About the Collection

Purpose

The purpose of this web project is to raise awareness of a collection of letters held in the Clarke Historical Library that were written to the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892).

John Greenleaf Whittier was one of nineteenth-century America’s favorite poets who today is best remembered for his poem “Snow-bound.” Written a year after the end of the Civil War, the piece is a long narrative reminiscence recalling an ideal rural New England past, fast disappearing in the face of rapid social and economic change. Lesser known than his poetry is Whittier’s prominent role in the anti-slavery movement.

John Greenleaf Whittier, Abolitionist

John Greenleaf Whittier served the anti-slavery movement through his work as a poet, editor, and political activist. He grew up on a small farm in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His parents were Quakers, a religion which he too embraced, and one which shaped his commitment to the anti-slavery cause. Another abolitionist influence in the young poet’s life was his friendship with William Lloyd Garrison, who was first to publish one of Whittier’s poems, “The Exile’s Departure,” in 1826. By 1833, Whittier was fully committed to abolitionism. That year, Whittier wrote the essay “Justice and Expediency,” in which he came out forcefully in favor of the immediate emancipation of America’s slaves and against the racism of the Colonization Society. Also in 1833, Whittier was one of the founding members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In his lifetime he would edit anti-slavery newspapers—like The Pennsylvania Freeman and The National Era—and would write numerous essays and letters attacking the “peculiar institution” and those who condoned it.

In his poem “Ichabod,” for example, Whittier attacked Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, for supporting the Fugitive Slave Law. Often his poetry was criticized for being too declamatory, written in the service of a cause (“The Slave Ships,” “The Hunters of Men,” “Massachusetts to Virginia”). Whittier would probably have agreed unapologetically.

He was in continual correspondence with politicians like Caleb Cushing, who represented Whittier’s district (Massachusetts’ 3^rd district), agitating for legislation favorable to the slaves’ cause. He was also in continual correspondence with others in the movement, as the letters included make clear. He and Charles Sumner, the outspoken Senator from Massachusetts who was caned nearly to death in the Senate chamber by Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina, remained in close contact until Sumner’s death in 1874.

Whittier and William Lloyd Garrison would go their separate ways when the anti-slavery movement split over the issue of forming a third political party, an idea which Whittier supported but Garrison opposed. In fact, Whittier was instrumental in establishing the Liberty Party, a short-lived, abolition-centric political party. Whittier’s activism came to a close after the Civil War, but he would continue to send and receive considerable correspondence from his anti-slavery friends for the rest of his life.

The letters transcribed and presented here are for the most part letters from prominent abolitionists, but there are many more in this very special collection. The authors range from the famous to the obscure; from Ralph Waldo Emerson to P. L. Canedy. Canedy was a Union soldier writing to Whittier from Richmond, Virginia, who, in response to Whittier’s poem “The Peace Autumn,” sent what he called “one of the few fallen leaves… in this our ‘Peace-Autumn.’” It was a blank receipt “picked up in the Auction Room where The last Slave was found.” The receipt remains with the letter.

Provenance

Whittier spent his later years living at Oak Knoll in Danvers, Massachusetts, in the company of Col. Edmund Johnson, a widower who had been married to Whittier’s first cousin, Phoebe Whittier Johnson. Col. Johnson, three of his daughters—Caroline, Abby, and Mary—and Abby’s small daughter Phebe, along with Whittier, made up the Oak Knoll household.

In his lifetime Whittier carried on a voluminous correspondence which he brought with him to Oak Knoll. A large part of that correspondence came into the possession of the William Wallace McClench family when they took over the Oak Knoll estate upon Caroline Johnson’s death in 1928. McClench’s wife Katherine and two daughters, Cora and Marion, sorted through the Whittier correspondence. The bulk of the collection, but not all, was given to the Essex Institute and is now housed at the Phillips Library in Rowley, Massachusetts.

It was through Marion McClench that Central Michigan University came into possession of its Whittier collection. In the 1930s her career led her to Michigan. By 1951 she was serving as editor for the Michigan Department of Education and living in Lansing. Around that time, she signed up for a literary tour of New England that was sponsored by Central Michigan University and led by Professor John Hepler of the English Department.

As a result of discussions with Hepler, Marion McClench decided to donate the part of the Whittier collection she still possessed to Central Michigan University (a gift which included a piece of curtain from Robert Burns’ wife Jean Armour’s four-poster bed, Burns being Whittier’s favorite poet), and McClench persuaded her sister Cora McClench to do the same. In 1953 Marion received an honorary degree from CMU.

John Hepler

Publication of the letters then became a project to which John Hepler devoted himself. It is clear that he gave years of his life in the 1960s to organizing and transcribing the letters, but for whatever reason, they were not published before his death in 1992. Twenty-three of the letters had already been published in 1911, long before Central Michigan University came into possession of them, in Whittier Correspondence from the Oak Knoll Collections 1830-1892, edited by John Albee.

Hepler may not have talked much about his work; colleagues still living who knew “Jack” know little about the letters. He did, however, write articles based on the letters[1] and he did share the letters on occasion with other scholars; a William Lloyd Garrison letter with colleague Ron Primeau, for example.[2] In John B. Pickard’s three volume The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, a scholarly collection of Whittier letters, some of the footnotes contain fully transcribed responses to Whittier, taken from letters cited as being located at Central Michigan University.[3]

[1] John Hepler, "'Gordon'—A New Whittier Poem," The New England Quarterly 34 (March 1961): 93-95; "A Proposed Quaker Poem," Quaker History 57 (Spring 1968): 42-48.
[2] Ronald Primeau, "Garrison to Whittier on Jonathan Walker and Other Things: An Unpublished Letter," Harvard Library Bulletin 22 (April 1974): 176-184).
[3] John B. Pickard, editor, The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, vols. 1-3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1975).

General description of the collection

The Clarke Historical Library’s John Greenleaf Whittier Collection is made up of:

1. 78 original letters that Whittier himself wrote to others
2. 501 original letters written (mostly) to Whittier by others
3. Over 15 published and unpublished hand-written Whittier poems
4. Various notes, pieces of paper, and other ephemera
5. A piece of curtain from Robert Burns’ wife’s four-poster bed, given to Whittier by the writers Richard and Harriett Prescott Spofford.

What distinguishes the collection are the letters sent to Whittier that testify to his importance in the anti-slavery movement. These letters are from both men and women abolitionists, with many letters from women who went on to leading roles in the women’s rights movement.

Methodology

In transcribing and presenting these letters, the editors have provided their readers with as clear a text as possible. Transcriptions are presented side by side with high resolution scans of the actual letters. The transcriptions derive from three sources: John Hepler’s original typed transcriptions, other published transcriptions of some of the letters, and from the editors’ own re-transcriptions of the original manuscripts.

No attempt was made to make typescript images since readers can refer to the scans of the actual letters. Dates and locations have been standardized, and there are few interruptions of the text itself. Brackets are inserted in transcriptions only where the editors found words or phrases indecipherable. In these cases, if the meaning was guessed at, the word or phrase appears inside brackets along with a question mark; otherwise, if no attempt was made to guess the meaning of the word or phrase, then “word” appears inside brackets.

No attempt was made to correct an author’s spelling or punctuation. End punctuation was not added if the author did not supply it, so one should not assume that typos or misspellings are errors on the part of the editors. To verify this, the reader has the scanned image of the letter to refer to. Footnotes are not provided. The headnote to each letter is meant to lead the reader into the letter and to clear up obvious confusions, but there was no attempt made to identify every person or to explain every event mentioned in a letter.

Two sources relied upon in the editing that the reader may find helpful are: Pickard’s The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier and Ronald H. Woodwell, John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography (Haverhill, MA: Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, 1985).

John Fierst, 2022

Project Editors: John Fierst and Ben Ackley
Editorial Assistance: David Wright