The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
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more poems, only to be chased away by Whittier’s father, who considered verse writing a dubious line of work. Whittier and Garrison had both grown up at the margins of the Era of Good Feelings, Whittier the son of small-scale Quaker farmers, Garrison of indentured servants transported from England, and both had entered public discourse through the partisan press before moving into organized antislavery.4 Before his 1828 conversion to abolition, Garrison had been a printer’s devil at the Newburyport Herald (a Federalist paper) and editor of a series of Federalist and National Republican newspapers; Whittier, after a brief stint teaching, wrote for pro-Clay papers in Hartford and Boston, a political association that overlapped with his conversion to antislavery in the early 1830s.5 This newspaper culture was, in Meredith L. McGill’s words, “regional in articulation and transnational in scope,” and Whittier published prolifically in it, putting out more than seventy poems in 1828 alone.6
Whittier’s earliest work was heterogeneous and not explicitly political: georgics describing the surrounding area (“The Vale of Merrimac”), biblical narratives (“Judith at the Tent of Holofernes”), vignettes culled from European legend (“The Sicilian Vespers,” “Isabella of Austria”), accounts of Native American history in New England (“The Fratricide,” “Mogg Megone,” “Metacom”—efforts perhaps meant to dovetail with Edwin Forrest’s hugely popular performances as Metacomet), even an elegy for Simón Bolívar, and a dialect temperance song, “The Drunkard to His Bottle,” presented in homage to Burns as “lyrics the great poet of Scotland might have written had he put his name to a pledge of abstinence”:
Nae mair o’ fights that bruise an’ mangle,
Nae mair o’ nets my feet to tangle,
Nae mair o’ senseless brawl an’ wrangle,
Wi’ frien’ an’ wife too,
Nae mair o’ deavin’ din an’ jangle
My feckless life through.7
When he compiled his Complete Works in the 1880s, Whittier excluded nearly all of these poems (most remain uncollected to this day), and the diversity of their topics and styles indicates the job-work nature of newspaper verse writing; they cannot really be organized according to abstractions of the work or oeuvre, and even the author is an inadequate frame, since these poems were published anonymously (a few were not identified as Whittier’s until after his death). The decentralized and dispersed character of periodical culture in the 1820s and 1830s worked against the specificity and organicism necessary for post-Romantic literariness; the poems’ generic-ness was their most important quality, since it prepared them for reprinting and reproduction across different venues.8
A set of social, cultural, and technological developments converged in the 1830s to politicize the emergent mass production of print, of which Whittier’s early career was part; the ability to disseminate text rapidly across a diverse range of formats and broad geographic space increasingly provoked reactions against the more networked infrastructure that was coming to characterize the Jacksonian era, a period marked, variously, by the “transportation revolution” and “market revolution” and named, in one biting poem, the “Era of PAPER, and the AGE OF PRINT.”9 The 1830s were a decade of conflict on many fronts, and antislavery prompted some of the strongest antagonism. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 (also the year Garrison founded the Liberator), violence over antislavery was directed primarily against its system of communication—free association, public speaking, and print circulation. While the worst riots were intended to disrupt abolitionist lectures and meetings (Garrison and Whittier were each attacked during the speaking tour of George Thompson, for example), mobs just as often targeted abolitionist publications and printing presses; in the most infamous instance, Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, was murdered while defending his press, which mobs had destroyed three times previously. The violent tensions surrounding antislavery and communication are savagely satirized in Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, which used the conceit of metempsychosis to send up Jacksonian society. At one point, the title character jumps into the body of a Quaker reformer, who is immediately kidnapped by proslavery agents and taken to Virginia to be lynched. Just before this denouement, he jumps into the body of a local slave, who then participates in a bloody uprising incited by a stray abolitionist tract.10
Although Garrison was a higher profile target, Whittier’s abolitionist writings (especially an 1833 pamphlet, Justice and Expediency) earned him notoriety from New England to the border states. Unlike Garrison, though, and unlike other important abolitionist poets such as Frances E. W. Harper, Whittier’s relation to antislavery was almost entirely print based—he was a poet, editorialist, pamphleteer, and political organizer but rarely a lecturer or recruiter. This commitment to communication as the agent of social change imbued Whittier’s poems—even those written much later in his career—with the idiom of the 1830s’ embattled public culture. That is, his poems locate agency in a discourse structured by immediate publication and immediate emancipation, where freedom comes from the ability to speak and move without restrictions. Whittier’s antislavery poems are, therefore, greatly concerned with efforts to suppress a popular voice, and they urge that voice to resist by talking back—but the voice belongs to the Yankee and not the slave. And, if his poems respond to specific moments in the struggle over antislavery, their political power is realized more through their genre and the metapragmatics of their circulation than by their content.
The poems’ rhetoric and politics track closely with major campaigns of the American Anti-slavery Society (AAS) (for which Whittier was a paid secretary) involving exercises of free speech and free circulation, commitments that grounded moral suasion in mass-mediated print.11 The era’s technological innovations and infrastructure improvements better enabled organized abolition to imagine a national public as the target of its reformist address. In 1835, the AAS (which was at its peak in the mid-1830s, with 300,000 members) began a direct-mailing campaign, sending several hundred thousand letters, pamphlets, tracts, stories, poems, and appeals into the South, thereby using the federal postal system to circumvent local restrictions against immediatist material.12 By mid-July, 175,000 items (among them Justice and Expediency) were in the New York City Post Office, ready to be mailed.13 When these materials reached Charleston, they inflamed raw fears that Northern “incendiaries” wanted to ignite a slave rebellion, and local leaders quickly and ruthlessly suppressed the distribution of “Tappan, Garrison & Co’s papers, encouraging the negroes to insurrection.”14 A mob stormed the Charleston post office, seized the sacks of mail, and burned them in a wild pubic display.15 This riot sparked similar panics across the slaveholding states, as “postmasters censored the mails and mobs roamed the countryside,” with numerous cities suspending habeas corpus and arresting anyone suspected of being an abolitionist (one case involved a man who was jailed and nearly lynched in Washington for passing a copy of Justice and Expediency).16
After failing to transform private sentiments by disseminating pamphlets, tracts, and letters, the AAS organized a congressional petition drive to use government as a platform for public speech; to give a sense of the scale of this project, Congress received 225,000 antislavery petitions in 1837 alone.17 This campaign initiated a second controversy, about the role of Congress in social reform debates. While Congress had read petitions against slavery since the 1790s, the abolitionist mails campaign prompted Southern legislators to argue that such petitions were insurrectionary, and they sought to bar Congress even from receiving them, let alone having them read on the floor. Debates about the right to petition consumed the House of Representatives throughout 1836. Under an arrangement brokered by South Carolinian Henry L. Pinckney, the House resolved that no petition pertaining to slavery could be read, printed, or discussed by the House.18 This resolution became known as the “gag rule,” and no sooner had it passed than northern Whig congressmen, most prominently John Quincy Adams, began defying it, using ploy after ploy to read antislavery petitions to the House and thereby creating a spectacle that riveted national attention on slavery and free speech.19
These battles over the circulation of discourse provide context and coherence for the otherwise centrifugal antislavery verse of the