Читать книгу The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America - Michael C. Cohen - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

The Poetics of Reform

The Poetics of Reform

Chapter 1 concluded with the claim that in the early national period, certain genres of poetry condensed societal anxieties about circulation and public order. Particular kinds of poems were understood to have a constitutively social function, or, rather, particular kinds of poems were understood to be constitutive of sociality. That is, they engaged large audiences on diverse arrays of topics, but more important, they enabled certain concepts of community to become visible to members of the community. This relation was recursive, since people imagined such poems to participate in relations that the poems helped lay down. As we saw, these genres (most prominently the ballad) produced ambivalent feelings: they were and also were not literary, decorous, and decent, and while they were known to be popular and powerful ways of communicating, their powers were felt to be potentially and potently dangerous. Chapter 2 continues this line of thought by examining how one social reform project, abolition, drew upon the ambivalent charges ascribed to poems in the Jacksonian and antebellum eras. How did antislavery—the project most transformative in its vision and most incendiary in its practice—mobilize the energies encoded into common and widely read poetic genres? What sort of work did antislavery poems do? And what sorts of communities were formed or deformed by the circulation and exchange of antislavery verse?

I must begin by emphasizing that the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for—to put the point as strongly as possible—poems made reform possible as a social project. Anthologies by Marcus Wood and James Basker have demonstrated that antislavery poetry dates back at least one hundred years earlier than the organized movement itself.¹ Thousands of authors wrote songs, hymns, laments, satires, ballads, and odes in the service of antislavery, to change hearts and minds, to recruit new members, and to build solidarity within local organizations and across the transnational movement. Abolitionist newspapers relied heavily on poems to provide front-page commentary or even to report news. Giftbooks of poetry, such as The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by her Friends (discussed later), sold to raise money at abolitionist fairs, were exchanged as tokens among acquaintances, thus securing bonds of friendship in sympathy with the bondage of the slave. Making these books was one way to act politically; buying and giving them away were others. Songs and hymns condensed the evangelism at the heart of much antislavery activism, most famously in “Amazing Grace,” but also in hundreds of other hymns sung in and out of church. Such songs, which after the 1820s could be cheaply printed in large numbers, for distribution across the Atlantic world, also epitomized the mass mediation of reform. One example is Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (1835): as a broadside featuring Josiah Wedgwood’s famous engraving for the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it sold for two cents a copy and was so widely distributed that in 1837, William Lloyd Garrison described it as having “been circulated in periodicals, quoted in addresses and orations, and scattered broad-cast, over the land.”²

Garrison’s biblical-sounding language shows how the evangelical mission of antislavery was bound up in its practices of communication and circulation. To sow the word was to spread the word; to reach hearts and minds, one had to reach eyes and ears. While pamphlets and orations could make a formal case against slavery, other genres—satires, invectives, polemics, songs, hymns, and ballads—were better able to reach larger numbers of people and ignite their passions. Sarah Lewis, an activist in Philadelphia, dramatically posed the advantages that “a few abolition songs” offered to “materially advance our cause” in 1841: “We know Tippecanoe songs did much towards the great Whig victory last year—When thee is in the humor of writing poetry could thee not write a song or two to some favorite national air—‘Hail Columbia’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ for dignified composition and Yankee Doodle for the mobocracy—or to any popular air—national or not—.”³

Lewis’s bourgeois distinction between dignified and mobocratic compositions still emphasizes how important a “favorite national air” was to the work of reform: by harnessing the associative powers of tunes like “Yankee Doodle,” abolition could propagate on an almost subconscious level, controlling the mob or the quality as though without their will (which was a common interpretation of William Henry Harrison’s “Old Tippecanoe” songs of 1840). Lewis’s comment may idealize the efficacy of circulation, but it also demonstrates an astute understanding of how airs, tunes, and songs generate political agency, as Harrison’s campaign had made compellingly clear. The familiarity of a popular air, not its literary qualities, made it effective. Lewis diagnoses the media ecology of the 1840s, where new genres and technologies of communication worked in tandem with old ones (such as the familiar melody) to influence public discourse. Thus, as we will see, even though antislavery poets were keenly interested in the literariness of their work, they viewed a poem’s literary value as a subsidiary aspect of its broader social value, its ability to be carried in people and to carry people away.

Figure 9. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (New York, n.d.). Courtesy of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.

This chapter extends the argument from Chapter 1 by examining the poetics of reform in the 1830s and 1840s. Antislavery activists used poems to mobilize energies and anxieties similar to those that suffused the scurrilous broadsides of balladmongers like Thomas Shaw or Jonathan Plummer. Those wares had seemed, at least to some contemporaries, to spread themselves invisibly and insidiously, despite the all-too-human presence of their peddlers, who attracted audiences while also exciting their disdain. Abolition songs and poems aspired to this idealized, invisible communication, to be so potent as to be always already familiar with audiences and so portable as to require no apparent means of transport. But as with the balladmonger, the abolitionist poet’s aspiration to invisible immediacy paradoxically heightened the visibility of communications systems in Jacksonian society. The antislavery conflict was very often waged in fights about speech, assembly, and circulation, in which battles to control institutions like the postal system or the lecture hall served as proxy challenges to local sovereignty, regional autonomy, or federal authority. In this kind of political situation, the blank, abstract conventions of so many antislavery poems promoted their circulatory power and intensified their messages about the freedoms of speech, thought, and association, as well as freedom from chattel servitude.

The typical antislavery poem therefore works first and foremost at the formal level, as something generic and conventional in the most positive sense. Abolitionist verse needed to be formally familiar: stanza patterns, airs and melodies, and rhetorical commonplaces all carried information in excess of any particular poem’s specific content and circumstances of composition, while the authority of the individual writer was always necessarily subordinated to the needs of the collective enterprise. Like ballads, antislavery songs are above all communal property. And one poet’s ability to cite or pass along the work of another, in the service of a social project requiring all the powers of circulation, created a circumstance in which the literary coterie could embody the imaginative work of reform. Friends forging bonds through the exchange of verses (often on the breaking of legal bonds or bondage) mimicked the kinds of sociable forces encoded in popular genres like the ballad. But the paradoxical capacity to pitch one’s “voice” through poems characterized by the way they could “echo” large numbers of similar poems led, in the 1840s, to a tangled set of political affiliations in which antislavery authors drew affective charges from the minstrel theater, thereby turning racial mimicry inside out into new social productions. The beginnings of an African American poetry (something I will trace in Chapter 6) are to be found in the “abolitionist minstrelsy” of the 1840s, which deployed the open conventions of antislavery verse genres (such as the “lines” and “stanzas” discussed below) to create a distinctly inauthentic, secondary, derivative voice of freedom.

The Politics of Circulation in the 1830s

As the most popular and prolific poet of the antislavery movement, Whittier’s career can illustrate the permutations of verse in the project of reform. Whittier began writing poems in the late 1820s, and his work first appeared publicly in a newspaper system that was firmly embedded in New England, even in rural areas. He sent his earliest poems anonymously to Garrison, who at the time was editing the Newburyport Free Press; as legend later had it, Garrison tracked Whittier down, found him laboring on the family farm, and encouraged him to contribute more poems, only to be chased away by Whittier’s father, who considered verse writing a dubious line of work. Whittier and Garrison had both grown up at the margins of the Era of Good Feelings, Whittier the son of small-scale Quaker farmers, Garrison of indentured servants transported from England, and both had entered public discourse through the partisan press before moving into organized antislavery.⁴ Before his 1828 conversion to abolition, Garrison had been a printer’s devil at the Newburyport Herald (a Federalist paper) and editor of a series of Federalist and National Republican newspapers; Whittier, after a brief stint teaching, wrote for pro-Clay papers in Hartford and Boston, a political association that overlapped with his conversion to antislavery in the early 1830s.⁵ This newspaper culture was, in Meredith L. McGill’s words, “regional in articulation and transnational in scope,” and Whittier published prolifically in it, putting out more than seventy poems in 1828 alone.⁶

Whittier’s earliest work was heterogeneous and not explicitly political: georgics describing the surrounding area (“The Vale of Merrimac”), biblical narratives (“Judith at the Tent of Holofernes”), vignettes culled from European legend (“The Sicilian Vespers,” “Isabella of Austria”), accounts of Native American history in New England (“The Fratricide,” “Mogg Megone,” “Metacom”—efforts perhaps meant to dovetail with Edwin Forrest’s hugely popular performances as Metacomet), even an elegy for Simón Bolívar, and a dialect temperance song, “The Drunkard to His Bottle,” presented in homage to Burns as “lyrics the great poet of Scotland might have written had he put his name to a pledge of abstinence”:

Nae mair o’ fights that bruise an’ mangle,

Nae mair o’ nets my feet to tangle,

Nae mair o’ senseless brawl an’ wrangle,

Wi’ frien’ an’ wife too,

Nae mair o’ deavin’ din an’ jangle

My feckless life through.⁷

When he compiled his Complete Works in the 1880s, Whittier excluded nearly all of these poems (most remain uncollected to this day), and the diversity of their topics and styles indicates the job-work nature of newspaper verse writing; they cannot really be organized according to abstractions of the work or oeuvre, and even the author is an inadequate frame, since these poems were published anonymously (a few were not identified as Whittier’s until after his death). The decentralized and dispersed character of periodical culture in the 1820s and 1830s worked against the specificity and organicism necessary for post-Romantic literariness; the poems’ generic-ness was their most important quality, since it prepared them for reprinting and reproduction across different venues.⁸

A set of social, cultural, and technological developments converged in the 1830s to politicize the emergent mass production of print, of which Whittier’s early career was part; the ability to disseminate text rapidly across a diverse range of formats and broad geographic space increasingly provoked reactions against the more networked infrastructure that was coming to characterize the Jacksonian era, a period marked, variously, by the “transportation revolution” and “market revolution” and named, in one biting poem, the “Era of PAPER, and the AGE OF PRINT.”⁹ The 1830s were a decade of conflict on many fronts, and antislavery prompted some of the strongest antagonism. After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 (also the year Garrison founded the Liberator), violence over antislavery was directed primarily against its system of communication—free association, public speaking, and print circulation. While the worst riots were intended to disrupt abolitionist lectures and meetings (Garrison and Whittier were each attacked during the speaking tour of George Thompson, for example), mobs just as often targeted abolitionist publications and printing presses; in the most infamous instance, Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, was murdered while defending his press, which mobs had destroyed three times previously. The violent tensions surrounding antislavery and communication are savagely satirized in Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, which used the conceit of metempsychosis to send up Jacksonian society. At one point, the title character jumps into the body of a Quaker reformer, who is immediately kidnapped by proslavery agents and taken to Virginia to be lynched. Just before this denouement, he jumps into the body of a local slave, who then participates in a bloody uprising incited by a stray abolitionist tract.¹⁰

Although Garrison was a higher profile target, Whittier’s abolitionist writings (especially an 1833 pamphlet, Justice and Expediency) earned him notoriety from New England to the border states. Unlike Garrison, though, and unlike other important abolitionist poets such as Frances E. W. Harper, Whittier’s relation to antislavery was almost entirely print based—he was a poet, editorialist, pamphleteer, and political organizer but rarely a lecturer or recruiter. This commitment to communication as the agent of social change imbued Whittier’s poems—even those written much later in his career—with the idiom of the 1830s’ embattled public culture. That is, his poems locate agency in a discourse structured by immediate publication and immediate emancipation, where freedom comes from the ability to speak and move without restrictions. Whittier’s antislavery poems are, therefore, greatly concerned with efforts to suppress a popular voice, and they urge that voice to resist by talking back—but the voice belongs to the Yankee and not the slave. And, if his poems respond to specific moments in the struggle over antislavery, their political power is realized more through their genre and the metapragmatics of their circulation than by their content.

The poems’ rhetoric and politics track closely with major campaigns of the American Anti-slavery Society (AAS) (for which Whittier was a paid secretary) involving exercises of free speech and free circulation, commitments that grounded moral suasion in mass-mediated print.¹¹ The era’s technological innovations and infrastructure improvements better enabled organized abolition to imagine a national public as the target of its reformist address. In 1835, the AAS (which was at its peak in the mid-1830s, with 300,000 members) began a direct-mailing campaign, sending several hundred thousand letters, pamphlets, tracts, stories, poems, and appeals into the South, thereby using the federal postal system to circumvent local restrictions against immediatist material.¹² By mid-July, 175,000 items (among them Justice and Expediency) were in the New York City Post Office, ready to be mailed.¹³ When these materials reached Charleston, they inflamed raw fears that Northern “incendiaries” wanted to ignite a slave rebellion, and local leaders quickly and ruthlessly suppressed the distribution of “Tappan, Garrison & Co’s papers, encouraging the negroes to insurrection.”¹⁴ A mob stormed the Charleston post office, seized the sacks of mail, and burned them in a wild pubic display.¹⁵ This riot sparked similar panics across the slaveholding states, as “postmasters censored the mails and mobs roamed the countryside,” with numerous cities suspending habeas corpus and arresting anyone suspected of being an abolitionist (one case involved a man who was jailed and nearly lynched in Washington for passing a copy of Justice and Expediency).¹⁶

After failing to transform private sentiments by disseminating pamphlets, tracts, and letters, the AAS organized a congressional petition drive to use government as a platform for public speech; to give a sense of the scale of this project, Congress received 225,000 antislavery petitions in 1837 alone.¹⁷ This campaign initiated a second controversy, about the role of Congress in social reform debates. While Congress had read petitions against slavery since the 1790s, the abolitionist mails campaign prompted Southern legislators to argue that such petitions were insurrectionary, and they sought to bar Congress even from receiving them, let alone having them read on the floor. Debates about the right to petition consumed the House of Representatives throughout 1836. Under an arrangement brokered by South Carolinian Henry L. Pinckney, the House resolved that no petition pertaining to slavery could be read, printed, or discussed by the House.¹⁸ This resolution became known as the “gag rule,” and no sooner had it passed than northern Whig congressmen, most prominently John Quincy Adams, began defying it, using ploy after ploy to read antislavery petitions to the House and thereby creating a spectacle that riveted national attention on slavery and free speech.¹⁹

These battles over the circulation of discourse provide context and coherence for the otherwise centrifugal antislavery verse of the 1830s. Efforts to regulate or suppress debate became the content of debate, and the freewheeling, atomized newspaper culture—so resistant to literary authorship or authority—became the surest means for resisting authorized control over the diffusion of debate. The reflexivity of this fight (a debate about the right to debate, a discourse on the virtues of discourse) enabled polemicists to encode the terms of one struggle onto another: antislavery poems, letters, pamphlets, and editorials relentlessly equated gag rules, suppression laws, and antiabolitionist intimidation with chattel slavery, a rhetorical move that enlisted in the fight against “the slave power” or “King Cotton” many who were not otherwise friendly to emancipation. When Whittier exhorts readers to fight slavery, he often means them to stand up for themselves. “Stanzas for the Times” (1835), for example, bridges the rhetorical gap between chattel slavery and “the suppression of free speech”: according to the poem, those living with a “fettered lip” must ultimately “Yoke in with marked and branded slaves, / And tremble at the driver’s whip” (271). The poem’s occasion was a proslavery meeting in Boston, and it addresses the “Yankee farmer” (the poem was signed originally “A Farmer”) facing the prospect, should he capitulate, that “his freedom stands / On Slavery’s dark foundations strong” (ibid.). In the poem’s rhetoric, the Yankee’s commitment to freedom is first a commitment to New England’s land and history; freedom entails an obligation to section as much as to abolition.

Is this the land our fathers loved,

The freedom which they toiled to win?

Is this the soil whereon they moved?

Are these the graves they slumber in?

Are we the sons by whom are borne

The mantles which the dead have worn?

And shall we crouch above these graves,

With craven soul and fettered lip?

Yoke in with marked and branded slaves,

And tremble at the driver’s whip?

Bend to the earth our pliant knees,

And speak but as our masters please? (Ibid.)

By living with “fettered lip,” the community bows down to Southern masters, forfeits its Revolutionary heritage, and empties the land of sacred national value. The poem’s questions destabilize a collective identity based on shared relations to a symbolic landscape: if “we speak but as our masters please,” the poem implies, then we will no longer be the sons born of our fathers or borne upon this land. Whittier continues in this mode, asking, “Shall tongue be mute … shall Truth succumb? / Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?” to which he answers,

No; guided by our country’s laws,

For truth, and right, and suffering man,

Be ours to strive in Freedom’s cause,

As Christians may, as freemen can!

Still pouring on unwilling ears

That truth oppression only fears. (Ibid.)

By answering in this way, the poem’s readers stand up to the threat of slavery and assert themselves as true heirs to “all the memories of our dead”—in other words, they constitute themselves as a free people supported by Christianity, law, truth, and right. At the conclusion, Whittier assures the “brethren of the South,”

No seal is on the Yankee’s mouth,

No fetter on the Yankee’s press!

From our Green Mountains to the sea,

One voice shall thunder, We are free! (272)

By speaking freely, “the Yankee” comes to figure a people bonded to the New England landscape (our Green Mountains) and possessing one voice, whose self-authorizing annunciation is “We are free!” The discourse of liberation in the poem agitates not for the end of slavery but for the unquestionable right and use of free speech, and the threat of slavery is not the harms it inflicts on chattel slaves but is rather slavery’s power to destroy the social selfunderstanding of Yankees.

As a poem to and for Yankees, “Stanzas for the Times” gained persuasive force from its sites of publication, because the poem’s referents were also its audience, the readers of the newspapers where it appeared. “Stanzas for the Times” was first published in the Essex Gazette, Whittier’s hometown paper, and then quickly reprinted around New England and in further-flung abolitionist papers, even appearing in Niles’ Register, the preeminent proslavery paper of the day (one editorial referred to it as “Whittier’s well known and soul stirring lines”).²⁰ The sites of publication—small New England or antislavery newspapers—enhanced the poem’s rhetorical force by aligning its address with its readership (“it speaks for the general public,” says a character in the fin-desiècle historical tale “She Loved a Sailor,” by Whittier’s friend Amelia Barr).²¹ To press the point, continuous reprinting helped actualize the poem’s politics—free speech and movement were the poem’s consequence more than they were its content or intention.

Yet the capacities of a poem like “Stanzas for the Times” to secure political agency through reprinting conflicts with the specificity of context and audience that made it powerful. “The times,” after all, can be any time, and any poem that addresses them can be stanzas for the times. Whittier wrote at least four other poems called “Stanzas for the Times” (similarly, he titled eight different antislavery poems “Lines”), which addressed new concerns and controversies in the continuing fight against efforts to suppress free speech.²² For example, in 1839, he penned a “Stanzas for the Times” to attack Pennsylvania Governor David Porter, who had stated in his inaugural message that “to agitate the question [of slavery] anew, is not only impolitic, but it is a virtual breach of good faith to our brethren of the South.” The new “Stanzas” rejoined:

We ask no boon: our RIGHTS we claim—

Free press and thought—free tongue and pen,

The right to speak in Freedom’s name,

As Pennsylvanians and as men:

To do, by Lynch Law unforbid,

What our own Rush and Franklin did.²³

These “Stanzas” reproduce the ideology and iconography of their earlier counterpart: “we” Pennsylvanians will assert free press and thought, tongue, and pen (“the right to speak in Freedom’s name”), with “our own Rush and Franklin” standing as the genii loci for free speech (the earlier stanzas had cited heroes from Bunker Hill as New England’s presiding spirits). In a political discourse organized through meetings and assemblies, newspapers and broadsides, “Stanzas for the Times” could never be quoted out of context. Genericness (considered pragmatically rather than aesthetically) made these poems effective. To be agents of change, they must be deemed capable of addressing and intervening in their situation; not only must they circulate freely, but readers also have to anticipate and recognize that freedom. Conventions help this happen: a blank title like “Stanzas for the Times” (further enabled by recognizable stanza forms and meters) elicits that sense of open timeliness, since the absence of markers frees the poem for unlimited transposition. In a process that Chapter 5 will examine in detail, the blankness of this verse later made it difficult to read; as one of Whittier’s biographers requested in the 1880s,

I now write to beg of you that ere it is too late you will prepare an edition of [your antislavery poems] with little paragraphs attached—headings rather than notes—indicating the circumstances which called them forth. I am sure that such an edition would be very welcome & that it would be immensely useful in the way of distinction concerning many features of the anti slavery struggle. Your poems will be read much more than any history.²⁴

In order to be abstracted from its setting, the antislavery poem had to already be abstract; to be read as history, it first had to be history, or to become history, by addressing a time it did not name. Thus, while “Stanzas for the Times” angrily speaks out against the times, it makes few references to them; assured that readers live in the times, the poem foregoes historical description to go straight to their hearts and minds. Temporal immediacy and contextual immanence therefore made “Stanzas for the Times” available for redeployment throughout the antebellum era: it was sung on many occasions and reprinted at moments of national crisis until as late as December 1860.²⁵ Whitman Bennett has described this kind of poem as

a very special brand—for which poetry in the accepted sense may not be quite the just word…. In fact, nothing quite like them is to be found in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literature … these versified outbursts of indignation, satire, reproach, scorn, and exhortation, all mingled with specific arguments and supplications for divine aid, reached the ears and hearts of millions … who would never have read prose pamphlets or have been influenced by them.²⁶

Versified outbursts of scorn and supplication reach ears and hearts otherwise beyond the grasp of more formal discourse (prose pamphlets, congressional debates, etc.); in this description, free circulation aligns with freed verse, verse that can move freely because it is conventionally marked. The conventions of the newspaper antislavery poem elicit readings unique to the newspaper, because readers encounter the poem amid articles, editorials, and advertisements pertaining to the events the poem described. For instance, the Liberator printed “Stanzas for the Times” next to an article by Whittier reporting how he had been attacked by a mob in New Hampshire; this place on the page (the front page, no less) provided the poem with evidence to support its urgent tone. The high level of context and recognition between the poem and its readers demonstrates not only that newspaper antislavery poems are a distinct genre but also that the “speaker” of the poem is, in this case, Whittier, and his readers (readers of the Liberator) would know him and would know themselves to be addressed by him. This conclusion seems broadly true for newspaper antislavery poems—they do not have abstract, anonymous speakers but function as direct address between author and reader—they are heard, not overheard, and the space of the newspaper determined that they would be heard (or read) collectively.

We can best understand the political efficacy of antislavery verse by detailing its production, distribution, and consumption: the newspaper, the pamphlet, the broadside, and the oration are not incidental sites for these poems but are instead crucial to their form and meaning. Poems in ephemeral settings must be understood in relation to the mobility of their formats, which differ widely from the anthology or single-authored book (Whittier wrote poems for fifteen years before he published a book of them under his own name). But the combination of topical subjects and ephemeral formats also meant that republication changed poems’ meanings. When Whittier reprinted “Stanzas for the Times” in May 1837 as the conclusion to a pamphlet of Adams’s speeches against the Pinckney resolution, this new setting made the poem a comment on the gag rule and legitimized it by association with Adams (a juxtaposition made possible by the pamphlet format of Letters from John Quincy Adams to His Constituents). Placing the poem in this context gave it a different meaning, without changing any of its original lines.

Another example can highlight the stakes of an antislavery poetics that advocates a politics (both abolition and free speech) in the service of a sectional spirit. “Lines,” Whittier’s response to “the passage of Pinckney’s Resolutions in the House of Representatives, and of Calhoun’s ‘Bill of Abominations’ in the Senate of the United States,” also grounded New England identity in the historical prerogatives of free communication and association.²⁷ Like “Stanzas for the Times,” “Lines” plays with the generic sense of its own portability, which enforces its message of free speech while complicating its coherence as a poem. After publication in June 1836, “Lines” appeared in many formats, under several titles, and in relation to various political and historical contexts, over a period of fifty years.²⁸ The poem internalizes the temporal disjuncture between immediate events and long-term purposes by juxtaposing New England’s “ancient freedom” with contingencies of the moment, “Mammon’s lure or Party’s wile” (273). To the “Sons of old freemen,” Whittier asks, “do we but inherit / Their names alone? // Is the old Pilgrim spirit quenched within us … To silence now?”

Now, when our land to ruin’s brink is verging,

In God’s name, let us speak while there is time!

Now, when the padlocks for our lips are forging,

Silence is crime! (Ibid.)

Like “Stanzas for the Times,” “Lines” presents antislavery as a struggle over speech, between people whose identities derive value and meaning from historical associations that must be defended against current exigencies—in order to live up to “the old Pilgrim spirit,” “Our New England” must speak in the face of “Mammon’s lure or Party’s wile.” If one purpose of Calhoun’s act was to assert local control over a national system (the U.S. Post Office), Whittier’s poem draws out a further sectionalist consequence—passage of Calhoun’s act would constitute Southern dominion over ancient New England privileges. In a sign of things to come, a battle over communication and discourse becomes a fight between the irreconcilable prerogatives of different sections. The only alternative to those “padlocks for our lips” is a voice that emerges from the geography of New England—“her wild, green mountains … her rough coast, and isles”—and from “her unbought farmer … her free laborer … From each and all, if God hath not forsaken / Our land” (ibid). Their voice will be borne on Northern winds “Over Potomac’s to St. Mary’s wave,” where “buried Freedom shall awake to hear it.”

Oh, let that voice go forth! The bondman sighing

By Santee’s wave, in Mississippi’s cane,

Shall feel the hope, within his bosom dying,

Revive again.

Let it go forth! The millions who are gazing

Sadly upon us from afar shall smile,

And unto God devout thanksgiving raising,

Bless us the while.

Oh for your ancient freedom, pure and holy

For the deliverance of a groaning earth,

For the wronged captive, bleeding, crushed, and lowly,

Let it go forth! (273–74)

“Men of the North-land” need only speak to assert their freedom; what they say is less important. This expression of New England identity will necessarily cut against Southern tyranny; in its very form, and regardless of its content, the “People’s voice” will transcend sectional lines and revive the spirits of despairing slaves. Even if “A People’s voice” does not free slaves directly, “Lines” comes as close as any of Whittier’s poems to connecting Northern free speech with the liberation of Southern slaves. “A People’s voice” is thus the matrix of agency and freedom, and it is materialized by the poem, which “speaks out” against slavery, in defiance of Pinckney and Calhoun’s proscriptions (never even mentioned in the poem), by virtue of its public existence. It is the fact of a voice going forth, the movement of the poem in itself, more than any particular message, that accomplishes the political work desired in the poem’s lines.