Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Chapter 14: anti-slavery poems and second marriage

It is difficult now to realize what an event in Longfellow's life was the fact of his writing a series of anti-slavery poems on board ship and publishing them in a thin pamphlet on his return. Parties on the subject were already strongly drawn; the anti-slavery party being itself divided into subdivisions which criticised each other sharply. Longfellow's temperament was thoroughly gentle and shunned extremes, so that the little thin yellow-covered volume came upon the community with something like a shock. As a matter of fact, various influences had led him up to it. His father had been a subscriber to Benjamin Lundy's ‘Genius of Universal Emancipation,’ the precursor of Garrison's ‘Liberator.’ In his youth at Brunswick, Longfellow had thought of writing a drama on the subject of ‘Toussaint l'ouverture,’ his reason for it being thus given, ‘that thus I may do something in my humble way for the great cause of negro emancipation.’

Margaret Fuller, who could by no means be