Who is john g whittier

The cause was dangerous. See this site on his poetry for details. Garrison thereafter published a Whittier poem every week in this newspaper. His poetry was prolific during this time. By the end of the Civil War all the women of his family had died, leaving Whittier lonely and alone in his Amesbury house. An exhausted war-weary nation embraced the poem and Whittier, once the Abolitionist outcast, became a hero. Snowbound , a poem about memory of family and of a heartfelt time that had gone by, was written with such clarity that you feel and know that you too were sitting around that fire, warm and safe, while the winter storm raged outside.

In his later years many honors came to Whittier. He died on Sept. Scudder The standard biography is Samuel T. Other sound studies include John A. Fields, Annie, Whittier: notes of his life and of his friendships, Norwood, Pa. William Lloyd Garrison published Whittier's first poem in and persuaded his parents to send him to Haverhill Academy for two terms.

For several years Whittier supported himself as a newspaper editor. In he obtained a position at The American Manufacturer , a political weekly in Boston owned by moral reformer Rev. William Collier. Although he only served as its editor for less than a year, he moved on to similar jobs with the Haverhill Essex Gazette and the Hartford, Connecticut, New England Review.

His newspaper work both whetted his appetite for politics and exposed his opinions to the populace. Editorial support for the Whig, Henry Clay , earned him acclaim. Whittier was chosen as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in , campaigned unsuccessfully for a Congressional seat in , and served one term in the Massachusetts legislature a few years later.

By most accounts, in Whittier renewed his friendship with William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of his first poem back in By this time Garrison had become a radical abolitionist, and sought to enlist Whittier in the cause. The latter served as a delegate to the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Convention.

In , Whittier published a tract, Justice and Expediency: or, Slavery considered with a view to its rightful and effectual remedy, abolition , proposing immediate and unconditional emancipation of slaves. By the time he was twenty, he had published enough verse to bring him to the attention of editors and readers in the antislavery cause. A Quaker devoted to social causes and reform, Whittier worked passionately for a series of abolitionist newspapers and magazines.

Whittier was active in his support of National Republican candidates; he was a delegate in to the national Republican Convention in support of Henry Clay, and he himself ran unsuccessfully for Congress the following year. His first book, Legends of New England in Prose and Verse, was published in ; from then until the Civil War, he wrote essays and articles as well as poems, almost all of which were concerned with abolition. In he wrote Justice and Expedience urging immediate abolition.

In he was elected as a Whig for one term to the Massachusetts legislature; mobbed and stoned in Concord, New Hampshire, in During his tenure as editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, in May , the paper's offices burned to the ground and were sacked during the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall by a mob.

Whittier founded the antislavery Liberty party in and ran for Congress in In the mids he began to work for the formation of the Republican party; he supported presidential candidacy of John C.

He helped to found Atlantic Monthly in Although Whittier was close friends with Elizabeth Lloyd Howell and considered marrying her, in he decided against it.