader New England heritage. Because of his anti-authoritarian rewriting of New England history, Whittier is able to present the act of resistance to slavery as one of filial piety, a sharp counterpoint to the paternalism of pro-slavery arguments. He issues a direct call for Massachusetts to live up to its heritage: And still the Pilgrim State remains What she hath been; Her inland hills, her seaward plains, Still nurture men! Nor wholly lost the fallen mart; Her olden blood Through many a free and generous heart Still pours its flood. That brave old blood, quick-flowing yet, Shall know no check, Till a free people’s foot is set On Slavery’s neck.  (Whittier, 416)

New England, and specifically Massachusetts, has in Whittier’s telling here a commitment to freedom that means that the choice to oppose slavery vigorously is a matter of asserting its own identity, not of modifying it. Like Sigourney in the last of her poems on slavery discussed above, like Douglass in his most compelling oratory, and indeed like Lincoln in

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his Gettysburg Address, Whittier uses the Fourth of July to serve as a promise of future expansion of liberty: Even now, the peal of bell and gun, And hills aflame, Tell of the first great triumph won In Freedom’s name. The long night dies: the welcome gray Of dawn we see; Speed up the heavens thy perfect day, God of the free!  (Whittier, 416)

Whittier refers to celebrations of the American Revolution in the lines above, and he also brings the poem full circle in terms of its atmosphere: we are again in the moments just before dawn, but instead of being a moment of terror, it has become a moment of promise, suggesting that the “God of the free” will work through human intermediaries to ensure that the crime denounced in this poem one day will cease to recur. Whittier’s wedding of his religious faith with questions of secular justice may seem counter-intuitive in our own century, but it offers a model of how religious belief can be something other than the fixed identity category it can often seem to be in the twenty-first century United States: it can be a venue for moral reasoning that finds relevance in sacred texts without subordinating moral reasoning to fundamentalist biblical exegesis. The African American political tradition in particular has drawn on religious resources in support of justice, and Whittier offers a model in which religious faith, moral reasoning, and the impassioned pursuit of justice become naturally and eloquently connected. Many of the tropes Whittier uses in pursuing this appeal to his readers’ deepest moral intuitions are elements that appear across the wider field of antislavery poetry that is not necessarily aligned directly with one highly publicly visible author. William Wells Brown, often regarded as America’s first African American novelist, also captured the way in which poetry could provide a voice for a wide range of positions and perspectives, both in his fiction and in his anthologies of poetry by many authors, known and unknown. In this, Brown both extended the communal voice of antislavery poetry at large and made manifest the interdependence of the many poetic voices that contributed to the collective body of verse that bore witness to slavery’s atrocities and fundamental injustice.

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William Wells Brown and the Anthologizing Impulse in Antislavery Poetry As Geoffrey Sanborn has noted, William Wells Brown’s artistic method is shaped by his appropriations of the work of others, often taking the form of outright plagiarism (1–2). Sanborn views this appropriative quality of Brown’s work in a different light from the moral condemnation that such appropriations often elicit: for Sanborn, Brown “means to be multitonal, to cast overlooked objects in a new light, to exist by sympathy, to communicate clearly—to be, in short, relational, versatile, inclusive, and responsive” (126). In this sense Brown extends the protean quality that Michael C. Cohen has noted in Whittier’s work and in antislavery poetry at large, by which many poets work with a similar range of themes and poetic techniques in the service of a common goal. Even as we can distinguish the voices and strategies of some of the most prolific and influential poets in the antislavery movement, there is also a sense in which all of the poets discussed in this volume, from those as famous in their time as Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Sigourney to those who have gained in fame since their deaths, are participating in a unified conversation that means that the interactions among poets and texts become especially important. Notably, Brown also managed to give voice in memorable form to many of the poets whose antislavery writing was not collected in individually authored volumes like those by Longfellow, Pierpont, Horton, Sigourney, and Whittier. Brown’s novel Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter, often regarded as the first African American novel, draws much of its power from Brown’s appropriation of a range of antislavery poets. Although he is primarily remembered as an author of prose, William Wells Brown gave poetic voice to the plight of those fleeing slavery in his “Lament of the Fugitive Slave,” which ends his Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown, published in London in 1849. If Sigourney bore witness to the injustice of slavery from a distance, and Whittier did so as a committed abolitionist, Brown spoke as a man who had both experienced slavery himself and who had collated the stories of many others in his fiction and in his editorial work. The poem speaks in the voice of a man, identified in his autobiography with Brown himself, who has escaped from slavery but who is mourning the loss of his mother that has accompanied his freedom. The separation of families, which is so central to so much antislavery literature, gains a special poignancy when it is confirmed rather than ended by an escape to freedom. Brown’s protagonist fulfills the role of a Romantic hero in this poem, which opens with a mournful apostrophe to a parent the fugitive has lost:

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I’ve wandered out beneath the moonlit heaven, Lost mother! loved and dear, To every beam a magic power seems given To bring thy spirit near; For though the breeze of freedom fans my brow, My soul still turns to thee! oh, where art thou?  (Brown, 132)

Like a good Romantic, the speaker is inspired by the natural world, contemplating how the moon and the evening breezes seem to restore a connection to the mother to whom he can no longer speak, and whom he can no longer embrace. A Byronic world-weariness suffuses the second stanza, where the fugitive reflects not only on his own loss, but on the losses his mother had experienced even before his time. Where art thou, mother? I am weary thinking; A heritage of pain and woe Was thine,—beneath it art thou slowly sinking, Or hast thou perished long ago? And doth thy spirit ’mid the quivering leaves above me, Hover, dear mother, to guard and love me?  (132)

The fugitive’s weariness becomes connected directly to his mother’s “heritage of pain and woe.” He is suffering from a loss that connects him broadly to his contemporaries, in that many people in the nineteenth century of all races and classes had lost a parent, and particularly a mother, at a young age, given the high rates of infectious diseases and maternal mortality. However, the loss of a mother is particularly likely, and fraught, in the case of slavery, as enslaved children were deliberately denied contact with their mothers, as Frederick Douglass memorably delineated in the opening of his Narrative. Thus Brown’s speaker is meditating on a particularity of the enslaved person’s experience that resonates deeply with the losses that many of his white and Black contemporaries experienced or feared. The third stanza takes the ambiguity of the mother’s fate in the first two stanzas and makes it an explicit theme of the poem. Given her enslavement, there are a limited number of possibilities for where she may presently be: she may be still enslaved or she may be dead. The possibility that she has somehow, like her son, managed to escape enslavement is too far-fetched to merit consideration: I murmur at my lot: in the white man’s dwelling The mother there is found; Or he may tell where spring-buds first are swelling Above her lowly mound;

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But thou,—lost mother, every trace of thee In the vast sepulchre of Slavery!  (132)

The concluding lines of the stanza, which show that whether dead or alive, the mother has effectively been buried by her enslavement, dramatize the pathos of the fugitive’s situation. If she has died, he has lost her, but if she lives, he also has lost her to the system of slavery that has made it impossible for them to live as a family. The speaker then reveals that this familial separation happened in the distant past but continues to haunt him: Long years have fled, since sad, faint-hearted, I stood on Freedom’s shore, And knew, dear mother, from thee I was parted, To meet thee never more; And deemed the tyrant’s chain with thee were better Than stranger hearts and limbs without a fetter. Yet blessings on thy Roman-mother spirit; Could I forget it, then, The parting scene, and struggle not to inherit A freeman’s birth-right once again? O noble words! O holy love, which gave Thee strength to utter them, a poor, heart-broken slave!  (132)

Here Brown’s speaker makes clear that the mother in the poem is not just a passive victim: she has chosen freedom for her son even at the cost of severe loss for herself. She has sacrificed her own connection with her son in order to ensure his freedom. This model of maternal love, which sacrifices maternity itself, presents a model that will reappear in intensified form in Frances E. W. Harper’s poems on maternal devotion to freedom. Her poem on Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who killed her child rather than see her returned to slavery, exhibits a still sterner version of Brown’s “Roman-mother spirit.” Brown’s speaker concludes with a plea for a seemingly impossible connection with his mother: Be near me, mother, be thy spirit near me, Wherever thou may’st be; In hours like this bend near that I may hear thee, And know that thou art free; Summoned at length from bondage, toil and pain, To God’s free world, a world without a chain!  (132)

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Brown offers a picture of the speaker’s relationship to his mother that is at once touching and triumphant: her heroism makes her a model for him, and he is able to imagine her as the matriarchal hero of his poem. Brown’s greatest contribution to antislavery came from his work in anthologizing popular antislavery verse, however. In The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848), Brown collected a wide array of poems, by famous poets and unknown versifiers alike. The Anti-Slavery Harp offers a broad taxonomy of the forms that abolitionist poetry could take in the nineteenth century. Geoffrey Sanborn has noted that Brown’s method in many of his prose writings can only be described as plagiarism, as he frequently drew together sources in his novels with no attempt to credit their sources. In his poetry and his anthologies, Brown allowed many voices to speak as one. As Aaron D. McClendon notes in one of the more substantial treatments of The Anti-Slavery Harp, “The link between music and morality was crucial to the abolitionists’ attraction to the art” (89). To cite one example from The Anti-Slavery Harp, Brown offers a poem that heightens the drama of Whittier’s “The Christian Slave,” “The Fugitive Slave to the Christian,” by a poet simply acknowledged as “D. Wright.” The hounds are baying on my track; O Christian! will you send me back? I felt the stripes, the lash I saw, Red, dripping with a father’s gore; And worst of all their lawless law, The insults that my mother bore! The hounds are baying on my track; O Christian! will you send me back? Where human law o’errules Divine, Beneath the sheriff’s hammer fell My wife and babes,—I call them mine,— And where they suffer, who can tell? The hounds are baying on my track; O Christian! will you send me back? I seek a home where man is man, If such there be upon this earth, To draw my kindred, if I can, Around its free, though humble hearth. The hounds are baying on my track; O Christian! will you send me back?  (Brown, Anti-Slavery Harp, 28)

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Wright offers a direct reproach from the mouth of the fugitive from slavery: this is not a third party delivering a sermon, as in Whittier’s poem, but a direct appeal from one person to another. The Christian in the title is asked to look into the eyes of the fugitive and make a choice, and the choice is framed in the same way that hymns calling for repentance in the context of a conventional nineteenth-century revival would be. If Whittier puts his own stamp on a vast array of antislavery genres and forms, and Sigourney connects her antislavery impulses to her poetry in support of Indigenous causes and her poetry of mourning, Brown provides a clearinghouse of sorts for antislavery verse in the Anti-Slavery Harp, and he gathers and ventriloquizes antislavery verse as a genre in his novels and personal narratives. What Whittier, Brown, and Sigourney have in common is the way in which they individually help to define the contours of nineteenth-century antislavery activism in verse, both in terms of its boundaries and its interconnectedness with their wider projects. That the contours of antislavery are both transnational and deeply engaged with the US past became apparent in the work of James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who from opposite sides of the Atlantic reflected on the relationship of New English religious history to the crises associated with slavery in the 1840s.

4: Present Valor and the Trauma of Slavery: James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among the most respected poets in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. Lowell’s reputation has not proved as enduring as Barrett Browning’s, but they are united by a moral fervor regarding slavery that extended to their writing several of their most substantial poems on the subject virtually on their respective honeymoons. in this chapter I consider how two of the most important arbiters of literary taste on opposite sides of the Atlantic were shaped in their own poetic production by debates over slavery and freedom, including a discussion of the transatlantic publication history of Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” If Lowell offered a stirring call to moral clarity in response to the crisis presented by slavery and the looming invasion of Mexico, Barrett Browning offered a rebuke to any attempt to believe that slavery was a peripheral part of the identity of the antebellum American republic. Both poets were deeply engaged by the question of how history could be made to speak to the present moment. Although we have seen intimations of this tendency in Whittier’s engagement with Puritan and Quaker history, there is a special degree of self-consciousness about the relationship between present and past moral struggles in the work of Lowell and Barrett Browning. Even the publication history of these poems shows how closely they are linked. As Anthony H. Harrison has pointed out, it was Lowell, along with editor Maria Weston Chapman, who commissioned Barrett Browning’s most famous antislavery poem for the Liberty Bell, and so the poem’s obsessive interrogation of the past is connected to Lowell through its publication history as well as through its themes. Harrison also notes that Barrett Browning was haunted by the fact that she was descended from slave-owners in Jamaica, and so she found the history of slavery in the Americas to have profound personal resonances (Harrison, 53). Lowell and Barrett Browning thus both understand the moral crisis of slavery as being related to the long history of settlement in the Americas and of slavery in the Anglophone world beyond the United States, and these poems are thematically and formally as well as circumstantially part of an ongoing conversation about the implications of the past for understanding the present in the Americas. ames



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James Russell Lowell’s “Present Valor” Lowell’s most resonant antislavery poem was “The Present Crisis,” written in a moment of profound despondency after the election of James K. Polk. The intensity of Lowell’s engagement with questions raised by Polk’s election appears in the fact that he wrote the poem during his honeymoon, which took place in December 1844 (Duberman, 58). Lowell was a nearly exact contemporary of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, both of whom, like Lowell, were born in 1819. Like Melville and his older contemporaries Longfellow and Poe, Lowell’s work was shaped by the legacy of British Romanticism, and Lowell himself looked the part of a latter-day Romantic poet. “The Present Crisis” offers a Romantic version of the jeremiad sermonic form that Lowell had inherited from his Puritan ancestors. Lowell’s framing of the poem as an intervention into the politics of the 1840s is evident from the start, as Lowell subtitles the poem “dated December, 1844.” Written in a trochaic heptameter catalectic line, the poem resembles Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in its rhythm, even if it does not match the musicality of Poe’s famous poem. The thumping trochees give Lowell’s poem the feel of oratory. Despite the general grimness of the situation, the poem begins with a stirring, almost exultant note: When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.  (67)

Lowell offers an image of Romantic revolution as it had been envisaged by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron on the British side of the Atlantic, even as he focuses the energy of his poem on the specifically American institution of slavery. Moral resistance to slavery becomes a cosmic act, one that can transform the world even has it encourages the enslaved to claim the “awful verge of manhood.” The “energy sublime  / Of a century” suggests the idea that there is a natural force that leads human beings inevitably toward freedom and away from a past of slavery and inequality. This is the prophetic vision of Romantic poetry: Blake, early Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, adapted to the context of the mid-century United States. The idea that time as a whole is on an irresistible natural trajectory toward freedom (comparable to Theodore Parker’s claim that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” later taken up by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama) is amplified in the second

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stanza, which begins with an image of universal enlightenment as an electric shock: Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe, When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro; At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start, Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart, And glad Truth’s mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart. (67)

The impulse toward liberty has the power to overcome the gap between the rich and the poor and to announce a new dispensation in human relations, upending national structures and uniting the future of human society behind the Truth, anthropomorphized as a fetus in the womb of the Future. This picture offered in the first two stanza brings together Romantic revolution and liberal ideals of gradual and inevitable human progress. This beginning makes the turn in the third stanza especially jarring, as it suggests that the triumph of freedom is anything but inevitable, and indeed the apparent trajectory of the moral universe can be slowed or even reversed. The “So” that opens the third stanza turns the poem from a general reflection on historical progress to a grim acknowledgement of present distress: So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill, Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill, And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod, Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod.  (67)

Freedom’s progress has been radically disrupted in the third stanza of the poem, and the universe as a whole is experiencing a chill as a result. Lowell mirrors the language of the first stanza in his third line, and we see that the slave’s status as a human made in God’s image does not automatically lead to freedom, but can resolve itself into death and defeat, described here in forthrightly Gothic terms. If the optimistic, revolutionary side of Romanticism is captured in the opening stanzas, the horrors of the Gothic are on display here. It is worth considering for a moment the historical events that inform Lowell’s profound pessimism here: James K. Polk had just been elected the eleventh President of the United States on a deeply pro-slavery and expansionist platform. Although the annexation of Texas, the US invasion of Mexico, and the expansion and reinforcement of the power of the slaveholding South have not yet taken place when Lowell writes “The Present Crisis,” all those outcomes are clearly in sight. In the



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aftermath of this presidential election, those who opposed slavery could easily draw the conclusion that Polk’s election could mean the triumph of evil and the end of resistance to slavery in the United States. The first three stanzas thus illustrate the cosmic stakes in the events of the 1840s in the United States: the moral trajectory of the world as a whole is endangered by Polk’s election, as the 25-year-old Lowell sees it in this poem. Lowell proceeds by explaining precisely why, in his own cosmology, the stakes are so unimaginably high. Human beings are collectively interconnected, and an action anywhere in the world affects humans everywhere on earth: For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along, Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;— In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.  (67)

The unity of human experience that Lowell proclaims here may seem evident to many twenty-first century readers, but Lowell is staking out a controversial claim here, and indeed he is swimming against the tide of popular and scientific opinion in the nineteenth-century United States with these lines. Samuel Morton, a craniometrist and the founder of the “American school” of ethnology, advanced the argument that human beings not only were not fundamentally equal, but indeed did not share a common ancestor. Christianity had historically assumed a common ancestor for human beings, but theology and science were joining forces in the antebellum United States to suggest that sentiments of human brotherhood were misguided. Morton’s theory of polygenesis argued that different races of human beings had likely been created separately and for different purposes. Claims that human beings were brothers and sisters across racial lines, or that one could assume that humans from different parts of the world shared a common nature and common emotions thus were portrayed as being naïve or misguided, particularly by those who endorsed slavery or the separation of racial groups via colonization. Lowell’s fourth stanza thus constitutes a powerful philosophical rejection of emerging trends in nineteenth-century scientific and religious culture. At the same time, this stanza also reflects the development of science and technology in the nineteenth century and an elaboration on the moral and ethical implications of this development. Earlier in 1844, Samuel Morse had demonstrated the ability of the telegraph to convey messages over astonishing distances, when he launched the telegraph line between Washington DC and Baltimore with a transmission of the biblical phrase “What hath God wrought?” conveying the possibility that human beings could be literally connected by electrical pulses. Thus, if

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the rise of polygenesis, the defense of slavery, and the election of Polk all point toward a regression away from human fraternity and connectedness, the telegraph and the resistance to slavery expressed in Lowell’s own poem points in the opposite direction, toward greater human connectedness. If it is possible in December 1844 to see the way with Mexico on the horizon, is it also possible to intuit the transatlantic telegraph, when the “fibres” that connect human beings will no longer be sundered by oceans. Interconnectedness does not mean that human beings are spared the dilemmas of moral choice and conflict, however. Lowell highlights the imperative of moral choice in the fifth stanza of his poem: Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.  (67)

Universal connection gives way to binary conflict here: each individual, and each nation, must decide between the good trajectory illustrated in the first two stanzas and the evil one illustrated in the third. This stanza is the first in which Lowell begins to use the explicitly religious language of the Puritan jeremiad, invoking the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25. In this parable, Jesus offers a version of the final judgment in which all people are divided into goats, who are damned, and sheep, who are saved to eternal glory. What makes this parable most distinctive is the criterion used to separate the sheep from the goats. The sheep who are saved have distinguished themselves by caring for the most vulnerable and discriminated against members of society: prisoners, the sick, the homeless, and the hungry. The goats, who are damned, are distinguished precisely by their failure to provide for these groups of people, not, as one might expect, for theological or doctrinal reasons. The modern sheep and goats are separated by “some great cause, God’s new Messiah,” meaning that in each generation, moral choices come along that redraw the line between good and evil, and each generation will be responsible for their own moral choices and will not be able to rely upon the previous moral victories of their ancestors, a point that will be central to the argumentative development of Lowell’s poem. Lowell then strikes a clearly sermonic note: calling for a moment of decision on the part of his contemporaries, individually and collectively. He poses the moral questions of the present, as in the previous stanza, in the language of Christian moral theology and homiletic exhortation:



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Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand, Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong, And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.  (67)

Lowell’s appeal here is partisan, not in the conventional usage of US party politics and the second United States party system of the Democrats and the Whigs, but rather with regard to questions of fundamental morality. Will Lowell’s contemporaries stand for Truth, or will they be seduced by Evil? These are grand, cosmic questions, and the reason why they reach beyond conventional politic affiliations and alternatives is the moral urgency of the slavery question in the United States. Here Lowell reframes Romantic and liberal categories of revolution and progress as a theological question of good versus evil, truth versus falsehood. Truth, freedom, and progress all seem to have been defeated by Polk’s election, but Lowell expresses confidence that Truth will ultimately triumph, in part via a divinely ordained trajectory (“beautiful, tall angels”) from darkness to light. The next stage in Lowell’s argument turns to history itself, offering the prospect that the seeming reverses that his moral and political goals have encountered in recent US history must be gauged against a wider historical pattern. In this, Lowell’s theory of history resembles Georg Hegel’s idea that history progresses dialectically through antithesis and synthesis rather than moving forward in a linear fashion, and it reflects the profound influence of German idealism on New England literary intellectuals. Lowell’s deeply theoretical historical argument is made concrete through his topographical imagery: Backward look across the ages and the beacon-monuments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut though Oblivion’s sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet the chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgement has passed by. (67)

This is a knotty stanza that deserves unpacking: the first two lines illustrate the dialectical progress of history (understood in terms of Hegelian idealism rather than the Marxist materialism that would emerge in coming years), whereas the third through fifth lines suggest that when one is in the midst of a great moment of moral crisis, the nature of the crisis, the “choice momentous” facing each generation, is often invisible. Crises serve as “God’s stern winnowers” to separate the moral wheat from

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the moral chaff (to use another metaphor from Jesus’s parables in the Gospels), but the humans who metaphorically constitute the wheat and the chaff may have a hard time determining their status from within the historical moment. This obscurity of present moral choices can seem to lead to despair, particularly when one lacks the long historical perspective that informs this poem. The shape of the next stanza is determined by the movement between contemporary despair and historically informed hope: Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.  (67)

Beginning with the idea that God is the great Avenger (“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord”), Lowell acknowledges that the divine trajectory of history and the role of a God who enforces justice and punishes injustice can be invisible at any given moment in the present. The “death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word” reinforces the moral stakes of the conflict and also the role of both epistemological and ethical incertitude in heightening the conflict and reason in mediating the conflict. The “Word” would also be readily recognized by a nineteenth-century audience as a reference to the most philosophical and Platonic of the Christian Gospels: the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John begins “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In this opening, the story of Jesus as it developed in the earlier Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and in the early traditions of the Christian church becomes framed in neo-Platonic terms: the historical man Jesus becomes, for the Johannine author, the perfect expression of the divine Logos. In this opening of the Gospel of John, Lowell’s Puritan heritage and Romantic and Idealist networks blend almost seamlessly. The antislavery cause, which has been implicit in Lowell’s poem from the start, becomes identified with both the Christ of the Gospels and the onward-moving spirit of history. And yet, as any Christian reader of Lowell could point out, Christ himself was crucified, and here the line “Truth forever on the scaffold” captures the idea that each generation’s “new Messiah” will face vigorous opposition and even persecution. And in the Christian narrative, Christ’s crucifixion is the necessary prelude to his resurrection and ascension. If Polk’s victory is a crucifixion for those who oppose slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, Lowell is able to intuit a resurrection precisely because of the Christian theological framing of the poem. Like the cross of Christ,



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the scaffold on which Truth is exposed can ultimately change the future, and God waits in the shadows to ensure that this change will take place. When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk, it was this stanza that he pulled out of Lowell’s poem to serve as an epigraph for chapter 2. This choice emphasizes the degree to which Lowell’s times and Du Bois’s turn of the century moment reflected each other. Lowell’s lines both acknowledge a reality in which truth and right seem to have been defeated, but expresses a hope in the inevitable future triumph of both. This dual acknowledgment is highly resonant for Lowell at a moment of profound political despair in the 1840s, and it is similarly resonant for Du Bois given the ascendance of Jim Crow in the opening decade of the twentieth century. Lowell thus offers a model for those in his own time and in future generations who face a situation that could cause them to despair but who are seeking grounds for hope at moments of darkness and discouragement. This sense of resilience may help to explain why, when he was founding the major publication for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Du Bois chose to use The Crisis, with its echo of Lowell’s poem, as its title. As “The Present Crisis” continues, Lowell focuses on finding grounds for resilience in history, meaning that his theory of history continues to be central to the poem. Lowell emphasizes the partiality of human knowledge in the next stanza: We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great, Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular, amid the market’s din, List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within “They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.” (67)

The opening two lines emphasize that human perspective is limited in the midst of historical turmoil. We always have reason for humility and to acknowledge the partiality of our perspectives. This acknowledgment could point toward quietism and passivity, but that is not Lowell’s prescription here. Having affirmed the limits of our knowledge, he then affirms that it is necessary to trust our moral intuitions: if the “soul is still oracular,” then we avoid its promptings at our peril, and whatever the limits of our vision in times of crisis, we still must value our baseline moral intuitions. The “market’s din” serves a dual purpose here, as it captures the ambient noise that can detract from our ability to attend to our moral intuitions, but it also suggests that it is the market—the reduction of human moral relations to strictly economic activities—that introduces a baleful moral incertitude into situations where the soul’s voice should be

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clear. The final line emphasizes that slavery is both the crucial moral issue in Lowell’s present and the perennial dividing line in human moral life. That slavery is central to Lowell’s moral and historical argument is foregrounded in the next stanza, where Lowell personifies slavery as the great moral adversary of his time: Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood, Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;— Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?  (67–68)

By describing slavery as a Cyclops, Lowell allows the classical learning of his readers to do some important work for him, in the same way that he used the biblical knowledge of his readers in earlier stanzas. The Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey would be the most familiar Cyclops from Greek mythology, and would convey the lawless brutality and violence of slavery, but Lowell’s use of “earth-born” to describe the Cyclops of slavery also points back to the Cyclopes of Hesiod’s Theogony, which are the sons of Gaia, or the Earth herself. The suggestion is that there are fundamentally violent impulses in the cosmos and that progress requires overcoming them. The concluding line is particularly powerful in that it highlights violence against children, and particularly “our” children, establishing a unified community that could be threatened by the persistence of slavery. From this point in the poem on, the antislavery emphases of the poem are completely explicit. Having established the centrality of slavery to his poem of protest and hope, Lowell reemphasizes that the battle against slavery is a matter of truth versus falsehood, Christ versus Satan. Centrally, Lowell presses the moral necessity of arriving at just moral decisions before they become easy and popular: Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.  (68)

Lowell’s emphasis here is on the opportunity that the short-term triumph of what he regards as profound historical evil offers: “To side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust” implies that when morally right behavior is marginalized, then practicing it is praiseworthy, to a degree that is not the case when it is easy to speak the truth or do the right thing. Under the new Polk administration, with its pro-slavery



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policies and trajectory, it is not “prosperous to be just,” which is precisely why this moment is one that can separate the sheep from the goats, the just from the unjust, the brave man from the coward. Lack of courage in responding to slavery becomes, for Lowell, complicity in the crucifixion of Christ, and although Lowell believes that the truth of the antislavery position will triumph in the long run, the multitude who claim this truth once it is easy to do so forfeit the moral benefits of doing so. Lowell’s poem moves from metaphysical abstraction and moral philosophy to didactic calls for action as the poem progresses. He moves to the first person in an effort to illustrate the moral triumph that opposing slavery before it is fashionable to do so involves. Lowell thus offers an individual voice speaking out against the moral and political evil of his time: Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design. (68)

Heroes, Lowell suggests, are those who stand with moral truth against the tide of public opinion. As he has done earlier, Lowell turns to biblical analogies to complement the Classical and Romantic metaphors and themes he has developed earlier. The image of the “contumelious stone” recalls the stoning of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, notable in part because an effect of Stephen’s stoning is the conversion of St. Paul. Stephen has faith that his death will ultimately change the trajectory of history; and the rest of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, and indeed of the following eighteen centuries of human history have demonstrated it to be so. With this model in mind, those who oppose slavery can assume a similar long-term triumph, even if the trajectory of history seems to be thwarting their aims in the short term. From the earliest Christian martyrs, Lowell turns to a specifically Protestant history of martyrdom, a compelling narrative in a nation that in the 1840s often defined itself as arising out of the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of the supremacy of a supranational Church that persecuted heresy. Like Stephen, those who choose to follow the truth that they have understood may die for it, but this very martyrdom can be a triumph: By the light of burning heretics Christ’s bleeding feet I track, Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back, And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned

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One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned. (68)

The “light of burning heretics” is a cultural and religious reference that would be readily accessible to readers in the nineteenth-century United States. Many US Protestants in the generations before and after Lowell grew up with a deep familiarity from childhood with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which narrated the sufferings of English Protestants under Queen Mary I, as well as those of various proto-Protestant figures (such as Jan Hus) on the continent. Lowell extends the figures of Protestant martyrdom to refer to anyone who is making a stand for a truth that has not been recognized by previous generations. Each generation has its own Calvary (the hill on which Christ was crucified) to climb, and history continues on a trajectory toward greater and greater justice, but only through the sacrifices of those who are ahead of their times. This crucial point, that the morality of the past can quickly become the immorality of the present, is the driving force of the remainder of the poem, a point that Lowell again reinforces through biblical reference, even as he suggests that the morality of ancient sacred texts is insufficient on its own: For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History’s golden urn.  (68)

The martyr who his burned for his or her faith occupies a specific historical moment: the moral stance that the martyr has taken is superior to that of the martyr’s contemporaries—so much so that the result is persecution and death. And yet, paradoxically, the martyr’s moral stance will likely become a popular stance in a generation or so and will then involve no risk, and yet further in the future, an individual who holds a similar moral position to the martyr will not be a noble figure at all, but rather will have taken a place among the persecutors and betrayers of a new generation of martyrs, becoming “Judas [the betrayer of Christ in the Gospels] with the silver in his hand.” The sacrifice of the new martyr, whether crucified or burned at the stake, advances a new moral consensus that will convert their persecutors into followers. If Lowell has made his case in terms of the Gospels and the Protestant Reformation in earlier stanzas, he now turns to a direct application of his grand historical argument to the present crisis, as his title has it, in the United States, and to the nation’s own narratives of martyrdom and



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heroism. Lowell makes the present situation in the United States in the 1840s an instance in how past virtue is insufficient: ’Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers’ graves, Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;— Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time? Turn those tracks toward Past or Future that make Plymouth Rock sublime? (68)

Lowell invites his readers to be heroes, but he stresses that resting in past moral triumphs is a form of moral slavery. If denizens of Massachusetts in the 1840s regard the Puritan and Separatist past of their community to be sufficient to ensure their own moral superiority, or even acceptability, they are deceived, and slogans that simply point Lowell’s contemporaries to past glories and triumphs are, he strongly suggests, morally depraved. Lowell’s line “Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime” is a crucial negation of calls to make any community great again, as the greatness of past generations can only be valued and advanced by those who are not content with “light ancestral.” The pilgrim Separatists who landed at Plymouth Rock did not do so, Lowell suggests, because they simply adhered to a moral vision that had been handed down to them, but rather because they had embraced a new moral vision for which they were willing to risk death. Lowell’s moral argument here is subtle: he is prepared to look back to a heroic past as a source for present inspiration, but the inspiration requires resistance to the unjust structures that have been passed on to the present generation rather than a smug celebration of values that have lost their moral edge. This is a version of what Sacvan Bercovitch called the “American Jeremiad,” but one that rejects the idea that the United States can regard itself as uniquely chosen if it fails to keep pace with the moral demands of the present. This emphasis on the present as the crucial moment for moral decision becomes explicit in the next stanza, and it emphasizes that a reliance on a narrative of chosenness based on past virtue is an utter betrayal of what is most admirable in the Puritan past: They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past’s; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free. Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea. (68)

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Lowell’s phrase “present valor” perhaps captures the historical argument of his poem more directly than any other moment in the entire piece. What distinguishes the Puritans for Lowell is that they met the central moral challenges of their own time, notably that of freedom of conscience. This distinction does not for Lowell imply a need to return to the past of the Puritans, to make New England great again, as twenty-first century political slogans might put it, but rather to show the same moral courage in the 1840s United States that the Puritans showed relative to their established persecutors in seventeenth-century England. These men were worthy of admiration precisely because they were “unconvinced by ax or gibbet that all virtue was the past’s.” Thus successors to the Puritans who have not moved beyond them morally, by rejecting their own religious persecution of Quakers, Anabaptists, and Catholics, for example, and through rejecting the violence of Indian Removal and slavery, are by definition unworthy successors to the Puritans. The “great Impulse” beyond Puritanism—an expansion of human liberty—is what matters about the Puritan past, not the specific dogmas of their faith, which contain the risk that the present generation will “make their truth our falsehood.” Here Lowell makes a powerful moral argument for progress and liberation as the model for human history, rather than the pattern of declension and return that his more conservative contemporaries might have endorsed. Lowell repeats the third person pronoun from this stanza at the beginning of the next stanza, but with a new referent: “They” were “men of present valor”; now, in Lowell’s present, “They” are the ones who “have rights who dare maintain them.” Filiopietism, or devotion to the ideals of one’s forefathers and mothers, which Perry Miller defined as a central trait of the early “New England Mind,” can only be satisfied by those who maintain their fires rather than hoarding their ashes: They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?  (68)

Lowell offers a poignant query here: “Shall we make their creed our jailer?” Following past models without reference to their moral implications in the present restrains the present from moral action, and those who seek too sedulously to preserve a perceived heroic past run the risk of dishonoring it. In a biting historical irony, those who seek to preserve the Puritan past in amber become the present equivalent of Queen Mary’s henchmen who persecute the early Protestants. In an era like our own, when filial piety toward any imagined past is invoked in the law and public



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sphere as a rebuttal to any attempt to address present injustices, Lowell’s bracing vision of fidelity to the past as inherently forward-looking can serve as a useful corrective. Lowell’s final stanza offers a summary of his historical, philosophical, ethical, and theological arguments, as he calls on his contemporaries to honor the Pilgrim ancestors, not by repeating their practices, but by launching forward into an uncertain future with the same moral courage that the early inhabitants of New England showed: New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.  (68)

“The Present Crisis” offers a bracing view of moral renewal as a pattern repeated across history even as Lowell determinedly points to the great issues of his present time: slavery above all, but also the expansionist impulse that expressed itself in Indian Removal in the 1830s and would express itself again via the US invasion of Mexico. Twenty-first century readers are used to finding these sorts of moral arguments in Henry David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” and Walden, but it is worth noting that such impulses are present in wider New England literary culture. Tracing the roots of Lowell’s moral presentism can be useful in illuminating the sources of the radicalism of Thoreau and John Brown. Less overtly political than “The Present Crisis” is the poem that immediately precedes it in Lowell’s Complete Poetical Works: “The Search.” This poem is very explicitly religious in its framing, with the search in the title identified in the opening line as a search “for Christ.” The speaker’s search is at first deflected by a Romantic devotion to nature, where the young man seems to find the glory of the cosmos in spring. With the onset of winter, however, the speaker comes to realize that the natural world cannot offer consistent spiritual uplift. His next step takes him to the world of political power and economic wealth, but again he finds that wealth and power are both illusory and mutable, and neither offers him the vision of Christ that he seeks. It is only when the speaker turns to personified Love as a principle that he finds his way to Christ, and what Love tells him is that he can only find Christ in the company of the poor:

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I followed where they led, And in a hovel rude, With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for meekly stood; A naked hungry child Clung round his gracious knee, And a more hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free; New miracles I saw his presence do,— No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, The gathered chips into a wood-pile grew The broken morsel swelled to goodly store; I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak. (Lowell, “The Search,” 66–67)

Lowell is frequently remembered (to the degree that he is remembered at all) as a fairly genteel figure, one who functioned as an arbiter of literary taste and who embodied the privilege of the Boston Brahmins who dominated cultural life in nineteenth-century New England. Although this characterization of Lowell has much to support it, there is another side to Lowell that we see on display here. His explicit and total identification of Christ with the poor, the enslaved, and those who face discrimination resonates with the writings of Latin American and Black liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez and James H. Cone: Lowell’s Christ, like Gutierrez’s and Cone’s, takes sides, and he takes sides against wealth and power and with the poor and marginalized. It may seem jarring to identify members of old New England families with Gutierrez’s “preferential option for the poor” or Cone’s identification of Christ as Black, but Lowell’s theology at this moment contains kernels that would blossom in the writing of Gutierrez and Cone. Lowell’s principles would appear in later political poetry as well, as he devoted perhaps his most famous work of poetry in his own time to a biting critique of the US war on Mexico. In “The Biglow Papers,” Lowell satirizes the justifications behind the Mexican-American War, and he does so by offering common-sense critiques, expressed in the vernacular, of the morally vacuous rationales that the Polk administration had put forward for the war. While slavery is not at the center of “The Biglow Papers,” Lowell’s indignation over a war that would expand the boundaries of slavery in the United States is at the core of his satirical mission in “The Biglow Papers.” Lowell’s reading of history and his desire to intervene directly into his own historical moment find a particularly sharp focus in two poems in which he laments the loss of early antislavery leaders: his memorial verses to William Lloyd Garrison and William Ellery Channing. In both, he situates the man whose life he is memorializing in a long



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historic movement from tyranny to freedom, and he makes the antislavery movement in the nineteenth-century United States the cusp of the movement toward freedom worldwide.

Transatlantic Antislavery Poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” The legacy of the Puritans that had been so important for Lowell and even Whittier shapes in its own way the most famous antislavery poem of the 1840s by a British writer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Barrett Browning, like Lowell, gives her ethical rebuke of slavery a theological dimension, and to Lowell’s resonant proclamation of principles, she adds an expression of the embodied experience of enslaved women. By the time Barrett Browning wrote this poem, violence against women in the slave system had already become a central antislavery trope, and this emphasis would intensify in the 1850s, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Notably, when Barrett Browning published this poem, she did so in a venue within the United States rather than in England: the antislavery annual The Liberty Bell, in 1848. Joshua King has argued persuasively for a theological reading of “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” suggesting that Barrett Browning, to a greater degree than is frequently recognized, highlights the “complex roles played in “Runaway Slave” by the body of Christ, understood as both the figure of Christ and the Christian community” through her invocations of New England religious history in the poem (King, n.pag.). The poem is built around the crisis faced by an enslaved woman who has been raped by white men and has carried a child as a result, with the culmination being the woman’s killing of her child. Marjorie Stone has compared the poem to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, arguing that both share “the transgression of aesthetic thresholds through the disturbingly graphic portrayals of a mother killing her child . . . and an emphasis on the ways in which the violence done by a slave woman is inextricable from the violence done to her” (139). Anthony H. Harrison meanwhile has tracked the lines between both Barrett Browning and Lowell via the trope of Prometheanism as a response to inequality (Harrison, 55–68). Barrett Browning could engage in considerable formal experimentation with line length and meter in her poetry, as shown by her popular narrative poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” which provided a model that Edgar Allan Poe, with rather modest acknowledgment, adapted in “The Raven.” Here, however, Barrett Browning chose a fairly unadorned form for narrative and dramatic verse, as the poem is written in consistent

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iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABABCCD, a common metrical form for narrative verse that has the merit of moving swiftly through a story told in poetic form. The rhyme scheme in particular is associated with medieval troubadours, so it lends itself to our reading the poem as a song of sorts, and particularly a song performed by a person whose talent and eloquence exceeds her formal education. Barrett Browning begins her poem with a direct reference to the Puritan history of New England, referencing the Separatists who came to North America on the Mayflower: I. I stand on the mark beside the shore Of the first white pilgrim’s bended knee, Where exile turned to ancestor, And God was thanked for liberty. I have run through the night, my skin is as dark, I bend my knee down on this mark . . . I look on the sky and the sea.  (Wood, 356)

Like Lowell, Barrett Browning draws a direct line between the early history of British North America as a refuge for religious dissidents and the present practice of slavery. The nature of the relationship of the present generation to revered forebears is expressed powerfully in the expression “Where exile turned to ancestor.” What does this transformation mean? The status of being an exile is that of being deprived of a homeland and a past, whereas when one is an ancestor, one creates a homeland and a past for future generations. The instability of the two identities, the fact that the first can metamorphose into the second, suggests a similar point to Lowell’s about the relationship between present and past generations, and indeed, “where exile turned to ancestor” captures much of Lowell’s impulse toward “present valor” as moral commitment. If an exile can become an ancestor, then the moral implications of the past cannot be static, and it is ideal of moral progress that drives Barrett Browning’s poem. Immediately after the identification of liberty as the catalyst for this transformation from exile to ancestor, Browning introduces her firstperson narrator, who by virtue of being Black and enslaved has been denied the joys of the liberty for which God has been thanked here. Barrett Browning’s enslaved narrator then turns to a direct address to the exiles who have become the ancestors of the United States: II. O pilgrim-souls, I speak to you! I see you come out proud and slow From the land of the spirits pale as dew . . . And round me and round me ye go!



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O pilgrims, I have gasped and run All night long from the whips of one Who in your names works sin and woe.  (Wood, 356)

The cultural politics here are rich and suggestive. The speaker is addressing the “pilgrims,” and so making a connection with early New England history, but she also is pointing to something that will matter increasingly to later antislavery poets, which is the complicity even of states with high levels of antislavery sentiment in the injustices of slavery. The descendants of the “pilgrims” must confront the reality that, whatever their personal attitudes toward slavery, the slaveholding portion of the country acts in part in their name. This sense of national responsibility for slavery would appear with increasing intensity in the 1850s, as enslaved people who escaped to Massachusetts could be forced back into slavery. Whittier reinforced this point powerfully in “Moloch on State Street,” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” provided a definitive statement of the irony of a free state playing the role of a slave catcher in the 1850s. Given that the pilgrim ancestors, in spite of their prayers of thanksgiving for liberty, are implicated in the slave system that dominates the country at large, Barrett Browning’s speaker holds the entirety of the New England and American experiment responsible for the atrocities that she has experienced and that she is about to reveal in Barrett Browning’s poem. As the poem progresses, Barrett Browning shows that freedom and slavery, blessing and curses, are mutually dependent on each other. Long before Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom meticulously traced the interdependence of the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of slavery in colonial Virginia, Barrett Browning explores the paradoxical relationship between prayers for freedom and the curses of slavery through her speaker. The speaker feels a close connection with the pilgrims she invokes because she, like they, has fled the place of her birth in order to seek freedom, and if her enslavers seem to act in the name of the white exiles who became ancestors of the United States as a political structure and community, she now offers her curse to the land of her enslavement in their name: III. And thus I thought that I would come And kneel here where I knelt before, And feel your souls around me hum In undertone to the ocean’s roar; And lift my black face, my black hand, Here, in your names, to curse this land Ye blessed in freedom’s evermore.  (Wood, 356)

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She offers her “black face” and “black hand” as a contrast to the paleness of the pilgrim souls, but the curses that she applies to slavery are a logical continuation of their blessings of freedom. As such Barrett Browning’s implied argument closely parallels Lowell’s: in order to be a true heir to the Puritans who sought their version of liberty in New England, one must be opposed to slavery, and continuing slavery in the early colonists’ name becomes a species of blasphemy. The next turn in Barrett Browning’s poem intensifies the sharp contrast between black and white, freedom and slavery, that she has been developing thus far. The speaker reflects on her position as a Black woman who both shares the divine image and has her humanity dismissed by the surrounding white society: IV. I am black, I am black; And yet God made me, they say. But if He did so, smiling back He must have cast His work away Under the feet of His white creatures, With a look of scorn,—that the dusky features Might be trodden again to clay.  (Wood. 356)

The speaker reinforces her blackness, circling back on the ways in which her circumstances seem to undermine both the ideals of liberty and the Christian faith that the inhabitants of New England have claimed to cherish. She also calls attention to the theological and scientific debates over monogenesis and polygenesis: are all humans brothers and sisters brought into existence by a common divine father, are have some humans been cast away because of the color of their skin as a lesser form of creation? The concluding two lines capture the humiliation of living in a racist society where one’s shared humanity is denied. For Barrett Browning, as for Whittier and Lowell, the issue of race is in part a theological problem, and the idea of a universal deity becomes an argument against racial discrimination and prejudice. The crucial question here, then, is whether black skin can somehow justify the rejection of human solidarity and the humiliation and abuse of those who manifest it. Barrett Browning’s speaker moves to this crucial question in the next stanza. The pacing in this poem is notable: even though Barrett Browning has a story to tell, she is focused here on letting her narrator try to understand her own position in the world and what her black skin means on a metaphysical level: V. And yet He has made dark things To be glad and merry as light.



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There’s a little dark bird sits and sings; There’s a dark stream ripples out of sight; And the dark frogs chant in the safe morass, And the sweetest stars are made to pass O’er the face of the darkest night.  (Wood, 357)

The “dark things” that God has made collectively suggest that corporeal blackness is not a metaphysical quality: darkness and light are dependent on each other, as in the case of the stars, and the dark birds and frogs that sing and chant indicate that dark colors are not exclusively associated with suffering and pain. If “dark things” are not confined to suffering and exploitation in nature, the speaker reflects that dark bodies have been confined in just such a way in her experience. VI. But we who are dark, we are dark! Ah, God, we have no stars! About our souls in care and cark Our blackness shuts like prison bars: The poor souls crouch so far behind, That never a comfort can they find By reaching through the prison-bars.  (Wood, 357)

Barrett Browning’s speaker thus calls attention to the unnaturalness of her plight: the night has stars, and even a prison has spaces between the bars, but those who are condemned to slavery in the nineteenth-century United States do not have a means to reach beyond the bars of their prison. As readers, we can now understand the significance of the early references to the blessings of freedom all the more clearly, as the ability to escape and go into exile is contrasted with a situation in which the avenues of escape are more zealously and strictly guarded than in any denial of freedom the earlier pilgrims had experienced. The universe itself seems incompatible with the kind of denial of humanity that the speaker and other enslaved people are experiencing, and by framing the injustice of slavery in such cosmic terms, Barrett Browning heightens the irony which so often is the dominant literary device in antislavery poetry. The natural world is a double-edged sword for the enslaved, the speaker reveals. Like their masters, the enslaved experience the pains and pleasures of the natural world, offering a perspective on how the enslaved can understand their own equality. There are recognizable echoes here of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the Jewish money lender Shylock reflects on his shared humanity with his Christian persecutors: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs dimensions, senses, affections, passions: fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same

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diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer that the Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Barrett Browning’s use of the seasons calls attention to the shared humanity of Black and white people, but it also calls attention to the profound material differences in their lives: one group is far more likely to suffer from exposure and the cruelty of nature than the other. VII. Howbeit God’s sunshine and His frost, They make us hot, they make us cold, As if we were not black and lost: And the beasts and birds, in wood and wold, Do fear and take us for very men! Could the weep-poor-will or the cat of the glen Look into my eyes and be bold?  (Wood, 357)

Barrett Browning moves beyond Shakespeare’s attribution of a plea for the recognition of a shared humanity between Jews and Christians to Shylock, in that she also emphasizes the ways in which animals recognize Black and white people as belonging to a common species: animals fear human beings, and their fears are neither assuaged nor intensified by a difference in the color of a person’s skin. Barrett Browning’s speaker returns to the refrain of her blackness in stanza 9, calling attention to yet another characteristic she shares with the pilgrim ghosts and with all human beings: the longing for erotic love and connection. VIII. I am black, I am black!— But, once, I laughed in girlish glee; For one of my colour stood in the track Where the drivers drove, and looked at me— And tender and full was the look he gave: A Slave looked so at another slave,— I look at the sky and the sea.  (Wood, 357)

The tenderness in her lover’s glance fulfills several functions. It reveals to her that she is beautiful and desirable to another human being and that her skin is not, as she has been taught to think, an inherent flaw. Touchingly, Barrett Browning’s poem finds love to be a release from the dehumanization that the speaker has experienced in her life thus far. The speaker is able to find a kind of spiritual freedom through love, which allows her both to celebrate the beauty of her own blackness and to know that she is not alone in the world. After much sorrow and pain, the lines that follow are jubilant:



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IX. And from that hour our spirits grew As free as if unsold, unbought: Oh, strong enough, since we were two To conquer the world, we thought! The drivers drove us day by day; We did not mind, we went one way, And no better a liberty sought.  (Wood, 357–58)

The ability to create a private space of love and mutual affection even when both lovers are enslaved by day still allows for a kind of liberty with which the speaker is content for a time, until the cruelty of slavery once again intervenes. The story that she develops here looks forward to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which makes a romantic relationship between two enslaved people central to its narrative arc. Jacobs reflects on her relationship with a Black man during her time of enslavement: WHY does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence? When separations come by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in resignation, and say, “Not my will, but thine be done, O Lord!” But when the ruthless hand of man strikes the blow, regardless of the misery he causes, it is hard to be submissive. I did not reason thus when I was a young girl. Youth will be youth. I loved and I indulged the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining. I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are too dense for light to penetrate. A land Where laughter is not mirth; nor thought the mind; Nor words a language; nor e’en men mankind. Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows, And each is tortured in his separate hell.  (Jacobs, VII, “The Lover)

The fact that the above passage from Jacobs ends with a passage in verse quoted from Lord Byron is indicative of the degree to which verse works its way even into non-fiction narratives in the struggle against slavery. Using a narrative strategy that would become crucial to the antislavery movement’s quest to invite empathy from women across social classes, the speaker presents Barrett Browning’s narrative as a very touching love story. Even in the midst of their forced labor, her lover snatches a moment to say “I love you,” and the literal storms that they experience— including hurricanes—serve to enhance their privacy and their opportunity to develop a relationship.

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X. In open ground between the canes, He said “I love you” as he passed: When the shingle-roof rang sharp with the rains, I heard how he vowed it fast: While others shook, he smiled in the hut As he carved me a bowl of the cocoa-nut, Through the roar of the hurricanes.  (Wood, 358)

The touching image of the two lovers, forced indoors and hence out of the fields by a hurricane, captures the ability of human beings to find a sort of liberty even in the midst of the cruelest enslavement. The speaker’s delight in her beloved increases in the stanza that follows. It is perhaps worth remembering that Barrett Browning composed this poem immediately following her famous marriage to her fellow poet Robert Browning. With the passion of the newly in love, the speaker relates her feelings for the man she has met: XI. I sang his name instead of a song; Over and over I sang his name— Upward and downward I drew it along My various notes; the same, the same! I sang it low, that the slave-girls near Might never guess from aught they could hear, It was only a name.  (Wood, 358)

The repetition of her lover’s name conveys the degree to which love has changed and enlivened her, and it is notable that the effect of the love that she has discovered is to turn her toward the arts: she has become a musician in order to sing the name of the man she loves. This idea that the arts play a central role in human experience and that they signify a fullness of sorts in the lives of those who produce them is an element that connects Barrett Browning’s verse with that of many less well-known antislavery writers. One of the reasons that antislavery poetry matters so much today is its wholehearted affirmation of the value of artistic creation, even and especially for those who are among the most oppressed of people. There is a sad inevitability to what happens next: the speaker, having discovered joy, pleasure, and love, now suffers an extraordinarily painful species of loss, and she forecasts it in the twelfth stanza before narrating it in the thirteenth stanza: XII. I look on the sky and the sea— We were two to love, and two to pray,—



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Yes, two, O God, who cried to Thee, Though nothing didst Thou say. Coldly Thou sat’st behind the sun! And now I cry who am but one, How wilt Thou speak to-day?—  (Wood, 358)

The parallelism in the second line of the twelfth stanza reinforces the depth of the enslaved couple’s commitment to each other: “We were two to love, and two to pray,” and now the question of theodicy—why a just and loving God would allow the persistence of suffering and evil—comes bursting to fore in the poem. Both have implored God’s help and justice, but God is silent, sitting “coldly” at an unimaginable distance. “And now I cry who am but one” conveys the depth of her bereavement and loneliness, and the final line poignantly expresses the emotional trauma inflicted by divine silence in the face of suffering and evil. The issue of race, which had been first reimagined and then muted, is announced with immense pathos in the first line of the fourteenth stanza. The “we” that the speaker has created with her lover is now about to be erased, and their blackness will be used as the grounds for denying them “love and bliss”: XIII. We were black, we were black! We had no claim to love and bliss: What marvel, if each turned to lack? They wrung my cold hands out of his,— They dragged him . . . where ? . . . I crawled to touch His blood’s mark in the dust! . . . not much, Ye pilgrim-souls, . . . though plain as this!  (Wood, 358)

The couple has been violently parted, and we are left with the painful image of the speaker seeking to touch the only part of her lover to which she still has access, his blood that is left on the ground after he has been dragged away. The violence of the lovers’ parting is followed by the violence of a rape, which the speaker narrates with surprising directness: XIV. Wrong, followed by a deeper wrong! Mere grief’s too good for such as I. So the white men brought the shame ere long To strangle the sob of my agony. They would not leave me for my dull Wet eyes!—it was too merciful To let me weep pure tears and die.  (Wood, 358–59)

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Having had her happiness with her lover destroyed, and having experienced the loss of the man with whom she had begun to share her life, the speaker has now been subjected to the violence and humiliation of a gang rape by the men who have enslaved her. The fact of sexual slavery and sexual violence was crucial to much antislavery writing, from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it is seldom narrated so directly in the first person in nineteenth-century literature. If we compare seduction narratives like Charlotte Temple with this poem, it is clear that the victims of sexual violence rarely narrate their own fate so directly. The humiliation of this assault has the effect of reinforcing the ways in which the narrator’s blackness is used to deny her humanity. Having been violated and become the mother of a child of mixed European and African ancestry as a result, she returns to her refrain of “I am black, I am black!” This return reinforces the ways in which race is used to justify dehumanizing violence against the speaker. She reveals the extent of the pain that she and her child share: XV. I am black, I am black!— I wore a child upon my breast An amulet that hung too slack, And, in my unrest, could not rest: Thus we went moaning, child and mother, One to another, one to another, Until all ended for the best.  (Wood, 359)

The child and the mother have shared a sense of violence, and the child’s tears mirror the mother’s pain. The ominous line “Until all ended for the best” suggests that further tragedy is in the offing. The speaker takes on a metafictional mode in the next stanza, as she tries to give voice to the unspeakable, and so she begins the stanza by describing the way in which she is telling the story: XVI. For hark ! I will tell you low . . . low . . . I am black, you see,— And the babe who lay on my bosom so, Was far too white . . . too white for me; As white as the ladies who scorned to pray Beside me at church but yesterday; Though my tears had washed a place for my knee.  (Wood, 359)

By describing the child as “white . . . too white for me” and comparing it to the phenotypically white women who have scorned her at church, the



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speaker makes clear that the child is the result of her rape by the white men. She also gives expression to the ways that the politics of race in a society based on slavery can distort the most intimate of familial relations, as her own child partakes of the appearance of those who have enslaved and assaulted her. Her baby boy bears the marks of her oppression, and here the poem turns toward the Gothic as she smothers her own child because of his association with the violence that she has experienced. When Barrett Browning wrote the poem, Margaret Garner’s tragic story was still years in the future, but this poem points toward the sort of agony that could lead to the decision to kill one’s offspring as a result of the dislocating power of slavery. Unlike Garner, however, Barrett Browning’s speaker is not necessarily killing her child to ensure that he is not enslaved; rather she is at least in part repelled by his connection to her enslavers and rapists: XVII. And my own child! I could not bear To look in his face, it was so white. I covered him up with a kerchief there; I covered his face in close and tight: And he moaned and struggled, as well might be, For the white child wanted his liberty— Ha, ha! he wanted his master right.  (Wood, 359)

Here she imagines the child she is smothering wanting his liberty as a consequence of his whiteness, which is also the facet of his identity that irrevocably separates him from her. She seems to have given way to madness by the end of the stanza, as she laughs at the idea of him wanting his “master right.” The killing of the child proceeds in excruciating detail as he attempts to breathe, but the speaker feels that the act of violence that she is committing is beyond her control: XVIII. He moaned and beat with his head and feet, His little feet that never grew— He struck them out, as it was meet, Against my heart to break it through. I might have sung and made him mild— But I dared not sing to the white-faced child The only song I knew.  (Wood, 359)

The heartbreaking conclusion to this stanza suggests that because her ability to be a mother has been taken away by the violence carried out against her, the speaker has no choice but to end her baby’s life. The

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crushing loss of agency, even when she is carrying out an act of violence, becomes representative of what slavery has stolen from her: her partner in life, her own sense of self, and even the ability to bond with the baby her body has nurtured. As she continues to smother the child, she returns to her own experience of the natural world: she has noted earlier that she shared the experience of the natural world with those who have enslaved her, and now in smothering her son, she blots out the sun, and so his experience of the natural world, for him: XIX. And yet I pulled the kerchief close: He could not see the sun, I swear, More, then, alive, than now he does From between the roots of the mango . . . where . . . I know where. Close! a child and mother Do wrong to look at one another, When one is black and one is fair.  (Wood, 360)

If her child is buried close by, this burial has taken place in a world in which even living families cannot acknowledge each other across the color line. The child is himself a refutation of the racist belief in a fundamental, essential distinction between races, but he is also doomed by precisely this belief. Indeed, the poem reinforces the color line as the impetus behind the death of her child, as the mother relates that she is driven mad by the appearance of the whiteness that she can only associate with the violence of slavery in her son’s face. XX. Even in that single glance I had Of my child’s face, . . . I tell you all, I saw a look that made me mad . . . The master’s look, that used to fall On my soul like his lash . . . or worse! And so, to save it from my curse, I twisted it round in my shawl.  (Wood, 360)

Like Garner’s real-life experience in the next decade, the speaker’s choice to kill her child is framed as saving him: the violence of slavery has left her without any ability not to curse her baby, and so to save him from her curse, she takes his life. It is also framed as a response to her trauma as someone who has been enslaved on the basis of her race: she sees the “master’s look” on the child’s face, and so the response that she has to the child is shaped by both altruism and by the wounds that she has already had to internalize.



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In graphic terms Barrett Browning’s speaker describes the death of her child: XXI. And he moaned and trembled from foot to head, He shivered from head to foot; Till, after a time, he lay instead Too suddenly still and mute. I felt, beside, a stiffening cold, . . . I dared to lift up just a fold . . . As in lifting a leaf of the mango-fruit. XXII. But my fruit . . . ha, ha!—there, had been (I laugh to think on’t at this hour! . . .) Your fine white angels, who have seen Nearest the secret of God’s power, . . . And plucked my fruit to make them wine, And sucked the soul of that child of mine, As the humming-bird sucks the soul of the flower.  (Wood, 360)

The role of whiteness in Christianity is emphasized here, as the angels that suck the child’s soul away are distinguished by their white robes. Several years later, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick would capture a similar impulse, as in the midst of a storm on the Pequod, the Black character Pip expresses his internalization of the idea of a white deity: “Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!” (Melville, Moby-Dick, 178). Whiteness appears here as a source of power, but it also is ominous: it is the “white angels” who take away the life of the speaker’s child, “As the humming-bird sucks the soul of the flower.” The speaker becomes dissociated from her actions precisely through this mechanism of whiteness, as she attributes the death of her child to the angels rather than to her own smothering of the baby. XXIII. Ha, ha, for the trick of the angels white! They freed the white child’s spirit so. I said not a word, but, day and night, I carried the body to and fro; And it lay on my heart like a stone . . . as chill. —The sun may shine out as much as he will: I am cold, though it happened a month ago.  (Wood, 361)

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Even as she has chosen to end the life of her child for a complex array of reasons, the mother in this poem has an intense attachment to the child, whom she carries with her rather than disposing of the body. The psychological Gothic elements of the poem serve to dramatize the internal conflicts associated with being Black in a society where blackness is associated with slavery and whiteness with power. In lines that follow, the speaker confronts the natural world as she carries the evidence of both her crime and the crime that has been committed against her. The trees of the forest offer her protection even as they remind her that they rise in the direction of an omniscient deity. The speaker has now both smothered and buried her child, and her response to her position reflects the trauma that she has experienced. She returns to the songs of her own childhood: “I sate down smiling there and sung / The song I learnt in my maidenhood.” As she sings, she finds that her song itself provides a sort of reconciliation between herself and her lost child from beyond the grave: XXVII. And thus we two were reconciled, The white child and black mother, thus: For, as I sang it, soft and wild The same song, more melodious, Rose from the grave whereon I sate! It was the dead child singing that, To join the souls of both of us.  (Wood, 361–62)

The story becomes a ghost story of sorts in this stanza, but it is a ghost story that touchingly leads to a reconciliation between the violated mother and the murdered child. She is able to sing of her love to her child, and at the same time, her child is able to communicate with her from beyond the grave. From this touching scene of reconciliation, the slave mother turns back to the question of what such a story can mean in the very place colonized by the New England Pilgrims: XXVIII. I look on the sea and the sky! Where the pilgrims’ ships first anchored lay, The free sun rideth gloriously; But the pilgrim-ghosts have slid away Through the earliest streaks of the morn. My face is black, but it glares with a scorn Which they dare not meet by day.  (Wood, 362)

After the climactic horror of her poem, in which the violence of slavery has become manifest both in her own body and in the body of her dead



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child, the speaker returns to her framing of the early history of the nation. She embodies a judgment of the failure of the descendants of the Pilgrims to live up to their vision of freedom, and for the first time she is able to assert her own moral judgment against those who would condemn her for killing her child. Here we are very much in the territory of Whittier’s “Moloch on State Street” and Lowell’s “The Present Crisis”: whatever the ideals that the United States at large and New England in particular might claim, a system built on racialized slavery turns the inhabitants of mid-nineteenthcentury United States society into a place that is defined by whether one is one of the hunters or the hunted, and opting out of the system is impossible when social relations are relentlessly shaped by racialized slavery. Barret Browning’s speaker dramatizes this dialectic of hunters and hunted as she draws toward the conclusion of her story: XXIX. Ah!—in their ’stead, their hunter sons! Ah, ah! they are on me—they hunt in a ring— Keep off! I brave you all at once— I throw off your eyes like snakes that sting! You have killed the black eagle at nest, I think: Did you never stand still in your triumph, and shrink From the stroke of her wounded wing?  (Wood, 362)

She notes that that the descendants of the pilgrims are now slave hunters, and she throws out her own challenge to those who are responsible for her losses. Her madness at this point becomes a fertile source of metaphor, revealing her power and the fear that she is able temporarily to generate in those who pursue her and the pitiable sense of loss that she has experienced: she may have the power of a wounded eagle, but she also is doomed. Invoking the story from the Gospels of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery, in which Jesus suggests that only those “without sin” could “cast the first stone,” she rebukes directly those who would condemn her action: XXX. (Man, drop that stone you dared to lift!—) I wish you, who stand there five a-breast, Each, for his own wife’s joy and gift, A little corpse as safely at rest As mine in the mangos!—Yes, but she May keep live babies on her knee, And sing the song she liketh best.  (Wood, 362)

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If she was unwilling to curse her own child, she is prepared to pronounce a curse on those who have pursued her and on their own wives and children: she wishes that they may each encounter the same loss that she has, even as she notes that women who have lost their children may still have the consolation of surviving children. She continues to pursue relentlessly the psychological and moral aspects of racialized slavery with the opening line of the next stanza: XXXI. I am not mad: I am black. I see you staring in my face— I know you, staring, shrinking back— Ye are born of the Washington-race: And this land is the free America: And this mark on my wrist . . . (I prove what I say) Ropes tied me up here to the flogging-place.  (Wood, 362)

The statement “I am not mad: I am black” reveals that she regards her categorization as a black woman within a society that rejects color as the source of the inevitability of her actions. The disjuncture between the seeming insanity of her actions and the rationality of those same actions in a society that has utterly lost its moral bearings is central here. By tying the rhetoric of freedom to the practice of slavery, the United States has ensured that the refutation of its own national self-understanding is marked on her body. Indeed, the very identification of her pursuers with the “Washington-race” points to the existential contradiction at the heart of American identity, as George Washington’s name invokes national independence and civic virtue at the same time that it reminds readers that Washington was himself a slave-holder. That this contradiction may be irresolvable is suggested in the curses that the slave mother directs at her pursuers and her direct suggestion that only an outright revolution can be the appropriate response to the story she has shared: XXXII. You think I shrieked then? Not a sound! I hung, as a gourd hangs in the sun. I only cursed them all around, As softly as I might have done My very own child!—From these sands Up to the mountains, lift your hands, O slaves, and end what I begun!  (Wood, 363)

The power of the speaker’s rejection of whiteness and the ideology that undergirds slavery is evident in that because of her exploitation she



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is able to realize a sense of racial consciousness and solidarity with other Black people, and out of this sense of solidarity she calls for a slave revolt. The treatment of this aspect of the speaker’s response to slavery is reminiscent of the celebration of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the poetry of antislavery writers from Wordsworth to Whittier. Notably, one of Herman Melville’s revisions to his source materials in his powerful short story “Benito Cereno” references precisely the idea that the humiliation and exploitation of enslaved women can be a motivator for revolution, and it is equally noteworthy that Barret Browning has introduced this idea in the previous decade to Melville’s writing of the story. The uncanniness of the mother’s curses is heightened by the fact that she claims to curse her pursuers “As softly as I might have done / My very own child!” The fact that the enslaved and the enslavers share an unbearably intimate relation is at the core of what makes this poem so compelling and disturbing at the same time. XXXIII. Whips, curses; these must answer those! For in this UNION, you have set Two kinds of men in adverse rows, Each loathing each: and all forget The seven wounds in Christ’s body fair; While HE sees gaping everywhere Our countless wounds that pay no debt.  (Wood, 363)

Barrett Browning’s language here reflects the Garrisonian rejection of union with slaveholders. The dominant view within the antislavery movement in the 1840s emphasized the moral compromise involved in living in the same country as the slave system, and William Lloyd Garrison had gone so far as to burn a copy of the Constitution in a public rally, calling the document “A covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” The speaker adopts Garrison’s view, and condemns the descendants of the Pilgrims for their national alliance with slavery. The reference to “Christ’s seven wounds” here is especially poignant. The nails in Jesus’ hands and feet, the spear in his side, and the crown of thorns are all visions of suffering that could unite humanity around a single ideal, but the wounds of enslavement have no redemptive role to play. The slave mother is grappling with the meaning of apparently purposeless suffering. XXXIV. Our wounds are different. Your white men Are, after all, not gods indeed, Nor able to make Christs again Do good with bleeding. We who bleed . . .

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(Stand off!) we help not in our loss! We are too heavy for our cross, And fall and crush you and your seed. XXXV. I fall, I swoon! I look at the sky: The clouds are breaking on my brain; I am floated along, as if I should die Of liberty’s exquisite pain— In the name of the white child, waiting for me In the death-dark where we may kiss and agree, White men, I leave you all curse-free In my broken heart’s disdain!  (Wood, 363)

Barrett Browning’s conclusion leaves us with the necessity of actual liberation, as opposed to a narrative that renders the sufferings of the slave redemptive without considering all the ways in which redemption is denied to those who suffer. The slave mother may leave her pursuers, and by extension her complicit readers, “curse-free,” but she also refuses to allow them the sentimental comfort of believing themselves to be a virtuous exception to the inhumanity that has come to define their nation. In this, Lowell and Barrett Browning come together: Lowell urges his readers to adapt the moral courage of earlier generations to the needs of the present, and Barrett Browning disabuses her readers of the idea that this incarnation of “present valor,” to use Lowell’s phrase, will be easily achieved. The theological dimensions of Lowell’s and Barrett Browning’s work become increasingly complex in the work of the poets consider in the next chapter: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances E. W. Harper.

5: Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy

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Beecher Stowe is rarely remembered as a poet: even those who recall that her body of fictional work extended well beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin tend to forget that she was also the author of the antislavery poem “Caste and Christ,” as well as a volume of devotional verse. Frances E. W. Harper is more frequently remembered as a poet, as she established her career as a writer of verse long before she published what is now her best-known novel, Iola Leroy. in this chapter I consider an interracial pairing of two eloquent female abolitionists, exploring how both work within and expand the conventions of women’s poetic production in the nineteenth-century United States as they blend sentiment and satire in their critique of slavery. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most frequently cited and taught work of antislavery fiction in American literature, and her novel Dred is also among the more frequently studied and taught antislavery works. As a poet, however, Stowe is a relatively minor figure when compared with Harper, who has a reasonable claim, perhaps along with John Greenleaf Whittier, to being the most ambitious and varied in her production of antislavery poems. Stowe’s only substantial antislavery poem, “Caste and Christ,” offers a premonition of sorts of major strands that Harper developed much more fully, particularly its emphasis on biblical and theological themes within a more orthodox context than many earlier antislavery poets. What links Stowe and Harper most closely is the profoundly theological quality of their antislavery poetry, a trait that is shared to some degree by Whittier, but which is much more consistently evident in Stowe’s and Harper’s work than in that of their contemporaries. As Dawn Coleman has observed in her work on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both of these women, denied a pastoral role in nineteenth-century American Christianity because of their gender, function as preachers and biblical exegetes through their poetry (Coleman, 156–73). arriet

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Incarnational Theology in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Caste and Christ” Stowe’s “Caste and Christ” is more significant than has often been acknowledged, and Stowe is a better and more compelling poet than many scholars of American literature realize. Part of the reason that Stowe’s poetry has been acknowledged less frequently than is warranted is that scholars who have studied Stowe have been primarily concerned with the novel as a genre. Moreover, most of Stowe’s verse is private and devotional in its themes and modes, and her one very explicitly antislavery poem, “Caste and Christ,” was initially published in Autographs for Freedom but was not reprinted in a volume of Stowe’s own poetry. “Caste and Christ” begins with a biblical epigraph that highlights the idea that Christianity offers a vision of human brotherhood and interconnectedness: “He is not ashamed to call them brethren.” Here the incarnation of Christ as the Son of God in Christian theology becomes the basis for racial equality: if the Son of God eschews racial prejudice, then racial bias becomes an expression of unchristian arrogance and even of blasphemy. This incarnational argument shapes the poem that follows. Stowe’s speaker, presumptively white, presumptively Christian, begins by addressing an enslaved person: Ho! thou dark and weary stranger From the tropic’s palmy strand, Bowed with toil, with mind benighted, What wouldst thou upon our land?  (Griffiths, 4)

The opening four lines stress that the enslaved person Stowe’s speaker addresses is a “stranger” in North America as a result of his abduction from Africa, calling up the biblical injunction in Exodus 22:21 against the oppression of strangers: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” With this injunction in mind, the question that the speaker poses is what the need of the stranger is in North America. Stowe’s speaker retains certain common nineteenthcentury prejudices with regard to Africa, describing the stranger’s mind as “benighted,” but this descriptive is undermined by the stranger’s own words. When the stranger responds, the opening lines constitute a direct assertion of equality and brotherhood, and they would seem to call into question the idea that the mind of the stranger is “benighted”: Am I not, O man, thy brother? Spake the stranger, patiently. All that makes thee, man, immortal, Tell me, dwells it not in me?  (Griffiths, 4)

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Figure 5.1. Am I not a man and a brother? Image accompanying the broadside edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Our Countrymen in Chains”; Reproduction of Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 seal for the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2008661312/.

The stranger paraphrases the slogan of the British anti-slave-trade movement that Josiah Wedgewood had used in his seal for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 (fig. 5.1). The stranger claims his status as a man and a brother, and he then expounds on what it means to share in everything that makes human beings immortal: I, like thee, have joy, have sorrow; I, like thee, have love and fear; I, like thee, have hopes and longings Far beyond this earthly sphere. Thou art happy,-—I am sorrowing; Thou art rich, and I am poor;

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In the name of our one Father, Do not spurn me from your door.  (Griffiths, 4)

The stranger begins with the emotions that he shares with the speaker and with all other humans—joy, sorrow, love, fear, hope, longing—and then contrasts the circumstances in which these two affectively identical individuals find themselves. The stranger is distinguished by poverty and sorrow, but not by an inability to feel the emotions to which these conditions lead. The final plea in this stanza: “In the name of our one Father / Do not spurn me from thy door” conveys the idea that the Christian identification of the first person of the deity with divine paternity means that denying the stranger’s claim on one’s natural affections constitutes the denial of one’s own sibling. This idea, that the concept of a divine Father implies equality, is one of the concepts that ties together Stowe’s and Harper’s poetry. Stowe’s poem now opens up the vista that the reader is observing to include the reactions of a variety of members of American society to the stranger’s plea: Thus the dark one spake, imploring, To each stranger passing nigh; But each child and man and woman, Priest and Levite passed him by.  (Griffiths, 5)

The reference to those who refuse to respond to the stranger’s word as “Priest and Levite” is a highly specific biblical allusion, calling to mind one of Jesus’s most famous parables in the Gospels, that of the “Good Samaritan.” In that parable, a man who has been attacked and beaten is lying at the side of the road in evident distress and need: And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 33

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 34

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

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35

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. 36 Which

now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? (Luke 10:30–36, King James Version)

Jesus’s account in the parable of the Good Samaritan stresses ethnic, religious, and cultural tensions in ways that Stowe is able to read as analogous to race in the context of the United States. Cultural insiders such as the priest and the Levite spurn the man who had fallen among thieves, and a cultural outsider, the Samaritan, rescues him. The stranger of Stowe’s poem partakes of characteristics both of the victim of the attack, as he is a person who has had his very control over his own body and destiny violently taken from him, and of the Samaritan, as he is considered to be an outsider in the culture in which he lives. The biblical passage to which Stowe refers by alluding to the priest and the Levite, then, offers a narrative that can be both antislavery and potentially antiracist as well. Stowe follows the allusion to the Gospels with an allusion from the Hebrew Bible that Christians have usually interpreted as being a prophecy of Jesus’s incarnation: Spurned of men,—despised, rejected, Spurned from school and church and hall, Spurned from business and from pleasure, Sad he stood, apart from all.  (Griffiths, 5)

Again, the biblical connection is direct, as the stranger’s description matches that of the Sad, suffering servant, identified by Christian exegetes with Jesus, in Isaiah, 53:3 (King James Version): “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Here the exclusion of the stranger in a racist society connects him all the more closely to Christ. The stranger’s connection with Christ becomes literalized in the form of an actual appearance by Christ in the next stanza. The speaker describes a vision of divinity: Then I saw a form all glorious, Spotless as the dazzling light, As He passed, men veiled their faces, And the earth, as heaven, grew bright.  (Griffiths, 5)

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The vision of Jesus here is that of another biblical episode with which Stowe’s readers would be universally familiar: the transfiguration of Jesus, where his divine status is revealed to his disciples. Here Jesus comes as Christ—in Christian theology as the Son of God and the second person of the Christian Trinity—and in his glorified state, he acknowledges the stranger as a brother: Spake he to the dusky stranger, Awe-struck there on bended knee, Rise! For I have called thee brother, I am not ashamed of thee.  (Griffiths, 5)

That Jesus in his glorified divinity calls the enslaved stranger a brother creates a specifically theological argument for human equality across racial lines, and it does so specifically within the Trinitarian context of the incarnation of Christ. This move is an important one for Stowe to undertake, as much of the antislavery energy from white Americans in the earlier portions of the nineteenth century came from either Unitarians, who explicitly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, or Quakers, who held varying views on the idea of the Trinity, but who generally resisted the language of doctrine in favor of more direct comunication with the divine. What Stowe offers here is a rationale for theologically orthodox Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians (and for that matter, Catholics) to reject slavery with equal fervor to their Unitarian and Quaker contemporaries, no small contribution in a context where many American Protestants understood their intellectual lives largely in theological terms. This emphasis on Trinitarian incarnational theology becomes explicit in the next stanza: When I wedded mortal nature To my Godhead and my throne, Then I made all mankind sacred, Sealed all human for mine own.  (Griffiths, 5)

Christ here emphasizes that Christian theology can be enlisted in support of universal human brotherhood and sisterhood, and he suggests that the violation of the human form thus becomes a kind of sacrilege. The syllogism is that because Christ is both God and man in Trinitarian theology, human beings are collectively identified with the divine, and so must be universally treated with respect and dignity. Stowe’s Trinitarian theology becomes the basis for stanzas that echo James Russell Lowell’s identification of Christianity and moral progress in “The Present Crisis.” Here Stowe specifically emphasizes the idea that Christ is identified with the poor and oppressed, suggesting a model that

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would become crucial to liberation theology in the twentieth century. Stowe is generally more middle-class in her sympathies than twentiethcentury liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez or James H. Cone would be, but the idea that the Christian Gospel has what Gutierrez would describe as a preferential option for the poor is certainly present in the words that Stowe attributes to Jesus here. By Myself, the Lord of ages, I have sworn to right the wrong; I have pledged my word, unbroken, For the Weak against the strong. And upon my Gospel banner I have blazed in light the sign— He who scorns his lowliest brother, Never shall have hand of mine.  (Griffiths, 5–6)

Stowe’s Jesus offers both a positive statement that he identifies with the weak and the oppressed and a stern warning of judgment. The threat that one who “scorns his lowliest brother, / Never shall have hand of mine” directly implies the damnation of those who support slavery and racial prejudice. Stowe’s speaker concludes with his own voice in the final stanza, urging Stowe’s readers to act in accordance with Christ’s words in the previous stanzas. The stanza serves as a counterpart to the application portion of a traditional Protestant sermon in plain style, as it conveys a call to act upon what the readers have learned about Christ’s incarnation and human brotherhood and sisterhood. Stowe calls upon her readers to enlist in a battle for freedom, and she suggests that the theological ruminations in which her poem engages matter precisely because they offer hope: Hear the word—who fight for freedom! Shout it in the battle’s van! Hope! for bleeding human nature! Christ the God, is Christ the man.  (Griffiths, 6)

This conclusion places Stowe in line with the stirring call to action in Lowell, Pierpont, and Whittier, even as it offers a rationale for Americans who are not New England radicals, Unitarians, or Quakers (or some combination of the three) to enlist their energies in the antislavery movement with the assurance that they are acting in accordance with their most deeply held religious beliefs. In this way, Stowe extends the trajectory of orthodox Protestant antislavery verse that Sigourney had developed earlier in the century, and she offers a mode of pleading the antislavery

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case in verse that parallels the work that she did in her fiction in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred. Frances E. W. Harper, herself a Unitarian, would resemble Stowe in her ability to connect antislavery verse to antislavery fiction and sermons, even as she extended the scope of antislavery poetry by writing as a young Black woman.

Frances E. W. Harper and Antislavery Literary Scripturism Frances E. W. Harper’s career is a remarkable moment in the history of American letters. She was a published poet at a very young age. She was an activist in both the antislavery and women’s movements, and she helped to define connections among the pre–Civil War antislavery movement, the post–Civil War movement for equal rights under the law in the Reconstruction period and its aftermath, the women’s rights movement, and the temperance movement. She is remembered at least as much as a novelist as a poet today, as her novel Iola Leroy has become a staple of African American literature and late nineteenth-century American literature classes. As Meredith McGill has noted, her poetry has often taken a back seat to the study of Iola Leroy, but Harper’s career as a whole is a varied and impressive one, and her poetry provides internal evidence of the range of audiences to which she spoke: “Some of the formal features of this first collection of poems can be accounted for by recalling her need to address multiple audiences of would-be reformers. . . . the very miscellaneousness of the volume seems designed for an audience drawn to the ‘sisterhood of reforms’” (McGill, 63). Elissa Zellinger, meanwhile, has found Harper’s use of form in her poetry to be crucial: “Indeed, lyrical strains in Watkins Harper’s poetry worked to reverse the dispossession enacted on women’s bodies by slavery” (Zellinger, 102). Even as Harper’s biographer Melba Joyce Boyd has rightly objected to her being “pigeonholed . . . as an abolitionist poet, or as a ‘protest poet’” as such “critical misreadings . . . discredited her literary merit,” it is worth understanding the degree to which Harper’s literary merit is reflected in her antislavery poetry as well as in her better-known prose fiction (Boyd, 23). Harper’s poetry, like Stowe’s, is deeply informed by Christian theology and biblical allusions, stories, and metaphors. Her work as a whole is perhaps an even more perfect illustration of Lawrence Buell’s concept of “literary scripturism,” or the process by which “secular literature acquired greater spiritual legitimacy as the propagation of religion came to be seen as dependent upon verbal artistry and as the record of revelation itself was seen to be a verbal artifact,” as Stowe’s (Buell, 168). As Eric Gardner has perceptively pointed out, Harper’s commitment to “a variation of old-style typology” is tied closely to her commitment to celebrating “the growing sheaf of Black accomplishments” in the late antebellum, war, and

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Figure 5.2. Frances E. W. Harper, 1898. Frontispiece to Frances E. W. Harper, Poems (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson, 1898). Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/97513270/.

postwar periods (Gardner, 151). The very first poem in her 1854 edition of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects might seem to be significantly removed from the focus on slavery and liberation that takes up most of the volume, as it is dedicated to a recounting of a story from the New Testament, but in fact it captures a great deal of what is distinctive about Harper’s vision. In “The Syrophoenician Woman,” Harper recounts the story of a woman

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whose faith saves her child despite the fact that she is an outsider to the community from which Jesus comes. The poem begins with the woman’s ecstasy at seeing the man who she believes can heal her sick son: Joy to my bosom! Rest to my fear! Judea’s prophet draweth near! Joy to my bosom! Peace to my heart! Sickness and sorrow before him depart! Rack’d with agony and pain, Writhing, long my child has lain; Now the prophet draweth near All our griefs shall disappear.  (Harper, 3)

This opening shows something of the sophistication of both Harper’s prosody and her rhetorical appeals. The first stanza begins with a fourfooted line consisting of a dactyl, a trochee, another dactyl, and a single catalectic stressed syllable, with a caesura in the middle of the line. The unstressed syllable omitted at the end of the first line is added to the second line, meaning that the line scans as iambic on its own but preserves the rhythm of the stanza. The third line repeats the dactylic/trochaic/ dactylic/catalectic patter of the first line, and the final line consists of three dactyls followed by a stressed catalectic syllable. This is the sort of prosody that one would associate with a metrically accomplished poet like Longfellow or Poe, not with a young poet who is just beginning her career, and when read out loud it has something of the effect of a musical fanfare. The sound of the line matches the sense, as the rollicking rhythm, the strong repeated consonants and the use of parallelism between the first and third lines all convey excitement and delight. The jubilation of the opening stanza is tempered by the sorrow of the second stanza. It maintains throughout a trochaic catalectic line that speaks to the suffering of the author’s child and her determination that his suffering will end and her faith that the prophet she is approaching will be the one to give him healing and end his anguish. This stanza also parallels an aspect of antislavery rhetoric that Harriet Beecher Stowe had used to stunning effect two years earlier in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: it conjures up the fear that women in the nineteenth-century United States felt about the possibility of losing a child. In Stowe’s portrayal of Mrs. Bird in her most famous novel, she had shown that a woman who had lost a beloved child was in a particularly good position to understand the anguish of another woman who risked everything to avoid losing her child to the slave trade. As Joan Hedrick, Stowe’s most influential modern biographer has suggested, one of the events that most shaped Stowe’s writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the loss of her own favorite son, Charlie, to a cholera epidemic

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(188). Stowe’s narrator writes movingly on the emotions connected with maternal loss, reflecting “And oh! Mother that reads this, has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave? Ah! Happy mother that you are, if it has not been so” (Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 132). In Stowe’s chapter “In Which It Appears that a Senator is but a Man,” Eliza Harris explicitly ties her potential loss of a son, who would have been sold away from her had she not fled, to Mrs. Bird’s experience of losing a son to death. In Harper’s poem, the connection between the loss of a child through illness and the loss of a child through slavery is not spelled out, but it looms suggestively in the background. The poem establishes a pattern that would play itself out through poems more explicitly linked to slavery. Harper’s opening poem continues with two stanzas narrating the woman’s words to the prophet, who is revealed to any readers who had not already recognized the context from the title of the poem as Jesus. The woman’s address to Jesus begins the first line of the third stanza: “Lord!” she cried with mournful breath, “Save! Oh save, my child from death!” But as though she was unheard, Jesus answered not a word. With a purpose naught could move, And the seal of woman’s love, Down she knelt in anguish wild— “Master! save, Oh! Save my child!”  (Harper, 3)

The trochaic pattern that Harper established in the second stanza holds throughout the stanzas and serves to express something of the woman’s emotional intensity and desperation. As with the opening stanza, Harper uses caesuras to break up and intensify her rhythmic effects. In the final line of the fourth stanza, Harper brings the emotional effects of the woman’s plea to a climax with the spondee (save, Oh!) in the middle of the line. Harper chose for this poem a rather offbeat story from the New Testament, in that Jesus seems oddly diffident and even harsh in his response to the woman’s plea. After initially declining to reply and eliciting the woman’s frantic second address, Jesus responds with words that seem cruel: “’Tis not meet,” the Savior said, “Thus to waste the children’s bread; I am only sent to seek Israel’s lost and scattered sheep.”  (Harper, 3)

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As callous as these lines sound, Harper has omitted a still more brutal reflection from Jesus’s words as reported in the New Testament. In his response in the gospel of Mark 7:27 (King James Version), Jesus dismisses the woman’s plea: “But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.” Harper softens this response slightly, but she still conveys the appearance that Jesus has rejected the woman’s plea. In both the biblical narrative and Harper’s poem, the woman’s response is remarkable for its equanimity and resourcefulness as well as its faith: “True,” she said, “Oh gracious Lord, True and faithful is thy word: But the humblest, meanest may Eat the crumbs they cast away.”  (Harper, 3)

The woman has taken a metaphor that is being used to deny her access to Jesus’s blessings, and she has made it into an irrefutable argument that she must receive them. In this, the woman’s response mirrors Harper’s own implicit strategy in beginning her collection with this poem: Harper is telling the story of a woman who has been excluded as a result of the racial contempt of the first-century Jewish community for an outsider who does not appear to share in the blessings of a chosen community, and the story calls to mind Harper’s own position as a Black writer in a society that defines itself in part by anti-Black racism. That the Syrophoenician woman’s plea is successful thus has the effect of offering a prophecy of the success of Harper’s own aims in writing poetry, as Jesus embraces the argument that the woman has made on behalf of herself and her son: “Woman,” said th’ astonished Lord, “Be it even as thy word! By thy faith that knows no fail, Thou hast ask’d, and shalt prevail.”  (Harper, 3)

The woman’s impassioned plea and her rhetorical adroitness in making it have combined to overcome her exclusion from the society into which she was born and to save her child’s life. In the biblical account, the woman’s daughter is said to have been possessed by a devil, and so it is an exorcism that that the woman seeks, but Harper has raised the stakes by suggesting that the child will actually die if Jesus does not intervene. The woman’s faith had saved her child, and she has demonstrated her faith in part by the adroitness of her logic and her rhetorical appeals. This poem provides a frame for the poems that follow in Harper’s major antislavery collection: mothers repeatedly seek and find ways to plead their case, and Harper’s narrative voice tells with heartbreaking specificity the losses

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experienced by women who were unable to save their children. The story of the Syrophoenician woman, here told in verse with considerable prosodic and rhetorical sophistication, offers a promise that Harper’s own poetic efforts will prevail. In the second poem of the collection, Harper offers an excruciatingly painful picture of the alternative to the Syrophoenician woman’s miracle. In the first of two poems that she would write under the title of “The Slave Mother,” Harper compelled her readers to focus on the story of a contemporary woman who receives no such miracle. The poem begins by calling on her readers to witness the pain and loss of the mother in her title: Heard you that shriek? It rose So wildly on the air, It seemed as if a burden’d heart Was breaking in despair. Saw you those hands so sadly clasped— The bowed and feeble hand— The shuddering of that fragile form— That look of grief and dread? Saw you that sad, imploring eye? In every glance was pain, As if a storm of agony Were sweeping through the brain.  (Harper, 4)

These first three stanzas have the effect of causing the reader to attend to every aspect of the slave mother’s suffering and to truly hear and see her. Harper’s prosody is less complex in this poem than in “The Syrophoenician Woman,” but it conveys the emotion of parental loss with similar intensity through its simple ballad meter. The poem also is distinguished by its psychological precision in describing the mental pain that the mother is experiencing even as it engages readers deeply with the anguish that they might feel in a comparable situation. Harper turns next to a physical description of the woman who faces the loss of her son: She is a mother, pale with fear, Her boy clings to her side, And in her kirtle vainly tries His trembling form to hide.  (Harper, 4)

The image here is heart-rending: the mother is terrified, and the child is trying to hide himself in her clothing. The stanza captures something that distinguishes Harper’s poetry from the discursive, argumentative, and

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declamatory poetry produced by many antislavery writers, as she demonstrates a particular skill for the visual, offering set pieces that could easily be imagined as paintings or as illustrations in magazines. The pallor of the “slave mother” is noteworthy as well. Although the fact that she is “pale with fear” does not necessarily indicate that she is of both African and European descent, it does suggest this as a possibility. There is, of course, a racially problematic aspect to the way in which lighter skin is associated with sensibility in much nineteenth-century literature, but there is also a suggestion here of the fact that the mother herself may be the child of an African woman who was raped by a white man, emphasizing that the violence that Harper is capturing at this moment is part of a longer pattern of violence against African bodies as part of the system of enslavement. From sexual violation, the poem moves to the unique violations of parental affection perpetrated by a system that denied the connection between parents and children in favor of the status of children as chattel to their masters. Three times in the next two stanzas Harper repeats the clause “He is not hers,” with mounting pathos in each repetition. Both the mother’s pain at having her parental rights denied and the cruelty of a system that tramples on the most fundamental human affections in this way are dramatized in these stanzas: He is not hers, although she bore For him a mother’s pains; He is not hers, although her blood Is coursing through his veins! He is not hers for cruel hands May rudely tear apart The only wreath of household love That binds her breaking heart.  (Harper, 4)

The initial expression of “he is not hers” would seem to have the effect of showing that the boy in the previous image is not her child, but the clauses that follow the first two iterations of the statement show that in fact this is a child to whom she gave birth and to whom she is biologically connected. “He is not hers,” then, is making the monstrous suggestion that a woman who has carried and given birth to a child can be denied a connection to him at any time. The third iteration of “he is not hers” shows the mechanism by which this violation of natural piety can take place: “cruel hands” may take her son from her at any time, and with no better reason than simply that she is enslaved and so is her child. Rather than showing the scene of her child’s being snatched from her that the poem has foreshadowed to this point, Harper’s speaker pulls back to emphasize how much happiness the young son has brought to the mother, making the inevitable crisis all the more painful:

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His love has been a joyous light That o’er her pathway smiled, A fountain gushing every new, Amid life’s desert wild. His lightest word has been a tone Of music round her heart, Their lives a streamlet blent in one— Oh Father, must they part?  (Harper, 4–5)

The affective qualities of these stanzas continue to show evidence conscious artistry. Harper’s speaker begins with visual metaphors that then are paralleled first by the tactile metaphor of water in the desert and then by an aural metaphor of music. The image of lives blending as a “streamlet” emphasizes that whether the law recognizes a connection between the mother and her child her not, they are naturally and indistinguishably merged with each other. And the final line “Oh Father, must they part?” reminds readers that even the relationship of Christian believers to their deity is imagined in parental terms, making the violation that this poem narrates an act of outright sacrilege. Finally, Harper’s speaker narrates the act of violence and violation that her readers have known is coming from the very start of the poem, and she has prepared her readers to encounter the full emotional and ethical force of what she is describing: They tear him from her circling arms, Her last and fond embrace. Oh, never more may her sad eyes Gaze on his mournful face. No marvel then, those bitter shrieks Disturb the listening air, She is a mother, and her heart Is breaking in despair.  (Harper, 5)

This conclusion, with its final affirmation, “she is a mother,” emphasizes that this woman has shared the experience of many women who have lost their children, whether to death or to enslavement, but that in her case, the loss is not the result of a surprise pandemic or the inscrutable will of God, but rather of human malice and greed. This emphasis on human malice and greed and the distorting effect that it has on the Christian faith to which Harper was herself devoted appears very explicitly in her frequently anthologized poem “A Bible Defense of Slavery.” Harper uses the form of the jeremiad in offering a pointed response to the ways in which Christianity had been enlisted in

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support of slavery in the antebellum United States. The poem begins with a call for repentance: Take sackcloth of the darkest dye, And shroud the pulpits round! Servants of Him that cannot lie, Sit mourning on the ground.  (Harper, 5)

Harper provides a scene of mourning characteristic of the penitential practices of the Children of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. Wearing sackcloth and ashes and sitting in the dust are forms of repentance prescribed by the Hebrew prophets, and they signify an act of national morning. From the outer garments, Harper moves to a call for corporeal signs of repentance. She imagines first the horror, expressed in gothic terms, at the violence of slavery as seen in the faces of a people who are repenting, and then she offers a hyperbolic vision of rocks and stone weeping for the crimes of slavery: Let holy horror blanch each cheek, Pale every brow with fears; And rocks and stones, if ye could speak, Ye well might melt to tears!  (Harper, 5)

Harper then moves from the visual to the aural, imagining the hushed tones appropriate to national mourning and repentance: Let sorrow breathe in every tone, In every strain ye raise; Insult not God’s majestic throne With th’ mockery of praise.  (Harper, 5)

As with the first stanza, the second stanza resembles the rebukes of the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah 1 offers a rebuke for empty worship that is not reinforced by justice: 13

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. 14

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. (Isaiah 1:13–14, King James Version)

Similarly, Amos 5 rebukes the sacrilegious celebration of feasts and fasts in the absence of justice:

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I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. 22

Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. 23

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. 24

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. (Amos 5:21–24, King James Version)

Harper’s “Insult not God’s mighty throne / With th’ mockery of praise” is recognizably in the mode of these powerful passages that formed a scriptural bedrock for the tradition of the jeremiad in the United States, which such foundational scholars of American studies as Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch have, in their differing ways, found to be crucial to the development of a national identity for the nineteenth-century United States. The source of this blasphemous mockery of the Christian deity becomes clear in the next stanza, where Harper displays for her readers a Christian minister who offers the defence of slavery referred to in her title: A “reverend” man, whose light should be The guide of age and youth, Brings to the shrine of Slavery The sacrifice of truth!  (Harper, 5)

Again, Harper skillfully invokes the language of Isaiah and Amos, suggesting that instead of approaching God’s throne with acceptable sacrifices, this depraved “reverend” sacrifices truth to a demonic “shrine of Slavery.” Harper continues to develop the language of divine judgment that has appeared throughout the poem when she describes the status of modern-­day slavery in the biblical canon of wickedness: For the direst wrong by man imposed, Since Sodom’s fearful cry, The word of life has been unclos’d, To give your God the lie.  (Harper, 5–6)

That she refers to Sodom is significant because of its status as a city that, along with Gomorrah, was completely destroyed by the Hebrew God for its wickedness, suggesting rather pointedly that a similar judgment could

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await a nation that refused to do away with slavery. A word about Sodom is in order here, as the destruction of Sodom has at times been used by anti-gay Christians to justify discrimination on the basis of sexuality. This argument is based on the portion of the story of Sodom in which Lot, a righteous man and the nephew of Abraham, is visited by angels, and some drunken men of Sodom demand that Lot turn the angels over to them so that they can abuse Lot’s guests sexually. Beyond the obvious fact that the men of Sodom are threatening rape, and not consensual relations of any time, there is also the fact that someone as well versed in the Hebrew scriptures as Harper would know that the sin of Sodom was identified by the prophet Ezekiel in a way that tied it much more directly to slavery than to sexuality: “49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Men who enslaved other men and women for their personal ease and wealth were thus directly connected to Sodom through the most direct statement of Sodom’s sin in the entirety of the biblical text, since “pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness,” not to mention a failure to “strengthen the hand of the poor and needy” could be directly connected to the slave system in the United States. Harper’s final stanza is the clincher, as she invokes one of central features of American Protestant piety, the commitment to foreign missionary endeavors, to expose the hypocrisy of Christian ministers and congregants who justify the enslavement of fellow human beings: Oh! When ye pray for heathen lands, And plead for their dark shores, Remember Slavery’s cruel hands Make heathens at your doors!  (Harper, 6)

Just how crucial this antislavery argument was could easily be lost on secular twenty-first century readers, but in Harper’s theological economy, this final stanza represents a crescendo. If slavery causes people to reject faith in Christ, this means that slavery not only causes suffering in this life but also contributes actively to the damnation and so eternal suffering of souls that might otherwise be saved. Christian missionary organizations, from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which had by the time of Harper’s writing been sharply criticized for its neutrality on slavery, to the American Missionary Association (AMA), which was staunchly antislavery, were central cultural and religious institutions for nineteenth-century US Protestants, and one point that they all agreed upon was that the conversion of non-Christian people to Christianity was necessary in order to save their souls from eternal suffering. Harper reverses a conventional proslavery argument that justified

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slavery by its contribution to the conversion of Africans by emphasizing that it is an obstacle to such conversion. Slavery, then, becomes not only damnable, but actively damning of the very people whom US Protestants wished to proselytize. Like Stowe, Harper here offers a recognizable continuation of the earlier emphasis on divine judgment that appeared in Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s work as early as the 1830s. Harper’s “Eliza Harris” was the first of the poems eventually included in her first book to be published, and it reflects Stowe’s influence, both in the title and throughout. Eliza Harris was one of the first characters whom Stowe’s readers met in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and she engendered special sympathy as a beautiful young mother attempting to save her child from being sold away from her (fig. 5.3). Harper uses the image of Eliza Harris fleeing from slavery that served as one of the defining moments in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and still more in theatrical adaptations of the novel, to present a dramatic and stirring version of the argument against slavery via motherhood. In Stowe’s novel, Eliza crosses the Ohio River by leaping from ice floe to ice floe in a melting river; in the theatrical adaptations and visual representations that almost immediately followed the novel’s publication, Eliza was portrayed as being pursued by dogs as she made her way to freedom. Written in a driving anapestic tetrameter (as usual in predominantly anapestic verse, iambs are sprinkled throughout), the poem dramatizes the moment of Eliza’s escape across the Ohio: Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild, A woman swept by us, bearing a child; In her eye was the night of a settled despair, And her brow was o’ershaded with anguish and care.  (Harper, 6)

The speaker here has a position that resembles that of an audience member in the theater viewing Eliza’s flight, or, improbably, of a bystander at the moment that Eliza reaches the river. The speakers are collectively impressed by Eliza’s swiftness, but they also have time to register her face and describe the ways in which her anguish is revealed by physiognomy. The narrative is propelled by the driving rhythm of the lines, as we as readers are invited to join the speakers in seeing the courage of the woman who will risk her own life and that of her child rather than to see him suffer a lifetime of slavery. She was nearing the river—in reaching the brink, She heeded no danger, she paused not to think! For she is a mother—her child is a slave— And she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave!  (Harper, 6)

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Figure 5.3. “Mother can’t eat until you are safe.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Philadelphia: H. Altemus Company, 1900), 45. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/00004791/.

In a move that Harper would continue to revisit throughout her pre– Civil War poetry, she emphasizes that the maternal love of her protagonist is such that Eliza demonstrates it through her willingness for her child to die rather than to be taken more deeply into the system of slavery. Harper then turns to the effects of this vision on her speakers: ’Twas a vision to haunt us, that innocent face— So pale in its aspect, so fair in its grace; As the tramp of the horse and the bay of the hound, With the fetters that gall, were trailing the ground!  (Harper, 6)

Stowe’s novel made considerable use of Gothic models and effects in order to dramatize the horrors of slavery, and Harper uses the combination of Eliza’s haunting face and the sounds of the hoof-beats, the hounds, and the clank of the fetters to accomplish this purpose succinctly. The effect of this opening is similar to that achieved by theatrical

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adaptations or illustrations associated with Stowe’s novel: to capture in a moment the main lines of exposition that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin so compelling for its readers. The scene that Harper provides of Eliza leaping across the Ohio could easily have appeared in Ann Radcliffe or any of the writers of the Gothic as well as Stowe herself. Eliza’s terror and love make her impervious to the dangers she faces: She was nerved by despair, and strengthen’d by woe, As she leap’d o’er the chasms that yawn’d from below; Death howl’d in the tempest, and rav’d in the blast, But she heard not the sound till the danger was past.  (Harper, 6)

By making Eliza a Gothic heroine in lines like these, Harper contributes to her functioning as a character who can stir the sympathies of women who have experienced their own losses and fears in relation to their children. Having set the stage for Eliza’s escape and left her in the very act of eluding her pursuers, Harper then turns toward the irony that was so important in Frederick Douglass’s oratory and would shape the poetry of her contemporary James Monroe Whitfield. With Eliza presumably halfway across the Ohio, Harper reflects on the contradictions in American identity: Oh! how shall I speak of my proud country’s shame? Of the stains on her glory, how give them their name? How say that her banner in mockery waves— Her “star-spangled banner”—o’er millions of slaves? How say that the lawless may torture and chase A woman whose crime is the hue of her face? How the depths of forest may echo around With the shrieks of despair, and the bay of the hound?  (Harper, 6)

Harper contrasts the central images of American patriotism with the horror that Eliza is facing, emphasizing that she is having to flee because of her race, and that the star-spangled banner is inextricable for the sounds of bloodhounds chasing human beings and the enslavement of millions. On the cusp of that reflection, Harper turns back to the drama of Eliza’s quest for freedom, emphasizing her maternal courage in protecting her son above all else: With her step on the ice, and her arm on her child, The danger was fearful, the pathway was wild; But, aided by Heaven, she gained a free shore, Where the friends of humanity open’d their door.

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So fragile and lovely, so fearfully pale, Like a lily that bends to the breath of the gale, Save the heave of her breast, and the sway of her hair, You’d have thought her a statue of fear and despair. In agony close to her bosom she press’d The life of her heart, the child of her breast:— Oh! love from its tenderness gathering might, Had strengthen’d her soul for the dangers of flight.  (Harper, 7)

The scene of Eliza’s flight across the river and to the Quakers plays on both her status as a woman in danger and her devotion to her children. The fact that this woman, described repeatedly in terms of her youth and beauty, is at risk of being torn apart by the dogs of the slave catchers provides a voyeuristic frisson to the scene. At the same time, the fact that she is protecting her child with the considerable strength and athleticism that allows her to elude her pursuers makes her an icon of maternal heroism. But she’s free!—yes, free from the land where the slave From the hand of oppression must rest in the grave; Where bondage and torture, where scourges and chains Have plac’d on our banner indelible stains. The bloodhounds have miss’d the scent of her way; The hunter is rifled and foil’d of his prey; Fierce jargon and cursing, with clanking of chains, Make sounds of strange discord on Liberty’s plains. With the rapture of love and fullness of bliss, She plac’d on his brow a mother’s fond kiss:— Oh! poverty, danger and death she can brave, For the child of her love is no longer a slave!  (Harper, 7)

In dramatizing this scene, so familiar both to readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to those who had the opportunity to view theatrical adaptations of Stowe’s text, Harper offers a vision of the triumph of freedom over slavery, and of a mother’s drive to free her child over the forces that threaten to rend him from her. In a few years, events recorded in the newspapers of the 1850s United States would cause her to revisit this theme in telling a much more tragic story in verse. Harper revisits the matter of maternal loss most powerfully in her poem “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio.” This poem narrates the story of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who kills her children rather than allow them to be taken back into slavery. The most famous literary response to Garner’s story is of course Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but it is striking that Harper wrote a poetic response to Garner’s story so

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quickly after the event. Harper makes Garner herself the speaker in the poem and emphasizes that the motivating force behind her act of violence is love. Paul D’s admonition in Toni Morrison’s novel to Sethe (the Margaret Garner figure) that “your love is too thick” is likely to hover in the background of the experience of reading this poem for many twentyfirst-century readers (Morrison, 234). The language of Harper’s opening highlights the aching pain of the mother who is confronting the likelihood of the perpetual enslavement of her beloved children: I have but four, the treasures of my soul, They lay like doves around my heart; I tremble lest some cruel hand Should tear my household wreaths apart.  (Harper, 28)

The “slave mother” opens with an expression of a fear that nineteenthcentury woman could feel universally, in that the survival of one’s children could not be taken for granted, but the reference to a “cruel hand” emphasizes that unlike a white mother who might be reading this poem, this mother has to fear the possibility that her children will be willfully taken away from her by human agency. The line is a simple, touching iambic tetrameter (pentameter in the first line), and Harper’s readers are thus gently invited to see the mother’s fears and her love for her children through her eyes. From there, the speaker catalogs her children whose loss she fears, starting with her infant daughter: My baby girl, with childish glance, Looks curious in my anxious eye, She little knows that for her sake Deep shadows round my spirit lie.  (Harper, 29)

The innocence of the daughter’s glance contrasts sharply with the gathering shadows that her mother confronts. The mother’s acknowledgment of her daughter’s innocence blends uncomfortably with her certainty that slavery will blight this innocence, and increases the mother’s sense that any sort of resolution that removes her from slavery is better than for her to continue on the trajectory into which she has been born. The mother continues by turning to her older children, both boys, and the apparent inevitability that their lives will be blighted by slavery: My playful boys could I forget, My home might seem a joyous spot, But with their sunshine mirth I blend The darkness of their future lot.  (Harper, 29)

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Noteworthy here is that Harper not only acknowledges that the mother knows that her children are likely doomed, but also has her reflect on the psychological effect that such knowledge has on her. Even in the midst of sunshine, even as she looks upon the playfulness and innocence of her children, which in most circumstances would be an antidote to depression, the mother finds herself sinking ever more deeply into despair, a despair that is only heightened by the beauty of her children and her love for them. When she returns to contemplating her daughter, her fear and depression become all the more palpable, with a special intensity that comes from her knowledge of the likely abuse that she will face as an enslaved woman: And thou my babe, my darling one, My last, my loved, my precious child, Oh! when I think upon thy doom My heart grows faint and then throbs wild.  (Harper, 29)

The intensity of the mother’s feelings manifests in actions as she realizes that she must rescue her children from the suffering she has experienced. The only way that she can find such relief for herself and her children is to take precisely the path that Harper showed Stowe’s Eliza Harris following in her earlier poem: north across the Ohio River and on to freedom. Like Eliza Harris, her path to freedom lies across the ice of a frozen Ohio: The Ohio’s bridged and spanned with ice, The northern star is shining bright, I’ll take the nestlings of my heart And search for freedom by its light.  (Harper, 29)

Comparing herself to a mother bird, she knows that she must fly from her current circumstances with her children. The earth itself, however, seems to cast doubt on the success of her mission: Winter and night were on the earth, And feebly moaned the shivering trees, A sigh of winter seemed to run Through every murmur of the breeze.  (Harper, 29)

Harper suggests that this mother will not achieve the escape that Eliza Harris has managed, and a sense of foreboding looms over this poem of attempted escape. Beyond Margaret Garner’s own tragic story, Harper would have known that the foreshadowed outcome in this poem was

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more likely than Eliza Harris’s success for those fleeing slavery with their children. Harper continues to attend closely to the psychology of the mother’s quest for freedom as she narrates her attempted escape: She fled, and with her children all, She reached the stream and crossed it o’er, Bright visions of deliverance came Like dreams of plenty to the poor.  (Harper 29)

Freedom seems so close to the mother that, like a starving woman at a feast, she can nearly taste what has eluded her. She experiences “visions of deliverance” that the poem has already suggested will prove illusory, and her heartbreak is compared to those across US society who dream of escaping poverty only to be thwarted. Here there is something of Dickens as well as Stowe in the background, as Harper attends to the way in which slavery fits into a wider landscape of inequality. Harper turns to direct address to the mother in her next paragraph, acknowledging that this time, escape will be impossible: Dreams! vain dreams, heroic mother, Give all thy hopes and struggles o’er, The pursuer is on thy track, And the hunter at thy door.  (Harper, 29)

In narrative terms the contrast between the mother’s momentary illusion of escape and the inevitability of her capture is heartbreaking, and having built to this crescendo, Harper, as she so often did, turns to a biblical analogue for her heroine’s plight. Harper’s next stanza makes reference to the Hebrew Bible and the cities of refuge that the Mosaic law offered for the relief of fugitives. As described in Joshua 20:2–4, these cities were designed especially to shelter a man who had unintentionally killed someone from the revenge of the surviving family members of the person who has died: 2

Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Appoint out for you cities of refuge, whereof I spake unto you by the hand of Moses: 3

That the slayer that killeth any person unawares and unwittingly may flee thither: and they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood. 4

And when he that doth flee unto one of those cities shall stand at the entering of the gate of the city, and shall declare his cause in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the city unto them, and give him a place, that he may dwell among them.

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Notably, there are significant ways in which the mother’s situation does not resemble that of a Hebrew seeking out refuge in one of these cities: she had killed no one, and no one has any reason for vengeance against here, except insofar as her enslaver feels deprived of his property. Part of the point, surely, in pointing toward the Mosaic cities of refuge is to remind Harper’s readers by contrast of the ways in which her heroine’s predicament is far more unjust that the biblical characters she uses to provide context for her flight would have experienced (Joshua, 20: 2–4, King James Version). Harper’s speaker reflects: Judea’s refuge cities had power To shelter, shield and save, E’en Rome had altars; ’neath whose shade Might crouch the wan and weary slave.  (Harper, 29–30)

In the Hebrew Bible, understood by Harper’s Christian contemporaries as the “Old Testament,” even someone who had committed involuntary manslaughter could find relief if he managed to make it to a city of refuge, and in pagan Rome there were sanctuaries explicitly reserved for those fleeing slavery, but under the Fugitive Slave Law in the putatively Christian United States, no such sanctuaries existed, as Harper’s speaker observes: But Ohio had no sacred fane, To human rights to consecrate, Where thou may’st shield thy hapless ones From their darkly gathering fate.  (Harper, 30)

Here as so often in antislavery poetry a version of Frederick Douglass’s “scorching irony” appears, as Ohio, a northern, ostensibly free, state, is shown to be utterly devoid of the most basic protections for human rights. It is this cruel irony that leads the mother to her final, tragic decision. Considering that neither she nor her child will find any protection or redress in Ohio, the mother chooses an option that shocked both Margaret Garner’s contemporaries and the readers of Morrison’s Beloved. Then, said the mournful mother, If Ohio cannot save, I will do a deed for freedom. She shall find each child a grave. I will save my precious children From their darkly threatened doom, I will hew their path to freedom Through the portals of the tomb.

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A moment in the sunlight, She held a glimmering knife, The next moment she had bathed it In the crimson fount of life.  (Harper, 30)

That this scene has retained its power to shock is evident from the role that it played in Morrison’s Beloved, where Paul D exclaimed to Sethe, the Margaret Garner character in that novel, “your love is too thick” (Morrison, 234). The scene closes with a reflection on the affective force of the act. The men pursuing the mother seize the weapon with which she has stabbed her children, not out of any value that they place on the human life of the two boys and the girl she has stabbed, but out of a desire to retain their human prey. The boys survived, but her daughter has died: They snatched away the fatal knife, Her boys shrieked wild with dread; The baby girl was pale and cold, They raised it up, the child was dead.  (Harper,30)

Having presented this powerful tableau: the shrieking boys, the cold corpse of the daughter, the bloody knife, Harper encourages her readers to reflect on the meaning of this act. She asks, Sends this deed of fearful daring Through my country’s heart no thrill, Do the icy hands of slavery Every pure emotion chill?  (Harper, 30)

The slaughter of the daughter is described as a “deed of fearful daring,” in that it at once shows the extraordinary courage of the mother and the horror of the act to which she has been driven. Harper challenges the nation’s conscience, asking if slavery has made it impossible for Americans to feel the sentiments that any decent person would feel when confronted by a scene that has something of the power of mythology: a loving mother who has been forced to destroy her own child by the impossible situation in which she finds herself. The conclusion is a call to action: Oh! If there is any honor, Truth or justice in the land. Will ye not, as men and Christians, On the side of freedom stand?  (Harper, 30)

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Both the mother’s courage and the horror of the choice that she faced become a challenge to Harper’s readers. Faced with this mother’s unimaginable sacrifice in losing her daughter to death rather than slavery, how will “men and Christians” of good will in the United States respond? Harper’s suggestion is that there is only one appropriate response: they must take on some form of the courage that the mother in Harper’s poem showed in order to stand against what they know to be an intolerable wrong. The gendering of antislavery poetry is particularly interesting in Harper’s poem “Ethiopia,” which personifies the African American community as a woman. The opening stanza of the poem has something of the quality of a Christian hymn: Yes, Ethiopia yet shall stretch Her bleeding hands abroad; Her cry of agony shall reach The burning throne of God.  (Harper 7)

The biblical reference that frames this poem comes from Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” The passage was a favorite of the missionary movement in the United States, and Harper’s use of it shows how the popularity of missionary narratives and songs in the nineteenth-century United States could be harnessed by the antislavery movement. As I have argued elsewhere regarding Harriet Beecher Stowe: “Missionaries are one of the great overlooked presences in nineteenth-century American literary culture, and this is particularly true when we consider the work of an explicitly religious writer” (Yothers, “Harriet Beecher Stowe, Missionaries, and Martyrdom,” 246–47). By invoking this highly charged missionary tradition, Harper is able to cast the liberation of the enslaved as part of a providential cosmic plan. In the missionary tradition, Ethiopia’s stretching her hands toward God reflects her desire for salvation through conversion to the Christian faith. Here, the emphasis on the personified Ethiopia’s “bleeding hands” and “cry of agony” makes clear that the deliverance is, centrally, a deliverance from slavery. The difference between Harper’s use of the missionary tradition and conventional invocations of that tradition becomes clear in the next stanza: The tyrant’s yoke from off her neck, His fetters from her soul, The mighty hand of God shall break And spurn the base control.  (Harper, 8)

Here Harper eschews the apolitical approach that formed the mainstream framing for missionary literature. Ethiopia lifts her hands to God for

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deliverance from sin, to be sure, but crucially, her deliverance from sin is tied directly to her deliverance from bondage. There is a clear indication here that sin is not only individual but can inhere in oppressive social structures. This realization corresponds to the emphasis on bearing witness against structures that enforce inequality in the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and the Black theology of liberation of James H. Cone, particularly in Gutierrez’s embrace of a “preferential option for the poor” as a model for divine justice. Harper strikes a powerful note of hope here, as she envisions God freeing the captives in the nineteenth century in the same way that he freed the enslaved Children of Israel in Egypt. Harper then moves toward an optative view of the future, in which divine redemption and freedom from slavery are parallel conditions: Redeemed from dust, and freed from chains, Her sons shall lift their eyes; From lofty hills and verdant plains Shall shouts of triumph rise.  (Harper, 8)

Here the poem emphasizes conversion, as is standard in missionary literature, but it also speaks to a collective redemption. The end of slavery is not distinct from the private salvation of one’s soul, but rather is intimately connection to such salvation. Upon the dark, despairing brow Shall play a smile of peace; For God shall bend unto her woe, And bid her sorrows cease. Neath sheltering vines and stately palms Shall laughing children play; And aged sires, with joyous psalms, Shall gladden every day. Secure by night and blest by day, Shall pass her happy hours; Within her peaceful bowers.  (Harper, 8)

This conclusion offers a picture of the bliss of the saved in heaven that is also the joy of the freed on earth. As she does throughout her antebellum poetry, Harper emphasizes that the salvation of the soul and the redemption of the body are not separable, but essentially connected in a world where people are enslaved. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the question that she grapples with in her poetry is that of the meaning of salvation once chattel slavery has ended but the brutal inequality that derives from it has not.

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Harper chronicled the resistance of enslaved people to the slave system in her poems that followed the Civil War. Notably, the tone of her poems changes considerably after the triumph of the Union in the Civil War, and she emphasizes the agency of enslaved people and their resistance to slavery even under the most unyielding of circumstances. This emphasis would shape her best-known novel, Iola Leroy, which she began with a dramatization of how enslaved people could communicate news about the war even under severe surveillance from their masters. As Robert Johnson and Thomas Anderson passed homeward from the market, having bought provisions for their respective homes, they seemed to be very light-hearted and careless, chatting and joking with each other; but every now and then, after looking furtively around, one would drop into the ears of the other some news of the battle then raging between the North and South which, like two great millstones, were grinding slavery to powder. As they passed along, they were met by another servant, who said in hurried tones, but with a glad accent in his voice:— “Did you see de fish in de market dis mornin’? Oh, but dey war splendid, jis’ as fresh, as fresh kin be.” “That’s the ticket,” said Robert, as a broad smile overspread his face. “I’ll see you later.” “Good mornin’, boys,” said another servant on his way to market. “How’s eggs dis mornin’?” “Fust rate, fust rate,” said Tom Anderson. “Bob’s got it down fine.” “I thought so; mighty long faces at de pos’-office dis mornin’; but I’d better move ’long,” and with a bright smile lighting up his face he passed on with a quickened tread. There seemed to be an unusual interest manifested by these men in the state of the produce market, and a unanimous report of its good condition. Surely there was nothing in the primeness of the butter or the freshness of the eggs to change careless looking faces into such expressions of gratification, or to light dull eyes with such gladness. What did it mean? During the dark days of the Rebellion, when the bondman was turning his eyes to the American flag, and learning to hail it as an ensign of deliverance, some of the shrewder slaves, coming in contact with their masters and overhearing their conversations, invented a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battle-field. Fragile women and helpless children were left on the plantations while their natural protectors were at the

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front, and yet these bondmen refrained from violence. Freedom was coming in the wake of the Union army, and while numbers deserted to join their forces, others remained at home, slept in their cabins by night and attended to their work by day; but under this apparently careless exterior there was an undercurrent of thought that escaped the cognizance of their masters. In conveying tidings of the war, if they wished to announce a victory of the Union army, they said the butter was fresh, or that the fish and eggs were in good condition. If defeat befell them, then the butter and other produce were rancid or stale. (Harper, Iola Leroy, 1–2)

As this excerpt from Iola Leroy suggests, Harper moved from tragic to comic modes in much of her post–Civil War poetry. The helplessness of the enslaved woman who has no choice but to kill her own children is replaced by accounts of the resourcefulness of those who found ways to resist under slavery, and of the triumph of those who used that same resourcefulness after the Civil War to surmount what at previously seemed utterly intractable obstacles. In “Learning to Read, Harper emphasized a use of subterfuge similar to what she described in Iola Leroy, here told from the point of view of Aunt Chloe, a woman who had been denied literacy for most of her life. The poem begins with the opening of Freedmen’s schools in the South, where the teachers were often women from the North. Aunt Chloe reflects: Very soon the Yankee teachers Came down and set up school; But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,— It was agin’ their rule.  (Harper, 127)

The turn to the vernacular allows us as readers to experience Aunt Chloe as a shrewd observer who has herself been denied the benefits of literacy, but who will be poised to seize on these benefits once they become available. She also shows that she understands clearly the reasons for which literacy was withheld: Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge didn’t agree with slavery— ’Twould make us all too wise.  (Harper, 127)

This second stanza echoes quite directly one of the most frequently quoted portions of Frederick Douglass’s biography, where he recounts the arguments between Mrs. Auld and Mr. Auld, when the former begins to teach him the alphabet:

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To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” he said, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” (Douglass, 113)

Mr. Auld’s argument is, of course that literacy and slavery are incompatible, and he points to Douglass as a child as an example of the threat that literacy poses to the slave system. When we consider the danger that slave-owners perceived in the written word, and the degree to which using literacy as a dividing line reinforced the power of slaveholders and the durability of racism, it is not surprising that W. E. B. DuBois would be the author of one of the most beautifully resonant passages on the liberal arts in American literature, when he reflects in The Souls of Black Folk: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land? (DuBois, 67)

Ultimately, DuBois’s devotion to the liberal arts is of a piece with Douglass’s reading of Mr. Auld’s objections to Mrs. Auld’s teaching him the basics of literacy: the act of reading, whether in its first steps or in its most complex iterations, serves to undermine the idea that one person can have the right to extract or own another’s labor. Douglass makes this point powerfully in agreeing with his master’s cruel logic even as he asserts his resistance to Mr. Auld’s attempts to deny him literacy: I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress,

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I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both. (Douglass, 113)

Douglass’s ability to understand Mr. Auld’s reasoning dialectically—to realize that Mr. Auld could be correct in his argument with regard to his own aims, and that this very correctness could guide Douglass toward the most effective means of resistance—is at the heart of Harper’s Aunt Chloe’s reflections as well. Because literacy is denied, she realizes that it is something she must find a way to appropriate. Her struggle to appropriate the denied bounty of literacy is couched in the very terms that slave owners might use to justify their attacks on literacy: But some of us would try to steal A little from the book. And put the words together, And learn by hook or crook.  (Harper, 127)

Chloe sees that the moral economy of slavery presumes that her attempts to read are illicit, and so she imagines the practice of literacy, the effort to learn to read, as a kind of theft. If the slaveholding classes of the South regard literacy as something to be denied, then the only response is to “try to steal” the knowledge that she is prevented from possessing, “by hook or crook.” This effort requires a willingness to reverse the moral codes that lend legitimacy to her oppressors, and to see that in this case, the theft of knowledge is not only justified but the only moral response to the immoral effort to block her from a common human inheritance. Intensifying her comedic tone, Aunt Chloe begins to offer examples of just how enslaved people could find a way to literacy “by hook or crook.”

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I remember Uncle Caldwell, Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book, And hid it in his hat.  (Harper, 127)

The rollicking ballad meter here conveys a sort of zest in the pursuit of education under the noses of those who strove to deny it. Uncle Caldwell’s cleverness in escaping the notice of the master who sought to prevent him from reading offers a curious inversion of the schoolboy stories that show how young boys who were able to go to school could avoid schoolmasters’ best efforts to educate them. And had his master ever seen The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers, But nothing to be read.  (Harper, 128)

Harper’s light touch here should not obscure the rich irony of both the situation and the self-conscious duality of Uncle Caldwell’s strategies. He is able to remain safe while defying his enslaver by providing an alternative narrative for why he might have the papers in his hat, and he also uses the racist preconceptions of his enslavers against them in order to be able to pursue his education, as does another character, “Mr. Turner’s Ben”: And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben, Who heard the children spell, And picked the words right up by heart, And learned to read ’em well.  (Harper, 128)

“Mr. Turner’s Ben” is of course employing strategies in the service of literacy that are very familiar to readers of slave narratives. Frederick Douglass recounted in his Narrative [I] used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. (Douglass, 116)

Children could be a useful source of information about literacy, as they were in the process of learning to read and write themselves, and they also had at least in some cases yet to internalize the racism of their elders.

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From here, Harper returns to the period after the war, emphasizing the role of women from the North in bringing schools and literacy to the newly emancipated population: Well, the Northern folks kept sending The Yankee teachers down; And they stood right up and helped us, Though Rebs did sneer and frown. And I longed to read my Bible, For precious words it said; But when I begun to learn it, Folks just shook their heads, And said there is no use trying, Oh! Chloe, you’re too late; But as I was rising sixty, I had no time to wait. So I got a pair of glasses, And straight to work I went, And never stopped till I could read The hymns and Testament. Then I got a little cabin A place to call my own— And I felt independent As the queen upon her throne.  (Harper, 128)

Aunt Chloe’s acquisition of liberty is not merely a negation of the denial of literacy that she had experiences under slavery; it is also an affirmation of her hard-won autonomy. Her Christian faith is crucial to her identity (as indeed to Harper’s), and she now is able to read the words of her Bible and her hymnal for herself, meaning that she is no longer fully constrained by the interpretations of the dominant culture. Harper had an extraordinary ability to rework tropes from t he dominant culture in ways that served the cause of justice for the formerly enslaved. Two late poems capture this element within her work. In “God Bless Our Native Land,” Harper offers what might very nearly seem a clichéd patriotic anthem, except for the ways in which Harper subtly reworks and subverts common patriotic clichés in the piece. She begins with a conventional invocation of divine blessing: “God bless our native land,” and then tellingly ending the couplet “land of the newly free.” Harper makes clear that the United States has not always been the land of the free, and the fact that she mentions the recent emancipation of

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the enslaved also means that the “our” in “our native land” has been expanded to acknowledge Black citizenship. The possessive pronoun in the first line subtly becomes inclusive in Harper’s poem in a way that it would not be if not for the explicit reference to emancipation in the second line. The third and fourth lines use the subjunctive in a way that highlights the fact that liberty in the United States is a goal and not a given: “Oh may she ever stand  / For truth and liberty” (184). By this point, it becomes clear to the attentive reader that this poem is a rewriting of the 1831/1832 patriotic standard “America” (My Country ’Tis of Thee), by Samuel Francis Smith, one that like the text it revises can easily be sung to the tune of “God Save the Queen” (in the Victorian Era, as through most of the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, the English national anthem addressed a female monarch). As we will see, Harper was joined in rewriting these patriotic standards by James Monroe Whitfield in her own time, and in a later generation by W. E. B. DuBois. In “America” liberty is a stable possession of the United States, which is a “land of liberty” in an uncomplicated way that Harper refuses to grant. The contrast between Harper’s phrasing and Smith’s original is striking in the fragility and novelty that Harper imputes to American liberty. This contrast continues to obtain throughout Harper’s poem. The second stanza of “God Bless Our Native Land” echoes Smith’s “land where my fathers died” with the line “where sleep our kindred dead” (184). Both the close resemblance of the content of the lines and Harper’s revision of Smith matter: “land where my fathers died” reflects filial piety toward the generation of the American Revolution; “where sleep our kindred dead” encompasses that generation but also calls to mind the more recent dead from the Civil War, which is implicitly acknowledged as a second war of independence that has delivered on promises of freedom that had previously been deferred. It also strikes an obliquely feminist note in contrast to the patriarchal invocation of fathers: the complexity of families and the role of mothers are both included in Harper’s phrasing in a way that they are not in Smith’s. In the third and fourth lines, Harper’s speaker asks of the God whom she invokes in the first line, that he “Let peace at [his] command / Above their graves be shed” (184). The ethical and moral content of peace matters here, and that it does is significant in light of the pattern of amoral reconciliation among Northern and Southern whites that began to obtain almost immediately after the end of the war. The turn in the third stanza to “God help our native land” in the opening line is likewise fraught with meaning. The deity is asked to “bring surcease to her strife, And shower from [his] hand / A more abundant life” (184). The religious overtones here are both understated and unmistakable, as any reader with a degree of biblical knowledge would hear

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echoes of Jesus’s words from John 10:10 “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” The results of freedom are presented as being redemptive here, and Emancipation thus becomes part of a larger divine plan of human salvation. Notably, Harper’s soteriology, or theory of salvation, is collective and progressive, rather than individual and reactionary. Lines like this remind us that evangelicalism need not necessarily point in a politically regressive direction, however frequently it has done so in recent US history. It also points us toward the Civil Rights movement and the immersion in biblical language and theological concepts that characterized the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr. The closing stanza also emphasizes the degree to which Harper sees this poem as a prayer for a fulfillment of the national promise rather than as a claim that the nation’s promises of freedom and liberty have been fulfilled. Here Harper asks, “Her homes and children bless, / Oh, may she ever stand  / For truth and righteousness” (184). Harper’s plea is for a nation that is still taking shape, and that depends for its future on spheres conventionally associated with women as well as men and on the freedom of those who until very recently had been denied it. Harper’s patriotism is prospective rather than retrospective, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson’s terms, and the civil religion that a poem like this one reinforces is inseparable from moral critique. We have seen multiple rewritings of conventionally patriotic songs and documents over the course of this study, but what stands out about Harper’s rewriting of such pieces is the way in which she seems to prefer appropriation to overt satire. A reader can almost miss the elements that make Harper’s versions of patriotic verse different from those written by white men altogether, even as the choices that Harper makes serve to subtly reinvent the lyrics with which she is in dialogue. Harper’s “Home, Sweet Home” offers an even more striking revision of conventional narratives of the later nineteenth century. Here Harper took on the idea of the “brothers’ war” that was invoked in the service of regional, but not racial, reconciliation. As Cody Marrs has pointed out, this idea of the Civil War as fratricide was one of the most enduring myths about the Civil War, and one the myths most fraught with problems for racial justice and reconciliation. For Whitman and Melville, the “brothers’ war” suggests that regional reconciliation is possible based on fraternal bonds, whereas for Harper, the concept is interrogated in order to ensure that it includes questions of racial justice. Harper’s poem begins with a straightforward invocation of the “brothers’ war.” She writes about a form of brotherhood that is universal, not particular, and so rather than having a Union or Confederate soldier recognize his biological brother in the man he has just killed from the other side, she appeals to a wider sense of fraternity. Harper describes

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Civil War soldiers as “Sharers of a common country” who “met in deadly strife,” and though they “should have been as brothers, / madly sought each other’s life.” She sets up a scene where soldiers sing in between rounds of fighting: from the Southern camp the song is Dixie, and from the Northern, the song is “Home, Sweet Home.” She reflects on the affective response of soldiers who have fought in this extraordinarily bloody war to music that reminds them of home: Then the hearts of strong men melted For amidst our grief and sin, Still remains that touch of nature, Telling us we all are kin.  (185)

Here Harper imagines an interracial brotherhood that transcends the divisions that cause people to identify some others as their kin and some as their foes. The concept of the “brothers’ war” that so often worked in favor of regional reconciliation but against racial justice is neutralized when we come to regard all human beings as siblings. Harper’s own poetry has moved her readers toward such a realization, by presenting fully realized pictures of their complex motivation throughout her antebellum and postbellum work. Harper’s work represents a culmination of sorts of many of the strands operative through mid-nineteenth-century antislavery poetry and also provides a bridge to the kind of poetry of witness that would be required when chattel slavery was no long formally legal. She weaves together the theatrical and the theological, the social and the solitary, in a way that allows her readers to see the inhumanity of slavery from multiple vantage points, but also to see the prospect of a different and better world. In this sense she transcends the quality of protest that is sometimes taken to be the sole relevant element within much antislavery writing. James Baldwin wrote in the late 1940s about the shortcomings of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguing that Stowe failed to show her African American characters in their full humanity. Whether Baldwin was right about Stowe, or for that matter Richard Wright, whom he also criticized sharply, it is clear that Harper found a way to recognize and affirm the humanity of the people about whom and in whose voices she wrote, without simply making them into victims or object lessons in an anatomy of oppression. As such, Harper represents a pinnacle in the artistry of antislavery poetry, and offered a more nuanced view of what redemption from oppression might look like than nearly any of her contemporaries.

6: Aspects of America: James M. Whitfield, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

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of a scholarly edition of the free African American poet James Monroe Whitfield’s work, Robert S. Levine and Ivy Wilson suggest that Whitfield’s 1853 America and Other Poems could be read as a counterpart to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Levine and Wilson, 2). In this chapter I respond to that challenge, exploring the complex role that slavery and freedom play in the development of Whitman’s poetic voice and the alternative understanding of the early history of the republic offered by Whitfield. The chapter also includes a discussion of Whitman’s Civil War collection Drum-Taps and Herman Melville’s BattlePieces, two major collections to come out of the Civil War that reflected on the conflict with an ambivalence that contrasts with the jubilation in John Greenleaf Whittier’s postwar poetry. Whitfield and Whitman offer a telling contrast to each other, as a white poet and a Black poet who worked under differing conditions associated with their race even as both made equality as a concept central to their poetry. They also offer important contrasts to many of their contemporaries, in that Whitman, although appalled by slavery, was not an abolitionist, and indeed criticized abolitionists in print, even as he celebrated behavior that could fairly be deemed abolitionist in his poems. Whitfield, by contrast, clearly and consistently advocated the destruction of slavery, but his understanding of race in America reflects Martin Delany’s separatism and emigrationism rather than the mainstream of abolitionism represented by Frederick Douglass. Melville offered yet a third path: not only was he a writer who loathed slavery but he could also, unlike most white antislavery writers, be regarded as actively antiracist, especially early in his career, but that antiracism did not lead him to the kind of outspoken abolitionist activism that Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, or Henry David Thoreau engaged in. Taking Levine and Wilson’s cue, in this chapter I delve into the ways in which Whitman and Whitfield could both extend and revise or even contradict the antislavery poetry of their predecessors. Whitman’s principled egalitarianism collides with his desire to speak across sectional boundaries in his early verse. (Sadly, by the later portion of Whitman’s career, his egalitarianism would become attenuated in relation to questions of n the recent publication

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race.) Whitfield, at the same time, is both powerfully antiracist and in some ways marginal to the political antislavery movement. A crucial tension that appears in the poetry of Whittier, Whitfield, Whitman, and Melville and later in W. E. B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction has to do precisely with this matter of violence. In Black Reconstruction, DuBois repeatedly laments the way in which Black manhood was validated by martial prowess, as if the ability to kill is required in order to assert a shared humanity. This lament is anticipated by each of the authors considered in this chapter in distinct but related ways. James M. Whitfield, perhaps the African American poet best known specifically for his poetry in the years leading up to the Civil War, captures this tension between resistance to slavery and skepticism about violence with especial poignancy in his 1853 collection America and Other Poems.

James M. Whitfield and African American Abolitionist Poetry James M. Whitfield is among the most underrated figures in mid-­ nineteenth-century US literature: his work is infrequently taught (although the existence of a scholarly edition of his works edited by Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson has served to increase the likelihood of his work being assigned) and as of late 2022, there are only 13 Primary Subject Author hits on the MLA International Bibliography for Whitfield. Despite this general neglect, Whitfield is the author of a substantial and accomplished body of poetic work, and his treatment of slavery, abolition, and race provide a valuable and unique counterpoint to antislavery poetry by white authors and even that by an enslaved African American poet like George Moses Horton. Whitfield maintained a fairly consistent formal model throughout his career, writing mostly in iambic tetrameter in forms that address the public, whether through elegies for important figures in (and to) the antislavery movement, occasional verse addressing major antislavery milestones, or satirical verses pointing out the contradictions in American freedom as understood in the antebellum period. Whitfield’s biography helps to suggest why the numbers of prolific African American poets in the antebellum period are relatively small: rather than being able to make his living directly as a writer or through a career in a university, Whitfield’s primary occupation in earning his livelihood was the work he did as a barber, a common occupation for African Americans in the nineteenth century (Levine and Wilson, 3–4). Whitfield was born free in the north, but he still faced significant obstacles from the racism that undergirded the slave system, despite never having been himself enslaved. As Levine and Wilson note, Whitfield’s publication history is marked by the challenges that systemic racism posed for African

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American poets, as he would hold the profession of barber throughout his adult life, and would never support himself entirely through his writing. In publishing America and Other Poems in 1853, in the midst of a decade divided by slavery, Whitfield established his ability to speak as an African American abolitionist through poetry on a range of topics and themes, including but not limited to slavery and freedom. As Levine and Wilson show, Whitfield had built his fame gradually, by participating in reading his poetry at antislavery meetings throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s. He was praised, as Wilson and Levine note, by Frederick Douglass as a “sable son of genius” and by Martin R. Delany as “one of the purest poets in America” (Levine and Wilson, qtd. 9). As Douglass and Delany became rivals, with Douglass embracing the integrationist position that would be characteristic of the quest for civil rights for African Americans in the Reconstruction era and again in the Civil Rights movement, and Delany moving increasingly toward separatism and emigrationism, Whitfield moved toward Delany even as he continued to make the kinds of appeals for an interracial identity for the United States that was more characteristic of Douglass than Delany. To some degree, his poetry seems to have provided an opportunity both to work out the contradictions in his political life and to evade them. Crucial to Whitfield’s working out of his disparate impulses is his treatment of violent resistance to slavery. Like DuBois, Whitfield found the issue of resistance to be agonizing, and his poems point both towards a celebration of the courage of those who risked their lives to resist slavery and a desire to find a way out of slavery that could avoid bloodshed. His paired poems on the subject of the Amistad revolt and the ensuing trial and his poem on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies capture these contradictory impulses well. Among Whitfield’s most striking poems is his celebration of Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh), the leader of the enslaved people on the Amistad who rebelled against their masters and took control of the ship by force. Cinque had been at the center of one of the most famous legal cases in US history, which went to the Supreme Court in 1841 and was argued in front of the Supreme Court by former US President John Quincy Adams (fig. 6.1). The verdict from the Supreme Court was in favor of the enslaved Africans, in part because the transatlantic slave trade was illegal by this time. Whitfield wrote poems that celebrated both Cinque and his fellow revolutionaries and the lawyer who pleaded their case, John Quincy Adams. In his poem on Cinque, Whitfield celebrated the physical courage and heroism of a man who had defied those who had enslaved him, and he reveres Cinque as a man who would be remembered for the bravery that had freed both himself and others:

Figure 6.1. Cinque The Chief of the Amistad Captives / / painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn; engraved by J. Sartain (Philadelphia: n.p., 1840). Mezzotint, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2018647801/.

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ALL hail! thou truly noble chief, Who scorned to live a cowering slave; Thy name shall stand on history’s leaf, Amid the mighty and the brave: Thy name shall shine, a glorious light To other brave and fearless men, Who, like thyself, in freedom’s might, Shall beard the robber in his den.  (Whitfield, 49)

These opening lines of Whitfield’s poem “To Cinque” draw upon early works that lionize enslaved people who are said to be of royal descent: by being a “truly noble chief,” Cinque resembles the hero of Aphra Behn’s seventeenth-century prose romance Oroonoko and the heroes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s antislavery poems. His courage, which squares with his rank, will cause him to be remembered as an exemplary figure, and his forcible resistance to enslavement is a universal embodiment of “freedom’s might.” As historian Marcus Rediker makes clear, Cinque was indeed a formidable leader, using a “combination of military, spiritual, and political authority” to drive the rebellion (Rediker, 73). As Whitfield continues, he expands on the idea that Cinque’s resis tance will not only be justified by history but also serve to shape history: Thy name shall stand on history’s page, And brighter, brighter, brighter glow, Throughout all time, through every age, Till bosoms cease to feel or know “Created worth, or human woe.” Thy name shall nerve the patriot’s hand When, ’mid the battle’s deadly strife, The glittering bayonet and brand Are crimsoned with the stream of life: When the dark clouds of battle roll, And slaughter reigns without control, Thy name shall then fresh life impart, And fire anew each freeman’s heart. Though wealth and power their force combine To crush thy noble spirit down, There is above a power divine Shall bear thee up against their frown.  (Whitfield, 49)

Whitfield’s praise of Cinque in this poem captures a gathering sense on the part of those who opposed slavery that at least in some cases, violent resistance to slavery could be justified. More than this, it also offers the suggestion that others may follow in Cinque’s footsteps, and that Cinque can be a model for others who resist enslavement by force. Cinque emerges as

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a heroic figure who can demonstrate his manhood through his resistance, and this demonstration will be reinforced by divine justice. Cinque represents the impulse toward viewing resistance to slavery as a variety of just war: even if violence is to be avoided in most circumstances, in this case, violent resistance to slavery is justified as a means of repelling tyranny. The second poem in this pairing captures the other side of Whitfield’s antislavery consciousness, with its emphasis on the law as the predominant means of redress against the wrongs of slavery. Here Whitfield writes about John Quincy Adams, who argued the case of the Amistad’s crew before the Supreme Court of the United States and succeeded in preventing them from being returned to slavery. Regarding Adams, Whitfield writes: THE great, the good, the just, the true, Has yielded up his latest breath; The noblest man our country knew, Bows to the ghastly monster, Death The son of one whose deathless name Stands first on history’s brightest page; The highest on the list of fame As statesman, patriot, and sage.  (Whitfield, 47)

As the poem opens, Whitfield presents Adams as a figure who eclipses the founding generation to which he is attached: while Whitfield refers to the elder John Adams as “one whose deathless name / Stands first on history’s brightest page,” he still gives John Quincy Adams great plaudits as “The noblest man our country knew.” Whitfield thus blends the filial piety that regards the founding generation as preeminent in accomplishments and virtue with the suggestion that later generations might eclipse the founders, specifically through an enhanced devotion to the cause of freedom. This subtly echoes James Russell Lowell’s call for men of “present valor” in “The Present Crisis,” and it exemplifies the means by which antislavery poets could combine fervent patriotism with equally fervent critique of the ways in which slavery had been embedded in the culture, economic system, and law of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield’s account of John Quincy Adams’s life gives form to precisely this sort of progressive patriotism. For Whitfield, the younger Adams is grounded in the founding generation, but he also moves beyond it: In early youth he learned to prize The freedom which his father won; The mantle of the patriot sire, Descended on his mightier son. Science, her deepest hidden lore Beneath his potent touch revealed;

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Philosophy’s abundant store, Alike his mighty mind could wield. The brilliant page of poetry Received additions from his pen, Of holy truth and purity, And thoughts which rouse the souls of men! Eloquence did his heart inspire, And from his lips in glory blazed, ill nations caught the glowing fire, And senates trembled as they praised!  (Whitfield, 48)

The praises that Whitfield bestows on his subject shows that the founders can be and have been surpassed by later generations of Americans. John Quincy Adams is the “mightier son” of John Adams because of the range of his intellectual interests and his choice to place these interests in the service of an extended liberty. He has embraced both poetry and science, and together they have empowered his political eloquence, which has advanced the antislavery cause around the nation. Notably, this picture of John Quincy Adams is somewhat incomplete: his heroism in the Amistad case and in his opposition to slavery during his post-presidency has to be paired with his temporizing and accommodation with the Slave Power at times during his presidency. The progress that John Quincy Adams represents over his own founding father is paralleled by the declension that large portions of the nation have experienced. If in the Adams family the son has surpassed his father, in the population at large, many Americans have fallen well short of the ideals of the founding generation, and they constitute the opposition to the vision of both presidents from the Adams line. While all the recreant of the land To slavery’s idol bowed the knee— A fawning, sycophantic band, Fit tools of petty tyranny— He stood amid the recreant throng, The chosen champion of the free, And battled fearlessly and long For justice, right, and liberty. What though grim Death has sealed his doom Who faithful proved to God and us; And slavery, o’er the patriot’s tomb Exulting, pours its deadliest curse; Among the virtuous and free His memory will ever live; Champion of right and liberty, The blessings, truth and virtue give.  (Whitfield, 48)

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The “fawning sycophantic band” that Whitfield decries is composed of those who have abandoned their principled moral commitments in the service of temporary advantage, and it is precisely John Quincy Adams’s unwillingness to do the same that makes him an exemplary figure. What binds Cinque and Adams together in these poems is historical memory: each of these figures offers a model for future resistance to injustice, and in these poems, they are complementary, not opposed, as they both embody the same cause. Cinque has employed physical resistance in battle, and John Quincy Adams has applied moral resistance in a court of law, but both have offered a principled alternative to acquiescence in an unjust system. The reason that both Cinque and Adams can appear as heirs to the virtues of the founding generation as well as correctives to the failures of the founding generation appears in Whitfield’s most powerful challenge to slavery, which appears in the poem that gave his 1853 collection its title: “America.” In this poem, Whitfield parodies the famous patriotic song “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (typically sung to the tune of “God Save the King”), and he moves from a parodic opening to an overview of the history of the founding of the United States that puts African Americans at the center rather than the periphery of the narrative. The opening clearly echoes the familiar patriotic song: AMERICA, it is to thee, Thou boasted land of liberty,— It is to thee I raise my song, Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong. It is to thee, my native land, From whence has issued many a band To tear the black man from his soil, And force him here to delve and toil; Chained on your blood-bemoistened sod, Cringing beneath a tyrant’s rod, Stripped of those rights which Nature’s God Bequeathed to all the human race, Bound to a petty tyrant’s nod, Because he wears a paler face.  (Whitfield, 41)

The opening couplet’s iambic tetrameter echoes but also extends the trimeter in the opening lines of the patriotic song “My country tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty.” America—the United States as a whole— becomes to the speaker only a “boasted” land of liberty in this opening, and the lines that follow deconstruct the boast, identifying the nation as a “land of blood, and crime, and wrong.” Decades before W. E. B. Du Bois identified “double consciousness” as playing a crucial role in Black American identity, Whitfield stresses the dual quality of his relationship

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to the United States. America is his “native land,” so he has a claim to it, but it is also the source of “many a band” that has abducted Africans from Africa and imposed slavery upon them. The lines “Stripped of those rights which Nature’s God  / Bequeathed to all the human race” both echoes the Declaration of Independence and calls explicit attention to the nation’s hypocrisies. The reference to “Nature’s God” is easily recognizable to anyone who has read the opening of the Declaration of Independence: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (Archives.gov)

The “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are fundamental to the colonists’ claim of independence at the outset of the American revolution, and anyone who recalled the reference to “Nature’s God” in the opening paragraph would be likely to remember what followed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” All human beings have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and all three of these are being stripped away from the enslaved. Finally, Whitfield points to the racialization of slavery, in that the “petty tyrant’s rod” derives its power from a “paler face.” Having established the profound ironies of the situation via his parodic opening, Whitfield turns from parody to a narrative that is framed by a poignant question: Was it for this, that freedom’s fires Were kindled by your patriot sires? Was it for this, they shed their blood, On hill and plain, on field and flood? Was it for this, that wealth and life Were staked upon that desperate strife, Which drenched this land for seven long years With blood of men, and women’s tears?  (Whitfield, 41–42)

The extended rhetorical question “Was it for this . . .? catalogues the losses, sacrifice, and pain associated with the American Revolution. The loss of blood, of wealth, of life, and the pain of mourning for those who have been lost all are captured in Whitfield’s verse here, and the

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poignancy of the question derives from the evident fact that slavery is a reversal of the moral principles claimed for the nation in the Declaration of Independence. Here we see an extension of Whitfield’s representation of John Quincy Adams as a figure who is at once an heir to the American revolutionary generation and a realization of unfinished aims. If the American Revolution is to fulfill its promise, Whitfield implies, then Americans must revisit the causes for which it was fought. What follows this initial question is a narrative that intensifies both the ironies of the opening passage and the poignancy of the extended rhetorical question: When black and white fought side by side, Upon the well-contested field,— Turned back the fierce opposing tide, And made the proud invader yield— When, wounded, side by side they lay, And heard with joy the proud hurrah From their victorious comrades say That they had waged successful war, The thought ne’er entered in their brains That they endured those toils and pains, To forge fresh fetters, heavier chains For their own children, in whose veins Should flow that patriotic blood, So freely shed on field and flood.  (Whitfield, 42)

Whitfield offers a history of the American Revolution that highlights a story that has been deliberately suppressed, absolutely in his time, and to varying degrees in our own. Black and white soldiers fought together in many of the battles of the American Revolution, and the debt of gratitude that the nation owes to its founding fathers and mothers applies to Black soldiers and widows as well as white; the “patriotic blood” shed as part of the American Revolution was shed by Black people as well as white. Black and white soldiers had fought together, killed together, died together, and Whitfield offers a picture of the truly brutal irony that Black patriots may have “endured those toils and pains, / To forge fresh fetters, heavier chains / For their own children.” By helping to overthrow British power in North America, Black patriots had obtained freedom for their oppressors, and cruelly, paradoxically, an enhanced and more oppressive form of slavery for their own descendants. Whitfield emphasizes that the irony of enslaved and free Black people fighting for a more ferocious form of slavery is not an act of perversity on their part: they have simply had the good faith to take the Declaration at its word:

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Oh no; they fought, as they believed, For the inherent rights of man; But mark, how they have been deceived By slavery’s accursed plan. They never thought, when thus they shed Their heart’s best blood, in freedom’s cause That their own sons would live in dread, Under unjust, oppressive laws: That those who quietly enjoyed The rights for which they fought and fell, Could be the framers of a code, That would disgrace the fiends of hell!  (Whitfield, 42)

The irony of their fighting for freedom and receiving generations of slavery gathers still more moral weight: Black soldiers have fought for freedom and been rewarded with a legacy of slavery as a result of deliberate deceit. They fought for freedom, but they were lied to. The rights they earned with their own blood had been turned against them, and Whitfield uses the weighted terms “framers,” so often applied to the Constitutional Convention to describe the development of a racial “code, / That would disgrace the fiends of hell!” Retrospectively, Whitfield sees that the betrayal of Black people’s aspirations for the liberty and equality endorsed by the nation’s founding Declaration could have endangered the American Revolution and so the independent nation itself if they could have known how thoroughly their valor would be exploited. The catalogue that follows rivals Whitman’s catalogues in “Song of Myself” in its scope, but it is a catalogue of horror and cruelty, pain and loss: Could they have looked, with prophet’s ken, Down to the present evil time, Seen free-born men, uncharged with crime, Consigned unto a slaver’s pen,— Or thrust into a prison cell, With thieves and murderers to dwell— While that same flag whose stripes and stars Had been their guide through freedom’s wars As proudly waved above the pen Of dealers in the souls of men!  (Whitfield, 43)

Whitfield’s description of how an ambiguous “they”—Black veterans of the American Revolution? All veterans of the American Revolution?— would have perceived the degraded present in which he lives is rich with irony. He imagines those who have fought for liberty viewing the most

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egregious violations of human dignity: men who were born free sold into slavery (of which he could have adduced multiple examples, but Solomon Northup’s experience as described in Twelve Years a Slave might be particularly telling), the criminalization of race in mid-century US law, and most profoundly, the way in which men, women, and children could be sold and families separated by “dealers in the souls of men.” The tone here is reminiscent of what Frederick Douglass had described in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” as “scorching irony,” and it carries a similar purpose: both Douglass and Whitfield highlight the profound gap between the ideals of liberty and equality and the practice of slavery in the antebellum United States. The irony in Whitfield’s poem intensifies as he imagines the dead of the American Revolution inspecting the degraded present. Imagining that the patriots killed in the American Revolution could see the results of their sacrifice, he laments Or could the shades of all the dead, Who fell beneath that starry flag, Visit the scenes where they once bled, On hill and plain, on vale and crag, By peaceful brook, or ocean’s strand, By inland lake, or dark green wood, Where’er the soil of this wide land Was moistened by their patriot blood,— And then survey the country o’er, From north to south, from east to west, And hear the agonizing cry Ascending up to God on high, From western wilds to ocean’s shore, The fervent prayer of the oppressed; The cry of helpless infancy Torn from the parent’s fond caress By some base tool of tyranny, And doomed to woe and wretchedness; The indignant wail of fiery youth, Its noble aspirations crushed, Its generous zeal, its love of truth, Trampled by tyrants in the dust; The aerial piles which fancy reared, And hopes too bright to be enjoyed, Have passed and left his young heart seared, And all its dreams of bliss destroyed. The shriek of virgin purity, Doomed to some libertine’s embrace, Should rouse the strongest sympathy

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Of each one of the human race; And weak old age, oppressed with care, As he reviews the scene of strife, Puts up to God a fervent prayer, To close his dark and troubled life.  (Whitfield, 43–44)

The images of enslavement, torture, separated families, and brutalized bodies practically gush onto the page. Whitfield shows us first the ways in which the land itself has been tied to the African American experience in the United States: the blood of men who have fought as soldiers has consecrated the land to Black Americans as well as white, and this fact makes the way that Black Americans have been treated and Black bodies have been violated all the more evidently horrifying. He catalogues the separation of families, the exploitation of labor, and the destruction of the aspirations of the young, the rape of enslaved women, and the lack of care for those enslaved people who have passed the age at which they can continue to work, in order to create a picture of the present situation that evokes both indignation at the injustices he describes and empathy for those who suffer under them. Whitfield next bears down on the specific issue of family separation, arguing that this violation of basic human bonds calls out not only for indignation and empathy on the part of fellow human beings, but also divine wrath: The cry of fathers, mothers, wives, Severed from all their hearts hold dear, And doomed to spend their wretched lives In gloom, and doubt, and hate, and fear; And manhood, too, with soul of fire, And arm of strength, and smothered ire, Stands pondering with brow of gloom, Upon his dark unhappy doom, Whether to plunge in battle’s strife, And buy his freedom with his life, And with stout heart and weapon strong, Pay back the tyrant wrong for wrong, Or wait the promised time of God, When his Almighty ire shall wake, And smite the oppressor in his wrath, And hurl red ruin in his path, And with the terrors of his rod, Cause adamantine hearts to quake.  (Whitfield, 44)

Slavery will lead inexorably to judgment, and the nation that tolerates it cannot expect to be spared the wrath of a just God. There is a notable

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resemblance here to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address, where he explicitly links the destruction of the Civil War to the consequences of the injustices of slavery: If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.“ (Lincoln, 360–61)

As in Lincoln’s explanation for the Civil War, Whitfield sees a direct link between the atrocities of slavery and a coming divine judgment. This aspect of antislavery poetry may seem less congenial to twenty-first century readers than its ethical appeals, but it does convey a general sense that there are consequences to immoral and exploitative actions that transcend temporary material gain. Tied to this belief in ineluctable consequences for injustice is Whitfield’s powerful appeal to Christianity as a source of human brotherhood and sisterhood, and the violation of the tenets of Christianity that is implied by the violence of slavery: Here Christian writhes in bondage still, Beneath his brother Christian’s rod, And pastors trample down at will, The image of the living God. While prayers go up in lofty strains, And pealing hymns ascend to heaven, The captive, toiling in his chains, With tortured limbs and bosom riven, Raises his fettered hand on high, And in the accents of despair, To him who rules both earth and sky, Puts up a sad, a fervent prayer, To free him from the awful blast Of slavery’s bitter galling shame— Although his portion should be cast With demons in eternal flame!

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Almighty God! ’t is this they call The land of liberty and law; Part of its sons in baser thrall Than Babylon or Egypt saw— Worse scenes of rapine, lust and shame, Than Babylonian ever knew, Are perpetrated in the name Of God, the holy, just, and true; And darker doom than Egypt felt, May yet repay this nation’s guilt.  (Whitfield, 44–45)

Whitfield’s poem takes on the form of a jeremiad here, rebuking the ways in which a society in which the majority of people were ostensibly Christians could behave in a way antithetical to the morality and ethics of Jesus in the New Testament. Central to Whitfield’s case here is the fact that both the enslavers and the enslaved were nominally Christians, and so the violence of slavery was violence committed against the slaveholders’ co-religionists. Still more, the enslaved and the enslavers as fellow human beings both shared in the image of God, and so slavery became a blasphemous violation of the deity’s own self. Whitfield closes his poem with a fervent prayer, requesting divine justice and intervention to cause human beings to make a moral stand against slavery. He implores the deity: Almighty God! thy aid impart, And fire anew each faltering heart, And strengthen every patriot’s hand, Who aims to save our native land. We do not come before thy throne, With carnal weapons drenched in gore, Although our blood has freely flown, In adding to the tyrant’s store. Father! before thy throne we come, Not in the panoply of war, With pealing trump, and rolling drum, And cannon booming loud and far; Striving in blood to wash out blood, Through wrong to seek redress for wrong; For while thou ’rt holy, just and good, The battle is not to the strong; But in the sacred name of peace, Of justice, virtue, love and truth, We pray, and never mean to cease, Till weak old age and fiery youth In freedom’s cause their voices raise, And burst the bonds of every slave;

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Till, north and south, and east and west, The wrongs we bear shall be redressed.  (45–46)

Of particular note is the blending of antislavery activism with pacifism in the conclusion of the poem. Whitfield explicitly disclaims “carnal weapons drenched in gore,” tying his antislavery activism to peace rather than war. This pacifist impulse recurs in his poem in celebration of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. Whitfield’s poetry illustrates the transatlantic quality of much abolitionist verse as well as a recasting of patriotic sentiment in the United States. In “Stanzas for the First of August,” he celebrates the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, which, as Ivy Wilson and Robert S. Levine have noted, was “far more meaningful than July 4” for African American abolitionists (n.95). The brief poem captures both the joy associated with the occasion and the hope that the same “moral force” that ended slavery in the British colonies in the Caribbean could also end slavery in the United States. Whitfield’s tone is exultant: From bright West Indies’ sunny seas, Comes, borne upon the balmy breeze, The joyous shout, the gladsome tone, Long in those bloody isles unknown; Bearing across the heaving wave The song of the unfettered slave.  (95)

The opening, in upbeat iambic tetrameter, conveys both the jubilation that accompanied the breaking of the fetters of the enslaved in the Caribbean and the length of the suffering that enslaved people had endured: the epithet “bloody isles” conveys centuries of brutality even as it embraces the possibility that those centuries have come to an end. In light of the fact that the US Civil War was only a dozen years away when Whitfield first recited this poem, the lines that follow have a certain poignancy. In 1849 at least, Whitfield embraced the idea that moral suasion could bring an end to slavery, as he notes specifically that the abolition of slavery in the West Indies did not come as a direct result of warfare, writing No charging squadrons shook the ground, Where freedom here her claims obtained; No cannon, with tremendous sound, The noble patriot’s cause maintained: No furious battle-charger neighed, No brother fell by brother’s blade.  (95)

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Here Whitfield offers a utopian view of the efficacy of moral rather than martial strife: the defeat of slavery in the West Indies has been achieved without the horrors of war, and he specifically raises the possibility of warfare between siblings, a figure that would define postwar discussions of the US Civil War among Northern and Southern white people. In the next stanza, Whitfield again emphasizes that freedom has been achieved without “the awful waste of human life” associated with warfare, but rather because “truth and justice spoke from heaven / And slavery’s galling chain was riven.” He makes the argument for a principled antislavery pacifism most explicit in the penultimate stanza: ’T was moral force that broke the chain, That bound eight hundred thousand men; And when we see it snapped in twain, Shall we not join the praises then?— And prayers unto Almighty God, Who smote to earth the tyrant’s rod.  (95)

The scale of the undertaking—the freeing of “eight hundred thousand men”—would seem to indicate the sort of accomplishment that could only be achieved through military victory, but Whitfield emphasizes that, counterintuitively, it has been achieved through “moral force,” prefiguring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s twentieth-century argument that liberation for the oppressed could be achieved by “meeting physical force with soul force.” Although the moral force in the West Indies that Whitfield describes is associated more with lawmaking and political activism than with direct non-violent resistance, there is a significant line from Whitfield’s embrace of non-violence and love to King’s embrace of those principles a century later. Whitfield’s emphasis here is informed by the ideal of moral suasion championed by William Lloyd Garrison, to which Frederick Douglass also subscribed in the early days of his career as an antislavery writer and speaker. Having established the primacy of moral force, Whitfield concludes his poem with straightforward celebration: And from those islands of the sea, The scenes of blood and crime and wrong, The glorious anthem of the free, Now swells in mighty chorus strong; Tell the oppress’d, where’er they roam, Those islands now are freedom’s home.  (96)

For Whitfield, the Caribbean can serve as a harbinger of freedom for enslaved people in the United States precisely because of its history of enslavement and torture. If slavery can be overcome in the historical heart

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of slavery in the English-speaking world, it can be overcome in the United States as well. The emphasis on moral as opposed to physical force in Whitfield’s celebration of West Indian Emancipation parallels his conclusion in “America”: even as Whitfield’s critique of the form that the republic has taken in the nineteenth century is predicated in part on the valor of Black soldiers in the revolutionary generation, he holds out the hope that the destruction of slavery in the United States may not require violence, but may also be achieved through “moral force” and ethical persuasion. In “Ode for the Fourth of July,” Whitfield celebrates a date that is central to the identity of the United States as an independent nation but that was tainted for Black Americans in the antebellum period and beyond by the legacy of slavery. Although Whitfield was alive to the ironies that Frederick Douglass stressed in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” he offered a straightforward celebration of US independence in the opening of this July 4 poem: Another year has passed away, And brings again the glorious day When Freedom from her slumber woke, And broke the British tyrant’s yoke— Unfurled her standard to the air, In gorgeous beauty, bright and fair— Pealed forth the sound of war’s alarms, And called her patriot sons to arms!  (89)

This opening offers a standard celebration of the US triumph in the American Revolution: Americans fought for freedom, and the British stand in for tyranny. Whitfield also alludes to the standard narrative that the North American colonists were fighting for their own families and land, whereas the British hired mercenaries from Hesse, and even the British themselves were fighting as professional soldiers. Elided in this narrative is the fact that European soldiers also fought for the American side in the Revolution, and that Loyalists who sided with Britain are difficult to describe as mercenaries. Whitfield also leaves out the complexities of slavery in the Revolution and the reasons that Black Americans might identify the Loyalist cause with freedom. They rushed, inspired by Freedom’s name, To fight for liberty and fame; To meet the mercenary band, And drive them from their native land. Almighty God! grant us, we pray, The self-same spirit on this day, That, through the storm of battle, then Did actuate those patriot men!  (89)

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This enthusiastically patriotic endorsement of the revolutionary effort allows Whitfield to identify American patriotism with the cause of freedom, and so to set the 13 colonies in opposition to slavery, even though, as a matter of historical fact, some of the white revolutionary soldiers would have seen themselves as defending their ability to hold slaves, not fighting for freedom as a universal value to be applied to all people. The strategy here is acute: Whitfield is writing the sort of narrative of American history that Abraham Lincoln would encapsulate in the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Lincoln, 324)

Whitfield’s conclusion carries this interpretation of the founding documents of American democracy that he would share with Lincoln to its logical conclusion, and as did Lowell, Barrett Browning, and Harper, Whitfield suggests the need to find a model in the founders that transcends the current state of their legacy to the country: May those great truths which they maintained Through years of deadly strife and toil, Be by their children well sustained, Till slavery ceases on our soil— Till every wrong shall be redressed, And every bondman be set free;

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And from the north, south, east and west, Peans shall rise to Liberty.  (89)

This conclusion offers the prospect that the promise of the Fourth of July can truly be realized if slavery is abolished, thus supplementing Douglass’s stirring call for “scorching irony” and prefiguring Lincoln’s vision of an American republic that draws its foundations from the Declaration of Independence and its universalist invocations of liberty and equality. One final aspect of Whitfield’s poetry that is noteworthy is the way in which he self-consciously contributed to a burgeoning African American literary tradition. In “The North Star,” he offers an extension of earlier tributes to the celestial body in the title by Pierpont and Horton as a guide for those seeking to escape slavery, with a forthright celebration of the newspaper Frederick Douglass started as a venue for a developing literary tradition, beginning with a conventional invocation of the star as a guide out of slavery: Star of the north! whose steadfast ray Pierces the sable pall of night, Forever pointing out the way That leads to freedom’s hallowed light: The fugitive lifts up his eye To where thy rays illume the sky.  (96)

This opening stanza conveys the physical role that the star itself plays in guiding enslaved people toward freedom, and the following stanzas describes the ways in which the star provides succor for those escaping oppression: That steady, calm, unchanging light, Through dreary wilds and trackless dells, Directs his weary steps aright To the bright land where freedom dwells; And spreads, with sympathizing breast, Her ægis over the oppressed. Though other stars may round thee burn, With larger disk and brighter ray, And fiery comets round thee turn, While millions mark their blazing way; And the pale moon and planets bright Reflect on us their silvery light.  (96–97)

The star provides the necessary guidance to direct enslaved people toward the north and freedom, and Whitfield attributes this direction

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to something resembling human sympathy, making strategic use of what John Ruskin would call the “pathetic fallacy.” Not like that moon, now dark, now bright, In phase and place forever changing; Or planets with reflected light, Or comets through the heavens ranging; They all seem varying to our view, While thou art ever fixed and true.  (97)

The conventional invocation of the mutability of the moon provides a sharp contrast to a morally consistent, utterly reliable celestial body in the North Star. The concluding stanza makes a sharp turn in the direction of the literary “North Star” to which the heavenly body corresponds. So may that other bright North Star, Beaming with truth and freedom’s light, Pierce with its cheering ray afar, The shades of slavery’s gloomy night; And may it never cease to be The guard of truth and liberty.  (97)

The other bright North Start is the newspaper that Frederick Douglass founded and that would later bear his name, but it also stands in for the value of antislavery literary production itself. The title of the present study seeks to answer the question of why antislavery poetry matters now: with his invocation of both the celestial and terrestrial North Stars, Whitfield begins to provide a reason why it mattered then, one that continues to be relevant. The poetry of the antislavery movement offers a form of moral reasoning in verse that is consistent and principled in a way that is a requirement for the continued flourishing of a democracy, and the sort of moral reasoning and bearing of witness that Whitfield and Douglass’s North Star achieves offer a model for how poetry must continue to bear witness and to provide moral content for our words today.

Whitman’s Racial Body Electric Walt Whitman may seem an odd fit for a volume on antislavery poetry, given his that his commitment to racial egalitarianism is balanced, and at times seemingly outweighed, by his devotion to sectional reconciliation. Indeed, Whitman can seem to be an even more complicated poet in relation to race and slavery than Herman Melville, in that his most bracing statements on behalf of equality are more explicit than Melville’s but they are also modified to a much greater degree by other statements

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that undermine some of his most characteristic qualities. Ed Folsom has catalogued many of Whitman’s most condescending and racist statements about formerly enslaved African Americans from after the Civil War in his 2018 essay “‘A Yet More Terrible and More Deeply Complicated Problem’: Walt Whitman, Race, Reconstruction, and American Democracy,” and the remarks that Whitman made after the war about Black people make for harrowing reading, particularly in an extended comment in a late conversation with Horace Traubel, when he rejects the idea of interracial marriage and says, using racial slurs, that Black and Indigenous people will be “eliminated,” a conclusion widely at variance with much of what Whitman wrote in his poetry (Folsom, “Yet More Terrible,” 538). Even taking these ambiguities and outright contradictions into account, Whitman stands out as a poet who, like Whitfield and Harper, connects a critique of slavery quite directly with a broad commitment to racial equality in his early poetry; even his troubling post–Civil War movement toward paternalism toward newly emancipated African Americans and eugenics later in life does not prevent him from writing a major poem celebrating the interpenetration of cultures late in his career in “Passage to India.” As Ivy G. Wilson notes in his introductory essay in Whitman Noir (2014), Whitman’s expressions of equality in his poetry and his formal experimentation were both of great importance to the development of the African American poetic tradition. The Whitman we encounter in his poetry and his conversations with Horace Traubel is a deeply complex figure with regard to race, and he is also a figure who is deeply molded by antislavery tropes and whose early poetry not infrequently expressed directly antislavery convictions. If we are truly to understand how deeply Whitman draws on antislavery elements in his poetry, we must consider the poetry that he published before the formal breakthrough of Leaves of Grass. It can be easy for twenty-first century readers of Whitman to forget that his career as a versifier, if not as a canonical poet, preceded the publication of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. In “Song for Certain Congressmen,” which Whitman retitled “The Dough-Face Song” later in his life but initially wrote in 1850, Whitman offers a bracing attack on politicians who compromise over slavery. Doughface was not a term original with Whitman, but rather was used widely among antislavery advocates to attack Northern politicians who took the Southern position on the slavery issue, and even appeared in the 1847 edition of Webster’s dictionary. Whitman alludes to this origin in his epigraph to “Song for Certain Congressmen,” as he quotes from the Webster’s definition: “Like dough, soft, yielding to pressure, pale.” The poem that follows this contemptuous dismissal of the lack of moral courage on the part of these Northern sympathizers with slavery is much more conventional in its prosody than we might expect from Whitman: it is written in a bouncing ballad meter (iambic tetrameter alternating

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with trimeter) and an ABCBDB rhyme scheme that is also common to light verse. In directing his early antislavery poetry at Northern complicity in the slave system, Whitman resembles contemporaries like Whittier, Barrett Browning, and Thoreau, in that rather than allowing the issue of slavery to become a sectional issue that can be viewed from a moral relativist perspective, he establishes that slavery is a crisis for the entire country, and Northerners are not exempt from his criticism because their states are not formally slave holding states. The poem begins in the voice of the “docile Dough-Faces” who submit their consciences to the slave power in the pivotal year of 1850, when the Compromise of 1850 is passed and the most draconian Fugitive Slave Law to date comes into force. Whitman plays on the metaphor of the “Dough-Face” congressman as actual dough, and at the same time he frames his attack on them as a slur upon their masculinity as well as on their moral dereliction of duty: We are all docile Dough-Faces, They knead us with the fist, They, the dashing southern lords, We labor as they list; For them we speak—or hold our tongues, For them we turn and twist.  (Whitman, 1100)

In the opening couplet the congressmen who are supportive of the Compromise of 1850 are kneaded with the fist the way a baker might knead dough in making bread, but they are also shown to be under the fist of “southern lords” who can dominate them and, in moral terms, enslave them (“We labor as they list.”) The congressmen will not stand for any independent morality, but rather will “turn and twist” at the slaveholders’ demand. The adjective “dashing” applied to “southern lords” takes a major part of the self-representation of slave states and turns it against Northern complicity in the slave system. Southerners often represented themselves as being more masculine and martial than their Northern counterparts, and Whitman here suggests that the dough-faces are passively submissive in the face of pro-slavery aggression, thus shaming them for their lack of courage. Notably, Whitman is prepared to name names in rebuking the members of Congress who have shown moral weakness through their compromises: Take heart, then, sweet companions, Be steady Scripture Dick! Douglas, Cass, and Walker, To your allegiance stick!

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With Brooks, and Briggs and Phoenix, Stand up through thin and thick!  (1102)

Ten years before Abraham Lincoln’s election, Whitman is also rebuking Stephen Douglas’s proslavery temporizing, and he groups him with Lewis Cass, the 1848 Democratic candidate for Congress and an ally of Douglas and the virulently proslavery Robert John Walker in supporting the spread of slavery via “popular sovereignty.” The conclusion of the poem offers a scathing and disgusted summing up of the lack of moral courage and conviction of “Certain Congressmen”: We do not ask a bold brave front; We never try that game; ’Twould bring the storm upon our heads, A huge mad storm of shame; Evade it brothers—subterfuge Will answer just the same.  (1102)

The “Dough-Faces” are fearful of being shamed if they ever show any courage, but the dramatic irony in Whitman’s poem suggests that it is in fact their commitment to “subterfuge,” to the failure to embrace conviction and speak openly and honestly about these convictions that ultimately makes them shameful. Whitman only reprinted the above poem in Specimen Days after the Civil War: he clearly did not think it part of the body of poetry that he wanted represented in Leaves of Grass. Another antislavery ballad, however, would appear in the very first edition of Leaves of Grass. In “A Boston Ballad,” Whitman confronts one of the most egregious results of the expanded Fugitive Slave Act via the Compromise of 1850. In 1854, Anthony Burns (fig. 6.2), a young Black man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, was taken into custody in Boston in order to be returned to slavery. This was a galvanizing event for many New Englanders, who came to grasp the brutality of the Fugitive Slave Act and the degree to which it compelled them to violate their own consciences as a result of Burns’s arrest, extradition, and re-enslavement. Amos Adams Lawrence famously wrote that before Burns’s arrest “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” Whitman’s poem conveys a similar sense that the Burns affair was a defining moment in the relationship of the nation to the problem of slavery. As in “The Dough-Face Song,” Whitman made use of the form of the dramatic monologue in “A Boston Ballad.” The poem begins To get betimes in Boston town I rose this morning early, Here’s a good place at the corner, I must stand and see the show.

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Figure 6.2. Bust portrait of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, surrounded by scenes from his enslavement, escape, arrest, trial, and re-enslavement. Drawn by Barry from a daguerreotype by Whipple & Black; John Andrews, sc. Library of Congress.

Clear the way there Jonathan! Way for the President’s marshal—way for the government cannon! Way for the Federal foot and dragoons, (and the apparitions copiously tumbling.) I love to look on the Stars and Stripes, I hope the fifes will play Yankee Doodle.  (404)

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Notably, the poem begins with a conventionally patriotic American going into Boston to enjoy the pageantry of a military parade, seemingly unaware that his country faces an existential crisis. What he begins to realize uneasily is that something seems to have gone terribly amiss, and that the country is no longer committed to its old ideals. He comes to realize that beneath the apparent continuity of the parade with a glorious past, the ghosts of an earlier Republic are objecting to the scene: A fog follows, antiques of the same come limping, Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless. Why this is indeed a show—it has called the dead out of the earth! The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see! Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear! Cock’d hats of mothy mould—crutches made of mist! Arms in slings—old men leaning on young men’s shoulders. What troubles you Yankee phantoms? what is all this chattering of bare gums? Does the ague convulse your limbs? do you mistake your crutches for firelocks and level them?  (404)

Whitman imagines the veterans of the American Revolution returning to a horrifying realization of the betrayal of their cause, mirroring the case made by Whittier and Whitfield that slavery represents a betrayal of the revolutionary legacy. Whitman’s criticism of the Fugitive Slave Law and its execution in Massachusetts resembles that of Whittier in “Moloch on State Street,” Thoreau in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and Douglass in “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” The Fugitive Slave Law for Whitman in 1854 resembles the tyranny of George III, and the 1850s are seeing, paradoxically, the triumph of the British Empire in the American Revolution through the betrayal of revolutionary principles. For Whitman in “A Boston Ballad,” American ideals have turned to their opposite. Unlike Lowell and Barrett Browning, Whitman does not use New England Puritanism as the foil for contemporary decadence, but like Douglass, Whittier, and Whitfield, he uses the American revolution as a plumb line for measuring the nation’s departure from its founding values in his secular jeremiad. The year 1855 is, of course, the great turning point in Whitman’s career, as he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in that year. Aside from “A Boston Ballad,” none of the poems in the volume read directly as antislavery protest poetry. Whitman’s celebrations of the human body

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throughout the volume are deeply egalitarian, however, and at one point in the poem that would become “Song of Myself,” Whitman makes a forceful statement of resistance to slavery: The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, I had him sit next me at table. . . . my firelock leaned in the corner.  (35)

Whitman makes no explicit statement of a position on slavery here, but the actions that he narrates speak very clearly, in that what Whitman’s speaker is doing in this scene is a direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Law. Rather than returning an enslaved person to his bondage, the speaker is sheltering him and bearing witness to the violence he has experienced even as he treats the wounds of slavery that the man bears. Strikingly, he concludes with an image of himself eating at the table together with the fugitive: this is not a condescending act of philanthropy, but rather an acknowledgment of human brotherhood between two men. The fact that the speaker’s weapon “leaned in the corner” indicates that he is prepared to engage in violent resistance should the man he is hosting be pursued by slave catchers. This is a particularly powerful antislavery statement in that it is grounded in an egalitarian sense of universal human dignity. Like Lydia Maria Child, Whitman connects the racial egalitarianism of this passage with an egalitarian picture of interracial marriage between Indigenous and European people. In the stanza immediately preceding the vignette of the runaway slave, Whitman provides a vivid visual portrait of such a relationship: I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west. . . . the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near by crosslegged and dumbly smoking. . . . they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders; On a bank lounged the trapper. . . . he was dressed mostly in skins. . . . his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck,

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One hand rested on his rifle. . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl, She had long eyelashes. . . . her head was bare. . . . her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet.  (35)

Whitman’s picture of this interracial marriage reflects a broader commitment to valuing and admiring the human body without limiting this acknowledgment and admiration to white or European bodies. If in the passage on the man who has escaped from slavery Whitman’s focus is on the amelioration of the pain of bodily wounds, here his emphasis is on the beauty of the human body. We are being asked to see her, not just as an object of desire, but as a beautiful and powerful human being in her own right, and we are asked to imagine what American identity looks like when it embraces humanity across racial lines rather than drawing boundaries around marriage based on color. In the poem that would be known as “The Sleepers,” Whitman again invokes slavery directly, this time taking on the voice of the enslaved person. As with the mention of slavery in the extended vignette in “Song of Myself,” gender and sexuality stand alongside race in Whitman’s implied reflection on the inhumanity of the slave system. Whitman’s speaker, in this case identified directly with an enslaved man, declares: Now Lucifer was not dead. . . . or if he was I am his sorrowful terrible heir; I have been wronged. . . . I am oppressed. . . . I hate him that oppresses me, I will either destroy him, or he shall release me. Damn him! how he does defile me, How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for their blood, How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat that carries away my woman.  (113)

Whitman offers the voice of Lucifer’s “sorrowful terrible heir” as a rebuke of the wrongs and oppressions of slavery, and he presents the confrontation between the speaker and his enslaver as an existential fight to the death: if the speaker is not released, he ultimately will destroy his oppressor. Here as in Whittier’s “Moloch on State Street” and Barrett Browning’s and Harper’s poems about slave mothers, the violation of family ties is crucial. Whitman’s speaker curses his enslaver for “defil[ing]” him and for “inform[ing] against [his] brother and sister and tak[ing] pay for their blood.” The final image is the most appalling of all, as it shows the mockery of the enslaver at the sight of the wife of the enslaved man

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being sold away from him. The monologue here is at once an assertion of masculinity from a man whose masculinity has been denied and an assertion of the inviolability of family bonds among those who are enslaved. Whitman’s shift in perspective invites his white readers to consider what it would mean to have their own family members sold away from them, and what the men among Whitman’s readers might feel about having their own masculinity insulted and stripped away through the abduction of a spouse. Whitman’s identification of this figure with Lucifer is further suggestive of the Romantic argument that Milton’s Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost, encapsulated in Blake’s assertion that Milton “was a true poet & of the devil’s party without knowing it” and Shelley’s argument that “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy . . .” (Blake, 197; Shelley, 63). Whitman offers this heir of Lucifer as an example of heroic resistance in keeping with a broader tradition of resistance to tyranny, of which he, like an abolitionist poet such as Whittier, saw the United States as being a part. As with his pair of vignettes about Indigenous people and an enslaved person who has escaped in “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s speaker here pairs the image of the defiant man who has had his wife sold away from him with an image of the beauty of an Indigenous woman, whom he describes as his mother saw her in an encounter about which he heard at second hand: She looked at the beauty of her tallborne face and full and pliant limbs, The more she looked upon her she loved her, Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity; She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace. . . . she cooked food for her, She had no work to give her but she gave her remembrance and fondness. (112)

Here the beauty of the woman the speaker’s mother encountered and the rage of the enslaved man whose voice the speaker takes on come together in a statement about the dignity of human beings across lines of race and gender. The fact that these passages appear next to each other is no accident, as together they assert the value of the human body and reject the idea that some bodies are less beautiful or significant than others because of color or race. In the poem that would become “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman makes his most direct statement in support of the idea that the human

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body is itself the source of equality, and he does so in a way that is both disturbing in the complicity that his speaker takes on with slavery and an extraordinarily powerful rebuke of the racism that underlies the slave system. Whitman’s speaker takes the paradigmatic scene of the violence of slavery and turns it into an acknowledgment of the beauty and power of Black bodies and of the equality of human minds across racialized boundaries. Whitman’s speaker exclaims: A slave at auction! I help the auctioneer. . . . the sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen look on this curious creature, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him, For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled. In that head the allbaffling brain, In it and below it the making of the attributes of heroes. Examine these limbs, red black or white. . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve; They shall be stript that you may see them. Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, goodsized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet. Within there runs his blood. . . . the same old blood . . . the same red running blood; There swells and jets his heart. . . . There all passions and desires . . . all reachings and aspirations: Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in parlors and lecture-rooms?  (123)

Whitman uses a catalog of the human body and its parts to make his case of equality still more explicit than in the other passages dealing with slavery in Leaves of Grass. If his speaker’s identification with the auctioneer is chilling on its face, it swiftly shifts to a celebratory affirmation of the humanity and dignity of the man who is being auctioned, and so calls into question the legitimacy of an auction that treats this extraordinary human creature as an object to be sold. He begins with a secularized version of the idea that human beings are made in the likeness of the monotheistic deity, with his assertion that “For him the globe lay preparing for quintillions of years without one vegetable or plant.” The assumption here is

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that humans are unique and constitute the pinnacle of life on earth, and that therefore a human who is being enslaved shares in a universal human dignity that is utterly inconsistent with enslavement. The blazon used to describe the man’s body conveys that he is beautiful and that his body itself should function as a reminder of the shared humanity between the putative auctioneer, and the reader, and the man who is being auctioned off, and this reminder is intensified by the reference to the “all-baffling brain” that precedes it. The presence of thought distinguishes humans from other animals for most nineteenth-century readers, and the beauty of the man’s body and the subtlety of his mind come together in an assertion of shared humanity. The final part of the description of the man’s body is his blood, which by definition cannot be distinguished on racial grounds. This shared blood comes to correspond as well to shared “passions and desires,” “reachings and aspirations,” with the clear implication that these are shared across racial boundaries. Whitman’s impassioned racial egalitarianism in the 1855 Leaves of Grass did, as many critics have pointed out, become attenuated later in his career, and especially after the Civil War. At the same time, he continued to put forward the idea that humans share a common lineage, common aspirations, and a common destiny, and this shapes his poems about the Civil War in Drum-Taps as well as in later works like “Passage to India.” Whitman’s “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” is both the poem that most directly addresses slavery as the reason for the Civil War and a leading example of his increasingly complicated and problematic racial politics. Here Whitman’s speaker addresses an aged woman who has experienced enslavement throughout her life, and now is looking at the possibility of freedom just as her life is approaching its conclusion. Whitman imagines her as a kind of mythical figure, who transcends ordinary human categories: WHO are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human, With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet? Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?  (451)

The description of the woman as “hardly human” has rightly concerned and frustrated Whitman’s readers, as it appears to be a retreat from the affirmations of human equality that appear so frequently in his earlier poetry. The fact that this phrase follows immediately after the words “so ancient,” however, suggests that it is not her race that is being mentioned so much as the idea that her age moves her beyond the standard sphere of human experience. She has lived and seen so much that she can be representative of more than just one individual’s lifetime of experience. The speaker reveals that he is a soldier in William Tecumseh Sherman’s army during his march toward the sea, and he reports the woman’s

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account of her life, using the metonym “Ethiopia,” frequently applied to Africans at large in the nineteenth century, to suggest that she can speak for a century’s collective experience of enslavement in the Carolinas: (’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines, Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me, As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.) Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.  (451)

The woman is now over a hundred years old and still remembers being abducted from Africa as a child. She is compelled to bear witness to her experience, even as she sees the promise of the army that is destroying the system that enslaved her. The shift in poetic style is striking. She is represented as speaking in a creole of sorts, but she is also speaking evocative poetry in a voice that is distinct from that of the soldier who is narrating the poem. The soldier seems genuinely shaken by this encounter: No further does she say, but lingering all the day, Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye, And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by. What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?  (452)

The soldier’s reverie here confronts the enormity of what this woman has experienced: he is not able fully to process the length of her life or the changes that she has seen, but he does recognize that she has challenged him in a way that must alter the way that he understands the world. The description of her “high-borne turban’d head,” like so many other moments in Whitman’s poetry, calls attention to the inherent dignity of a person who has faced great humiliation in her life. If there seems to be a gap between what the speaker sees and what he can understand, that gap seems to be part of what Whitman tries to acknowledge in the poem. Whitman’s impulses toward racial egalitarianism can also be seen in some of his later poetry that appearedat a stage when his stated opinions had moved in a less egalitarian direction. In “Passage to India,” Whitman wrote Passage O soul to India! Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

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Not you alone proud truths of the world, Nor you alone ye facts of modern science, But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables, The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams, The deep diving bibles and legends, The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions; O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun! O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold! Towers of fables immortal fashion’d from mortal dreams! You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest! You too with joy I sing.  (531)

Notably, Whitman is committed here to an ideal of human interconnection in which Asia and Africa are viewed as older siblings of Europe and the Americas. This idea holds within it the seeds of some condescension, in that it suggests, like the notion of the westward movement of empire that appears in early modern poetry about the Americas, that time has moved on past these older civilizations, but it also emphasizes that a piety of sorts is owed by the people of Europe to those of Asia and Africa. Passage to India! Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. A worship new I sing, You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours, You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours, You, not for trade or transportation only, But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.  (532)

Here, at a later stage in his career than in most of his more frequently taught poems, Whitman finds it crucial to acknowledge that the interconnection of human societies is essential to his vision of not just humanity, but the entire cosmos. He offers technology as a means of bringing people together, but this is in service of his understanding that human dignity is dependent on equality across the dividing lines of race, nation, and religion.

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“Far down the depth of a thousand years”: Herman Melville and the Teleology of Emancipation Like Whitman, Melville cannot be regarded as a thorough-going abolitionist. Indeed, Melville’s racial politics in the post–Civil War period have been subjected to not always flattering scrutiny as a result of his ambivalent Prose Supplement to Battle-Pieces (1866), his collection of Civil War poetry. We might even question whether Melville belongs in a volume on antislavery poetry, given his oblique treatment of slavery in BattlePieces. Nonetheless, Melville demonstrated not just antislavery views but also views supportive of broad racial equality across his career, and his poetry sheds light on the complicated racial politics of white writers who opposed slavery but did not necessarily label themselves as abolitionists. The complexities of Melville’s response to slavery have been probed usefully over the years, notably in Carolyn Karcher’s Shadow over the Promised Land (1979), Michael Paul Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy (1979), Robert K. Wallace’s Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (2005), Brian R. Pellar’s Moby Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory (2017), John Bryant’s Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (2021), and Samuel Otter’s and Robert S. Levine’s Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (2008). Melville’s career as a writer of prose fiction includes numerous discussions of race and slavery. In his first published novel, Typee, Melville included sharp criticisms of missionaries in the Marquesas and Hawaii, denouncing the way in which the ostensible goal of converting nonChristian islanders to Christianity could serve as a cover for a variety of enslavement. Notably, Melville’s remarks in Typee engage critically with the idea of slavery as a form of evangelism: one of the justifications for slavery in the American South was that it allowed enslaved people to encounter the Christian gospel. Thus, even though the following passage is explicitly about imperialism in the Pacific rather than chattel slavery in North America, it also reflects on one of the central justifications for slavery put forward by US Protestants, and it offers a withering rejoinder to this justification: But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one half of their labours, why does their modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?—Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces, and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes! (Melville, Typee, 255)

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The passage frames its criticism of missionary colonialism directly through antislavery language: it is wrong for people to be “civilized into draughthorses; and evangelized into beasts of burden” precisely because such behavior defaces a shared humanity. Melville’s career would be shaped consistently by a rejection of any failure to acknowledge shared humanity across racial, religious, or class grounds. Melville’s review of Francis Parkman offered a similar antiracist judgment to the one found in Typee, and it is still more explicit about the importance Melville placed on seeing the human race as a unified whole, fundamentally equal in dignity and worth: We are all of us—Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, and Indians—sprung from one head, and made in one image. And if we regret this brotherhood now, we shall be forced to join hands hereafter. A misfortune is not a fault; and good luck is not meritorious. The savage is born a savage; and the civilized being but inherits his civilization, nothing more. Let us not disdain, then, but pity. And wherever we recognise the image of God, let us reverence it, though it hung from the gallows. (Melville, Piazza Tales, 231)

Human beings, whether European or Asian, African or North American, are joined in a fundamental sort of brotherhood, Melville contends. And although Melville was never distinguished by firm Christian orthodoxy in his religious beliefs, he uses the Christian doctrine of the incarnation here to support this idea of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. The concluding line of the passage is particularly telling in relation to Melville’s later work: the image of a God who is hanging is of course central to Christianity via the crucifixion of Christ. Melville takes this conventional image and reframes it, replacing the cross on which Jesus was crucified with the gallows upon which nineteenth-century murderers and mutineers were hanged. This conflation of cross and gallows would recur at the end of Melville’s life in Billy Budd, and it hovers in the background of his Civil War poem “The Portent,” which depicts the hanged body of John Brown. Melville did not embrace in that poem the absolute identification of Brown’s gallows with Christ’s cross that appeared in the public rhetoric of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (even, less predictably, the young Louisa May Alcott), but the reference to Brown’s death as a crucifixion of sorts is certainly visible in the poem, as we can see below. In Mardi, Melville’s second novel, the issue of slavery is repeatedly and forcefully addressed, notably in the lightly veiled depiction of John C. Calhoun via the despicable Nulli, and the acknowledgment that Vivenza, which stands in for the United States in Mardi, excepts “the tribe of Hammo” from its supposed commitments to freedom and equality

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(Melville, Mardi 513). Melville also makes use in Mardi of the connection between Puritan protest against an established church as a model for resisting slavery that informs Whittier’s, Lowell’s, and Barrett Browning’s poetry when he writes “Your ancient pilgrims fathered your liberty; and your wild woods harbored the nursling. For the state that today is made up of slaves, cannot tomorrow transmute her bond into free; though lawlessness may transform them into brutes” (528). Melville here suggests that New England’s early history of resistance to tyranny will provide the institutional support that is ultimately needed for an end to slavery. Within Battle-Pieces itself, the prose Supplement that Melville appended after the poems in the volume can shift between condemnation of slavery and a tendency toward conciliation of the defeated south. At its worst, the Supplement can seem to suggest that matters of racial justice should be overlooked in favor of sectional reconciliation, but it also includes frank acknowledgments of the destructiveness of slavery to any concept of human freedom or dignity and the fact that it was precisely for this destruction of human dignity that the South fought in the war. Much of the ambivalence of the Supplement can be attributed to the fact that Melville was both appalled by slavery and, like Whittier and the Quakers, strongly pacifist in his impulses relative to warfare (see my discussion of this matter in the Melville chapter of Cody Marrs’s American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877). Perhaps the passage that best captures the movement in Melville’s thought on the war between pacifism and antislavery and antiracist impulses appears in the paragraphs in which he reflects on the relative bravery of the soldiers and people of the warring sides in the United States Civil War: The clouds of heroes who battled for the Union it is needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people. It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.

The blacks, in their infant pupilage to freedom, appeal to the sympathies of every humane mind. The paternal guardianship which for the interval government exercises over them was prompted equally by duty and benevolence. Yet such kindliness should not be allowed to exclude

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kindliness to communities who stand nearer to us in nature. For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety. Effective benignity, like the Nile, is not narrow in its bounty, and true policy is always broad. To be sure, it is vain to seek to glide, with moulded words, over the difficulties of the situation. Wherefore in a clear sky do we still turn our eyes toward the South, as the Neapolitan, months after the eruption, turns his toward Vesuvius? Do we dread lest the repose may be deceptive? In the recent convulsion has the crater but shifted? Let us revere that sacred uncertainty which forever impends over men and nations. Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall. But we should remember that emancipation was accomplished not by deliberate legislation; only through agonized violence could so mighty a result be effected. (Melville, Published Poems, 185–86)

I quote this passage at length because there is a great deal to unpack here: Melville states his abhorrence for the “atheistical iniquity” of slavery, and he acknowledges what at times it has seemed hard for twenty-first century Americans to admit: that the “implied aim” of the Southern side of the war was an “empire based on the systematic degradation of man.” The other side of this passage, which is less comforting to those of us who see an antiracist thread uniting Melville’s career, is his suggestion that Southern whites are “nearer us in nature” than the recently freed Black population, which reads a reflection of a broader tendency on the part of antislavery Northerners to fall short of true racial egalitarianism once chattel slavery had been abolished. A third twist is that as part of these cautionary remarks, Melville also acknowledges the necessity of the war itself: without the “agonized violence” of the war, the violence of slavery could not have been confronted. Melville thus emerges as a poet of impulses that we might call antiracist that are attenuated by a tendency toward prioritizing reconciliation among white people over farther-reaching racial justice. Both sets of impulses are shaped by Melville’s explicit sense that emancipation was only achieved through the “agonized violence” of the war, and thus such violence, however painful, was necessary and justified in order to combat the prospect of “the systematic degradation of man.” Three of Melville’s poems that touch especially directly on the importance of emancipation are “Formerly a Slave,” “The Swamp Angel,” and “Lee in the Capitol,” which I have discussed at more length in “Melville’s Reconstructions” (2015), but which merit further attention here. Perhaps Melville’s most touching evocation of the emancipation that he saw as the

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central legacy of the war appears in his poem “‘Formerly a Slave.’” The poem is an ekphrastic piece reflecting on Elihu Vedder’s painting “Jane Jackson, Formerly a Slave,” and it conveys the poignancy of a life lived in slavery and ending with hope for a brighter future. The speaker in the poem gazes upon Jane Jackson’s face in Elihu Vedder’s painting, and reflects on what he sees there: The sufferance of her race is shown, And retrospect of life, Which now too late deliverance dawns upon; Yet is she not at strife.  (Melville, Published Poems, 115)

This opening stanza offers readers a vision of a woman who can stand as a representative for the suffering experienced by Black people under slavery: she is nearing death, and her whole life has been spent as an enslaved person. Hinted at but unstated are all the things that her emancipation is “too late” for: too late for her to enjoy childhood, or adolescence, or education, or love, or marriage, or motherhood, or the growth of her children, or the arrival of grandchildren, too late for her, that is, to have a life that in any way resembles that of a free person. Emancipation is too late for her to enjoy its fruits. The speaker realizes that the grounds for bitterness and internal conflict for Jane Jackson are immense. The concluding line of the stanza, “Yet she is not at strife” should be read as a statement of amazement at Jackson’s resilience, akin to Melville’s exclamation in Sketch VIII of “The Encantadas”: “Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not the laureled victor, but in this defeated one.” (Melville, Piazza Tales, 157) If Jane Jackson has been deprived of the satisfactions of parenthood, she is still able to look with confidence toward a future in which her posterity flourishes. Her strength is derived in part from what she can intuit about her descendants’ future: Her children’s children they shall know The good withheld from her; And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer— In spirit she sees the stir. Far down the depth of thousand years, And marks the revel shine; Her dusky face is lit with sober light, Sibylline, yet benign.  (Melville, Published Poems, 115)

These stanzas capture the sense that Jane Jackson’s experience is part of a longer historical arc than one human life can compass. Jane Jackson’s status as a sibylline figure resembles that of the woman Whitman describes in

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“Ethiopia Saluting the Colours,” but she is also humanized in a way that Whitman’s oracle is not. Melville’s representations of blackness become especially compelling in his poem “The Swamp Angel,” which does not have an African American character, but does engage with the ways in which African Americans were racialized at the time of the Civil War. The poem is addressed to a weapon, but in a way that humanizes it: There is a coal-black Angel With a thick Afric lip, And he dwells (like the hunted and harried) In a swamp where the green frogs dip. But his face is against a City Which is over a bay of the sea, And he breathes with a breath that is blastment, And dooms by a far decree.  (Melville, Published Poems, 78)

The opening stanza describes the Parrott gun, used in the siege of Charleston, and its effectiveness as a weapon during the battle for Charleston. Melville uses his discussion of the weapon as a way of talking about how racialization worked in the antebellum and Civil War era United States, showing that anxieties about slave rebellions and the racism that these anxieties reinforced in the antebellum South had been met with a kind of poetic justice. For generations enslaved people had been terrorized by their masters, and now the white inhabitants of Charleston were terrified by the bombardment they were experiencing as part of the war. Those who had fled from slavery had risked death and torture when they escaped to the swamp, and now the “Swamp Angel” is pouring death back at the oppressors. Melville captures the terror of Charleston’s inhabitants in his poem: By night there is fear in the City, Through the darkness a star soareth on; There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith, Then the poise of a meteor lone— Lighting far the pale fright of the faces, And downward the coming is seen; Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc, And wails and shrieks between. It comes like the thief in the gloaming; It comes, and none may foretell The place of the coming—the glaring; They live in a sleepless spell That wizens, and withers, and whitens;

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It ages the young, and the bloom Of the maiden is ashes of roses— The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom. Swift is his messengers’ going, But slowly he saps their halls, As if by delay deluding. They move from their crumbling walls Farther and farther away; But the Angel sends after and after, By night with the flame of his ray— By night with the voice of his screaming— Sends after them, stone by stone, And farther walls fall, farther portals, And weed follows weed through the Town.  (79)

Every night is an experience of terror as a result of the firepower of the “Swamp Angel,” which can strike from distances that neither civilians nor soldiers in previous wars had experienced, and the inhabitants of Charleston were beginning to live with the horrors that civilians in cities under bombardment have lived with over the last century, in events like the London Blitz in the Second World War and the current bombardment of cities in Ukraine. Melville, like the Quaker Whittier, has considerable ambivalence about the practice of war, but like Lincoln in his Second Inaugural speech, he also recognizes that the suffering experienced by cities like Charleston during the war correspond to the suffering inflicted in their streets and market places through the slave system over decades and centuries. Melville turns to biblical language of judgment and divine wrath when he considers the plight of the city, which believed collectively that it could escape the consequences of its actions, and now was being force to suffer the consequences in full. His speaker asks: Is this the proud City? the scorner Which never would yield the ground? Which mocked at the coal-black Angel? The cup of despair goes round. Vainly she calls upon Michael (The white man’s seraph was he), For Michael has fled from his tower To the Angel over the sea. Who weeps for the woeful City Let him weep for our guilty kind;

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Who joys at her wild despairing— Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.  (79)

The conclusion highlights Melville’s ambivalence towards a war that he regards as just, but which he acknowledges is brutal: the tone of the earlier stanzas highlights the arrogance of the white population of Charleston and the depths of their despair with an alertness to irony that verges on mockery, and the final stanza provides an indication that Charleston’s current predicament may mirror a broader human tendency toward cruelty, selfishness, and exploitation. Weeping for Charleston meant acknowledging a broader human tendency to use others for profit, and the specific way in which this had manifested in large portions of the United States for decades or even centuries as cruelty and exploitation of Black people at the hands of white people who had proclaimed their devotion to liberty. The invocation of Christ the Forgiver at the end of the last stanza indicates that an easy denial of one’s own complicity in slavery because one is on the right side of the Civil War is morally insufficient, and it points toward the rebuke of complicity that runs through so many of the poems discussed in this study, from Pierpont, to Whittier, to Barrett Browning, to Harper. Perhaps the poem that best captures Melville’s ambivalence toward the violence necessary to end slavery in the United States is his brief poem “The Portent,” which begins Battle-Pieces. Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! The cut is on the crown (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah! But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war.  (1)

As many critics have discussed, Melville offers John Brown here as a Christ figure, but as a deeply ironized and ambivalent version of Jesus on the cross. Ralph Waldo Emerson had endorsed the idea that Brown had “made the gallows glorious like the cross,” and Henry David Thoreau had reached across the eighteen centuries between Brown and Christ to

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discern “a chain that is not without its links.” In some ways, their Brown is also Melville’s, as Brown’s wounds appear as stigmata of sorts. Even the line “the cut is on the crown” seems to echo the torture of Jesus, who according to the accounts in the Gospels of his crucifixion was made to wear a crown of thorns. At the same time, Brown’s death does not seem to come with the promise of any resurrection. Compare Melville’s John Brown with his younger contemporary Louisa May Alcott’s vision of the antislavery crusader in her poem “With a Rose, That Bloomed on the day of John Brown’s Martyrdom”: In the long silence of the night, Nature’s benignant power Woke aspirations for the light Within the folded flower. Its presence and the gracious day Made summer in the room. But woman’s eyes shed tender dew On the little rose in bloom. Then blossomed forth a grander flower, In the wilderness of wrong. Untouched by Slavery’s bitter frost, A soul devout and strong. God-watched, that century plant uprose, Far shining through the gloom. Filling a nation with the breath Of a noble life in bloom.  (Alcott n.pag.)

Alcott’s version of Brown’s early life is the stuff of hagiography: she imagines him growing up in a benignant natural environment, trained by a mother who has shaped his moral intuitions. Here Brown is less the ambiguous symbol of violent upheaval that Melville finds and agonizes over than an emblem of a virtuous man whose conscience has been properly trained from his childhood. Once he has emerged into adulthood, John Brown’s childhood training is, for Alcott, transmuted into moral courage: A life so powerful in its truth, A nature so complete; It conquered ruler, judge and priest, And held them at its feet. Death seemed proud to take a soul So beautifully given, And the gallows only proved to him A stepping-stone to heaven. Each cheerful word, each valiant act,

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So simple, so sublime, Spoke to us through the reverent hush Which sanctified that time. That moment when the brave old man Went so serenely forth With footsteps whose unfaltering tread Re-echoed through the North. The sword he wielded for the right Turns to a victor’s palm; His memory sounds forever more, A spirit-stirring psalm. No breath of shame can touch his shield, Nor ages dim its shine; Living, he made life beautiful,— Dying, made death divine.  (Alcott n.pag.)

Here Brown is clearly not just a Christ figure, but an image of the nineteenth century Christ that Jaroslav Pelikan has described as the “poet of the spirit” (195). Alcott closes with a statement of the inadequacy of any monument to capture sufficiently Brown’s heroism: No monument of quarried stone, No eloquence of speech Can grave the lessons on the land His martyrdom will teach. No eulogy like his own words, With hero-spirit rife, “I truly serve the cause I love, By yielding up my life.”  (Alcott n.pag.)

Brown is unmistakably a hero in this poem, and Alcott views the “agonized violence,” to use Melville’s phrase, that proceeded from the war that followed his raid on Harper’s Ferry as the fulfillment of the cause he served in a fairly straightforward way, whereas for Melville the suffering caused by the war remains in sight even as he celebrates its final outcome. As with his poetry on the war, Melville’s poetry that begins to address Reconstruction, which I have discussed elsewhere, likewise includes both ambivalence about the violence needed to subdue Southern racist structures after the war and a strong impulse toward anti-racism. This combination can cause Melville to seem at times more conservative than other poets who are troubled by slavery, but at other times can make him seem prescient in rejecting racist hierarchies that could persist even among abolitionists. In “Lee in the Capitol,” perhaps the most explicitly Reconstruction-oriented of his poems, Melville offered a story

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through Robert E. Lee that emphasizes indirectly the ways in which race would need to be addressed in Reconstruction. As he is testifying before Congress, Lee offers this story: A story here may be applied: ‘In Moorish lands there lived a maid Brought to confess by vow the creed Of Christians. Fain would priests persuade That now she must approve by deed The faith she kept.  (Melville, Published Poems, 167,)

As I have discussed elsewhere, this story reworks the Southern narrative in a way that acknowledges the justice of the antislavery cause by calling for reconciliation using an African model: the Moorish maid is persecuted for her race and religion by European Christians, and she refuses to convert in order to maintain faith with her ancestors. On the one hand, Melville’s version of Lee is offering a parallel between forced religious conversion and what Lee regards as an excessively vigorous prosecution of Reconstruction; on the other, the example he uses, that of an African, Muslim woman who rejects conversion to Christianity by force, he acknowledges the force of the egalitarian values that drove the antislavery movement. If Melville’s antislavery and antiracist sympathies can seem submerged or ambivalent, they are also subtly and carefully crafted to call for a fundamental commitment to equality across race, religion, and nationality. Perhaps no poem by Melville is as indicative of his submerged connection to the antislavery tradition in poetry than “Misgivings,” one of the opening salvos in Battle-Pieces. Here Melville invokes directly one of the earliest bodies of antislavery poetry, that by William Cowper: When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills— The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. Nature’s dark side is heeded now— (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.  (3)

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Melville’s poem is largely concerned with the relationship between the natural world and the looming war, but right at the center of his poem is what multiple Melville scholars have identified as a direct reference to Cowper: “the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.” Melville’s structures his poem around a series of images of storms and of the power of nature to destroy human habitations and civilization, but he is also focused on the “storm we feel,” which is driven by the intense disconnection between the hope that America offers and the fact that slavery—“man’s foulest crime”—is a structural part of the nation’s present reality. Ultimately, Whitfield, Whitman, and Melville offer a response to slavery that will continue to resonate after the Civil War, in the form of the emigrationist and separatist impulses in Whitfield’s poetry, and reconciliationist strands in Whitman’s and Melville’s verse that can both frustrate admirers of their earlier radicalism and remind them that the driving impulse toward equality is present in the later work of both. The question posed by these poems is a crucial one: how will the moral clarity and courage that defined the battle against slavery persist, diminish, or mutate in the years following formal Emancipation? This question would drive the work of the major African American thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, even as it too often faded or was ignored in the writing of erstwhile abolitionists. W. E. B. DuBois would find that the challenge that James Russell Lowell posed in “The Present Crisis” continued to echo with uncanny prescience in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, and as a result, both his prose and his poetry continued to echo much of the structure and language of earlier antislavery verse, thus providing a powerful epilogue to the poetry examined in the preceding chapters.

Epilogue: W. E. B. DuBois and the Legacy of Antislavery Verse

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W. E. B. DuBois was looking for a title for the magazine of the NAACP, he found inspiration in James Russell Lowell’s 1844 poem “The Present Crisis,” settling on The Crisis as the title for the periodical. DuBois also used Lowell’s poem for an epigraph in The Souls of Black Folk. This epilogue explores how both African American spirituals and antislavery poetry helped to shape DuBois’s thought and his wideranging influence in American thought, and it considers the value of the recovery of antislavery verse in our own time. DuBois, one of the greatest stylists of non-fiction prose in American literary history, is not often remembered as a poet, but he was the author of a significant body of verse that continues to resonate today, even as his work as a critic has been crucial in placing the African American spiritual at the center of the literary history of the United States. Although DuBois can seem to be an exceptional figure who represents a foundation for later African American literature rather than appearing as an author in conversation with his predecessors, his work illustrates and acknowledges the degree to which it is rooted in earlier antislavery verse. In Darkwater, the volume of his work that most directly shows the influence of prewar antislavery verse, DuBois mixed prose and poetry, and the poetry bore eloquent and compressed witness to the complexities and moral challenges of the color line that he examined in his prose. In creating literary models to deal with the ongoing injustices faced by African Americans in the United States and to bear witness to the continuing ironies of American freedom and its reliance on unfreedom, DuBois drew heavily and explicitly on the existing tradition of antislavery poetry. In creating The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in November 1910, 45 years after the end of the US Civil War, and at the height of the post-Reconstruction lynching crisis, DuBois explicitly hearkened back to Lowell’s 1844 poem, “The Present Crisis.” In doing so, DuBois was actually acknowledging an existing tradition within the broader African American community of making Lowell’s poem a part of its own political and religious discourse. In 1890, one of the most resonant portions of “The Present Crisis” was adapted as a hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation,” with the tune “Ebenezer” by the Welsh composer Thomas J. Williams providing the musical accompaniment. The hymn appeared in a variety of hymnals, hen

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but it is notable that it was included in editions of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal, so using its stirring language as a model for The Crisis and as an epigraph in The Souls of Black Folk was not so much an act of antiquarian recovery as an adaptation of an existing public use of a poem that throughout its history has been invoked for public ends. A direct line appears between DuBois and James M. Whitfield in DuBois’s satirical verse and his parodies. Whitfield’s “America” offered a stunning rejoinder to the complacency masquerading as patriotism that could characterize nationalistic sentiments in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. DuBois’s adaptation of the same hymn to the world of Jim Crow extends the dissection of slavery’s ironies that appeared in Whitfield’s “America” and Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” to the failures of the post–Civil War republic to live up to the ideals of Lincoln and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which should have guaranteed equal citizenship for all Americans. DuBois begins with an epigraph that is clearly addressed to African American readers: Of course you have faced the dilemma: it is announced, they all smirk and rise. If they are ultra, they remove their hats and look ecstatic; then they look at you. What shall you do? Noblesse oblige; you cannot be boorish, or ungracious; and too, after all it is your country and you do love its ideals if not all of its realities. Now, then, I have thought of a way out: Arise, gracefully remove your hat, and tilt your head. Then sing as follows, powerfully and with deep unction. They’ll hardly note the little changes and their feelings and your conscience will thus be saved: (DuBois, “My Country” n.pag.)

Here DuBois confronts the fact that an honest person cannot sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” with a clear conscience in the early twentieth century any more than in the 1850s. By providing an alternative script for the hymn, DuBois offers a way of participating in the nation’s public civic life without pretending that all is well. Following his tongue in cheek introduction, DuBois offers alternative lyrics to a song that most Americans had been used to singing since childhood: My country tis of thee, Late land of slavery, Of thee I sing. Land where my father’s pride Slept where my mother died, From every mountain side Let freedom ring!  (DuBois, “My Country” n.pag.)

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Just as Whitfield found the contrast between the ideals in this popular patriotic hymn and the reality of American slavery to be rich with irony in the 1850s, DuBois found the contrast between simple-minded patriotic celebration and the gap in reality between white and Black experience to highlight the unfinished nature of the Civil War and the American project at large. When “Sweet land of liberty” becomes “Late land of slavery,” the prosody of the original is undisturbed, but the complex relationship between freedom and slavery in the United States becomes clearer: the nation is the “late land” of slavery because of Emancipation, but slavery also has deep roots in the nation’s very identity that can be ignored only at the cost of bad faith and injustice. Importantly, the concluding “Let freedom ring!” becomes not so much a sentimental commonplace, as in the original hymn, but rather a bracing challenge, similar to that which Martin Luther King, Jr. would pose to the nation in his speech in Washington DC in the National Mall in 1963. DuBois preserves the subtle tension between the hymn most Americans knew and the hymn that could honestly be sung at the turn of the twentieth century in the second stanza: My country ’tis of thee Land of the slave set free, Thy fame I love. I love thy rocks and rills And o’er thy hate which chills, My heart with purpose thrills, To rise above.  (DuBois, “My Country” n.pag.)

Here again, the hymn becomes a challenge rather than a self-satisfied celebration. The United State has triumphed over its own failings through the end of slavery, and there is much reason for pride in the “fame” that the nation has achieved through the accomplishment of Emancipation. More grimly, however, the country’s natural beauty, its “rocks and rills” are still linked to “thy hate which chills,” as the end of legal chattel slavery has not meant the end of bigotry and racial prejudice. DuBois’s next stanza reminds his readers that there is still much to mourn rather than celebrate in America’s present. His version of the song exhorts its listeners: Let laments swell the breeze And wring from all the trees Sweet freedom’s song. Let laggard tongues awake, Let all who hear partake, Let Southern silence quake, The sound prolong.  (DuBois, “My Country” n.pag.)

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“Sweet freedom’s song” here is rendered possible by laments that “swell the breeze,” replacing the more neutral “music” of the original. Without a recognition of the nation’s failings, no real reform is possible, and repentance and lamentation will be the necessary path to redemption. A central point here, as in the previous stanza, is that the end of slavery is only the first step toward a more just nation, and that self-satisfaction can be deadly. The conclusion to DuBois’s version of the song feels earned to a greater degree than that of the original. When he, in keeping with the original hymn, identifies “Our father’s God” as the “Author of Liberty,” he does so with an explicit acknowledgement of his nation’s violations of the principles of liberty, and this is reflected in his changes later in the song: Our fathers’ God to thee Author of Liberty, To thee we sing Soon may our land be bright, With Freedom’s happy light Protect us by Thy might, Great God our King.  (DuBois, “My Country” n.pag.)

Throughout, DuBois maintains a prophetic tone that shows that liberty is an aspiration to be pursued rather than a cause for self-congratulation. The expression “Soon may our land be bright / With Freedom’s happy light” is a subtle but important transformation. That DuBois parodies a hymn in a way that both affirms its ideals and challenges the nation’s shortcomings provides an important element of continuity with earlier antislavery writing, and it points toward the wider way in which DuBois marries the rhetoric of religious belief to a nonsectarian pursuit of justice. Throughout the poems that he intersperses with prose pieces in Darkwater, DuBois echoes the tradition in earlier antislavery poetry of using the language of faith to underwrite the pursuit of justice. DuBois’s greatest poem in the tradition of bearing witness to the injustices of racism against the backdrop of egalitarian ideals appears in his eloquent “A Litany at Atlanta.” This poem shows both why DuBois valued and delighted in the development of a vigorous African American aesthetic and intellectual culture in Atlanta and also saw the city as a representative of the persistent inequalities in American life. A litany is a liturgical prayer, meant to be joined by a full congregation, and typically constitutes a collective acknowledgment of guilt accompanied by prayers for forgiveness, redemption, and succor. As with his adaptation of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” here DuBois takes this liturgical form

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and turns it into a vessel for what is both an indictment of his nation’s historical wrongs and an urgent call for change and, in theological terms, repentance. DuBois’s poem echoes the language of the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, in that it actively calls upon God to judge those who have committed evil deeds. His collective we, which corresponds to the early twentieth-century Black community in Atlanta, acknowledges the human frailty of the speakers, but also calls directly on God to punish those who violate basic human dignity: We are not better than our fellows, Lord, we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed: curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home. Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 14)

The plea for mercy that bookends this stanza is accompanied by an argument that there are some deeds that are worthy of profound judgment, of cursing, and the speaker starts by acknowledging that these deeds occur within the community as well as outside it. Of profound concern to the speaker is the broader context for these misdeeds, however, as he suggests that the “deviltry” within his community is shaped by broader injustices in the society of the Jim Crow South and in the United States at large. The speaker queries: And yet whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed them in crime and fed them on in-justice? Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime, and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity? Thou knowest, good God!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 14)

The questions that the speaker proposes are not answered directly, but the implication is clear: a society that is barely more than a generation removed from slavery at the time of DuBois’s writing, and that has continued patterns of social and sexual injustice, would be a source of ongoing unsettlement and a root cause of violence in any society, and DuBois rejects the idea that self-examination and self-critique is only required of him and his community: he is prepared to look inward, but the story of race and slavery in the United States requires that in order to have an honest accounting, he look outward as well. In addition to the Psalms, DuBois calls upon the language of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, with phrases like “waxed fat and rich on public iniquity” bringing up to date the woes pronounced by prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos in

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the books of prophecy associated with their names. The rhythms of the language are drawn from the King James Bible. DuBois turns to a more traditional form of the litany, pleas for deliverance from sin, in the stanza that follows: From lust of body and lust of blood, Great God, deliver us! From lust of power and lust of gold, Great God, deliver us! From the leagued lying of despot and of brute, Great God, deliver us!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 15)

The traditional plea for deliverance from what 1 John in the King James translation would call the “lust of the flesh,” a personal, even intimate sin, becomes tied to more social, collective sins. “Lust of power and lust of gold” speak to economic greed and exploitation, and the “leagued lying of despot and of brute” moves outside the personal sphere to consider the way in which a broader society functions. This form of lying brings together manipulative and deceptive practices by those in power with a willingness to believe and propagate lies on the part of the masses. DuBois notes here that mobs can be driven by the lies told by those in power, and that their violent actions can reinforce the despotism that exploits them as well as their victims. DuBois then turns to narrating the race riots of 1906, in which African Americans were massacred in Atlanta, which had provided the occasion for his poem: A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance! Bend Us Thine ear, O Lord!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 15)

Readers familiar with antislavery poetry will recognize moves here that were made in the poetry protesting the Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s. Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely Thou too art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing? Ah! Christ of all the Pities! (DuBois, Darkwater, 15)

DuBois’s separation of Christ from whiteness is especially important here. A large portion of what underlies the racist violence of the Atlanta riots is

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an identification of whiteness with virtue, and DuBois makes a Christ of color who is an alternative to the association of whiteness with divinity. This divorce of divinity from whiteness is intensified in the lines that follow, which identify the deity to whom DuBois appeals as connected to the ancestors of Black Atlantans: Forgive the thought! Forgive these wild, blasphemous words. Thou art still the God of our black fathers, and in Thy soul’s soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night. But whisper—speak—call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the path. Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward, and without, the liar. Whither? To death? Amen! Welcome dark sleep!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 16)

DuBois is concerned particularly with the question of theodicy here: what does the persistent violence against Black people in Atlanta say, not just about the self-image of the United States, but about the justice of the Christian deity. DuBois concludes: Lord, we have done these pleading, wavering words. We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord! We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little children. We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord! Our voices sink in silence and in night. Hear us, good Lord! In night, O God of a godless land! Amen! In silence, O Silent God. Selah!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 16)

DuBois concludes his litany with the language of the Hebrew Psalms, in a way that is reminiscent both of Longfellow’s vignette of the enslaved man who sings the Psalms at midnight and of the broader tendency in the African American church to identify with the suffering of the Children of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. DuBois also extends the tendency of

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nineteenth-century American literature, from Melville’s Moby Dick and Douglass’s narratives to Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, to ask pressing questions about divine justice. The Psalms on which DuBois draws often pose uncomfortable questions for the deity, and DuBois’s ending offers a modern update in which the speaker cries out to a silent God when divine silence seems an unacceptable answer to the injustices of the early-twentieth-century world. DuBois’s attempt to extract answers from a silent deity continues throughout the poems in Darkwater, reaching a crescendo of sorts in “The Prayers of God.” Set against the backdrop of the First World War, the poem brings together the sometimes conflicting impulses toward pacifism and antiracism that appear in antislavery poetry. Here there is no conflict because DuBois regards the First World War as the outcome of colonialism, with its racist dominance of non-European people by Europeans. DuBois takes on the voice of a white American who has suddenly come to realize his own moral responsibility for the violence and destruction in the world. The connection with racism and slavery in the United States becomes explicit when the speaker reflects on his role in a lynching: Forgive; I did not know. Blood? Is it wet with blood? ’Tis from my brother’s hands. (I know; his hands are mine.) It flowed for Thee, O Lord. War? Not so; not war— Dominion, Lord, and over black, not white; Black, brown, and fawn, And not Thy Chosen Brood, O God, We murdered.  (DuBois, Darkwater, 146–47)

The speaker has begun by claiming that the violence of colonialism is justified, and he distinguishes the war between (white) European powers from the longer wars associated with colonialism by suggesting that Empire is part of the divine plan. He offers a version of colonial history that is at once revealing and self-justifying: To build Thy Kingdom, To drape our wives and little ones, And set their souls a-glitter— For this we killed these lesser breeds And civilized their dead, Raping red rubber, diamonds, cocoa, gold! For this, too, once, and in Thy Name, I lynched a Nigger—

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(He raved and writhed, I heard him cry, I felt the life-light leap and lie, I saw him crackle there, on high, I watched him wither!) Thou? Thee? I lynched Thee?  (DuBois, Darkwater, 147)

DuBois’s speaker’s realization that in lynching a Black man he has actually lynched Christ himself provides a powerful rebuttal to the underlying logic of both imperialism and Jim Crow, and follows the anti-lynching journalism of Ida B. Wells and prefigures poems like “Christ in Alabama” and “Song for a Dark Girl,” by Langston Hughes, which also present lynching as a form of crucifixion. The conclusion of this poem provides a still more profound turn, as the speaker experiences a conversion as a result of his realization that he has himself crucified Christ in the form of the Black man whom he has lynched, and he then begins to consider what his role and his responsibility may be. DuBois’s speaker asks: Is this Thy Crucifixion, God, And not that funny, little cross, With vinegar and thorns? Is this Thy kingdom here, not there, This stone and stucco drift of dreams? Help! I sense that low and awful cry— Who cries? Who weeps? With silent sob that rends and tears— Can God sob?  (DuBois, Darkwater, 147–48)

This image, that of a God who weeps and sobs and whose kingdom is in this world rather than the next, constitutes a substantial re-envisioning of the Christian deity as conventionally imagined. This is not the impassible deity of traditional theology, whose perfection precludes the experience of emotion, but rather a human God who can weep with a broken world, and who requires assistance in order to right its wrongs. DuBois then moves to an even more startling possibility: that this feeling, human deity who is vulnerable enough to require human aid in managing and changing the world, may actually pray—and that the addressee for those prayers can be humans themselves. DuBois’s speaker asks:

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Who prays? I hear strong prayers throng by, Like mighty winds on dusky moors— Can God pray? Prayest Thou, Lord, and to me? Thou needest me? Thou needest me? Thou needest me? Poor, wounded soul! Of this I never dreamed. I thought— Courage, God, I come!  (DuBois, Darkwater, 148)

Remarkably, DuBois envisions in these closing lines a deity who is pleading with humanity to do their part for the redemption of the world. DuBois’s conclusion here is theologically rich as well as politically provocative. He spends much of his poem making the case for linkages among a range of oppressive behaviors—slavery, colonialism and imperialism, lynching and segregation—and then establishing that they constitute grave crimes against the Christian faith and a sacrilegious desecration of the divine image. In the conclusion, he shows the violent speaker who has been guilty of lynching in a state of repentance, and what the repentant sinner perceives is that even as he needs God’s forgiveness, so God also needs him. The “prayers of God” from the title are revealed to also be prayers from God: the deity is imploring humans for their aid in restoring, or perhaps creating for the first time, justice in the world. The triple repetition of “thou needest me” offers a powerful affirmation that humans cannot merely put the possibility of a better, more humane and just, future off on a distant God, but must actively contribute to creating a more just world. This approach mirrors the “process theology” of Alfred North Whitehead, but it also captures something of the implicit theology of much antislavery poetry, where a backward-looking jeremiad works only in the service of a call to create a better world that has not existed before. Here, Lowell’s “present valor” is the subject not just of moral admonition, but of a touching divine plea on behalf of the entire cosmos.

* * * This volume addresses the issue of “why antislavery poetry matters now,” in its title, and I approach it both as an assertion and as a question. It is surely not obvious that poetry that is so much grounded in a specific debate at a specific historical and political moment is still relevant at a time when the letter of its arguments is now taken for granted even by those who would broadly dismiss the underlying spirit of these arguments. Certainly the question of whether racialized chattel slavery in

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morally permissible has been resolved quite decisively, in that there is no constituency that seriously argues in its favor in the twenty-first-century United States. At the same time, the resonances that the poems discussed in this volume generate with regard to questions of human equality, dignity, and the relative weight of these concepts with those of profit and property remain very much alive, and many questions to which the poetry of the authors discussed here would seem to speak remain topics of energetic debate. Moreover, as Andrew Delbanco noted in the title essay in The Abolitionist Imagination, the antislavery movement can be invoked on both sides of contentious issues: relative to abortion, opponents of abortion rights present themselves as heirs to the abolition movement in that they regard themselves as protecting innocent life (Delbanco, 48–50). Supporters of abortion rights, meanwhile, also regard themselves as heirs to the antislavery movement, in that they see forced pregnancy as a direct corollary of slavery’s denial of an individual’s control over her own body. To be clear, the resolution to these sorts of debates will not come from a more elegant close reading of antislavery verse from the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, reading these poems a century and a half after they were written brings us into contact with a world of moral reasoning and advocacy that is, as Thoreau would put it, “not without its links” to our present crises. If reading antislavery poetry does not teach us exactly how the moral controversies of our time should be resolved, it does offer a method of thinking through them, where humility and inquisitiveness are not ruled out by moral fervor, and do not themselves require a detached skepticism in relation to one’s deepest moral intuitions. The poets discussed in this book, white and Black, male and female, obscure and famous, all offer a picture of poetry in the service of a commitment to the good and the just. This does not mean that they speak with a unified voice: James Montgomery finds the British Empire’s banning of slavery and the British navy’s interventions against the slave trade to be a justification for that empire’s existence, whereas there is substantial skepticism of empire in later verse that becomes manifest in DuBois’s diagnosis of a close tie between European imperialism and other forms of racial injustice like slavery and lynching. Longfellow offers a volume of poems on slavery that, if they are meant to stir the conscience, are also calculated to avoid controversy, while Pierpont and Whittier are much more confrontational. Horton writes from inside the slave system itself, and so has to hedge his bets in a way that the free-born James Monroe Whitfield does not. Frances E. W. Harper finds temperance and antislavery to be closely connected, and she also makes connections between women’s equality and racial equality that are less apparent in many other poets’ work. Elizabeth Barrett Browning offers a scathing critique of the legacy of New England’s

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Puritan settlers, while Whittier and Lowell make the Puritans the source of antislavery virtues. The driving force in Lowell’s Janus-faced vision in particular is that he seeks to find values in the pat that can be extended into the present: that is, if in the early history of British North America and attenuated acknowledgment of the freedom of conscience appears, then in the present of 1844, that acknowledgment must not just persist, but must grow to incorporate a broader and more principled commitment to freedom of conscience. If in the Declaration of Independence Liberty and Equality are acknowledged as essential human goods, then that acknowledgment must be allowed to reach its organic fulfillment in the extension of liberty and equality to all people, not just privileged property owners or people of European descent. If the Hebrew Bible calls for a just nation to respect the stranger in its borders and if Jesus suggests in Matthew 25 that doing justice to the “least of these my brethren” is a critical dividing line between salvation and damnation, then bigotry on the basis of race and national origin, however frequently practiced by Christian nations, must ultimately be ruled out. This is what unifies the writers discussed in the preceding pages, from Montgomery to DuBois, with the challenges we face in our own times. Whether in relation to racial justice in policing, the plight of immigrants and refugees at the US/Mexico border, or the maintenance of democracy at a time when it is under extraordinary pressure, the moral and aesthetic commitment to “present valor” of antislavery poets, Black and white, continues to resonate in the United States and around the world.

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Index Abel, 122 abolitionism, 5–16, 19–20, 25, 27, 29, 39, 44, 61, 73, 82–89, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107, 124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 138, 149, 152, 187, 189, 194, 225, 226, 227, 240, 248, 253, 258, 267, 269, 280 Adams, John Quincy, 227, 230, 231, 232, 234 Africa, 23, 26, 28, 29, 33, 38, 40–41, 43, 48, 90–91, 93, 98, 105, 108, 110, 115, 119, 120, 122–23, 134– 36, 138–39, 188, 233, 256–57 African Americans, 3–6, 8–11, 14, 15, 17, 21, 28, 37, 58, 59, 61, 105, 106, 107, 115, 116, 134–36, 138–39, 148, 149, 194, 200, 205, 214, 224, 225, 226, 227, 232, 237, 240, 244, 246, 263, 268–69, 270–71, 273, 275, 276 Africans, 26–27, 32–34, 35–36, 38–41, 43, 44, 59, 63, 75, 84, 95, 102, 108, 114, 116, 119, 121–23, 134–36, 138–39, 178, 205, 256, 259 Alcott, Louisa May, 259, 266–67 Almeida, Joselyn M., 20 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 204 American Colonization Society, 7, 16, 105, 107, 134 American Missionary Association (AMA), 204 American Revolution, 63, 64, 71, 81, 144, 148, 222, 233, 234, 235, 236, 242, 250 Anabaptists, 20, 127, 166 Anti-Slavery Harp, The, 152–53 Apess, William, 32, 40, 114, 116

Asia, 26, 75, 108, 110, 256, 257, 259 Auden, W. H., 2 Baldwin, James, 224 ballad meter, 63, 90, 92, 94, 99, 108, 111, 143, 199, 220, 246 Barrett, Faith, 61 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 6, 17, 153, 154, 169–86 Basker, James G., 6–7, 51 Behn, Aphra, 21 Bell, John Frederick, 10 Bender, Thomas, 16 Benezet, Anthony, 37, 128 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 144, 165, 203 Bible, The, 5, 46, 73, 93, 102, 130, 131, 140, 142, 145, 191, 201, 202, 211, 212, 221, 257, 274, 275, 276, 281 Bicknell, John, 21 Birney, James G., 84 Blake, William, 77, 155, 253 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 16, 194 Brown, John, 11, 13, 126, 167, 259, 265, 266 Brown, William Wells, 6, 15, 16, 17, 25, 91, 102, 105, 148, 149–53 Bryant, John, 24, 258 Bryant, William Cullen, 79 Buell, Lawrence, 194 Bunker Hill, 77 Burns, Anthony, 249 Burns, Robert, 128 Cain, 122 Calhoun, Charles C., 88 Calhoun, John C., 130, 259 Canaan, 122, 133, 134, 142, 146 Canada, 80 Carey, Brycchan, 28

292 I  ndex Caribbean, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 32, 33, 39, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 88, 91, 106, 138, 240, 241 Carpenter, George Rice, 126 Cass, Lewis, 248 Catholicism, 28, 166, 192 Channing, William Ellery, 89, 103, 168 Chapman, Maria Weston, 154 Child, Lydia Maria, 248 Christianity, 10, 28, 32, 41, 42, 44, 61, 74, 75, 90, 94, 118, 119, 127, 137, 141, 157, 181, 187, 188, 192, 201, 204, 238, 258, 259, 268 Cinque, 227–30, 232 Civil War (US), 2, 4, 15, 17, 18, 29, 70, 87, 107, 126, 130, 194, 206, 215, 216, 217, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 238, 240, 241, 243, 246, 248, 255, 258, 259, 260, 263, 265, 269, 270, 271, 272 Cohen, Laura Langer, 15 Cohen, Michael C., 8, 126, 149 Coleman, Dawn, 187 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 64 Colored American, The, 71 Columbus, Christopher, 30, 31, 32, 51 Cone, James H., 168, 193, 215 Congregationalism, 106 Constitution, The, 185, 235, 260, 271 Cooper, Anna Julia, 10 Cooper, James Fenimore, 42 Cowper, William, 7, 19, 22–25, 268, 269 Crane, Gregg S., 12 Cyclops, 162 Davis, David Brion, 13, 27 Day, Thomas, 21 Declaration of Independence, The, 64, 71, 233, 234, 244, 281 Delany, Martin R., 225, 227 Delbanco, Andrew, 12–15, 280 Dickinson, Emily, 61, 104 Douglass, Frederick, 9, 10, 13, 15, 25, 27, 41, 69, 76, 77, 85, 95, 96, 102, 123, 140, 147, 150, 178,

207, 212, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 227, 236, 241, 242, 244, 245, 250, 258, 271, 277, 280 Drake, Sir Francis, 35 Duberman, Martin, 155 DuBois, W. E. B., 3, 6, 18, 95, 96, 102, 218, 222, 226, 227, 269, 270–81 Earle, William, 39 Eden, 93, 100, 122 Egypt, 95, 96, 115, 116, 188, 214, 215, 239 Ellis, Samuel, 20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 73, 223, 259, 265 emigration, 105, 225, 227 Episcopalians, 106, 192 Equiano, Olaudah, 22, 36, 37, 121 Erben, Patrick, 42, 127 Ferguson, Moira, 27 filiopietism, 166 Floyd, George, 5 Folsom, Ed, 246 Foner, Eric, 12 Foner, Philip, 37 Fugitive Slave Law, 130, 131, 142, 212, 247, 250, 251, 275 Gardner, Eric, 194–95 Garner, Margaret, 151, 179, 180, 208–13 Garrison, William Lloyd, 5, 6, 8, 14, 19, 60, 71, 129–30, 168, 185, 241 Germantown Quaker Petition against Slavery, 127 Ginsberg, Allen, 146 Gorman, Amanda, 1, 2 Gospels, 74, 131, 160, 164, 183, 190, 191, 266 Gould, Philip, 45 Gradert, Kenyon, 11, 12 Grainger, James, 21 Grant, David, 125 Great Britain, 7, 20, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 44, 78, 80, 81, 135, 242

Index Griffiths, Julia, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 168, 193, 215 Haight, Gordon Sherman, 106, 107 Haiti, 10, 16, 17, 19, 29, 38, 39, 48, 51, 53, 55 Ham, 133–34 Harper, Frances E. W., 194–224, 243, 246, 252, 265, 280 Harper’s Ferry, 11, 13, 267 Harrison, Antony H., 154, 169 Hartman, Saidiya, 9 Hedrick, Joan, 196 Hegel, Georg Frederic, 159 Henry VIII, 72 Herald of Freedom, 71, 84 Hesiod, 162 Hollander, John, 71 Homer, 162 Hopkins, Samuel, 145 Horton, George Moses, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 28, 60, 61–71, 89, 96, 103, 104, 105, 149, 226, 244, 280 Hughes, Langston, 278 Hume, David, 26 hymns, 22, 24, 63, 106, 118, 125, 153, 221, 238 Indian Removal, 16, 32, 75, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 123, 166, 167 Indigenous people, 9, 32, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 75, 79, 87, 96, 106, 108– 19, 138, 153, 246, 251, 253 Insko, Jeffrey, 3, 11 intersectionality, 75 Irmscher, Christoph, 88 Iroquois people, 87 Islam, 141 Jackson, Andrew, 114 Jackson, Jane, 262 Jackson, Virginia, 9, 10, 60, 61, 71, 77 Jacobs, Harriet, 175 James, C. L. R., 55 Japheth, 133–34



293

Jefferson, Thomas, 44, 45 jeremiad, 72, 73, 76, 81, 124, 142, 155, 158, 165, 201, 203, 239, 250, 279 Jerusalem, 90, 190 Jesus Christ, 11, 17, 46, 74, 79, 92, 93, 94, 110, 122, 131, 140, 141, 143, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 183, 185, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 204, 223, 239, 259, 265, 266, 267, 268, 275, 276, 278, 281 Jones, Martha, 11 Kant, Immanuel, 26 Karcher, Carolyn, 258 Kelly, Gary, 107 Kennedy, William Sloane, 126 Kilcup, Karen, 2 King, Joshua, 169 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 3, 155, 223, 241, 272 Las Casas, Bartolome, 43, 44 Lee, Robert E., 261 Leonard, Keith, 9, 10, 61 Levine, Robert S., 15, 225–27, 240, 258 Lewis, Georgia King, 126 Leyva, Yolanda, 4 Liberator, The, 14, 19, 60 Liberty Bell, The, 154, 169 Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 13, 30, 70, 128, 147, 238, 243, 244, 248, 264, 271 Liberation theology, 193, 215 Linton, W. J., 126, 60, 87–104, 105, 106, 124, 149, 155, 196, 229, 276, 280 literary scripturism, 194 Lloyd, Vincent W., 10 Longfellow, Hendry Wadsworth, 1, 6, 8, 16, 17, 60, 87–104, 105, 106, 124, 149, 155, 196, 229, 276, 280 Longfellow, Samuel, 88–89 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 10, 16, 17, 19, 29, 48–59, 130, 185

294 I  ndex Lovejoy, Elijah, 5, 73 Lowell, James Russell, 1–6, 17, 18, 86, 88, 106, 107, 142, 144, 149, 153, 154, 155–69, 170, 172, 183, 186, 192, 193, 230, 243, 250, 260, 269, 270, 279, 281 Luther, Martin, 40 lyric poetry, 8, 9, 10, 194, 223 Maher, Bill, 3 Marr, Timothy, 138 Marrs, Cody, 223, 260 Marxism, 159 Mary I, 72, 164, 166 McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, 14, 15 McClendon, Aaron D., 152 McGill, Meredith, 15, 61, 194 Meacham, John, 3 Mellor, Anne K., 27 Melville, Herman, 2, 6, 8, 12, 17, 23, 24, 28, 36, 37, 39, 54, 91, 93, 106, 130, 155, 169, 181, 185, 223, 225, 226, 245, 258–69, 277 Mexico, 2, 154, 156, 158, 167, 168, 281 Middle Passage, 36, 38, 97 Miller, Perry, 126, 144, 166, 203 Milton, John, 133 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 1 Moloch, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 171, 183, 250, 252 monogenesis, 172 Montgomery, James, 7, 17, 19, 20–44, 48, 58, 59, 90, 280 Moravians, 20, 40, 41, 42, 44 More, Hannah, 19, 25 Morgan, Edmund S., 171 Morrison, Toni, 169, 208, 209 Morse, Samuel, 158 Morton, Samuel, 157 Muller, Timo, 14 Muslims, 28, 109, 138, 141, 268 National Era, 138, 139 New Testament, 29, 41, 46, 74, 90, 96, 128, 163, 195, 197, 198, 239 Noah, 133

North Star (celestial body), 9, 69, 77–85, 244, 245 North Star, The, 9, 69, 244, 245 Oakes, James T., 12 Obama, Barack, 155 Ojibwe people, 87 Old Testament, 74, 96, 212 Occom, Samson, 96, 114, 115, 116 oratory, 117, 147, 155, 207, 223 Ottoman Empire, 138 Otter, Samuel, 258 Palestine, 104 Parker, Theodore, 155 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 127 Paul, St., 29 Pelaez, Monica, 6, 7, 8, 60, 71, 78, 79–85, 110 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 267 Pellar, Brian R., 258 Philemon, Epistle to, 29 Pickens, Cassidy, 20 Pierpont, John, 6, 9, 17, 60, 71–87, 88, 89, 96, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 149, 193, 244, 265, 280 Pinckney, Daryl, 12, 14 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 2, 66, 83, 88, 103, 155, 169 Polk, James K., 156, 162 polygenesis, 157, 172 Powers, Hiram, 137–38 Presbyterians, 192 Protestantism, 20, 27, 28, 33, 39, 40, 42, 72, 73, 74, 86, 90, 131, 141, 163, 164, 166, 192, 193, 204, 205, 258 Puritans, 11, 17, 145, 166, 169, 172, 281 Quakers, 13, 82, 126, 127, 131, 166, 192, 193, 208, 260 Quarles, Benjamin, 13, 14 Rediker, Marcus, 229 Robbins, Hollis, 14 Rogin, Michael Paul, 258

Index Romanticism, 3, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20, 27, 32, 48, 51, 52, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 77, 78, 79, 94, 96, 149, 150, 155, 156, 159, 160, 163, 167, 175, 253 Samson, 102–3 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 16, 149, 152 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 12 Sandler, Matt, 9, 10, 61 Sansay, Leonora, 39 Scott, Julius C., 10 Scudder, Horace, 3 Separatists, 165, 170 Shakespeare, William, 68, 84, 173, 174, 218 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 3, 4, 64, 77, 18, 155, 253 Shem, 133–34 Sherman, Joan R., 16, 61 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 255 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 6, 7, 16, 17, 20, 42, 105, 106–24, 138, 147, 149, 153, 193, 205 Sinanan, Kerry, 27 Sinha, Manisha, 12, 13, 14, 128 slave narrative, 22, 41, 67, 102, 220 Stauffer, John, 12, 13, 14 Stein, Jordan Alexander, 15 Stephen, St., 163 Stone, Marjorie, 169 Stott, Anne, 27 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 6, 15, 17, 39, 93, 94, 106, 107, 143, 145, 169, 178, 186, 187, 188–94, 196, 197, 198, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 224 Sumner, Charles, 1 Taylor, Charles, 27 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 87 theodicy, 46, 140, 177, 276 Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 72, 132, 133, 167, 171, 225, 247, 250, 259, 265, 280 Trodd, Zoe, 13 Twain, Mark, 55 Tyler, Royall, 28, 38, 138, 139



295

Unitarians, 60, 71, 72, 86, 89, 106, 192, 193, 194 United States, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 19, 20, 25, 28, 29, 37, 44, 45, 51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 64, 71, 73, 74, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 97, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 123, 124, 129, 132, 135, 136, 139, 141, 142, 148, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 183, 184, 187, 191, 196, 202, 203, 204, 208, 212, 214, 221, 222, 227, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242, 253, 259, 260, 263, 265, 270, 271, 272, 274, 276, 277, 280, 281 Vizenor, Gerald, 79–80 Wagenknecht, Edward, 126 Walker, Robert John, 248 Wallace, Robert K., 258 Webb, Frank J., 58, 59 Webster, Daniel, 130 Wedgwood, Josiah, 189 Weld, Angelina Grimke, 84 Weld, Theodore Dwight, 84 Wells, Ida B., 278 Wheatley, Phillis, 96, 114, 115, 116 Whitfield, James Monroe, 6, 15, 16, 17, 107, 207, 222, 225, 226–45, 246, 250, 269, 271, 272, 280 Whitman, Walt, 1, 2, 16, 17, 30, 31, 34, 104, 106, 146, 155, 223, 225, 226, 235, 245–57, 258, 262, 263, 269 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 5, 6, 8, 17, 19, 29, 48–59, 84, 88, 105, 106, 107, 124–48, 149, 152, 153, 154, 169, 171, 172, 183, 185, 187, 189, 193, 225, 226, 247, 250, 252, 253, 260, 264, 265, 280, 281 Williams, Eric, 27 Williams, Thomas J., 270 Wilson, Ivy, 225, 240

296 I  ndex Wood, Marcus, 6, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 45, 46, 47, 48 Woolman, John, 128 Wordsworth, William, 10, 29, 148, 51, 57, 58, 77, 155 Wright, Ben, 10

Wright, Richard, 224 Yearsley, Ann, 19, 25, 27, 28, 38 Yeats, William Butler, 2 Zellinger, Elissa, 194