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It was in 1638, when the great
Puritan emigration to
Massachusetts was beginning to slacken, that
Thomas Whittier, a youth of eighteen, possibly of
Huguenot extraction, landed in
New England and made a home for himself on the shores of the
Merrimac River.
The substantial oak farmhouse which, late in life, he erected for his large family near
Haverhill, is still standing.
Descended from him in the fourth generation,
John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, was born in this house, 17 December, 1807.
This is the homestead described with minute and loving fidelity in
Snow-Bound, and it is typical of the many thousands of its sort that dotted the
New England country-side, rearing in the old
Puritan tradition a sturdy pioneer stock that was to blossom later in the fine flower of political and ethical passion, of statesmanship and oratory and letters.
Though
Whittier's family tree was originally
Puritan, a Quaker scion was grafted upon it in the second American generation, when
Joseph Whittier, the youngest son of the pioneer, married
Mary Peaslee, whose father had been an associate and disciple of
George Fox. The descendants in this line remained faithful to the doctrines of the Society of Friends, and the poet, although he persisted in the characteristic and quaint (although ungrammatical) use of the second person singular pronoun in address, found the principle of non-resistance something of a strain in the days when his fondest hopes were bound up in the holy cause for which his friends were bearing arms and laying down their lives upon the battle-field.
