Thomas Wentworth Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier

“ ‘ There is a time to keep silence,’ saith Solomon. But when I proceeded to the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Ecclesiastes, ‘and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as are oppressed, and they have had no comforter; and on the side of the oppressors there was power,’ I concluded this was not the time to keep silence; for Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak Truth is dangerous.”

In 1840 Whittier's health had become impaired anew; his father had died, and his mother, sister, and aunt had removed their residence to Amesbury — partly for the sake of nearness to their meeting-house; and he joined them there and made the house his legal domicile, as it is now his memorial home.

His service to freedom, after ill health had driven him from Philadelphia, was irregular in place and form, but constant. He passed from Amesbury to Boston and thence to New York, to Saratoga, to Albany, and to western Pennsylvania, and wherever there was to be an antislavery convention; which meant, in his case, a convention based upon the ballot, aiming at political action, and still holding to the faint hope that Henry Clay might yet become its leader, and that Caleb Cushing might espouse its cause. At one time Whittier and Henry B. Stanton were deputed by the American Antislavery Society to go through Pennsylvania and find, if they could, seventy public speakers who would take part in the war against slavery.¹ He had at one time planned, when he felt himself more in command of his bodily forces, to attend the World's Antislavery Convention at London (June, 1840), but being cautioned by the well-known