longfellow presentation
TRANSCRIPT
2E. W. Clay, “America,” ca. 1841
3
Ernest Wadsworth
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, ca. 1851 (LNHS)
4Longfellow, Poems on Slavery, New England Anti-Slavery
Tract Association, 1843
Well done! Thy words are great and bold;
At times they seem to me,
Like Luther’s, in the days of old,
Half-battles for the free.
Go on, until this land revokes
The old and chartered Lie,
The feudal curse, whose whips and yokes
Insult humanity.
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In that hour, when the night is calmest,
Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist,
In a voice so sweet and clear
That I could not choose but hear,
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7Iron Mask, Leg Shackles, Spurs Used to Restrain Slaves. From
Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant, 1807.
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Now Lucifer was not dead . . . . or if he was I am his sorrowful
terrible heir;
I have been wronged . . . . I am oppressed . . . . I hate him that
oppresses me,
I will either destroy him, or he shall release me.
Damn him! how he does defile me,
How he informs against my brother and sister and takes pay for
their blood,
How he laughs when I look down the bend after the steamboat
that carries away my woman.
Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk . . . . it seems
mine,
Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, my tap is
death.
The sufferance of her race is shown,
And retrospect of life,
Which now too late deliverance dawns upon;
Yet is she not at strife.
Her children’s children they shall know
The good withheld from her;
And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer—
In spirit she sees the stir.
Far down the depth of thousand years,
And marks the revel shine;
Her dusky face is lit with sober light,
Sibylline, yet benign.
9
There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.
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11
Longfellow, Personal Account Book, 1855-
1856, Houghton Library
12
Josiah Henson and his Wife, North
American Black Historical
Museum, Inc., Amherstburg, Ontario
13
Alexander Gardner, “The Politics
and Poetry of New England,”
CDV, ca. 1863
14Louis Agassiz (1809-1873)
15
J. T. Zealy, Columbia, SC, “Jack,”
daguerreotype, 1850
16
Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876)
17
Louis Agassiz to Samuel Gridley Howe, 9 August
1863 (Houghton Library)
There is no ^such restraint upon the first ^
early passions as exists
everywhere in those communities where ^in which both sexes are
legally upon a footing of equality. The first gratification under
the pressure of so great a stimulus as the advantages accruing
to the family negress, from the connection with young
masters, already blunts his better instincts in that direction
and leads him gradually to seek more ^ “spicy partners,^” as I
have heard the full blacks called by fast young men. Moreover
it is not difficult physiologically to understand why mulattoes
with their peculiar constitution should be particularly
attractive physically, even though that intercourse should be
abhorrent to a refined moral sensibility. Again whatever be
the merit of this explanation, one thing is certain that there is
no elevating element whatever conceivable in the connection of
individuals of different races; there is neither love, nor desire
for improvement of any kind.
18Timothy O’Sullivan, Large Group of Slaves, Smith’s
Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, ca. 1861
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20
George Moses Horton, Letter to David Swain, 3
September 1844. University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
'Twas like the evening of a nuptial pair,
When love pervades the hour of sad despair--
'Twas like fair Helen's sweet return to Troy,
When every Grecian bosom swell'd with joy.
The silent harp which on the osiers hung,
Was then attuned, and manumission sung;
Away by hope the clouds of fear were driven,
And music breathed my gratitude to Heaven.
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22Slave Coffle, Washington, D.C., ca. 1819
Jane Benham, illustration for Evangeline, wood
engraving, 1850 23
24
Mary Webb (1828-1859)
“In the death of Longfellow the Nation, and we might say the world, loses one of its most genial spirits. … A genuine son of Massachusetts, his influence was always given on the side of Liberty.”
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26Photogravure, after Julia Margaret
Cameron, Longfellow