Whi: Whipper through Whittier

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


WHIPPER, William J., 1804?-1876, free African American, abolitionist, reformer, activist, writer, advocate of non-violence.

(Dumond, 1961, p. 340; Mabee, 1970, pp. 36, 57, 58, 62, 64, 71, 92, 106, 134, 187, 193, 197, 203, 248, 276, 277, 293, 298, 305-307, 337, 342, 390n15; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 44; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 12, p. 6).  Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 84-85:


WHITE, Albert Smith (October 24, 1803- September 4, 1864), lawyer, representative and senator, jurist. He served once more in the House of Representatives as a Republican from March 1861 to March 1863. His most notable activity was the introduction of a resolution for the appointment of a select committee to propose a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the border states (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1563). As chairman of such a committee he reported bills for indemnifying the loyal owners of slaves in Maryland, Missouri, and other states. Although the plan had the warm support of President Lincoln, it was not popular with White's constituents and cost him his renomination.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp.

WHITE, ALBERT SMITH (October 24, 1803- September 4, 1864), lawyer, representative and senator, jurist, was a descendant of Thomas White, an early settler of Weymouth, Massachusetts. He was born at the family homestead at Blooming Grove in Orange County, New York, the son of Nathan Herrick and Frances (Howell) White. The father was the presiding judge of the Orange County court for twenty years. The son was graduated from Union College in 1822, studied law at Newburgh, was admitted to the bar in 1825, removed to Indiana the same year, and, after brief periods at Rushville and Paoli, in 1829 settled permanently in Tippecanoe County, residing either at Lafayette or on his farm near Stockwell. In 1830-31 he was assistant clerk of the Indiana House of Representatives, and for the four succeeding years was clerk of that body.

In 1836 he was elected to a seat in the national House of Representatives as a Whig, and in March 1839 was elected to the Senate. In the House he served on the committee on roads and canals, and introduced a few resolutions, but refrained from active participation in debates. With Oliver Hampton Smith [q.v.] as his colleague, he took his seat in the Senate, December 2, 1839, at the opening of the Twenty-sixth Congress. A few days later he was appointed a member of the committee on Indian affairs and from the beginning of the third session of the Twenty-seventh Congress until the close of his term, in March 1845, he was chairman of that committee. He became an important member of the committee on roads and canals, and served effectively (1841-45) on the committee to audit and control contingent expenses. When in 1852 the bill for apportioning the membership of the House of Representatives among the several states was before the Senate, he delivered a scholarly and cogent address in favor of "popular" as against "party" representation and advocated measures for the security of the federal government rather than the rights of the states (Congressional Globe, 27 Congress, 2 Session, p. 583).

Between 1845 and 1860 White was engaged in the practice of law and in the building of railroads in the valley of the Wabash. He was the first president of the Lafayette and Indianapolis Railroad, and for three years was manager of the Wabash and Western Railroad. He served once more in the House of Representatives as a Republican from March 1861 to March 1863. His most notable activity was the introduction of a resolution for the appointment of a select committee to propose a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the border states (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Session, p. 1563). As chairman of such a committee he reported bills for indemnifying the loyal owners of slaves in Maryland, Missouri, and other states. Although the plan had the warm support of President Lincoln, it was not popular with White's constituents and cost him his renomination. On his leaving the House, Lincoln appointed him (appointment confirmed, March 7, 1863) one of three commissioners to adjust claim s of citizens of Minnesota and Dakota on account of depredations committed during th e Sioux Indian massacre on the Minnesota frontier in August 1862. A second appointment by Lincoln (confirmed January 18, 1864) made him judge of the United States District Court for Indiana, a position he held until his death at his residence near Stockwell. White was a man of small physique and thin visage, with a large aquiline nose. He was well versed in belles-lettres, and in legal and political lore. He married a member of the Randolph family of Virginia and was survived by his widow, two sons, and two daughters.

[G. W. Chamberlain, History of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1923), volume IV; B. F. Thompson, History of Long Island (1918), volume II; E. M. Ruttenber and L. H. Clark, History of Orange County, New York (1881); W.W. woollen, Biographical and Historical Sketches of Early Indiana (1883); C. W. Taylor, Bench and Bar of Indiana (1895); Register of Debates.  First Session, Twenty-fifth Congress (1837); Indianapolis Daily Journal, September 6, 9, 1864.]

N. D. M.


WHITE, Andrew Dickson (November 7, 1832-November 4, 1918), university president, historian, diplomat,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 88-93:

WHITE, ANDREW DICKSON (November 7, 1832-November 4, 1918), university president, historian, diplomat, came of English stock. A little before 1650 his ancestor, John White, husbandman, with a partner, James Phips, bought a tract in Maine just east of the Kennebec; and after Phips's death White married his widow. Their second son, Philip, saved with the rest in 1676 from the Indians by his shipbuilding half brother William Phips (the later Sir William), who sailed with them to Boston, was apprenticed to a "housewright" at Beverly, where soon he took to wife a daughter of Andrew Mansfield of Lynn. Their descendants pushed westward, and at Monson their great-grandson Asa White (b. 1750) throve as a builder and owner of mills. (For the whole pedigree see New England Historical and Genealogical Register, July 1919, p. 237.), His eldest son, Asa (b. 1774), migrated in 1798 to the rising village of Homer in central New York and prospered as its miller till in 1815 a fire was his ruin. Horace (1802-1860), the elder of his two sons, thus forced to self-reliance, proved an able man of business, and was already well-to-do when in 1831 he married Clara Dickson (1811-1882), only child of the prosperous Andrew Dickson, the district's assemblyman, who had come from Middlefield, Massachusetts, and of his wife, Ruth Hall, from Guilford, Connecticut.

Andrew Dickson White, Horace's elder son, born at Homer, was but seven when in 1839 his father moved the family to Syracuse, where he was now a banker and soon a man of wealth. The boy, an eager learner, after training in the schools of Syracuse, private and public, coveted a course at Yale. But his mother had revolted from the New England Calvinism of her village home to become an Episcopalian, and her husband, won by her to religion, was now a zealous churchman. First to a parish school the boy must go, then to the young Geneva College (now Hobart) nearby. He had been from childhood a champion of his mother's church, and always remained so; but the church college he could stand for only a year. When sent back he went into hiding till his father consented to his entering Yale. There he found himself in "the famous class of '53." He was already a wide and thoughtful reader; and, spurning marks, he was by preference a reading man. He was on the "Lit," belonged to Phi Beta Kappa, and took the Clark, Yale Literary, and De Forest prizes. Of his teachers Theodore Dwight Woolsey [q.v.] meant most to him; of his friends none more than Daniel Coit Gilman [q.v.], with whom he now set out for study abroad. A semester at Paris with teachers like Laboulaye, a year as an attaché to the American legation at St. Petersburg (1854-55), a semester at Berlin under Boeckh and Raumer, Ritter and Lepsius-Ranke he could not follow -then a ramble through Italy with Henry Simmons Frieze [q.v.] as a companion, and he was back at Yale for his A.M. There he chanced to hear Francis Wayland [q.v.] urge college men to a career in the West; and after a graduate year at Yale, he became professor of history in the University of Michigan, taking with him as his wife Mary Outwater, a Syracuse neighbor's daughter whom he married on September 24, 1857.

He was only twenty-five. The fraternity boys thought him a freshman and lugged his bags to his hotel. But, says Charles Kendall Adams, then his pupil: "His instruction in history was a genuine revelation to those accustomed to perfunctory text-book work. ... He not only instructed, ... he inspired" (H. B. Adams, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, 1887, p. 98) To the efforts of President Henry Philip Tappan [q.v.] to make the University of Michigan more like the universities of the European continent he gave hearty support. But in this he was no mere disciple. From his freshman days at Geneva College he had been dreaming of an American university more stately, more scholarly, more free than those he knew. Yale, with its single course, its chairs filled from a single sect, its great scholars wasted in recitation-hearing, did not satisfy him. Abroad with Gilman he had been an eager observer, and European universities had delighted him by their scientific spirit, their freedom of teaching and of study, the breadth of their instruction, the learning and charm of their lectures. He had been at Michigan scarcely a year when to his fellow New Yorker, George William Curtis [q.v.], he unfolded his dream of a state university for New York; and no sooner had the death of his father brought him private wealth than he took steps toward the fulfillment of this dream. From Syracuse, where he was settling his father's estate, he addressed (September 1, 1862) to his friend and fellow liberal, Gerrit Smith [q.v.], an appeal to join him in founding "a new University, worthy of our land and time." To this, he wrote, his own earnest thinking and planning had been given for years. It should exclude no sex or color; should battle mercantile morality and temper military passion; should afford "an asylum for Science-where truth shall be sought for truth's sake," not stretched or cut "exactly to fit 'Revealed Religion' "; should foster "a new Literature not graceful . . . but earnest" and "a Moral Philosophy, History, and Political Economy unwarped to suit present abuses in Politics and Religion"; should give "the rudiments, at least, of a Legal training in which Legality shall not crush Humanity"; and should be "a nucleus around which liberal-minded men of learning ... could cluster" (Cornell Alumni News, August 1931, p. 445). His plan for it shows provision not only for languages and mathematics, philosophy and history, law and medicine, but also for agriculture and engineering, and generously for the natural sciences. But Gerrit Smith, stricken in years and in health, could not help; and White himself, worn by teaching and business and by his efforts on behalf of the North in the Civil War, was forced to seek rest abroad.

Returning late in 1863, he found opportunity thrust upon him. His Syracuse town fellows, split between two rivals for a place in the state Senate, named him, though absent, as a compromise; and 1864 found him not only a senator, but chairman of the Senate's committee on education. This gave him large part in codifying the state's school laws and in creating its new normal schools; and it made him the guardian of that vast landed endowment which by the Morrill Act of 1862 the federal government had given the states for education in "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts;'' but "without excluding other scientific and classical studies." New York's share, the largest, was nearly a million acres and had not been parceled out to her existing colleges. The "People's College," a new enterprise, had indeed a lien upon it all; but its friends had not yet met the conditions of the grant, and Senator Ezra Cornell [q.v. ] of Ithaca, who had built up a fortune through the electric telegraph, but at heart was still a farmer, was asking half for a new agricultural college, offering to add a cash endowment. Chairman White would hear of no division and won Cornell to his own plans and to a larger gift. Together they drew the charter of a new university, whose site Cornell made Ithaca, whose name White made Cornell. Its educational clauses, all White's, ensured instruction not only in agriculture and the mechanic arts, but also in "such other branches of science and knowledge as the Trustees may deem useful and proper." "Persons of every religious denomination, or of no religious denomination," were to be "equally eligible to all offices and appointments"; and at no time should "a majority of the board be of any one religious sect, or of no religious sect." The whole land grant was asked; but Cornell in return pledged campus, farm, and a half million dollars. Nay, more; he proposed to locate the lands, as the state could not do, turning over to the university the proceeds of their eventual sale. A sharp struggle with rivals and this charter was granted-in April 1865. Most novel in the new institution were : (1) its democracy of studies, the natural sciences and technical arts not segregated, as elsewhere, but taught with the humanities under one faculty and in common classrooms; (2) its parallel courses, open to free choice and leading to varying but equal degrees; (3) its equal rank for the modern languages and literatures and for history and the political sciences; (4) its large use of eminent scholars a s "non-resident professors"; (5) its treatment of university student, as men, not boys, the in teachers as their friends and companions.

White now thought his task done. His ambitions were a scholar's and writer's. The Michigan chair was still his, and Yale was urging on him the headship of her new school of fine arts. Political office, if he wished it, was within his grasp. But Ezra Cornell would not go on with the university without White as president. White hesitated; but he accepted and set about gathering teachers and equipment. For his non-resident group he won Agassiz and Lowell, George William Curtis, Theodore Dwight, James Hall, Bayard Taylor [qq.v.]. Goldwin Smith, whom he had hoped to tempt from England as a nonresident, came, to his joy, as a resident instead; but in the main his resident faculty was of young men.

Despite its heresies the young institution won friends and gifts; and when at its opening, in 1868, six hundred students enrolled, success seemed assured. To the faculty White turned over the care of discipline and of matters curricular. The routine of administration he also gladly devolved on others. His to plan and to create; his to be spokesman to the outer world. His too to teach; and teaching was still his joy. For himself he had reserved the chair of history, though he dealt only with that of Europe. His lectures were always written, and with care; and never was he so busy that some new lecture was not under way. But to his written words he was never a slave. He broke away from them for an anecdote, a personal experience, a direct appeal. He would leave his desk, come to the edge of his platform, and "just talk." But, whether he talked or read, his students were to him live men and women-men and women about to go out to play a part, perhaps a leading part, in the live world of which he spoke. That they might follow his thought, and without waste of attention, he put always into their hands a printed outline; but he had it interleaved for their own notes. It was for them he built up his great library; and not alone with books for research-though fresh research went, if possible, with every lecture-but with books that had themselves made history, first editions, copies that great men themselves had thumbed, the documents, placards, caricatures, left over from the times themselves. These to make his lectures live he showed his students; or, better still, welcomed them to his house for their closer study. His house was a museum of such treasures-the house which from his own purse he built to be Cornell's presidential mansion. But not his classes alone heard' White. Whatever one studied at Cornell, one found time for the President's lectures; and, since at Cornell there was no bar to auditors, half his audience was always of faculty and townsfolk.

His pen, always prolific, was busy now in championing his educational theories and in defending the university and its founder against attacks. Fiercest of the critics were those who called the new school "godless" because in the care of no religious group. White showed in answer how almost every step in the advance of education and science had had to meet such charges from the pious, but how religion as well as science had been the gainer by freedom of teaching and research. This reply, at first but a lecture, grew to a magazine article, then in 1876 to a booklet, The Warfare of Science; and in the same year his Paper-Money Inflation in France, born of his lectures on the French Revolution, took book form for use against the currency juggling then urged on Congress.

Meanwhile, to the University fortune had been harsh. Its working capital had proved inadequate, and its western lands, now subject to state tax, had made it "land-poor." Ezra Cornell, whose purse for a time met every deficit, was all but ruined by the panic of 1873; and White, whose salary and much more had from the first gone to the University or its students, had now to dip more deeply into his own purse and his fellow trustees' to meet debts and finish buildings. The University escaped ruin, but in 1874 Cornell died and White's financial cares grew ever heavier. There had to be respites: in 1871 President Grant made him one of the commission to visit Santo Domingo and report on its fitness for annexation (Dominican Republic. Report of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo, 1871), and in 1872 a trip to the coeducational institutions of the West was needed as a text for his report favoring the admission of women to Cornell. But by 1876 his health was breaking; and the next two years he spent abroad, his pen soon busy on fresh chapters for his Warfare of Science and on a series he called "the warfare of humanity," that is, the war against such inhumanities as slavery, torture, witch-persecution. With this new course he came back in 1878 and tried to resume his duties. But his health was still precarious, and in the spring he welcomed the call of President Hayes to the post of minister to Germany. At Berlin his routine duties were heavy, though not uncongenial, and for diplomacy he was fitted, not only by training, but also by his social tastes, his affability, his liking for affairs. But it was as a scholar that best he bore the mantle of Bancroft and of Bayard Taylor. With German men of letters and science his ties grew close, and for Americans studying abroad he could do much. In 1881, when he returned, the University's fortunes seemed of better hope through the great bequest of Mrs. Fiske, but soon the Fiske will suit cast its gloom over all, and White's last years as president were crippled still by Cornell's poverty, though near their close the first great sale of western lands gladdened the outlook. White found time to be a leader in the fight for civil service reform, and in 1884 helped found the American Historical Association, becoming its first president. Alas, his health grew frailer, he had served Cornell for twenty years, and other tasks were clamoring to be done. In 1885, happy that his old Michigan pupil Charles Kendall Adams [q.v.] was made his successor, he sailed abroad to rest and write.

First came months of recuperation, with Mrs. White, in England and beyond the Channel. They were hardly back, in 1887, when her sudden death left him prostrate. From the blow he rallied but slowly, seeking comfort in penning a memorial. With returning vigor he sought solace in travel, making now a visit to Egypt and to Greece; but first he transferred to Cornell's shelves his rich historical library, while in his honor her departments of history and politics became The President White School of History and Political Science. When he returned late in 1889, his health proved so restored that he not only could resume research, but again become a lecturer; and during the next years he gave courses at many university centers, from Philadelphia to New Orleans. Stanford University, whose first president he could have been, made him a non-resident member of her faculty; and he journeyed thither as the guest of his friend Carnegie, with whom in his private car he visited Mexico and zigzagged through all the region beyond the Rockies. It was now too that he found (September 10, 1890) a second wife in Helen Magill, a daughter of President Magill of Swarthmore, herself a scholar and teacher.

Late in 1892 President Harrison called him again to the nation's service as minister to Russia. His success there must have satisfied the Washington authorities, for despite the change in 1893 of president and party he was kept there till, in 1894, he insisted on resigning (relieved November 1). But what he could achieve by no means satisfied him. The imperial court, as of old, he found corrupt and fickle, and his best efforts were thwarted by the minor rank of the American legation and its relatively scanty means. Distraction he found in acquaintanceships at court and in society, interested notably by Tolstoi and by the reactionary Pobedonostzeff. Then, too, he found time to work on, and on his return to Ithaca to complete, his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (2 volumes, 1896). But before this was out of press President Cleveland had named him to' the commission charged to find "the true divisional line between Venezuela and British Guiana," then in controversy with Great Britain. His congenial associates included his old friend Gilman, and the year was spent pleasantly in research at Washington; but ere its end Great Britain had consented to a judicial arbitration, and the commission published only the reports of its experts. White was still in Washington when the new president, McKinley, made him ambassador to Germany. Since his former service there he had shown himself a friendly interpreter of the "new Germany" and of German thought, and his appointment was welcome to German-Americans and in Berlin. But commercial rivalries had chilled German friendship and the Samoan squabble was at its height. Then came the Spanish- American War and the questions as to the fate of the Spanish colonies. In Foreign Minister Billow, White had found a temper like his own, and their affable good sense dispelled the clouds. To him, however, the great event of these years was the Hague Conference (1899). He had long urged the folly of war, but did not at first take very seriously the Czar's call "to put an end to the constantly increasing development of armaments." Called to head the American delegation, he awoke to the opportunity. So, too, had President McKinley and Secretary Hay awakened, and their delegates were charged to work not only for the exemption from seizure, during war at sea, of all private property not contraband of war-America's old claim-but also for an international court of arbitration. For the former claim they could gain no hearing; but White submitted for record a memorial and up. held it in a careful speech (F. W. Rolls, The Peace Conference of the Hague, 1900, pp. 307- 20). For the court of arbitration the day was won, and for the international commissions of inquiry urged by White. But not without a struggle. Alfred T. Mahan [q.v.], the naval member of the American delegation, whose able books on the history of sea-power gave his opinions weight, was averse to aught that threatened the efficiency of war; and the German Emperor, who had studied his books, proved so hostile that for long the conference threatened to shatter on the opposition of Germany and her allies. To allay this White did his utmost, and with at least a measure of success. Due wholly to him was the most dramatic event of the conference : the celebration by the Americans of their July 4th by laying a laurel wreath on the tomb of Grotius, the father of international law, with an address in his honor by White.

He returned to Berlin with prestige heightened, and the next years brought him many honors. But death dealt him heavy blows. In July 1901, there died at Syracuse his only son, long a sufferer. September saw the assassination of President McKinley, grown a warm personal friend. But Theodore Roosevelt, who followed, was to White no stranger. Together at the Chicago convention of 1884, as delegates at large from New York, they bad fought for the naming of George F. Edmunds, but together had stood by Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate; and their friendship had not lapsed. But the old diplomat had long resolved to leave at seventy the public service; and in November 1902 his resignation took effect.

Even at Berlin he had found time for much else than diplomacy. Andrew Carnegie had invited from him suggestions for the use of his great wealth; and the invitation was not neglected. In 1900 White urged on him the building of a Palace of Justice to house the International Tribunal at The Hague. The idea had come from his colleague of the conference, the great Russian jurist De Martens; but White made it his own, and it was he who eventually won from the generous Scot both the Palace of Peace and its great library of international law. In 1901 he tried to interest him in the project for a national university at Washington, and with such success that in May he could disclose the plan to his friend Gilman and in September spend a week with Carnegie at Skibo. What came of it was the Carnegie Institution of Washington, started early in 1902 with Gilman as president and White as a trustee. He was also an adviser and became a trustee of Carnegie's foundation for international peace.

Nor had his pen been idle at Berlin. His autobiography, long under way, and a biographical volume based on his university lectures were well advanced when he retired; and now, set free from cares official, he took quarters with his family it Alassio on the lovely Riviera, west of Genoa, where by May of 1904 the first task reached completion. Returning then to Ithaca he could send to press the Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (2 volumes, 1905) and rest a while among his friends. The lectures, finished at more leisure, appeared in 1910 as Seven Great States men in the Warfare of Humanity 'With Unreason. The seven-Sarpi, Grotius, Thomasius, Turgot, Stein, Cavour, Bismarck-were the heroes about whose deeds, by the biographical method he loved best, he had woven much of his course on the history of modern states; but into their story he had worked also a part of his older lectures on the "warfare of humanity." A later task was unforeseen. In Canada came danger of currency inflation and a public-spirited Toronto business man asked leave to print and circulate his Fiat Money in France (1896), a revision of his earlier work. Once more-in 1912, at eighty-he revised it, but "for private circulation only." Not till 1933 was this edition published in the United States.

At last he welcomed quiet, his routine broken mainly by his winter trip to Washington, for his duties as regent of the Smithsonian Institution and trustee of the Carnegie Institution. In 1914 the great war seemed the defeat of all his efforts for peace; but it could not rob him of his hopefulness or of his fairness, and happily he lived to see it all but ended. In late October of 1918 he gave a dinner to Lord Charnwood, then lecturing at Cornell. His mind was clear, and he as chatty as ever; but he seemed weary and he did not come downstairs again. On November 4 he died. There survived him his second wife and two daughters (one by each marriage), with a daughter of the elder of these and the two sons of his oldest daughter.

In person White was of barely middle stature, slender, brown-haired, bearded; in dress fastidious; in bearing kindly, though not 'Without reserve; in temper active, buoyant, generous. Never robust, he gained great powers of work from a careful regimen; but he was subject to periods of sick headache, and for years his life was threatened by a throat ailment due to exposure in his drives to Ithaca during Cornell's early days. Walking was his exercise and books his only sport; travel and music were his recreation and his medicine. All the fine arts he loved; but architecture gave him greatest joy the world over. The school for it at Cornell was his creation and his pet. An inveterate reader, above all of biography, he was also a charming raconteur and never failed to note down a good story. He was deeply reverent and with a profound faith in God, but never other-worldly. His ambition it was to serve his age and to deserve remembrance. His students he used to urge to give themselves to some great cause, and many were the great causes to which he was himself devoted. Foremost in his youth was doubtless antislavery; in his prime the freeing of inquiry and of teaching; in his old age the abandonment of war and a sterner dealing with high crime. But he was even more a man of action than of speech, and he hoped to be judged, above all, by his work as university founder and moulder.

[For his life the ample source is his Autobiography (1905), into which are absorbed all his earlier autobiographic articles. Appended to it is a list of his writings. His correspondence, with diaries and MSS., is still in the keeping of the Cornell University library; but letters and papers subsequent to his retirement, in 1885, from the presidency of Cornell are to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Of value for his life are the tributes in the Cornell Era for November 1912 at his eightieth birthday, and those at the unveiling of his statue on the Cornell campus, printed in the Cornell Alumni News, June 24, 1915. Best informed of the histories of Cornell are E. W. Huffcut, Cornell University, 1868-1898 (in the U. S. Bureau of Education's "Circulars of Information" for 1900) and the cooperative work bearing the name of W. T. Hewett, Cornell University: A History (1905). On these and on the writer's own memories as pupil, librarian, secretary, friend, this sketch is based.]

G. L.B.


WHITE, Charles Ignatius (February 1, 1807-April 1, 1878), Roman Catholic priest and editor. While in Washington, White erected a parochial school, St. Matthew's Institute, and St. Stephen's Church; established St. Ann's Infant Asylum, a chapel for colored persons, and a home for aged blacks;

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 94-95:

WHITE, CHARLES IGNATIUS (February 1, 1807-April 1, 1878), Roman Catholic priest and editor, son of John and Nancy (Coombs) White, who were of old Maryland families, was born in Baltimore and educated in the local schools and at Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg. As a seminarian, he studied theology at St. Sulpice in Paris and spent a year in the Sulpician novitiate at Issy prior to his ordination to the secular priesthood in Notre Dame Cathedral by Archbishop Hyacinthe de Quelen (June 5, 1830). On his return to Maryland, Father White served as a curate at Fell's Point (1830-33), as an assistant and as rector of the cathedral in Baltimore (1833-43), as professor of moral theology at St. Mary's Seminary (1843-45), from which he later received the degree of S.T.D. (1848), as pastor of St. Vincent de Paul's Church (1845), as pastor at Pikesville, where he erected a church (1849), and finally as rector of St. Matthew's Church in Washington, D. C. (1857- 78), where he became widely known in ecclesiastical and secular circles as a scholarly preacher and as an influential priest. Although a preacher on such important occasions as episcopal consecrations, a second choice for the see of Charleston in 1843, a secretary of the Third Provincial Council of Baltimore (1837) and a theologian at the Fourth Council (1840), and the only priest who had known intimately the nine archbishops of Baltimore, he was never elevated beyond the priesthood. His most severe critic, James Alphonsus McMaster [q.v.] of the Freeman's Journal, admitted that he was exemplary in character, pious, severe in temperament, and aristocratic in bearing, but feared that he had not been preserved from the Gallican tendencies of Paris.

While in Washington, White erected a parochial school, St. Matthew's Institute, and St. Stephen's Church; established St. Ann's Infant Asylum, a chapel for colored persons, and a home for aged negroes; introduced the Society of St. Vincent de Paul for social work among the poor; and compiled St. Vincent's Manual (2nd ed., 1848). As a musician and artist, he was intelligently interested in hymnology and architecture. Yet his greatest contribution was as an editor and as "one of the outstanding literary figures in the American priesthood" (Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England, 1927, II, 551). With the Reverend James Dolan, an early social worker in Baltimore, he founded and edited the Religious Cabinet (1842), which was continued as the United States Catholic Magazine (1843-48). Later he founded and edited the Metropolitan Magazine (1853). These magazines compared favorably with contemporary secular publications. Indeed, it was their erudite character that proved their undoing because of a lack of patronage among an uneducated constituency. In 1849 White assisted in founding the archdiocesan weekly paper, the Catholic Mirror, which he edited until 1855. In addition, he compiled under varying titles the annual Catholic directory (1834-57), issued a revised edition of J. L. Balmes' Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe (1850) and a Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton (1853) which passed through several editions, published a. revised edition of Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity (1856), translated from the French of Charles Sainte-Foi, Mission and Duties of Young Women (1858), and added a chapter on the Church in the United States to the English translation of Joseph E. Darras' General History of the Catholic Church (1866).

[M. J. Riordon, Cathedral Records (1906); Cath. Encyclopedia; F. E. Tourscher, The Kenrick-Frenaye Correspondence (1920); New York Freeman's Journal, April 13, 1878; Cath. Mirror, April 6, 1878; Sadlier's Cath. Directory (1879), p. 41; address of Archbishop James Gibbons [q.v.] in In Memoriam; a Record of the Ceremonies in St. Matthew's Church ... on the Occasion of the Funeral of Its Late Pastor Reverend Charles I. White (1878); obituary in Evening Star (Washington, D. C., April 1, 1878.]

R. J. P.


WHITE, George Leonard (September 20, 1838-November 8, 1895), conductor of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 100-101:

WHITE, GEORGE LEONARD (September 20, 1838-November 8, 1895), conductor of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, was born at Cadiz, New York, the son of William B. and Nancy (Leonard) White. From his father,. a blacksmith who in his spare time played in a local band, he derived a love of music. He attended public school until he was fourteen, when his formal education came to an end. At twenty he was teaching in Ohio and had acquired considerable reputation as a choir leader. With one or two associates he gathered the colored people of the neighborhood and taught them in Sunday schools, the singing in which he led his pupils forming a considerable part of the curriculum. In the. early days of the Civil War he joined the "Squirrel Hunters" to defend Cincinnati from the Confederates under Kirby-Smith. Later, as an enlisted man in the 73rd Ohio Regiment, he was at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and served until discharged for illness in 1864. After the war he went to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was briefly employed in the quartermaster's department, and then entered the service of the Freedmen's Bureau, under Clinton B. Fisk [q.v.]. In 1867 he was appointed instructor of vocal music at Fisk University, Nashville, which had just been founded by the American Missionary Association, and subsequently became a trustee and treasurer of the institution.

In 1870, when it seemed likely that Fisk University must close unless money could be raised, White suggested taking a group of students on a concert tour. He finally won the consent of the trustees and in October 1871, with a band of nine singers, started out. Although they were penniless, only recently emancipated, untutored except for the training White had given them, they repeatedly won hostile crowds and indifferent audiences to enthusiastic admiration, and in March 1872 returned to, Nashville with twenty thousand dollars they had earned over and above their expenses. After resting only a week, they started out again with some new recruits, going first to the World Peace Jubilee in Boston. Here their presence was the great feature of the occasion and they received an ovation. In April 1873 they sailed for England and in a tour of Great Britain met with the same astonishing success that had been theirs in America. Subsequently they toured England again and visited the Continent, raising in all more than $90,000 for Fisk University and spreading through the civilized world a new understanding and respect for the character and the capacities of the freed men. They finally disbanded in Hamburg in 1878. The testimony of all connected with the venture is that without White it could never have taken place. A man of faith, he had great courage and devotion to his work and to the students he had trained. He was extraordinary, too, in his musicianship; although almost entirely self-taught, he maintained standards of performance so high that only his personal influence over the singers kept them from wearying and rebelling. "His ear was exquisite," wrote an associate; "in passages of almost incredible power he would not tolerate anything that was not pure tone" (Fisk Herald, October 19rr, pp. 5, 6). "He would keep us singing all day until we had every passage ... to suit his fastidious taste," said one of the singers (Ibid., p. 30).

At Saratoga, Minnesota, August II, 1867, White married Laura Amelia Cravath, a missionary of the American Missionary Association and a sister of Erastus Milo Cravath [q.v.], first president of Fisk University. She died in Glasgow, Scotland, during the first tour of the singers. On April 12, 1876, during the second European tour, he married Susan Gilbert, a fellow teacher at Fisk, chaperon to the young women among the singers. Forced by an accident in 1885, from which he never fully recovered, to give up his work with the Jubilee Singers, he taught music at the state normal school, Fredonia, New York; in 1886-87 he was at Biddle (later Johnson C. Smith) University in North Carolina; and in later years, with his wife, was connected with Sage College, Cornell University. He died at Ithaca, in his fifty-eighth year, after being stricken with paralysis. His wife, with a son and a daughter of his first marriage, survived him; his eldest son had died in 1890.

[G. D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers (1873) and The Singing Campaign (1875); Fisk, Herald, October 1911; annual reports of the American Missionary Association, 1867-76; information as to certain facts from white's daughter, Miss Georgia L. White.]

M. G.


WHITE, Horace (August 10, 1834-September 16, 1916), journalist, economist.  Deeply stirred by the events in "bleeding Kansas," he soon became assistant secretary of the National Kansas Commission. As such it was his duty to receive and forward money, arms, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds to the Free State pioneers among them John Brown and two of his sons and to outfit parties of new settlers who passed through Iowa and Nebraska to the scene of the conflict. In 1857 he himself went to Kansas with the expectation of becoming a settler and a leader of the anti-slavery forces. In 1858 he reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates,  and began a warm friendship with Abraham Lincoln and also with Henry Villard [q.v.], then correspondent of the New York Staats-Zeitung.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 104-105:

WHITE, HORACE (August 10, 1834-September 16, 1916), journalist, economist, was born at Colebrook, New Hampshire, the son of Horace White, a physician, and his wife, Eliza Moore. As agent of the New England Emigration Company, Dr. White founded the town of Beloit, Wis., where his wife and two sons joined him in 1838. Entering Beloit College in 1849, at the age of fifteen, Horace was graduated four years later. He at once entered journalism and in 1854 became city editor of the Chicago Evening Journal. The following year he was made Chicago agent of the New York Associated Press. This place, also, he held but a short time for, deeply stirred by the events in "bleeding Kansas," he soon became assistant secretary of the National Kansas Commission, As such it was his duty to receive and forward money, arms, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds to the Free State pioneers among them John Brown and two of his sons and to outfit parties of new settlers who passed through Iowa and Nebraska to the scene of the conflict. In 1857 he himself went to Kansas with the expectation of becoming a settler and a leader of the anti-slavery forces.

Returning to Chicago to make final arrangements, he was induced by Dr. C. H. Ray, editor of the Chicago Tribune, to accept a position on that paper, of which he was a minority stockholder until his death. In 1858 he reported for it the Lincoln-Douglas debates, thus beginning a warm friendship with Abraham Lincoln and also with Henry Villard [q.v.], then correspondent of the New York Staats-Zeitung. At the outbreak of the Civil War the Chicago Tribune made White its Washington correspondent, permitting him also to hold the important position of clerk of the Senate committee on military affairs, which position gave to him a remarkable insight into the conduct of the war. In 1864 he formed, with Henry Villard and Adams Sherman Hill, in later life the distinguished Boylston Professor of Rhetoric in Harvard University, the first news agency to compete with the Associated Press, serving the Chicago Tribune, Springfield Republican, Boston Advertiser, Cincinnati Commercial, Rochester Democrat, and the Missouri Democrat of St. Louis. Villard took the field with the Army of the Potomac, and White and Hill covered Washington. With the dose of the war this syndicate was dissolved and White became editor-in-chief of the Chicago Tribune, remaining as such until his resignation because of ill health in 1874.

In 1877 he joined Villard, then receiver of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, in the service of that enterprise, subsequently being appointed treasurer of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company when Villard became president. In 1881 the latter purchased the New York Evening Post, and the Nation, and placed at their head the distinguished triumvirate, Carl Schurz [q. v.], Horace White, and Edwin L. Godkin [q.v.], in order to continue the then failing Nation, and to establish a politically independent daily newspaper devoted to the highest political and social ideals. The triumvirate lasted, however, only a little more than two years, at the end of which time Schurz retired and Godkin became editor, with White in charge of the financial and economic policies of the two journals. In this field White at once took a position of high authority. His book Money and Banking, Illustrated by American History, first published in 1895, was in 1935 still a standard textbook in schools and colleges. When Godkin retired in 1899, White became editor-in-chief of the Evening Post, which position he held until his retirement because of failing health in i,903. A profound Greek scholar, he published The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria,, Translated from the Greek (1899), and, in his retirement, wrote The Life of Lyman Trumbull (1913), besides editing various financial textbooks. In 1908 Governor Charles E. Hughes of New York appointed him chairman of a commission on speculation in securities and commodities, authorized by the legislature of the state. Its report recommended no action by the legislature and placed upon the stock exchange itself "the duty of restraint and reform." Eight of the fourteen recommendations were adopted by the governors of the exchange.

Of exceptionally strong character, White enjoyed the complete respect and the warm regard of friends and associates. He was always more the scholar and the philosopher than the journalist or executive. His modesty was extreme; his repugnance to public appearances, unconquerable. He had an extraordinarily strong grasp of fundamental economic truths which nothing could disturb. A convinced free-trader and an old-fashioned liberal of the Manchester school, he, like Godkin, threw himself passionately into the Evening Post's opposition to the annexation of Hawaii, to the American governments' attitude in the Venezuelan imbroglio with England in 1895, and to the war with Spain and the conquest of the Philippines, in all of which opposition he and his associates were actuated by complete devotion to the American ideal as they understood it. Like Godkin, too, he was rigid in upholding the literary and scholarly traditions of the Evening Post, the editorial page of which was £or thirty-seven years one of the most distinguished in American journalism. White was married first to Martha Root of New Haven, Connecticut, who died in 1873, and second, in 1875, to Amelia Jane McDougall of Chicago, Illinois, who died in 1885. He was survived by three daughters.

[Printed sources include obituary, autobiographical sketch, and editorial in Evening Post (New York), September 18, 1916, and One Hundredth Anniversary Edition of the Post, November 16, 1901; Allan Nevins, The Evening Post; A Century of Journalism (1922); 0. G. Villard, John Brown (1910); Memoirs of Henry Villard (1904); Who's Who in America, 1914-15. Most authorities give the year of White's birth as 1834, but his daughter states that a note in his own handwriting gives the year as 1833.]

O. G. V.


WHITE, Stephen Van Culen (August 1, 1831-January 18, 1913), banker, congressman,  Stephens father Hiram White, who hated slavery intensely, refused to do police duty during the wave of dread that swept over the South as a result of Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, and when Stephen was only six weeks old the family was forced to leave the state.  An ardent opponent of slavery, White wrote articles for the Republican party during Fremont's presidential campaign in 1856.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 119-120:

WHITE, STEPHEN VAN CULEN (August I, 1831-January 18, 1913), banker, congressman, was born in Chatham County, North Carolina, the son of Hiram and Julia (Brewer) White. His mother belonged to a Carolina family and his father was descended from a Pennsylvania Quaker who migrated to North Carolina after the close of the Revolutionary War. Hiram White, who hated slavery intensely, refused to do police duty during the wave of dread that swept over the South as a result of Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, and when Stephen was only six weeks old the family was obliged to leave the state. They settled in a log cabin near Otterville, Jersey County, Illinois, not far from the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. White attended the free school founded by Dr. Silas Hamilton in Otterville, helped about his father's farm and grist mill, and trapped forbearing animals. With the help of an elder brother he prepared for Knox College at Galesburg, Illinois, where he received the degree of A.B. in 1854. On leaving college he kept books for a mercantile house in St. Louis for eight months and then entered the law office of B. Gratz Brown and John A. Kasson [qq.v.]. An ardent opponent of slavery, White wrote articles for the Republican party during Fremont's presidential campaign. He was admitted to the bar on November 4, 1856, and in the same year moved to Des Moines; Iowa. Here he practised until the end of 1864, during which year he was acting United States district attorney for Iowa.

In the beginning of 1865 he moved to New York state, making his home in Brooklyn. Although he was admitted to the local bar he did not practise, but instead joined the open board of brokers and became a member of the banking and brokerage firm of Marvin & White, with offices in Wall Street. After the failure of this house in 1867, White went into business by himself. In 1869 he became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. He soon became known as a daring, though not always successful, stock manipulator, especially in the shares of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. In 1872 he was obliged to suspend for the second time in consequence of losses sustained through the great fire in Boston. In 1882 he formed the partnership of S. V. White & Company. He was elected as a Republican to the Fiftieth Congress in 1886 and served one term (1887-89), declining a renomination. In 1891 he tried to corner the corn market, but miscalculated the available supply and failed for almost a million dollars instead of making the huge profit he had counted upon. His creditors, however, having faith in his honesty and ability, cancelled their claims against him and returned to him his $200,000 remaining assets. He was readmitted to the stock exchange on February 15, 1892, and by the end of that year had paid off the last of his obligations, with interest.

A warm friend of Henry Ward Beecher [q.v.], whose legal expenses in the famous Beecher Tilton trial he is said to have defrayed, White vas a trustee of Plymouth Church from 1866 till 1902 and its treasurer from 1869 till 1902. In that year he retired £rem much of his business activity to give time to his avocations. Frequently called "Deacon," although he never held the office, he was in his day a well-known and picturesque figure in Wall Street. He was a short, stocky man with a full beard, quick and alert in his movements, cordial -in manner, and always attired in a frock coat with a soft, tun1ed-down collar and a black string tie. An astronomer with one of the finest telescopes in America owned by a private individual, he was one of the organizers of the American Astronomical Society, founded in 1884, which subsequently became the department of astronomy of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In February 1857, at Stanton, Illinois, he married Eliza M. Chandler, by whom he had a daughter.

[Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Fiftieth Congress: Official Congress Directory (1888); Who's Who in America, 1912 -13; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 18, 1913; New York Times, January 19, 1913.]

H. G. V.


WHITE, W. A., U.S. Congressman, member of the Free Soil Party.

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 345; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 


WHITMAN, Ezekiel (March 9, 1776--August 1, 1866), representative in Congress.  He favored restrictions on slavery in Missouri but opposed the same restrictions in Arkansas, 

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 140-141:

WHITMAN, EZEKIEL (March 9, 1776--August 1, 1866), representative in Congress, jurist, son of Josiah and Sarah (Sturtevant) Whitman, and descendant of John Whitman who settled in Weymouth, Massachusetts, about 1638, was born in Bridgewater (later East Bridgewater), Massachusetts. His father died when he was two years old. In 1783 his mother married again, and young Ezekiel went to live with his uncle, the Reverend Levi Whitman of Wellfleet, who gave him a rudimentary education. At the age of fourteen he prepared for college under the Reverend Kilborn Whitman of Pembroke, and after fifteen months' study he entered Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in 1791. Desperately poor, he was compelled to leave college in his senior year through lack of funds. He returned just before commencement and, on passing his examinations, received the degree of A.B. in 1795. He disliked Latin and Greek but excelled in other studies. Slow of speech and of motion, he pursued an independent way, and, though he was eccentric and obstinate at times, his honesty and integrity brought him respect. When graduated, Whitman was without funds and considered joining a company of players then performing in Providence, but his friend Peleg Chandler dissuaded him from this as well as from going to sea. He then studied law, first with Benjamin Whitman of Hanover and then with Nahum Mitchell in his native town. In 1796 he spent a year in Kentucky, where he had gone to settle the estate of a deceased Bridgewater citizen. In the spring of 1799, having been admitted to the bar of Plymouth County, he decided to begin the practice of law in Maine, and set out alone on horseback for Turner. In September he removed to New Gloucester, where he remained until January 1807 with steadily increasing success. He then removed to Portland. He was an able jury lawyer, using simple and direct methods, eloquent by reason of clarity and force, and not through rhetorical display. He was a successful advocate for merchants presenting claims under the treaty with Spain in 1819 and later in similar cases under the convention with France of July 1831. Many students studied in his office, among them Simon Greenleaf and Albion K. Parris [qq.v.].

Though he preferred the law to politics, he served as representative in Congress from Cumberland County, March 1809 to March 1811. In 1815 and 1816 he was a member of the executive council of Massachusetts. In 1816 he was a member of the Brunswick Convention, which met to consider the separation of Maine from Massachusetts. When members tried by misinterpreting the law to make it seem that the necessary five-ninths of the voters had voted for separation, he vigorously repudiated the action. Again elected to Congress in 1816, he served three continuous terms (March 1817-June 1822). He defended the bill authorizing the apprehension of foreign seamen deserting from merchant ships in the ports of the United States (Annals of Congress, IS Congress, 2 Session, p. 362). He favored restrictions on slavery in Missouri but opposed the same restrictions in Arkansas (Ibid., p. 1274). He opposed Henry Clay's successful attempts to unite the admission of Missouri with that of Maine (Ibid., 16 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 836, 1407) and voted against the bill admitting the two states together (for his defense see M. Kingsley and others, Address to the People of Maine, 1820). He addressed Congress frequently on the Florida question, strongly condemning Jackson for his action there. In 1819 he was a member of the convention which formed a constitution for Maine. He resigned from Congress, June I, 1822, in order to take up his duties as judge of the court of common pleas, a position to which Governor Parris had appointed him on February 4. On December 10, 1841, he succeeded Judge Nathan Weston as chief justice of the supreme court of Maine, an office which he filled until October 23, 1848, when, under the provisions of the state constitution, he was compelled to resign. The honesty and integrity for which he was noted in his youth, and later in Congress, enhanced his reputation as a judge. Though ordinarily he was quiet and deliberate, he could act quickly and vigorously in an emergency. His judicial opinions are to be found in Maine Reports (volumes XXI-XXIX). In 1832 he published Memoir of John Whitman and His Descendants. His wife, Hannah Mitchell, the sister of his legal instructor, whom he married October 31, 1799, died after a paralytic shock, March 28, 1852. They had a son and two daughters, one of whom married William Willis, 1794-1870 [q.v.]. Left lonely and desolate by his wife's death, in October 1852 he returned to East Bridgewater, where like many of his family he died at an advanced age. He was buried in Portland.

[See Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); William Willis, A History of the Law, the Courts, and the Lawyers of Maine (1863); Biographical Encyclopedia of Maine of the Nineteenth Century (1885); C. H. Farnam, History of the Descendants of John Whitman of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1889); Nahum Mitchell, History of the Early Settlement of Bridgewater (1840); Charles Hamlin, in Green Bag, October 1895; obituary notices in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, October 1866, Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, August 4, 1866, and Daily Portland Press, August 8, 1866. Comparison should be made between the biography letter of Peleg Chandler to William Willis, August 23, 1843, and the letter of Ezekiel Whitman to Willis, April 5, 1863 (both in the Willis MSS., collections of the Maine Historical Society).]

R.E.M.


WHITMAN, Walt, 1819-1892, poet, essayist, journalist. Wrote antislavery poetry.  Supported the Wilmot Proviso and was opposed to the inclusion of slavery in the new territories.  His poetry presented his views on the equality of the races.  Supported the abolition of slavery, but did not necessarily support the tactics of the abolitionist movement.  In 1856, he wrote to the people of the South, in an unpublished work, “You are either to abolish slavery, or it will abolish you.” (Hughes, Meltzer, & Lincoln, 1968). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 143-152)

WHITMAN, WALT (May 31, 1819-March 26, 1892), poet, was born at West Hills, in the town of Huntington, Long Island, of parents in whom Dutch and English blood predominated. His first known ancestor, Joseph Whitman, seems to have come from England to Stratford, Connecticut, and thence to Huntington about 1660. The family settled as farmer s in the hamlet of West Hills, where Nehemiah Whitman, the poet's great-grandfather, owned several hundred acres, worked by slaves. Nehemiah's widow is said by the poet to have been a great swarthy woman who smoked tobacco and swore at her slaves from the back of a vicious horse which she rode like a man. Their son Jesse married Hannah Brush, a schoolmistress, in 1775, and one of his children was Walter Whitman (1789-1855), the father of the poet. Walter, who added the occupation of carpenter to that of farmer, was a large, silent man; he inherited a leaning toward the Quakers and toward Elias Hicks [q.v.], the famous preacher 'whom the poet himself was always to remember and revere. The son, given his father's name; signed it to his writings until 1855, when he changed it to Walt, as he had been known at home. His father was married in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor (1795-1873), of Cold Spring, Huntington. Her father, Major Cornelius Van Velsor, a horse-breeder whose joviality and stout red face his grandson liked to celebrate, was pure Dutch, but he had married a woman (Amy Williams) of Welsh descent and Quaker leanings. The poet has had more to say about his mother than about his father; she was not educated, but in sympathy and understanding she was "perfect," and his relations to her were always very close. He was the second of nine children, the eldest and youngest of whom were mentally defective.

In 1823 or shortly thereafter the family moved to Brooklyn, then a town of less than 10,000 inhabitants. Here the poet spent a few years in the public schools, later being remembered by one of his teachers as "a big, good-natured lad, clumsy and slovenly in appearance, but not otherwise .remarkable" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxvi). In the summers he was taken on visits back to Huntington and to other places on Long Island, and he was subsequently to believe that the early knowledge thus gained of life on farm and seashore, among haymakers, eel-fishers, baymen, and pilots, was one of the few important influences upon his work. The shore, both then and during his young manhood, drew him to it whenever he was free; "I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour" (Autobiographia, pp. 23-24). But he was to be a poet of cities as well as of the sea, and his reminiscences in later life were also of the Brooklyn he had known as a boy, with its old houses and its winding streets, and with its ferries that went across the East River to New York.

His schooling ended in his thirteenth year, or possibly in his eleventh (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxvii). At eleven he was an office boy first for a lawyer and then for a doctor, the lawyer's son subscribing for him to a circulating library which introduced him to the Arabian Nights and to Sir Walter Scott. In the summer of his thirteenth year he became a printer's devil in the office of the Long Island Patriot, whence he went in the same capacity to the Long Island Star. This w.as the beginning of his long acquaintance with newspapers, and of a career which during three decades was to identify him with a bewildering number of editorial offices. Between 1833, when his family moved back to Long Island, and 1836, when he joined them there for a brief while, he may have been a journeyman compositor in Brooklyn and New York, making occasional contributions to the papers he worked for and getting his first taste of the theatre and the opera, those mainstays of his education a little later on.

Between 1836 and 1841 he confined his wanderings to Long Island, teaching seven schools in as many towns and editing the Long Islander at Huntington in 1838-39. His contributions to this and other local papers were conventional in their youthful sentiment, the verses dealing generally with the themes of loneliness, unrequited affection, and the grave. In 1839-40, when he alternated between teaching and typesetting at Jamaica, he impressed the wife of his employer, the publisher of the Long Island Democrat, as "a dreamy, impracticable youth," "untidy," "inordinately indolent," "morose," "not at all in tune with his surroundings," and insultingly indifferent to children. "He was a genius who lived, apparently, in a world of his own" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, xxxiii-xxxiv). This world included books among other things, for he was beginning by his own later testimony to read the Bible, Shakespeare, Ossian, the Greek tragic poets, the ancient Hindu poets, the Nibelungenlied, the poems of Scott, and Dante. He was also interested in politics; he electioneered as a Democrat in Queens County in 1840, and in 1841 he was one of several speakers at a Tammany mass meeting in City Hall Park, New York. Yet even this early it would appear that his thoughts turned frequently in upon himself.

From 1841 to 1848 Whitman was associated with at least ten newspapers or magazines in New York and Brooklyn: the Aurora, the Sun, the Tattler, Brother Jonathan, the Statesman, the Democrat, the American Review, the Columbian, the Democratic Review, and the Brooklyn Eagle. The two last were the most important. The Democratic Review was the best literary journal of the day, which meant that Whitman's contributions to it between 1841 and 1845 admitted him to the company of Hawthorne, Poe, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Thoreau, and Whittier. His contributions were not poems but stories- now in the manner of Hawthorne, now in the manner of Poe; sentimental, melancholy, and melodramatic. The few poems he printed elsewhere, while they were competent exercises in conventional verse forms, had nothing either of the method or of the quality which eventually were to distinguish his poetry from that of all others. Their subject matter also was routine, as was that of a temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, a Tale of the Times, which Whitman wrote for an extra issue of the New World in 1842, and which in its bombast and bathos failed to raise itself above the level of rhetoric on which a great deal of reform literature was being written at the moment. All the while Whitman was familiarizing himself with the varied life of the metropolis; he sauntered about the streets, haunted the omnibuses and ferries, became intimate with drivers and pilots, strolled off to the beaches and the bathing crowds, went regularly to the Bowery Theatre to see Fanny Kemble, the younger Kean, the elder Booth, Macready, Edwin Forrest, and Charlotte Cushman, listened to public speeches, and intoxicated himself at the opera with the "vocalism of sun-bright Italy." When in January 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a Democratic newspaper, his was equipped both by his personal and by his professional experience to conduct, as he did for two years, a brisk editorial page which was on the whole enlightened and well written, though naturally it never gave expression to a soul which even in these busy years was possessed with a sense of separateness and bewilderment. Whitman supported most of the contemporary reforms, local and national; he reviewed as many as 200 new books; he celebrated the joys of living in Brooklyn; and on the question of slavery he moved rapidly in the Free-Soil direction-losing his position, indeed, when in January 1848 he protested too vehemently against the failure of the Democratic party to face the issue of slavery in the new states. He was once more without a job.

Within a month, however, he was on his way south, having contracted in a theatre lobby to write for the New Orleans Crescent. With his brother Jeff he spent two weeks in February crossing Pennsylvania and Virginia and steaming down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers toward a different sort of city from any that he had known. New Orleans undoubtedly charmed him. His work was not arduous, so that he had ample leisure for exploring the markets, the levees, the barrooms, the sidewalks, and the cemeteries. Certain of his sketches for the Crescent indicate a susceptibility to the women of New Orleans. But it is not necessary to believe the legend that he fell in love with one of these and that the attachment colored all of his later life and work. His statement to John Addington Symonds in 1890 that he was the father of six illegitimate children was not accepted by some of his best friends as true, nor is it more generally credited; and even if it was true there is no evidence that the mother of any of the children had been met in New Orleans. Vague assertions by Whitman in his old ag~ concerning later trips to the South have transferred the scene of his "romance" elsewhere; but it remains doubtful whether he took any such trips. The poem, "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," has been offered as evidence; but a manuscript version of this poem (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, II, 102-03) reveals that it originally referred to an attachment with a man, not a woman. Nor is it possible to say with certainty that Whitman began now, and only now, to write his characteristic poetry; one of his notebooks (Ibid., II, 63 ff.) makes it reasonably clear that he was experimenting introspectively with sexual themes before 1848. The importance of the residence in New Orleans can easily be exaggerated, though it may be significant in that it introduced Whitman to a portion of the country he would never have seen otherwise. As for a romance, it is just as conceivable that he failed to find one there, and that this failure-in a scene so suitable for it-precipitated the lonely Leaves of Grass. At any rate, Whitman left New Orleans with his brother after three months, coming home by way of St. Louis, Chicago, the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, Albany, and the Hudson.

In Brooklyn he returned ostensibly to journalism, writing for the Freeman, a Barnburner paper, in 1848-49, for the Daily Advertiser in 1850, and for various unknown papers between 1850 and 1854. For two years, 1857-59, he edited the Brooklyn Times, and in 1861-62 he published a long series of articles on the early history of Brooklyn in the Standard. But he had returned, as only he knew for the. time being, to something of much greater importance to himself than journalism. For it was now that he entered definitely upon the seven-year period which came to its end and climax with the publication l in 1855 of Leaves of Grass.

It has been customary to suppose that Whitman passed through some mystical experience shortly before he wrote the twelve poems which composed the first edition of Leaves of Grass, and that this experience consisted in his having a sudden, full apprehension of himself. It is likely that his state of mind throughout the early 185o's was extraordinary, since the book which resulted was extraordinary; but his knowledge of himself was a much older thing. The illumination, if illumination there was, would appear to have been a discovery not of his own nature, which he already knew too well, but of a way in which that nature might be presented to the world and so justified. His existence up to this point must have seemed unsatisfactory to him, not only because in the outward matter of a profession he had managed to be little more than a knockabout journalist, but also, and this is more important, because in inward matters pertaining to his own soul he had been forced to realize how unlike the rest of the world he was. He was to celebrate himself as an "average man," and was always to insist that Leaves of Grass had no other value than that; yet he was anything but an average men, and, ignorant though he may have remained concerning his fundamental nature, he must have admitted his uniqueness long before 1850. Early and late his writings bear testimony to the sense of isolation which pursued him. His passion for rubbing through crowds on ferries and buses was not the passion of one whose need for society is normally satisfied. The theme of separation is constant in his work, both prose and verse. He was reserved to the end, so that among his final worshippers there was not one who knew whether he had ever enjoyed his complete confidence.

He was tall and heavy, but he was not the robust individual he claimed to be. Both his body and his mind moved slowly, dreamily. His eyes, as may best be seen in the portraits of 1855, 1863, and 1869, were heavy-lidded and uncommunicative; Emerson spoke of them as "terrible"; John Burroughs called them "dumb, yearning, relentless, immodest, unhuman" (Barrus, post, p. 15). Burroughs also is authority for the statement that Whitman's body was "that of a child," and that there was always "something fine, delicate, womanly in him" (Ibid., p. 265). He was more than moderate in his habits, he was fastidious; he never smoked. He was fond of cooking, bathing, and nursing, and he always paid the strictest attention to the dress both of himself and of his acquaintances. As a very young man he was a dandy; after he came back from New Orleans he cultivated the rough garments which in the early photographs made him famous; later on, in Washington, he carefully prescribed the fashion in which his shirts should be made, and invariably wore a gray suit; in his old age his open, lace-edged collar revealed a smooth, delicate neck, he wore in his shirt-bosom a pearl stud approximately an inch in diameter, and he regularly bathed his face and hands with eau de cologne.

Earlier than 1850 he must have recognized that his impulses were extraordinary. He was inordinately excitable by things and persons that touched him, and his notebooks of 1847 (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, II, 63) show how painfully conscious of the fact he was. He has been called autoerotic, erethistic, and homosexual; nor is it possible to doubt that some such extremes of nomenclature are necessary to explain certain passages in the "Song of Myself." For in those passages he does not seem to be inventing aptitudes and habits for himself; they could not have been invented, and furthermore, whatever deliberate construction he may have seen fit then or later to place upon them, their treatment retains many a trace of the uneasiness and the terror which a contemplation of them had inspired in him. That he loved men more than women was a fact which he was subsequently to erect into a reason for claiming special insight into the principle upon which democracies would hold together. The fact remains, however, that love for his own sex is the only kind of love about which he is ever personal or convincing, and that in his correspondence he reserves the word "darling" for his mother and for young men alone.

All this has nothing to do with his being a great poet, but it has much to do with the state of mind out of which Leaves of Grass grew with such slow and conscious effort. That effort was put forth both by the artist and by the man-was put forth by the man, indeed, in order that he might become an artist and so free himself from the slavery of self-contemplation. Leaves of Grass purports to be a poem about "Myself." But in one very important sense it is not personal at all. Or if it is personal, it exploits two selves in Whitman, one natural and one created. The created self is the one which the world has enjoyed, and it is one of the most magnificent fabrications of modern times. Whitman discovered the way to it through a number of channels, the broadest and deepest of these being undoubtedly his reading. Mention has been made of his early acquaintance with Scott and Homer and Shakespeare, the last of whom he knew in the theatre as well as from the printed page and continued throughout his life to discuss with significant eloquence. It is likely, however, that his immediate illumination came through intellectual contact with contemporaries. His review for the Eagle in 1846 of Goethe's autobiography shows how excited he was before the spectacle of a man who had explored the universe in terms of himself. Early and late Carlyle stood huge upon his horizon, helping him to find a prose style and convincing him that mystical significances could be discovered in the social behavior of men. Yet it was from Emerson that he caught the final, determining fire. Later on he denied this, attempting, unsuccessfully, to establish that he had never read Emerson before 1855 (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, 132). It is impossible to read either the early notebooks or the first edition of Leaves of Grass without feeling the presence of Emerson everywhere-in the epigrammatic style of the preface and the twelve poems, in the nature of the things said, and in the quality of the egoism. From Emerson he learned his fundamental lesson, that a man could accept and celebrate himself in cosmic language. He could transfer his vision from the eccentric, the unique self to the general, the impersonal one. He could move at once from doubt of Walt Whitman to faith in Man, of whom he might take what he called "Myself" as representative. Bound as he was to brood upon his own nature, he found in Emerson a way to do so which would legitimatize his emotions, liberate himself, and fascinate the world. He seems to have been assisted and supported in this acceptance of himself by the circumstance that in 1849 he had his "bumps" read at the phrenological cabinet of Fowler and Wells in New York and was told that he possessed an unusually high degree of every human quality. From the importance he attached to his own "chart of bumps" and to the claims of phrenology generally it would appear that the experience had convinced him of his signal sanity and his remarkable representativeness; it was thence, perhaps, that he gained the confidence to assert of himself in an anonymous review he wrote of Leaves of Grass in 1855 that he was "of pure American breed, large and lusty ... a naive, masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, imperious person" (In Re Walt Whitman, p. 23).

At the same time that he experimented in his notebooks with a new form and mood of poetry he reflected also upon a possible career which he might have as an orator. He never surrendered, indeed, his vision of himself as one who might go forth among the American people and astonish them with fresh and forceful utterances. His notebooks show that he practised even the gestures of the platform, and there is abundant evidence that he devoted a great deal of his time to the planning and writing of lectures. The style of his poetry can best be explained in terms of his apprenticeship in declamation. His temper, however, was not the positive temper of the happy orator, and he seems to have recognized this, as he recognized that the printed broadsides which he also conceived as a medium of expression might not be the most satisfactory medium. At any rate it was to poetry that he applied himself with the greatest zeal in the years after his return from New Orleans, and it was through his poetry, much of which must have been written while he helped his father build houses in Brooklyn (1851-54), that he was to become famous around the world.

Whatever hopes of fame he had, however, were confounded by the reception of his first performance. Leaves of Grass, printed in 1855, was a failure with the public. It was a tall, thin volume containing a long preface in prose and twelve poems without titles. The preface rendered an Emersonian account of the relation between the miraculous universe and the no less miraculous soul of man; predicted the future greatness of the American people, who "of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature"; and prescribed the duties of the American poet, as well as suggested the broad rules of his art. The poems included those later to be known as "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There was a Child Went Forth." The book was incomprehensible to some readers and shocking to others, and it still is one of the most difficult of all books to understand. The man who wrote it never fully understood himself-never, perhaps, understood how excellent he was merely as a poet, occupied as he was both then and later with the thought that he must be first of all a prophet. The complexity of his temperament explains the baffling way he took of gliding back and forth in these poems between his actual and his assumed self; the subtlety and the power of his faculties are evidenced everywhere by images and cadences beyond which no modern poet has gone in the direction either of explicitness or of ellipsis.

The book struck home here and there. A copy sent to Concord elicited the famous letter in which Emerson said: "I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy .... I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start" (Emory Holloway, Whitman. An Interpretation in Narrative, 1926, p. 118). Emerson was never to publish a word in praise of Whitman, and he is said to have recanted some of this praise in conversation; but he already had done enough. Whitman says he visited him soon in Brooklyn; certainly Thoreau and Bronson Alcott came down to see him, as Bryant came over from Manhattan. There were a few favorable reviews among many that were indignant or bewildered; in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for September 1855 Charles Eliot Norton in an unsigned article mingled disapprobation with astonished praise, confining to the secrecy of his desk a poem which he wrote at the same time in imitation of a book that had overwhelmed him against his will; and Edward Everett Hale was complimentary in the North American Review for January 1856 (unsigned, in "Critical Notices"). But for the most part the book fell dead from the printer's hands, and even the three rhapsodic reviews of it which Whitman himself wrote for the Brooklyn Times, the American Phrenological Journal, and the United States and Democratic Review failed of any noticeable effect. He could not have known at the moment that a few copies of Leaves of Grass had crossed the Atlantic to England, where in time they were to arouse a tempest of admiration.

After a brief retreat to eastern Long Island Whitman returned to the city "with the confirmed resolution, from which I never afterward wavered, to go on with my poetic enterprise in my own way and finish it as well as I could" (Uncollected Poetry and Prose, I, Iiii). By the next year, 1856, he had a second edition ready. This was printed by Fowler and Wells, and it included among twenty-one new poems "Salut au Monde," "Song of the Broad-Axe," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and "Song of the Open Road." Stamped on the back in gold letters was the unauthorized legend: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, R. W. Emerson." An appendix inside reprinted certain press notices and a long-letter from the author to Emerson, "dear Friend and Master." This edition was even more unfavorably received, an additional reason for dislike now being the presence of such exploitations, of the sexual theme  as "Spontaneous Me" and "A Woman Waits for Maine" Fowler and Wells, after selling, it is said, a thousand copies, refused to handle the volume any longer, and so it too fell into an apparent oblivion, though certain infatuated readers of it were to be heard from later.

The four years which elapsed before the third edition of 1860 were spent in necessary newspaper work and in writing more than a hundred new poems. It was during this time also, that Whitman began to frequent the "Bohemian" society of authors, actors, and artists at Pfaff's restaurant in New York, where he made valuable literary acquaintances. In 1859 he read to some friends a new poem which he called "A Word Out of the Sea" and which was immediately taken for publication by the Saturday Press, where the young John Burroughs saw it. Now known as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," this poem, upon which Whitman never improved more than perhaps once, gave full and perfect lyric expression to the emotions about death which he had only tentatively touched upon in the first two editions of his book. Henceforth love and death-love as longing and death as the satisfaction of longing-were to be his great themes, though the fact was not so easily apparent to most readers of the edition of 1860-61, which, brought out in Boston by the firm of Thayer and Eldridge, contained two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus." "Children of Adam" celebrated "amativeness," or the love of men and women; "Calamus" celebrated "adhesiveness," or the love of men for men. The first of these is treated from the greater distance, remaining "athletic" and abstract in Whitman's hands, and in a sense unreal; it is rather in the poems of comradeship or "manly love" that he is intimate and convincing. Only here does he employ the secondary but indispensable themes of bashfulness and jealousy; only here is he tenderly personal, so that one may believe him when he insists over and again that this is his true self speaking. And it is in association with the thought of an unattainable friendship that he utters most touchingly his philosophy of death.

The edition of 1860-61 sold better than either of the others, and Whitman's visit to Boston in connection with its printing brought about his meeting with William Douglas O'Connor [q.v.], who was to be his fiercest champion in future years. It also gave him an opportunity, he says, to talk at length with Emerson, who advised him in vain to expurgate his poems. But this edition too was ill fated. The Civil War reduced Thayer and Eldridge to bankruptcy and the book fell into the hands of pirates; Whitman once more was without a publisher. But the war itself was to engage both his body and his mind during the four years ahead.

The importance of the Civil War in Whitman's life was incalculable. Not only did it determine, Washington as his place of residence for eleven years; it influenced and modified every thought he had, and was the occasion of his last great burst of poetry. But he was not drawn into close contact with it until the end of 1862. During 1861 and 1862 he was contributing a series of twenty-five articles called "Brooklyniana" to the Brooklyn Standard, and in 1862 he wrote seven articles for the New York Leader, four of these dealing with the Broadway Hospital, where he spent some time in attendance upon the sick and wounded, both soldier and civilian. He lived at home with his mother, one of whose sons, George, the poet's junior by ten years, had enlisted in the 51st New York Volunteers, a Brooklyn regiment. He also was writing poems about the war, some of which were to be included in Drum Taps three years later. In December 1862 word came that George was wounded in Virginia. Whitman left immediately for Washington, where he happened upon his friend O'Connor and received assistance of a sort which enabled him to find his brother at Falmouth, Virginia, opposite Fredericksburg. George was recovered by this time, but Whitman saw enough wounded men and heard enough about battles at close range to realize that his life must somehow be involved with the war until it ended. Back in Washington after several days, he. accepted Mr. and Mrs. O'Connor's offer of a room in their house; and Major Hapgood, an army paymaster, gave him a desk in his office where he could earn a little money copying documents. Soon he was devoting himself to wounded soldiers, Northern and Southern, in the various huge hospitals about the city. He has left two records of this experience, his letters to his mother, published in 1902, and Memoranda During the War (1875). He may not have tended "from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand" soldiers, as he claimed, but there is ample testimony to the faithfulness of his services. He seems not to have been connected, unless for the briefest period, with the Christian Commission; he went entirely on his own, basket on arm, entering the wards in order to talk with the soldiers or read to them, to bring them gifts of oranges, jelly, and horehound candy, to furnish them with paper and envelopes and on occasion to write the letters which they dictated to their families, and even now and then to assist at dressings and operations. His subsequent paralysis he attributed to an infection which he received during these months of exposure to gangrene and fever. Whenever possible he made small gifts of money to the soldiers, out of a fund which he raised in Boston, Salem, Providence, Brooklyn, and New York. He made money for himself by contributions to the New York newspapers, and he attempted to secure a clerkship in some government office, but for the present without success.

He saw much of the O' Connors, since he lived with them, and of their friends, among whom was Edmund Clarence Stedman [q.v.], a frequent visitor and already an admirer of Whitman. In 1863 he was sought out by John Burroughs [q.v.], then living in Washington with his wife, and made to understand how much he had influenced the mind of the younger man; the attachment between the two was strong until the end of Whitman's life. There seem to have been no :meetings between Whitman and Lincoln, and if the story (H. B. Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1916, pp. 124-27) that Lincoln had read Leaves of Grass before he came to Washington is to be disbelieved (W. E. Barton, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, 1928, pp. 90-94) there is a probability that Lincoln never knew of the poet's existence. But Whitman saw the President a number of times as he rode in the city, and he liked to think that Lincoln was nodding to him from his horse. The death of Lincoln, occurring only a few weeks after Whitman had. secured his first clerkship, in the office of the Department of the Interior, was at any rate the occasion for Whitman's masterpiece, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which was printed as a supplement to Walt Whitman's Drum Taps, already in the press (1865). Whitman's letters at the time reveal that he thought Drum Taps his best work (Perry, post, pp. 150-51), partly because it lacked the "perturbations" of Leaves of Grass. The remark is significant of a change which was coming over all his work. Henceforth it is mellower, less egocentric, less nervous, less raw. Henceforth it makes much of religion and the spiritual problems facing society. Henceforth, too, the poems reprinted in successive editions of Leaves of Grass, are tempered and shorn of certain excesses. The war, as well as advancing age, had completed the process in Whitman whereby his private nature was lost sight of in the great, gray, kindly figure of the legend.

On June 30, 1865, Whitman was dismissed from his position in the Department of the Interior. He was soon given another in the attorney- general's office, but since the reason for his dismissal had been Secretary Harlan's unwillingness to employ the author of a scandalous book there was occasion now to enlist a wider sympathy for Whitman than the book itself had aroused. O'Connor's pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, written in a blue heat of indignation and published in 1866, was the first published volume about Whitman. The second was Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), by John Burroughs. At least half of this was written by Whitman himself, who desired that the secret be kept until Burroughs' death, as it was. The Nates are passionate in their praise and often inaccurate in their information, but they have an interest as showing Whitman's prose style of the period, and as revealing how completely he had made Burroughs his disciple. Burroughs never included the Nates in his collected writings, but he wrote more than fifty other books and articles about Whitman before he died. The next year, 1868, O'Connor laid another stone in the foundation of the Whitman legend by contributing his story "The Carpenter," presenting the poet in a disguised and idealized form, to Putnam's Magazine for January. Meanwhile Whitman was finding friends and-admirers, as well as a number of enemies, abroad; and the next few years saw the beginning of his European vogue. Articles about him appeared in Germany in 1868 and in France, Denmark, and Hungary in 1872. Edward Dowden in Ireland was creating a group of enthusiastic readers, and in England the publication of an expurgated edition of Leaves of Grass by W. M. Rossetti (1868) put men like Swinburne, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds under the spell-Swinburne, however, only temporarily. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, the widow of Blake's biographer, read Rossetti's edition and wrote an article for the Boston Radical (May 1870) which particularly pleased Whitman as being the first tribute to him from a woman. The correspondence between the two which began in 1871 and continued until Mrs. Gilchrist's death in 1885, being interrupted only by her residence in Philadelphia for two years in order that she might be near the poet, is evidence that Mrs. Gilchrist's love was personal as well as literary, though Whitman could only give her friendship and esteem in return. His fame grew steadily, bringing him the first of his English visitors and stimulating a greater and greater amount of discussion in current periodicals.

Whitman's Washington period came to its close when in January 1873 he suffered a stroke of paralysis and was forced to leave for Camden, New Jersey, where his brother George took him into his house and where he shortly (May 23, 1873) was to witness the death of his mother. His illness and his bereavement were two blows from which he never recovered, and henceforth his life ran gradually downhill. Between 1865 and 1873, however, he had published two new editions of Leaves of Grass (1867 and 1871), Passage to India (1871), and the prose work Democratic Vistas (1871). Both of these latter works reveal again how he had tempered his message with time. "Passage to India," his last great poem, is among other things a recognition of the claims of the past upon our souls, and an admission that America needs all the support she can find in old ideas and religions. Democratic Vistas, written more or less in answer to Carlyle's Shooting Niagara, is remarkable for the frankness with which it discusses the shortcomings of American democracy so far; the reference of Whitman's idealism is now to the future, in which he still has faith-as, ultimately, he still has faith in the democratic masses of "These States."

Of the nineteen years which remained to him Whitman spent the first eleven in his brother's house in Stevens Street, Camden, and the last eight in a smaller house he had bought for himself at 328 Mickle Street. After eighteen months' absence from his position in the attorney-general's office at Washington he lost it, being henceforth dependent for his living upon his brother, upon friends, and upon the sale of his book s, which he conducted partly from his own quarters, receiving orders and filling them with his own hand. His literary income was from time to time augmented through articles for the press, through the sale of new poems, and through the lecture he gave perhaps a dozen times on "The Death of Abraham Lincoln." His illness, from which he never recovered, was less acute during the ten years following 1876, when he formed the habit of going down to Timber Creek, a stream which flows into the Delaware about ten miles below Camden, and enjoying the out-of-doors as a guest of the Stafford family at Laurel Springs. Here he was repaired and refreshed, and here he composed for Specimen Days some of the best prose he ever wrote, besides revising his earlier work and preparing new editions for the press.

Before the end came he had issued five new editions of Leaves of Grass (1876, 1881-82, 1882, 1888-89, 1891-92); had published three collections containing new poems (Two Rivulets, 1876; November Boughs, 1888; and Good-Bye, My Fancy, 1891); and had published most of the prose which now belongs to his canon. Memoranda During the War (1875) was included in Specimen Days and Collect (1882-83), which with Democratic Vistas came after his death to represent him in prose until the process began a quarter-century later of unearthing his earliest work.

During no portion of this period was he lonely or neglected. His old friends Burroughs and O'Connor were usually within reach, though he was estranged from O'Connor for ten years after 1872. He continued to correspond with Peter Doyle, a young horse-car conductor whom he had met in Washington in 1866 and with whom he always comported himself half as father and half as lover. More and more visitors arrived for interviews, many of them from England Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, Lord Houghton, Sir Edwin Arnold, Henry Irving, Bram Stoker, Ernest Rhys, Edmund Gosse. As time went on he found himself surrounded by disciples. Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian physician, attached himself to the poet in 1877 and produced the first official biography in 1883, following this pious performance with a number of articles emphasizing the prophetic importance of Whitman, whom he considered one of the first men, along with Bucke himself, to have come under the influence of "cosmic consciousness." Bucke was one of Whitman's three literary executors, and as such was in a position to publish his literary remains. The other two executors were Thomas B. Harned and Horace Traubel [q.v.]-the latter a young man who fell completely under the old poet's influence and took down with a busy pencil almost every remark he let fall.

Two episodes during these years aroused wide discussion and gave new impetus to Whitman's fame. In the West Jersey Press of January 26, 1876, appeared an article, apparently by Whitman himself, describing him as "old, poor, and paralyzed," and neglected by his countrymen. A copy of this was sent by Whitman to W. M. Rossetti in England, who had a portion of it reprinted in the Athenaeum, where it attracted the fiery eye of Robert Buchanan, the Scotch poet (Blodgett, post, pp. 36 ff.). His blast about it in the Daily News was the signal for a controversy which ceased neither in England nor in America until relief began pouring in on Whitman in the form of orders for his books. Six years later the action of Osgood & Company, the Boston publishers who had just brought out a new edition of Leaves of Grass, in withdrawing the book because of official protests against its indecency, inspired another controversy, O'Connor this time returning to the front rank of the Whitman forces. The result among other things was the sale of 3,000 copies of the Philadelphia edition (1882) in a single day. Meanwhile the fame of Whitman grew steadily in a more normal fashion. Certain "enemies," as he called those who did not think him a great poet, continued to express their doubts-notably Thomas Wentworth Higginson and William Winter [qq.v.] in America and the editors of the Saturday Review in England. Swinburne recanted his praise of 1868 and 1872 in a savage article of 1887, and Robert Louis Stevenson tempered the admiration he had originally felt. But there was at the same time a growing chorus of appreciation. Before the poet died he. had been translated into Danish, Dutch, French (by Jules Laforgue and Francis Viele-Griffin), German, and Italian, and had been the subject of numerous critical studies which ranged all the way from analysis to panegyric.

Whitman's tendency to bask in so much adoration and to surround himself with champions who did his name on the whole more harm than good is pardonable, considering his career, and at the same time pitiable. Of necessity he lived quietly in Camden, though he left it for trips to Colorado in 1879, to Canada in 1880 to visit Dr. Bucke, to Boston (where he saw Emerson for the last time) in 1881, and to his birthplace on Long Island in the same year. In his own mind he mellowed perceptibly, embracing Hegelianism and asserting once more, in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" which prefaced November Boughs (1888), the importance to America of religion and of the older literatures. His former impatience with any poetry which was not American had quite disappeared in his old age, as had his tendency to dismiss other American poets than himself as of no account. His mature appraisals of Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, Bryant, and of course Emerson are no less valuable as contributions to criticism than are his meditations on the death of Carlyle.

His death in Camden on March 26, 1892, was the occasion for many attempts to sum up his excellence and his importance. For the most part these were failures, since the shadow of the disciples and the executors still obscured him. During forty years this shadow has gradually been dissipated under the influence of biographical research, a saner criticism, and the passage of time. The claims originally made for him as man and moralist are made less often, and promise to disappear. To the extent that his "teachings" can be proved to have been built upon the unsteady basis of his own unique psychology, proof has been forthcoming-in America, in England, in Germany, and in France. It is now difficult if not impossible to believe that he came into the world to save it, or that he will save it. The world in general pays little attention to his name; he has never been a popular poet, accepted of democracies as he hoped, nor has he been often imitated by other poets, as he also hoped. But as his isolation grows more apparent it grows more impressive, so that his rank among the poets of his country and his century, and indeed of the world, is higher than it has ever been before. His work manages to survive the attacks made either upon, its author as a man or upon what George Santayana called before 1900 the "barbarism" of his mind. It survives as certainly the most original work yet done by any American poet, and perhaps as the most passionate and best. It is easier now to comprehend Whitman as the artist that he was, though it is not easy and it never will be. As a maker of phrases, as a master of rhythms, as a weaver of images, as an architect of poems he is often beyond the last reach of analysis. His diaries of the war, his prefaces to Leaves of Grass, his Democratic Vistas, and his notes on the landscape at Timber Creek are a permanent part of American prose. He himself, looked back at purely as a writer, will always loom a gigantic and beautiful figure in nineteenth-century letters.

[The Harned Collection of Whitman manuscripts in the Library of Congress includes twenty-four notebooks of various dates as well as annotated newspaper clippings, letters, and miscellaneous items. The Complete Works of Walt Whitman were published by the literary executors, R. M. Bucke, T. B. Harned, and Horace Traubel, in 10 volumes in 1902. This material has been supplemented by Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada (1904), ed. by W. S. Kennedy; An American Primer (1904), ed. by Horace Traubel; Criticism, An Essay, by Walt Whitman (1913); The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman (1918), ed. by T. B. Harned; The Gathering of the Forces, contributions to the 'Brooklyn Eagle (2 volumes, 1920), ed. by Cleveland Rodgers and John Black; The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 volumes, 1921), ed. by Emory Holloway; Walt Whitman's Workshop, A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts (1928), ed. by C. J. Furness; I Sit and Look Out; Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times by Walt Whitman (1932), ed. by Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz; Walt Whitman and the Civil War (1933), manuscripts and contributions to the New York Leader, ed. by C. I. Glicksberg. For bibliographies see the Complete Works, volume VII; The Cambridge History of American Literature, volume II (1918), pp. 551-81; A Concise Bibliography of the Works of Walt Whitman (1922) by Carolyn Wells and A. F. Goldsmith; and the various annual bibliographies of American literature.

The chief biographies are: R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman (1883); H. B. Binns, A Life of Walt Whitman (1905); Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (1906); Leon Bazalgette, Walt Whitman; L'Homme et son Oeuvre (1908), published in translation by Ellen FitzGerald (1920); G. R. Carpenter, Walt Whitman (1909); Emory Holloway, biographical introduction to The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 volumes, 1921); Emory Holloway, Whitman. An Interpretation in Narrative (1926); John Bailey, Walt Whitman (1926); Jean Catel, Walt Whitman; La Naissance du Poille (1929). Reminiscences and miscellaneous biographical material may be found in: John Burroughs, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867, 1871); H. H. Gilchrist, ed., Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings (1887); In Re Walt Whitman (1893), ed. by his literary executors; T. B. Donaldson, Walt Whitman: The Man (1896); W. S. Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (1896); I. H. Platt, Walt Whitman (1904); Edward Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman (1906); Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, March 28, 1888-January 20, 1J. Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890--1891 (1917); Elizabeth L. Keller, Walt Whitman in Mickle Street (1921). The growth of Whitman's reputation has been studied in W. S. Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World (1926); in Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs Comrades (1931); and in Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (1934). For psychological analyses of Whitman see: Eduard Bertz, Der Yankee-Heiland (Dresden, 1906), and Whitman-Mysterien. Eine Abrechnung mit Johannes Schlaf (Berlin, 1907); W. C. Rivers, Walt Whitman's Anomaly (1913). For critical studies see: J. A. Symonds, Walt Whitman: A Study (1893); Basil de Selincourt, Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (1914); Cebria Montoliu, Walt Whitman: L'home i sa tasca (Barcelona, 1913); Leon Bazalgette, Le 'Poeme-Evangile' de Walt Whitman (Paris, 1921). An obituary and a long article were published in New York Times, March 27, 1892.]

M.V-D.


WHITTIER, John Greenleaf, 1807-1892, Haverhill, Massachusetts, poet, journalist, newspaper publisher and editor, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist.  Wrote antislavery poetry.  Publisher and editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman.  Founding member, Manager, and Secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Member of the Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.  Leader and active with the Liberty Party.  Member, Free Soil Party.  Called for immediate abolition of slavery in the United States. 

(Blue, 2005, pp. 5, 37-64; Drake, 1950, pp. 113, 127, 137, 140-142, 158-159, 176, 181, 195; Dumond, 1961, pp. 167, 245, 286, 301; Filler, 1960, pp. 56, 66, 90, 105, 134, 148, 151, 194; Mabee, 1970, pp. 2, 4, 9, 11-13, 18, 21-22, 25-26, 29-30, 35-36, 48, 51, 65, 194, 211, 309, 326, 329, 359, 368, 373, 378; Pease, 1965, pp. 65, 102-104, 123-128; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 161, 433, 641, 723; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI, pp. 493-494; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 173-176; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 23, p. 350; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume I. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 407). 

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

WHITTIER, John Greenleaf, poet, born  in Haverhill, Massachusetts, 17 December, 1807. His parents were members of the Society of Friends, and to the principles and practices of this sect he always remained faithful, […]

The literary impulse in him must have been strong, for while yet in his nineteenth year he contributed anonymous verse to the poet's corner of the “Free Press,” a journal edited by W. L. Garrison in Newburyport, and enjoyed the furtive bliss of print. Garrison saw signs of promise in these immature experiments, sought out the author, and gave him the precious encouragement of praise and sympathy. This led to a lasting friendship, and, with the traditions of his sect, may have had some influence in preparing Whittier to enlist in the anti-slavery crusade which began with the establishment of the “Liberator” in 1831, and afterward caught so much of its inspiration from his fervid lyrics. The ambition to become a poet was awakened in him appropriately enough by a copy of Robert Burns's poems, which fell into his hands in his fourteenth year.

 His father dying, he carried on the farm for the next five years, and in 1835 was sent to the general court from Haverhill. During all these years he had been an industrious writer, seeking an outlet in all directions and contributing poems to John Neal's “Yankee” and to the “New England Magazine,” where the “Autocrat” began his admirable discourses. In 1829 he undertook the editorship of the “American Manufacturer” in Boston, and in 1830 succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the “Haverhill Gazette” during the first six months of the year, and then of the “New England Weekly Review” in Hartford, Connecticut. This office he resigned in 1832 on account of failing health and returned home. In 1836 he became secretary of the American anti-slavery society, and afterward removed to Philadelphia, where for a year (1838-'9) he edited the “Pennsylvania Freeman.” This he did with such sincerity that its printing-office was sacked and burned by a mob. At that time it required the courage of passionate conviction to maintain principles the noisier profession of which was to become profitable a few years later. Delicate as his organization was, Whittier faced many a brutal mob with unflinching composure. He was never a mere fanatic, but always quick to recognize and celebrate high qualities even in an adversary, as many of his poems show. He refused to follow Garrison in the renunciation of political action as one means of reform. In 1840 he took up his abode in Amesbury, a quiet village near his birthplace, and there (with the exception of six months spent at Lowell as editor of the “Middlesex Standard”), in the simple dignity of a frugal independence, the fruit of his own literary labors, he has lived ever since, and happily still lives, known and loved wherever our tongue is spoken. From 1847 to 1859 he contributed editorially to the “National Era,” an anti-slavery newspaper published at Washington, in which '”Uncle Tom's Cabin” was first printed.

In his seclusion Whittier was never idle, nor did he neglect his duties as a citizen while confirming his quality as a poet. Whenever occasion offered, some burning lyric of his flew across the country, like the fiery cross, to warn and rally. Never mingling in active politics (unless filling the office of presidential elector may be called so), he probably did more than anybody in preparing the material out of which the Republican party was made. When the civil war was impending he would have evaded it if possible by any concession short of surrender, as his “Word for the Hour” (January, 1861) shows. While the war continued he wrote little with direct reference to it, and never anything that showed any bitterness toward the authors of it. After it was over he would have made the terms of settlement liberal and conciliatory. He was too wise and too humane to stir the still living embers of passion and resentment for any political end however dear to him.

Of all American poets, with the single exception of Longfellow, Whittier has been the most popular, and in his case more than in that of any other the popularity has been warmed through with affection. This has been due in part to the nobly simple character of the man, transparent through his verse, in part to the fact that his poetry, concerning itself chiefly with the obvious aspects of life and speculation, has kept close to the highest levels of the average thought and sentiment. His themes have been mainly chosen from his own time and country—from his own neighborhood even—he deals with simple motives and with experiences common to all, and accordingly his scenery (whether of the outward or the inward eye) is domestically welcome to all his countrymen. He is never complex in thought or obscure in expression, and if sometimes his diction might gain in quality by a more deliberate choice, yet the pellucid simplicity of his phrase and the instant aptness of his epithet as often secure a more winning felicity through his frankness of confidence in the vernacular. His provincialisms of word or accent have an endearing property to the native ear, though even that will consent to a few of his more licentious rhymes. One feels that it is a neighbor who is speaking. Nor should the genial piety of his habitual thought and the faith that seeks no securer foothold than the Rock of Ages, on which the fathers stood so firmly, be overlooked among the qualities that give him a privilege of familiar entrance to a multitude of hearts and minds which would be barred against many higher, though not more genuine, forms of poetry. His religion has the sincerity of Cowper's without those insane terrors that made its very sincerity a torture. There are many points of spiritual likeness between the English and the American poet, especially in their unmetaphysicized love of outward natures, their austerity tempered with playful humor, and in that humanity of tone which establishes a tie of affectionate companionship between them and their readers. Whittier has done as much for the scenery of New England as Scott for that of Scotland. Many of his poems (such, for example, as “Telling the Bees”), in which description and sentiment mutually inspire each other, are as fine as any in the language.

Whittier, as many of his poems show, and as, indeed, would be inevitable, has had his moments of doubt and distrust, but never of despair. He has encountered everywhere the moral of his inscription on a sun-dial, convinced that “there's light above me by the shade below.” He, like others, has found it hard to reconcile the creed held by inheritance with the subtle logic of more modern modes of thought. As he himself has said:

“He reconciled as best he could
Old faith and fancies new.”

But his days have been “bound each to each with natural piety”; he has clung fast to what has been the wholesome and instructive kernel of all creeds; he has found consolation in the ever-recurring miracles, whether of soul or sense, that daily confront us, and in the expression of his own delight and wonder and gratitude for them has conveyed that solace to the minds and hearts of all his readers. One quality above all others in Whittier—his innate and unstudied Americanism—has rendered him alike acceptable to his countrymen and to his kindred beyond the sea. His first volume was “Legends of New England,” in prose and verse (Hartford, 1831), which has been followed by “Moll Pitcher” (1832); “Mogg Megone” (Boston, 1836); “Ballads” (1838); “Lays of My Home, and other Poems” (1843); “Miscellaneous Poems” (1844); the first English edition of his poetry, entitled “Ballads, and other Poems,” with an introduction by Elizur Wright (London, 1844); “The Stranger in Lowell” (1845); “Supernaturalism in New England” (New York and London, 1847); “Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal” (Boston, 1849); “Voices of Freedom” (Philadelphia, 1849); a larger English collection of his “Poetical Works” (London, 1850); “Old Portraits and Modern Sketches” (Boston, 1850); “Songs of Labor, and other Poems,” and “The Chapel of the Hermits, and other Poems” (1853); “A Sabbath Scene: a Sketch of Slavery in Verse” (1853); “Literary Recreations and Miscellanies” (1854); “The Panorama, and other Poems” (1856); “Complete Poetical Works” (2 volumes, 1857); “Home Ballads and Poems” (1860); “Snow-Bound” (1862); a new edition of his “Complete Poetical Works” (1863); “In War Time, and other Poems” (1863); “National Lyrics” (1865); a collection of his “Prose Works” (2 volumes, 1866); “The Tent on the Beach” (1867); “Among the Hills” (1868); an illustrated edition of his “Complete Poetical Works” (1868); one corresponding in typography with the “Prose Works” (1869); a volume of his “Ballads of New England” contains sixty illustrations by various artists (1869); “Miriam, and other Poems” (1870); “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, and other Poems”  (1872); “Hazel Blossoms” (1874); “Mabel Martin” (1875); a new collected edition of his “Poetical Works” comprising poems that he had written till the date of publication (1875); “Centennial Hymn” (1876); “The Vision of Echard, and other Poems” (1878); “The King's Missive, and other Poems” (1881); “Bay of Seven Islands, and other Poems” (1883); “Poems of Nature” (1885); and “St. Gregory's Guest, and Recent Poems” (1886). A final edition of his poetical and prose works has been supervised by himself, and includes his sister's poems (7 volumes, 1888-'9). See a “Biography,” by Francis H. Underwood (Boston, 1875; new ed., 1883), and “John G. Whittier: his Life, Genius, and Writings,” by W. Sloane Kennedy (1882). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume VI. pp. 493-494.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 10, Pt. 2, pp. 173-176:

WHITTIER, JOHN GREENLEAF (December 17, 1807-September 7, 1892), poet, abolitionist, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the son of Quaker parents. His father, John Whittier, was a stern, prosaic, but generous man, while his mother, Abigail (Hussey) Whittier, was a kindly soul, who to some extent sympathized with her son's literary leanings. Both parents influenced him considerably by their religious doctrines and tales of local history. On his father's side, he was descended from Thomas Whittier who came to Massachusetts from England in 1638. His youngest son, Joseph, married Mary Peasley, a Quakeress, and their youngest son, also named Joseph, marr1ed Sarah Greenleaf, member of a Puritan family believed to be of Huguenot origin. Spending his boyhood and youth on a farm, Whittier came close to nature, and later described the rural scene of his locality more faithfully than had any other writer up to that time. His "Barefoot Boy" has become a classic poem of New England farm life. Overexertion when he was about seventeen resulted in injuries from which he never fully recovered.

His formal education was limited, but what he did not obtain from schools he learned from books. For a brief period he studied under Joshua Coffin, in the unfinished ell of a farmhouse; and at another time, in a school kept by a Newburyport woman. When he was about fourteen he became acquainted with the poems of Burns. He read them studiously and soon began writing poems himself, some of them in Scotch dialect. As time went on his reading came to include books of travel, and history, works on Quaker doctrine and martyrology, Thomas Ellwood's poem Davideis, and the writings of Milton, Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, and others. He also delved into colonial literature, becoming particularly familiar with Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.

The sending of one of his poems, "The Exile's Departure," by his older sister Mary to the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison [q.v.], was an important event in young Whittier's life. The poem was published June 8, 1826, and Garrison was sufficiently interested in the unknown author to call upon him. He urged the father to send his son to some school for a further education, but the elder Whittier was averse to such a procedure. Though Garrison continued publishing poems by Whittier, it was Abijah W. Thayer, the editor of the Haverhill Gazette (later called the Esser Gazette), who made Whittier's work widely known, publishing poems by him weekly. Thayer, also, urged the elder Whittier to send his promising son to an academy and this time the father agreed to do so. At the beginning of May 1827, Whittier entered the newly opened Haverhill Academy, where a poem of his was sung at the inauguration ceremonies. He remained here for about six months, taught school during the winter, and then returned to the academy for another term of six months. During this period he poured forth a steady stream of poems, which appeared not only in the Free Press and the Essex Gazette, but for a time in the Boston Statesmen, edited by Nathaniel Greene [q.v.]. Thayer proposed the publication of Whittier's poems in book form by subscription, but the project was not carried out.

Through the help of Garrison, Whittier, in January 1829, became editor of The American Manufacturer (Boston), serving as such for seven months and resigning in large part because he was needed at home. This was the first of the numerous editorial positions he held during his life. In the early part of 1830 he edited the Essex Gazette. After the death of his father in June, he succeeded George D. Prentice [q.v.] as editor of the New England Weekly Review, published in Hartford, Connecticut. To this periodical he contributed many poems, stories, and sketches, most of which have remained uncollected. In February 1831 he published his first book, Legends of New England in Prose and Verse. Relinquishing the editorship of the Review in January 1832 on account of ill health, he issued that same year his Moll Pitcher, and edited The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard, With a Sketch of His Life. During these years he suffered a grievous disappointment because of the marriage to another of Mary Emerson Smith, a relative, for whom he had had a deep affection since boyhood. She is doubtless the heroine of many of his early uncollected love poems and of his famous "Memories" and "My Playmate." His pathetic love letter to her, written May 23, 1829, is the only one of those that passed between them which has been published (L. G. Swett, John Riskin's Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders, 1931, 417-21).

A reading of Garrison's Thoughts on Colonization (1832), and a meeting with the author in the spring of 1833 made Whittier an abolitionist. For the next thirty years he devoted himself to the writing of Tyrtaen poems on subjects connected with slavery and its abolition. In December he was a delegate to the anti-slavery convention at Philadelphia, and was one of the signers of its declaration. Prior to the elections of 1834, 1836, and 1838 he secured from Caleb Cushing [q.v.] pledges that he would support the demand of the abolitionists, and Cushing attributed his success in the elections largely to the support of his Quaker friend (Pickard, post, I, 172). He was practically ostracized socially because of his views and activities, but succeeded in being elected a member of the Massachusetts legislature from Haverhill for the year 1835. On September 4, 1835, he and George Thompson, the English lecturer, were mobbed in Concord, New Hampshire. From May to December 1836 he was again in editorial charge of the Essex Gazette. Meanwhile, he sold his farm in Haverhill and moved, in July 1836, to his new home in Amesbury. His activities during the next few years were varied and his labors exacting; he spoke at an antislavery convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; he lobbied in Boston in behalf of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; during the summer of 1837 he was employed in New York under the auspices of the American Anti-Slavery Society. From March 1838 to February 1840 he edited the Pennsylvania Freeman, to which he contributed daring editorials. The office of the paper was in the new Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, when that building was burned to the ground by a mob in May 17, 1838. In November of that year he published a volume of fifty of his poems. Ill health compelled his resignation from the Freeman, and in 1840 he returned to Amesbury.

He was much depressed by the disruption of the American Anti-Slavery Society in that year, but he sympathized with the political-action party, to which Garrison was opposed, and became an aggressive member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In the fall of 1842 he ran for Congress on the Liberty party ticket. The following year he published Lays of My Home and Other Poems, which contained some of his best work and placed him among the leading American poets. From July 1844 to March 1845 he edited the Middlesex Standard, a Liberty-party paper published in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in his editorials opposed the annexation of Texas. In this paper appeared serially "The Stranger in Lowell," which was published separately in 1845. He also practically edited the Essex Transcript, an organ of the Liberty party, published in Amesbury. His anti-slavery poems were collected and published under the title Voices of Freedom, in 1846. In January of the following year he became corresponding editor of the National Era, published in Washington, and he contributed most of his poems and articles to it for the next thirteen years. In this periodical appeared his only lengthy work in fiction, "Stray Leaves from Margaret Smith's Diary, in the Colony of Massachusetts" (published in book form, under a slightly different title, in 1849) and most of the material in Old Portraits and Modern Sketches (1850) and Literary Recreations and Miscellanies (1854). Meanwhile, there was no relaxing of his political activities. He gave John P. Hale [q.v.] of New Hampshire much political advice, and thus indirectly helped elect him to the United States Senate; he attacked the administration bitterly for the Mexican War; and in the well known poem, "Ichabod," which appeared in the National Era, 11, May 2, 1850, he castigated Webster for the "Seventh of March speech." He was instrumental in inducing Charles Sumner to run for the United States Senate in 1851 on a coalition ticket of Free-Soilers and Democrats, and he urged him to remain a candidate when he wished to retire during the long and bitter fight that ensued in the Massachusetts legislature before he was elected. He was one of the first to suggest the formation of the Republican party and always considered himself one of its founders. In the mid-fifties, though he wrote campaign songs, and poems on the happenings in Kansas, ill health compelled him to abandon some of his activities. His reputation as a poet had meanwhile greatly increased. With the appearance of Songs of Labor (1850), The Chapel of the Hermits (1853), and The Panorama and Other Poems (1856), which contained his "Maud Muller" and the "Barefoot Boy," he took rank with Longfellow and Bryant among the greatest American poets.

During his middle years he had several romances, two of which almost led to marriage. While living in New York, in the summer of 1837, he met Lucy Hooper, a young poetess residing in Brooklyn, and a warm friendship sprang up between them. In 1841 Lucy died of consumption. Whittier never realized to what extent she was attracted to him. When he learned from her surviving sisters the depth of her affection he wrote to them contritely and defensively: "God forgive me, if with no other than kind feelings I have done wrong. My feelings toward her were those of a Brother. I admired and loved her; yet felt myself compelled to crush every warmer feeling-poverty, protracted illness, and our separate faiths-the pledge that I had made of all the hopes and dreams of my younger years to the cause of freedom-compelled me to steel myself against everything which tended to attract me-the blessing of a woman's love and a home" (Albert Mordell, in New England Quarterly, June 1934). His most serious affair, however, was with Elizabeth Lloyd, the poetess, with whom he formed a friendship in Philadelphia when he was editing the Freeman. In 1853 she married Robert Howell, who died in 1856, and Whittier resumed his friendship with her in 1858. Both were looking forward to marriage when Mrs. Howell irritated the poet by attacking the Quaker creed, of which she herself was an adherent. On August 3, 1859, he wrote her a letter which was tantamount to withdrawing from the semi-engagement that existed between them. Their friendship drifted on for a year or two, and by the end of 1860 it was over.

From the beginning of the Civil War Whittier's life was uneventful. His fame as a poet increased by reason of his many contributions to the Atlantic Monthly, in the founding of which he had a part, and to the Independent. The summit of his poetic career was reached in the decade of the sixties, during which appeared Home Ballads (1860); In War Time and Other Poems (1864), containing "Barbara Frietchie"; Snow-Bound (1866); The Tent on the Beach (1867); and Among the Hills (1869). In the summer of 1876 he moved to Danvers, where he lived with his cousins, the three daughters of Colonel Edmund Johnson. Here he made his place of abode almost to the time of his death, with occasional visits to Amesbury, which always continued to be his legal residence. He received numerous honors in his later days, was surrounded by friends, and had many visitors. Republican politicians still consulted him. The more important poetical works of his later years were: Miriam and Other Poems (1871), Hazel-Blossoms (1875); The Vision of Echard (1878); Saint Gregory's Guest (1886); and At Sundown (1890). A complete edition of his works, revised and corrected, in seven volumes, appeared in 1888-89. He died at Hampton Falls and was buried at Amesbury.

Whittier was a tall man with piercing dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, and was somewhat vain with respect to his appearance. Although a genial person, he would occasionally flash out in anger when people did not agree with him. He resented the reputation he had of being a saint. That he was of heroic spirit is beyond question, for he sacrificed much, endured abuse, and faced physical perils in his devotion to the cause which he espoused. He had a fine sense of humor and was adept at telling amusing tales. Toward other people's beliefs he was in general tolerant, and he sympathized keenly with those who were persecuted on account of their race, color, or creed. His religious spirit as expressed in his poems was such that not a few of them have found a permanent place in the hymnals of various denominations. With respect to industrial questions he was always extremely conservative, but he supported the operatives in the Amesbury-Salisbury strike of 1852 (T. F. Currier, in New England Quarterly, March 1935). As a means of settling the entire economic problem he recommended obedience to the Golden Rule and the saving of money. He tried to justify the existing system by showing that the laborer derived benefits from his poverty. In his poem, "The Problem," published in 1877, the year of the great railroad strikes, he assailed the labor leaders who sought palliative reforms, as "demagogues" proffering their vain and evil counsels. In the late eighties he refused to aid William Dean Howells in endeavoring to obtain clemency for the convicted Chicago anarchists.

Whittier's standing as a poet has somewhat declined since his day. "Snow-Bound" is still usually considered his masterpiece. A few of his ballads, like "Skipper Iresons's Ride" and "Telling the Bees," and religious poems like "The Eternal Goodness" are still much read and quoted. Critical schools differ as to which of his poems are superior-those treating of rural life or those dealing with colonial history. There is an increasing tendency, however; to regard him as a prophet and to emphasize the value of his abolition poems, in spite of the fact that the occasion that gave rise to them has passed, for the spirit that prompted them was the same spirit that inspired Milton and Shelley to battle against oppression and tyranny. "It is as a poet of human freedom that he must live if he is to hold his own with posterity .... He has not a well-defined domain of mastery save perhaps in the verses inspired by the contest over slavery" (W. P. Trent and John Erskine, Great American Writers, pp. 144, 147). While some of the abolition poems are still read and admired, notably "Massachusetts to Virginia," there are others which deserve to be revived.

[The largest collection of manuscript material is to be found in the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, which also has photostats and typewritten copies of letters to be found in libraries elsewhere. Whittier letters are preserved in the Library of Congress, the John Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the libraries of Harvard and Yale. The largest collection of printed material by and about Whittier, and some manuscript material is in the Haverhill Public Library, the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, and the Boston Public Library For other sources, see S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (2 volumes, 1894; I volume, 1907), and Whittier-Land (1904); W. S. Kennedy, John Greenleaf Whittier-His Life, Genius, and Writings (1882) and John G. Whittier, the Poet of Freedom (1892); F. H. Underwood, John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biog. (1884); T. W. Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier (1902); G. R. Carpenter, John Greenleaf Whittier (1903); A. J. Woodman, Reminiscences of John Greenleaf Whittier's Life at Oak Knoll, Danvers (1908); John Albree, Whittier Correspondence from Oak Knoll Collections, (1911); M. V. Denervaud, ed., Whittier's Unknown Romance: Letters to Elizabeth Lloyd (1922); F. M. 'Pray, A Study of Whittier's Apprenticeship as Poet: Dealing with Poems Written between 1825 and I835 not available in the Poet's Collected Works (1930); Albert Mordell, Quaker Militant, John Greenleaf Whittier (1933). More complete bibliographies are in the Cambridge History of American Literature, II (1918), 436-51, and in Quaker Militant, pp. 333-43. An exhaustive bibliography by T. F. Currier has been announced for publication.]. 

A. M.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.