Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Appendix I. Early and Uncollected Verses

Massachusetts

Written on hearing that the Resolutions of the Legislature of Massachusetts on the subject of Slavery, presented by Hon. C. Cushing to the House of Representatives of the United States, had been laid on the table unread and unreferred, under the infamous rule of “Patton’s Resolution.”

AND have they spurned thy word,

Thou of the old Thirteen!

Whose soil, where Freedom’s blood first poured,

Hath yet a darker green?

To outworn patience suffering long

Is insult added to the wrong?

And have they closed thy mouth,

And fixed the padlock fast?

Dumb as the black slave of the South!

Is this thy fate at last?

Oh shame! thy honored seal and sign

Trod under hoofs so asinine!

Call from the Capitol

Thy chosen ones again,

Unmeet for them the base control

Of Slavery’s curbing rein!

Unmeet for men like them to feel

The spurring of a rider’s heel.

When votes are things of trade

And force is argument,

Call back to Quincy’s shade

Thy old man eloquent.

Why leave him longer striving thus

With the wild beasts of Ephesus!

Back from the Capital—

It is no place for thee!

Beneath the arch of Heaven’s blue wall,

Thy voice may still be free!

What power shall chain thy utterance there,

In God’s free sun and freer air?

A voice is calling thee,

From all the martyr graves

Of those stern men, in death made free,

Who could not live as slaves.

The slumberings of thy honored dead

Are for thy sake disquieted.

So let thy Faneuil Hall

By freemen’s feet be trod,

And give the echoes of its wall

Once more to Freedom’s God!

And in the midst unseen shall stand

The mighty fathers of thy land.

Thy gathered sons shall feel

The soul of Adams near,

And Otis with his fiery zeal,

And Warren’s onward cheer;

And heart to heart shall thrill as when

They moved and spake as living men.

Not on Potomac’s side,

With treason in thy rear,

Can Freedom’s holy cause be tried:

Not there, my State, but here.

Here must thy needed work be done,

The battle at thy hearth-stone won.

Proclaim a new crusade

Against the foes within;

From bar and pulpit, press and trade,

Cast out the shame and sin.

Then speak thy now-unheeded word,

Its lightest whisper shall be heard.