John Greenleaf Whittier was born December 17, 1807, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Growing up on the family farm his education was little and informal. A Quaker, Whittier worked passionately for abolitionist newspapers and magazines. He was active in support of National Republican candidates he himself became a delegate in 1831 to the national Republican Convention in support of Henry Clay. In 1832 he ran for Congress but was unsuccessful. Legends Of New England In Prose And Verse, was published in 1831 followed in 1833 by Justice and Expedience which urged immediate abolition. In 1834 he was elected as a Whig for one term to the Massachusetts legislature. During his editorship of the Pennsylvania Freeman, in May 1838, the paper's offices were burned to the ground and sacked during the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall by a mob. Whittier founded the antislavery Liberty party in 1840 and ran for Congress in 1842. In the mid-1850s he began to work for the formation of the Republican party; supporting the presidential candidacy of John C. Fremont in 1856. He helped to found Atlantic Monthly in 1857. Although Whittier was close friends with Elizabeth Lloyd Howell and considered marrying her, in 1859 he decided against it. Whittier supporters would never claim he was a poet of the first rank but all would concede that his poems on abolition give him a vaunted place for those efforts."
1807-1892
John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Although he received little formal education, he was an avid reader who studied his father's six books on Quakerism until their teachings became the foundation of his ideology. Whittier was heavily influenced by the doctrines of his religion, particularly its stress on humanitarianism, compassion, and social responsibility.
Whittier produced two collections of antislavery poetry: Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between 1830 and 1838 and Voices of Freedom (1846). He was an elector in the presidential election of 1860 and of 1864, voting for Abraham Lincoln both times.
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended both slavery and his public cause, so Whittier turned to other forms of poetry for the remainder of his life.
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