John Greenleaf Whittier letters and documents

1850-1890

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1882) was an American poet, journalist and abolitionist. The collection consists of autograph letters written to various parties regarding literary, political and personal matters; autograph verses signed; and autograph signatures. Letter recipients include his editor James T. Fields, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Henry Wilson, newspaper editor and U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Whittier’s letter of 1853 September 23 to a political committee in New York City expresses his support of Free Soil politics and his disgust over the Fugitive Slave Law. The collection includes two separate autograph poems, The Christmas Carmen, enclosed in a letter to the editor of The Independent, 1872, and The Vanishers, undated. A letter to James T. Fields contains the emended opening lines of The Tent on the Beach, dated 1867.