Haverhill MA and the Abolition of Slavery
The life of John Greenleaf Whittier

In 1839, Whittier became a founding member of the Liberty Party. Within four years, the Party was exerting considerable influence within the anti-slavery lobby, and could count upon the moral support of such literary luminaries as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1845, he began writing his essay The Black Man which included an anecdote about John Fountain, a free black who was jailed in Virginia for helping slaves escape.
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended both slavery, and thus Whittier’s cause, so he turned to other subjects for his poetry for the remainder of his life. One of his most enduring works, Snow-Bound, was first published in 1866, and Whittier was surprised by its financial success - the first edition earning him some $10,000.
Whittier died on September 7, 1892, at a friend's home in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and he is buried at Amesbury, Massachusetts. Whittier's birthplace, John Greanleaf Whittier Homestead, is now an historic site, open to the public.

Perhaps Haverhill’s most famous son is the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who is best known for his poem Snow-Bound.

Whittier was born into a Quaker family on 17th December 1807, his parents being John and Abigail who had a small homestead just outside the town. John junior was somewhat frail, and not cut out for farm work, added to which he suffered from ill-health throughout his life.

He received little in the way of formal education, his main font of knowledge being his father’s books on Quakerism.

Home of John Whittier

Whittier was first introduced to poetry by a teacher, and his first poem, The Exile’s Departure, was sent (unbeknown to him) to the local Newburyport Free Press by his sister. It was duly published on 8th June 1826, and the paper’s editor, the anti-slavery activist William Lloyd Garrison, was to play an influential role in Whittier’s career, for he was instrumental in persuading him to attend the recently-opened Haverhill Academy. To raise money to attend the school, Whittier became a shoemaker for a time, and a deal was made to pay part of his tuition with food from the family farm. Before his second term, he earned money to cover tuition by serving as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in what is now Merrimac, Massachusetts.

Whittier attended Haverhill Academy from 1827 to 1828 and, amazingly, completed his high school education in only two terms.

After leaving the Academy, Garrison secured Whittier the job of editor of the National Philanthropist, a Boston-based temperance weekly. Shortly after, Garrison reassigned him as editor of the weekly American Manufacturer in Boston, where Whittier became an outspoken critic of President Andrew Jackson, and by 1830 he became editor of the prominent New England Weekly Review.

In 1833, Whittier published the antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency, and from thereon dedicated the next twenty years of his life to the abolitionist cause.
He was a founding member of the American Anti-slavery Society, and signed the Anti-slavery Declaration of 1833, which he often stated was the most significant action of his life.
From 1835 to 1838, he travelled widely in the North, attending conventions, securing votes, speaking to the public, and lobbying politicians. As he did so, Whittier received his fair share of violent responses, being several times mobbed, stoned, and run out of town! From 1838 to 1840, he was editor of The Pennsylvania Freeman in Philadelphia, one of the leading anti-slavery papers in the North.