The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
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authorized control over the diffusion of debate. The reflexivity of this fight (a debate about the right to debate, a discourse on the virtues of discourse) enabled polemicists to encode the terms of one struggle onto another: antislavery poems, letters, pamphlets, and editorials relentlessly equated gag rules, suppression laws, and antiabolitionist intimidation with chattel slavery, a rhetorical move that enlisted in the fight against “the slave power” or “King Cotton” many who were not otherwise friendly to emancipation. When Whittier exhorts readers to fight slavery, he often means them to stand up for themselves. “Stanzas for the Times” (1835), for example, bridges the rhetorical gap between chattel slavery and “the suppression of free speech”: according to the poem, those living with a “fettered lip” must ultimately “Yoke in with marked and branded slaves, / And tremble at the driver’s whip” (271). The poem’s occasion was a proslavery meeting in Boston, and it addresses the “Yankee farmer” (the poem was signed originally “A Farmer”) facing the prospect, should he capitulate, that “his freedom stands / On Slavery’s dark foundations strong” (ibid.). In the poem’s rhetoric, the Yankee’s commitment to freedom is first a commitment to New England’s land and history; freedom entails an obligation to section as much as to abolition.
Is this the land our fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the soil whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?
Are we the sons by whom are borne
The mantles which the dead have worn?
And shall we crouch above these graves,
With craven soul and fettered lip?
Yoke in with marked and branded slaves,
And tremble at the driver’s whip?
Bend to the earth our pliant knees,
And speak but as our masters please? (Ibid.)
By living with “fettered lip,” the community bows down to Southern masters, forfeits its Revolutionary heritage, and empties the land of sacred national value. The poem’s questions destabilize a collective identity based on shared relations to a symbolic landscape: if “we speak but as our masters please,” the poem implies, then we will no longer be the sons born of our fathers or borne upon this land. Whittier continues in this mode, asking, “Shall tongue be mute … shall Truth succumb? / Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?” to which he answers,
No; guided by our country’s laws,
For truth, and right, and suffering man,
Be ours to strive in Freedom’s cause,
As Christians may, as freemen can!
Still pouring on unwilling ears
That truth oppression only fears. (Ibid.)
By answering in this way, the poem’s readers stand up to the threat of slavery and assert themselves as true heirs to “all the memories of our dead”—in other words, they constitute themselves as a free people supported by Christianity, law, truth, and right. At the conclusion, Whittier assures the “brethren of the South,”
No seal is on the Yankee’s mouth,
No fetter on the Yankee’s press!
From our Green Mountains to the sea,
One voice shall thunder, We are free! (272)
By speaking freely, “the Yankee” comes to figure a people bonded to the New England landscape (our Green Mountains) and possessing one voice, whose self-authorizing annunciation is “We are free!” The discourse of liberation in the poem agitates not for the end of slavery but for the unquestionable right and use of free speech, and the threat of slavery is not the harms it inflicts on chattel slaves but is rather slavery’s power to destroy the social selfunderstanding of Yankees.
As a poem to and for Yankees, “Stanzas for the Times” gained persuasive force from its sites of publication, because the poem’s referents were also its audience, the readers of the newspapers where it appeared. “Stanzas for the Times” was first published in the Essex Gazette, Whittier’s hometown paper, and then quickly reprinted around New England and in further-flung abolitionist papers, even appearing in Niles’ Register, the preeminent proslavery paper of the day (one editorial referred to it as “Whittier’s well known and soul stirring lines”).20 The sites of publication—small New England or antislavery newspapers—enhanced the poem’s rhetorical force by aligning its address with its readership (“it speaks for the general public,” says a character in the fin-desiècle historical tale “She Loved a Sailor,” by Whittier’s friend Amelia Barr).21 To press the point, continuous reprinting helped actualize the poem’s politics—free speech and movement were the poem’s consequence more than they were its content or intention.
Yet the capacities of a poem like “Stanzas for the Times” to secure political agency through reprinting conflicts with the specificity of context and audience that made it powerful. “The times,” after all, can be any time, and any poem that addresses them can be stanzas for the times. Whittier wrote at least four other poems called “Stanzas for the Times” (similarly, he titled eight different antislavery poems “Lines”), which addressed new concerns and controversies in the continuing fight against efforts to suppress free speech.22 For example, in 1839, he penned a “Stanzas for the Times” to attack Pennsylvania Governor David Porter, who had stated in his inaugural message that “to agitate the question [of slavery] anew, is not only impolitic, but it is a virtual breach of good faith to our brethren of the South.” The new “Stanzas” rejoined:
We ask no boon: our RIGHTS we claim—
Free press and thought—free tongue and pen,
The right to speak in Freedom’s name,
As Pennsylvanians and as men:
To do, by Lynch Law unforbid,
What our own Rush and Franklin did.23
These “Stanzas” reproduce the ideology and iconography of their earlier counterpart: “we” Pennsylvanians will assert free press and thought, tongue, and pen (“the right to speak in Freedom’s name”), with “our own Rush and Franklin” standing as the genii loci for free speech (the earlier stanzas had cited heroes from Bunker Hill as New England’s presiding spirits). In a political discourse organized through meetings and assemblies, newspapers and broadsides, “Stanzas for the Times” could never be quoted out of context. Genericness (considered pragmatically rather than aesthetically) made these poems effective. To be agents of change, they must be deemed capable of addressing and intervening in their situation; not only must they circulate freely, but readers also have to anticipate and recognize that freedom. Conventions help this happen: a blank title like “Stanzas for the Times” (further enabled by recognizable stanza forms and meters) elicits that sense of open timeliness, since the absence of markers frees the poem for unlimited transposition. In a process that Chapter 5 will examine in detail, the blankness of this verse later made it difficult to read; as one of Whittier’s biographers requested in the 1880s,
I now write to beg of you that ere it is too late you will prepare an edition of [your antislavery poems] with little paragraphs attached—headings rather than notes—indicating the circumstances which called them forth. I am sure that such an edition would be very welcome & that it would be immensely useful in the way of distinction concerning many features of the anti slavery struggle. Your poems will be read much more than any history.24
In order to be abstracted from its setting, the antislavery poem had to already be abstract; to be read as history, it first had to be history, or to become history, by addressing a time it did not name. Thus, while “Stanzas for the Times” angrily speaks out against the times, it makes few references to them; assured that readers live in the times, the poem foregoes historical