of the most celebrated scholars of the day. Unitarian and Transcendentalist as he was, he was gifted also with the nature of a practical reformer, and his passionate eloquence was consecrated to an unflinching advocacy of abolition. He never wavered, was uncompromising, and his bitter invectives often drove the wavering away rather than attracted them to his cause. He died at Florence where he had gone to regain his health, just before the terrible conflict that was to result in the fruition of his hopes. Phillips and Sumner both lived to see the liberation of the slaves, and the latter was a distinguished figure in the national capitol before and after the war. The oratory of Phillips was polished and refined, and while it often seemed to lack the passionate sincerity of Parker it was scholarly and artistic and possessed that power of winning the sympathy of his audience which was lacking in the speech of the New England divine. Parker and Sumner were Harvard men and both were from the more cultured class. Different as they were, they had one trait in common, a violence and license in speech that often degenerated into personal abuse. For an attack of this sort on a South Carolina senator, Sumner was almost killed in the Senate Chamber at Washington. Though the powerful oratory of these men exerted its tremendous influence upon the period, it is hardly just to call their speeches literature; yet there are in the work of each, passages of great literary excellence. When men have a specific purpose in view, their utterance, however forcible and influential, is not apt to long outlive the epoch for which it was intended. But that which perhaps more than any other single thing aided in creating among the masses a sentiment against slavery was a book, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin was written for a distinct purpose, but even now, long after the events which called it into being have passed into history, the book continues to be read with unabated interest. Harriet Beecher Mrs. Stowe, a sister of Henry Ward Stowe Beecher, was the wife of a professor in Bowdoin college, and though burdened by the cares of a family she saw in the sufferings of the black race at the south a theme that moved her passionately. The result was a novel which in spite of its prejudices and exaggerations is an artistic creation, a vivid picture of human misery lightened now and then by pleasing rays of sympathy and affection. The book, published in 1852, was read everywhere and left behind it a conviction of the horror of slavery and a determination that some action must be taken. The remarkable influence of the book was not confined to America, for it was translated into twenty languages and millions of copies were sold. Mrs. Stowe wrote other novels, and were its fame not eclipsed by Uncle Tom's Cabin, her Old Town Folks would have gained her an enviable reputation, for its pictures of certain types of New England character are quite as apt and true to life as those of her more popular work. John Greenleaf Among the anti-slavery writers, one of Whittier the most active and influential was John Greenleaf Whittier whose biography has been sketched in Part Seven, page 137. No other American poet of equal prominence wrote so much and so effectively on the subject that called forth his most fervid utterance. His Quaker spirit was opposed to war, but when he saw war to be inevitable he was ready for the conflict. "Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, The anthem of the destinies ! The minor of thy loftier strain, Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, His great claim to renown as a man of letters does not rest upon the fiery poems of freedom, but upon the simple, sincere and loving poems in which he shows his generous heart. They deal with subjects of universal and perpetual interest. Though sometimes he is commonplace and now and again his lack of scholarship may show, yet he has a power and artistic merit that place him foremost among those who may be called the anti slavery agitators and is really one of those who are distinctly men of letters. To sum up this brief sketch nothing Summary can be better than the following, quoted from Barrett Wendell's Literary History of America: "Yet without a constant sense of the influences which were alive in the New England air, the literature which finally arose there can hardly be understood. It was all based on the traditions of a rigid old society, Puritan in origin and immemorially fixed in structure. To this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, came that impulse of new life which expressed itself in such varied ways,—in the classically rounded periods of our most finished oratory; in the scholarship which ripened into our lasting works of history; in the hopeful dreams of the Unitarians, passing insensibly into the nebulous philosophy of the Transcendentalists, and finally into first fantastic and soon militant reform. Each of these phases of our Renaissance gave us names which are still worth memory: Webster, Everett, and Choate; Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman; Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau; Theodore Parker, Phillips, and Sumner; Mrs. Stowe and Whittier. Thus grouped together we can see these people to have been so dissimilar, and sometimes so antagonistic, that human friendship between them, or even mutual understanding, was hardly possible. At the same time as we look at them together, we must see that all possessed in common a trait which marks them as of the old New England race. Each and all were strenuously earnest; and though the earnestness of some confined itself to matters of this world, to history, to politics, and to reform, while that of others was centered, like that of the Puritan fathers, more on the unseen eternities, not one of them was ever free from a constant ideal of principle, of duty. Nor was the idealism of these men always confined to matters of conduct. In Emerson, more certainly than in the fathers themselves, one feels the ceaseless effort of New England to grasp, to understand, to formulate the realities which must forever lie beyond the human ken. The New Englanders of our Renaissance were no longer Puritans; they had discarded the grim dogmas of Calvinism; but so far as Puritanism was a lifelong effort to recognize and to follow ideals which can never be apprehended by unaided human senses, they were still Puritan at heart." |