It is difficult now to realize what an event in Longfellow’s life was the fact of his writing a series of anti-slavery poems on board ship and publishing them in a thin pamphlet on his return. Parties on the subject were already strongly drawn; the anti-slavery party being itself divided into subdivisions which criticised each other sharply. Longfellow’s temperament was thoroughly gentle and shunned extremes, so that the little thin yellow-covered volume came upon the community with something like a shock. As a matter of fact, various influences had led him up to it. His father had been a subscriber to Benjamin Lundy’s “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” the precursor of Garrison’s “Liberator.” In his youth at Brunswick, Longfellow had thought of writing a drama on the subject of “Toussaint l’Ouverture,” his reason for it being thus given, “that thus I may do something in my humble way for the great cause of negro emancipation.” Margaret Fuller, who could by no means be 164 called an abolitionist, described the volume as “the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow’s thin books; spirited and polished like its forerunners; but the subject would warrant a deeper tone.” On the other hand, the editors of “Graham’s Magazine” wrote to Mr. Longfellow that “the word slavery was never allowed to appear in a Philadelphia periodical,” and that “the publisher objected to have even the name of the book appear in his pages.” His friend Samuel Ward, always an agreeable man of the world, wrote from New York of the poems, “They excite a good deal of attention and sell rapidly. I have sent one copy to the South and others shall follow,” and includes Longfellow among “you abolitionists.” The effect of the poems was unquestionably to throw him on the right side of the great moral contest then rising to its climax, while he incurred, like his great compeers, Channing, Emerson, and Sumner, some criticism from the pioneers. Such differences are inevitable among reformers, whose internal contests are apt to be more strenuous and formidable than those incurred between opponents; and recall to mind that remark of Cosmo de Medici which Lord Bacon called “a desperate saying;” namely, that “Holy Writ bids us to forgive our enemies, but it is nowhere enjoined upon us that we should forgive our friends.”
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To George Lunt, a poet whose rhymes Longfellow admired, but who bitterly opposed the anti-slavery movement, he writes his programme as follows:—
“I am sorry you find so much to gainsay in my Poems on Slavery. I shall not argue the point with you, however, but will simply state to you my belief.
“1. I believe slavery to be an unrighteous institution, based on the false maxim that Might makes Right.
“2. I have great faith in doing what is righteous, and fear no evil consequences.
“3. I believe that every one has a perfect right to express his opinion on the subject of Slavery, as on every other thing; that every one ought so to do, until the public opinion of all Christendom shall penetrate into and change the hearts of the Southerners on this subject.
“4. I would have no other interference than what is sanctioned by law.
“5. I believe that where there is a will there is a way. When the whole country sincerely wishes to get rid of Slavery, it will readily find the means.
“6. Let us, therefore, do all we can to bring about this will, in all gentleness and Christian charity.
“And God speed the time!”[61]
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Mr. Longfellow was, I think, not quite justly treated by the critics, or even by his latest biographer, Professor Carpenter,[62] for consenting to the omission of the anti-slavery poems from his works, published by Carey and Hart in Philadelphia in November, 1845. This was an illustrated edition which had been for some time in preparation and did not apparently, like the nearly simultaneous edition of Harper, assume to contain his complete works. The Harper edition was published in February, 1846, in cheaper form and double columns, and was the really collective edition, containing the anti-slavery poems and all. As we do not know the circumstances of the case, it cannot positively be asserted why this variation occurred, but inasmuch as the Harpers were at that period, and for many years after, thoroughly conservative on the slavery question and extremely opposed to referring to it in any way, it is pretty certain that it must have been because of the positive demand of Longfellow that these poems were included by them. The criticism of the abolitionists on him was undoubtedly strengthened by the apostrophe to the union at the close of his poem, “The Building of the Ship,” in 1850, a passage which was described by William Lloyd Garrison in the “Liberator” as “a eulogy dripping with the 167 blood of imbruted humanity,”[63] and was quite as severely viewed by one of the most zealous of the Irish abolitionists, who thus wrote to their friends in Boston:—
Dublin [Ireland], April 28, 1850.
[After speaking about Miss Weston’s displeasure with Whittier and her being unfair to him, etc., the letter adds—]
Is it not a poor thing for Longfellow that he is no abolitionist—that his anti-slavery poetry is perfect dish water beside Whittier’s—and that he has just penned a P?an on the union? I can no more comprehend what there is in the union to make the Yankee nation adore it—than you can understand the attractions of Royalty & Aristocracy which thousands of very good people in England look on as the source & mainstay of all that is great and good in the nation....
Rich D. Webb.[64]
Yet Mr. Whittier himself, though thus contrasted with Longfellow, had written thanking him for his “Poems on Slavery,” which in tract form, he said, “had been of important service to the Liberty movement.” Whittier had also asked whether Longfellow would accept a nomination 168 to Congress from the Liberty Party, and had added, “Our friends think they could throw for thee one thousand more votes than for any other man.”[65] Nor was Whittier himself ever a disunionist, even on anti-slavery grounds.
It is interesting to note that it was apparently the anti-slavery question which laid the foundation for the intimacy between Longfellow and Lowell. Lowell had been invited, on the publication of “A Year’s Life,” to write for an annual which was to appear in Boston and to be edited, in Lowell’s own phrase, “by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard and that set.”[66] Lowell subsequently wrote in the “Pioneer” kindly notices of Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” but there is no immediate evidence of any personal relations between them at that time. In a letter to Poe, dated at Elmwood June 27, 1844, Lowell says of a recent article in the “Foreign Quarterly Review” attributed to John Forster, “Forster is a friend of some of the Longfellow clique here, which perhaps accounts for his putting L. at the top of our Parnassus. These kinds of arrangements do very well, however, for the present.”[67]... It will be noticed that what Lowell had originally called a “set” has now become a “clique.” 169 It is also evident that lie did not regard Longfellow as the assured head of the American Parnassus, and at any rate he suggests some possible rearrangement for the future. Their real friendship seems to have begun with a visit by Longfellow to Lowell’s study on October 29, 1846, when the conversation turned chiefly on the slavery question. Longfellow called to see him again on the publication of his second volume of poems, at the end of the following year, and Lowell spent an evening with ............