When W. E. B. DuBois was looking for a title for the magazine of the NAACP, he found inspiration in James Russell Lowell's 1844 poem “The Present Crisis,” settling on The Crisis as the title for the periodical. DuBois also used Lowell's poem for an epigraph in The Souls of Black Folk. This epilogue explores how both African American spirituals and antislavery poetry helped to shape DuBois's thought and his wide-ranging influence in American thought, and it considers the value of the recovery of antislavery verse in our own time. DuBois, one of the greatest stylists of non-fiction prose in American literary history, is not often remembered as a poet, but he was the author of a significant body of verse that continues to resonate today, even as his work as a critic has been crucial in placing the African American spiritual at the center of the literary history of the United States. Although DuBois can seem to be an exceptional figure who represents a foundation for later African American literature rather than appearing as an author in conversation with his predecessors, his work illustrates and acknowledges the degree to which it is rooted in earlier antislavery verse.

In Darkwater, the volume of his work that most directly shows the influence of prewar antislavery verse, DuBois mixed prose and poetry, and the poetry bore eloquent and compressed witness to the complexities and moral challenges of the color line that he examined in his prose. In creating literary models to deal with the ongoing injustices faced by African Americans in the United States and to bear witness to the continuing ironies of American freedom and its reliance on unfreedom, DuBois drew heavily and explicitly on the existing tradition of antislavery poetry. In creating The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in November 1910, 45 years after the end of the US Civil War, and at the height of the post-Reconstruction lynching crisis, DuBois explicitly hearkened back to Lowell's 1844 poem, “The Present Crisis.” In doing so, DuBois was actually acknowledging an existing tradition within the broader African American community of making Lowell's poem a part of its own political and religious discourse.

Although the first of John Greenleaf Whittier's poems in Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States (1837) and in the collection of antislavery verse in his collected works assembled in 1888 is about William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of The Liberator and perhaps the United States’ most influential white abolitionist, the second, and much longer, poem in the portion of Whittier's collected works dedicated to antislavery poetry is devoted to the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. Especially given that Whittier was the most popular of antislavery poets from the 1830s to the 1850s in the United States, what Whittier's poem on Toussaint indicates is how crucial poetry about the Caribbean is for understanding the development and form of antislavery poetry in the nineteenth-century United States.

In this chapter I work across a range of transatlantic antislavery poetry as I examine the role that Haiti and the Caribbean played in the antislavery literary imagination. Beginning with poetry by William Cowper, Hannah More, and Ann Yearsley from the British side of the Atlantic and focusing particularly on James Montgomery's antislavery epic The West Indies, the chapter proceeds through representations of slavery in the Caribbean in the poetry of Philip Freneau and John Greenleaf Whittier and shows how crucial the history and representation of slavery in the Caribbean is to understanding the US antislavery movement. Appropriately, given the transatlantic context for much antislavery discourse, this chapter takes as its primary focus James Montgomery, a British poet who has largely been neglected in canonical accounts of British literature, even as the words of his most popular poems are more broadly familiar than many of the most revered examples of canonical British Romantic poetry. Montgomery is especially important because of the association of his work in The West Indies with the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, thus forming a bridge between late eighteenth-century British antislavery poetry and the efflorescence of antislavery poetry in the United States from the 1830s on.

James Montgomery's The West Indies: Slavery, Emancipation, Empire, and the Writing of History

James Montgomery is nearly forgotten as a poet, but his verse remains with us. Although his name is not immediately familiar from literature classrooms, he is the author of one of the most frequently sung Christmas carols in the English-speaking world, “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among the most respected poets in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. Lowell's reputation has not proved as enduring as Barrett Browning’s, but they are united by a moral fervor regarding slavery that extended to their writing several of their most substantial poems on the subject virtually on their respective honeymoons. in this chapter I consider how two of the most important arbiters of literary taste on opposite sides of the Atlantic were shaped in their own poetic production by debates over slavery and freedom, including a discussion of the transatlantic publication history of Barrett Browning's “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.” If Lowell offered a stirring call to moral clarity in response to the crisis presented by slavery and the looming invasion of Mexico, Barrett Browning offered a rebuke to any attempt to believe that slavery was a peripheral part of the identity of the antebellum American republic. Both poets were deeply engaged by the question of how history could be made to speak to the present moment. Although we have seen intimations of this tendency in Whittier's engagement with Puritan and Quaker history, there is a special degree of self-consciousness about the relationship between present and past moral struggles in the work of Lowell and Barrett Browning. Even the publication history of these poems shows how closely they are linked. As Anthony H. Harrison has pointed out, it was Lowell, along with editor Maria Weston Chapman, who commissioned Barrett Browning's most famous antislavery poem for the Liberty Bell, and so the poem's obsessive interrogation of the past is connected to Lowell through its publication history as well as through its themes. Harrison also notes that Barrett Browning was haunted by the fact that she was descended from slave-owners in Jamaica, and so she found the history of slavery in the Americas to have profound personal resonances (Harrison, 53). Lowell and Barrett Browning thus both understand the moral crisis of slavery as being related to the long history of settlement in the Americas and of slavery in the Anglophone world beyond the United States, and these poems are thematically and formally as well as circumstantially part of an ongoing conversation about the implications of the past for understanding the present in the Americas.

The development of antislavery poetry in the United States brought together a cast of characters who might seem to share little aside from their opposition to slavery. When we look at poets as different as an enslaved man from North Carolina, a white radical Unitarian minister from Connecticut, and an irenic Harvard professor of languages whose poetry was wildly popular around the English-speaking world, we see the range of the community that developed under the rubric of antislavery poetry. Juxtaposing these very different figures suggests how the moral impulses associated with the antislavery movement could find expression in a variety of aesthetic modes.

In all three cases, we see examples of a poetry and a poetics that is unabashedly public in its aims: Longfellow gave voice throughout his career to this desire to write the kind of poetry that ordinary people could share around the fireside, a desire that is eloquently expressed in his frequently anthologized (and sometimes parodied) poem “Day Is Done.” Pierpont wrote for antislavery journals like William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, constructing a poetic dialogue with the headlines of his time as they related to slavery. Horton's aims are perhaps the most public of those of all three of the poets, as he draws attention to the affective experience of slavery and gives voice to his desire for freedom in the sorts of public forums to which most enslaved people were denied access, even as his status as an enslaved person limited the explicitness with which he could write on antislavery topics.

This chapter thus brings together one of the nineteenth-century's most celebrated poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and, arguably, one of its most marginal and marginalized, George Moses Horton, along with John Pierpont, a figure of considerable renown in his own time who has virtually disappeared from American literary studies today (aside from one recent essay by Virginia Jackson discussed in the introduction to this volume and Monica Pelaez's inclusion of Pierpont in Lyrical Liberators). Horton's status as a poet who published as an enslaved man pairs usefully both with the verse of one of the most famous and widely praised Americans of his time (Longfellow) and that of a celebrated antislavery agitator (Pierpont) whose work has only recently started to be recovered.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is rarely remembered as a poet: even those who recall that her body of fictional work extended well beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin tend to forget that she was also the author of the antislavery poem “Caste and Christ,” as well as a volume of devotional verse. Frances E. W. Harper is more frequently remembered as a poet, as she established her career as a writer of verse long before she published what is now her best-known novel, Iola Leroy. in this chapter I consider an interracial pairing of two eloquent female abolitionists, exploring how both work within and expand the conventions of women's poetic production in the nineteenth-century United States as they blend sentiment and satire in their critique of slavery. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most frequently cited and taught work of antislavery fiction in American literature, and her novel Dred is also among the more frequently studied and taught antislavery works. As a poet, however, Stowe is a relatively minor figure when compared with Harper, who has a reasonable claim, perhaps along with John Greenleaf Whittier, to being the most ambitious and varied in her production of antislavery poems. Stowe's only substantial antislavery poem, “Caste and Christ,” offers a premonition of sorts of major strands that Harper developed much more fully, particularly its emphasis on biblical and theological themes within a more orthodox context than many earlier antislavery poets. What links Stowe and Harper most closely is the profoundly theological quality of their antislavery poetry, a trait that is shared to some degree by Whittier, but which is much more consistently evident in Stowe's and Harper's work than in that of their contemporaries. As Dawn Coleman has observed in her work on Uncle Tom's Cabin, both of these women, denied a pastoral role in nineteenth-century American Christianity because of their gender, function as preachers and biblical exegetes through their poetry (Coleman, 156–73).

Incarnational Theology in Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Caste and Christ”

Stowe's “Caste and Christ” is more significant than has often been acknowledged, and Stowe is a better and more compelling poet than many scholars of American literature realize. Part of the reason that Stowe's poetry has been acknowledged less frequently than is warranted is that scholars who have studied Stowe have been primarily concerned with the novel as a genre.

Horton, Pierpont, and Longfellow offer a version of nineteenth-century antislavery poetry as an emerging genre: Pierpont did not have the national visibility of Longfellow; Horton wrote from within the confines of his enslavement; and Longfellow's quest for a broad audience meant that antislavery poetry played a relatively limited role in his career even as it provided the subject matter for one of his earliest collections of poetry. It was possible, however, for poets to be broadly popular and national in their appeal and to write and collect antislavery verse as a major component of their poetic mission, and in this chapter I will consider three examples of how popular poets and anthologists could be defined in meaningful ways by their antislavery sensibilities, and particularly, in Whittier's case, by writing poetry aimed directly at abolition in the years in which the abolition movement was gaining momentum.

In this chapter I consider two of the nineteenth-century's most popular poets, the Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, known to contemporaries as “the slave's poet,” and the “sweet singer of Hartford,” Lydia Huntley Sigourney, along with a figure who is better known as a novelist (indeed the author of Clotel, Or The President's Daughter, the first full-length African American novel), William Wells Brown. I consider the array of poetic forms that Whittier and Sigourney used in their antislavery verse and that Brown anthologized in his important collection of antislavery poetry, The Anti-Slavery Harp, and I suggest that their antislavery verse can be illuminated by surveying broader patterns in their bodies of work. Notably, the positions that Sigourney and Whittier took on slavery were distinct, as Sigourney was an early supporter of the American Colonization Society, which advocated the emigration of enslaved people to Africa, and Whittier was a sharp critic of colonizationism, and the percentage of Sigourney's poetry devoted to slavery was relative low, while Whittier's percentage of poems about slavery in the antebellum period was notably high, but they shared a common emphasis on human fraternity and sorority and equality that mean that there are important continuities between the moderate from Hartford and the fierce abolitionist. Brown, meanwhile, writing as a formerly enslaved person himself, offered a heartrendingly personal version of the affective elements and calls for empathy that appeared in Sigourney's and Whittier's poetry.

In the recent publication of a scholarly edition of the free African American poet James Monroe Whitfield's work, Robert S. Levine and Ivy Wilson suggest that Whitfield's 1853 America and Other Poems could be read as a counterpart to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (Levine and Wilson, 2). In this chapter I respond to that challenge, exploring the complex role that slavery and freedom play in the development of Whitman's poetic voice and the alternative understanding of the early history of the republic offered by Whitfield. The chapter also includes a discussion of Whitman's Civil War collection Drum-Taps and Herman Melville's Battle- Pieces, two major collections to come out of the Civil War that reflected on the conflict with an ambivalence that contrasts with the jubilation in John Greenleaf Whittier's postwar poetry.

Whitfield and Whitman offer a telling contrast to each other, as a white poet and a Black poet who worked under differing conditions associated with their race even as both made equality as a concept central to their poetry. They also offer important contrasts to many of their contemporaries, in that Whitman, although appalled by slavery, was not an abolitionist, and indeed criticized abolitionists in print, even as he celebrated behavior that could fairly be deemed abolitionist in his poems. Whitfield, by contrast, clearly and consistently advocated the destruction of slavery, but his understanding of race in America reflects Martin Delany's separatism and emigrationism rather than the mainstream of abolitionism represented by Frederick Douglass. Melville offered yet a third path: not only was he a writer who loathed slavery but he could also, unlike most white antislavery writers, be regarded as actively antiracist, especially early in his career, but that antiracism did not lead him to the kind of outspoken abolitionist activism that Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, or Henry David Thoreau engaged in.

Taking Levine and Wilson's cue, in this chapter I delve into the ways in which Whitman and Whitfield could both extend and revise or even contradict the antislavery poetry of their predecessors. Whitman's principled egalitarianism collides with his desire to speak across sectional boundaries in his early verse. (Sadly, by the later portion of Whitman's career, his egalitarianism would become attenuated in relation to questions of race.) Whitfield, at the same time, is both powerfully antiracist and in some ways marginal to the political antislavery movement.

The idea for this book took shape late in 2016, when I found myself revisiting James Russell Lowell's powerful poem “The Present Crisis,” which, although it was written in December 1844 (according to the Cambridge Edition of Lowell's Collected Works), seemed to have acquired a new and compelling resonance (67). The sort of popular verse that had flourished in the nineteenth century seemed to be on an upswing throughout the year as a result of the enthusiastic response to Lin-Manuel Miranda's widely beloved musical Hamilton. The fact that an especially fraught election for the presidency of the United States had just concluded made the young Lowell's commitment to poetry that addresses the public good in a polemical form especially topical. The impetus for writing such poetry became all the more powerful in 2021, when after the defeat of a president who had offered encouragement to those nostalgic for the Confederate insurrection against the government of the United States, that president's supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attack reminiscent, for example, of the attack on Charles Sumner in his Senate chambers in 1856.

Two weeks after the horror of this attack, the inauguration of a new president unexpectedly found as much attention paid to poetry as ever before in US history—this despite the fact that previous inaugurations had featured poets as distinguished as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Alexander. The youthful poet Amanda Gorman read lines that reflected significant engagement with the US past even as it reached out to popular audiences at the present of January 2021. Gorman's poem showed evidence of the sort of cataloguing and parallelism that defined the poetry of Walt Whitman at the same time that it incorporated rhythms, internal rhyme, and alliteration that associates more closely with contemporary hip-hop—or with the experimentation with rhythm and sound that we might associate with Edgar Allan Poe or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century. Both tendencies are visible in the most Whitmanian moment in her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb”:

In 1851, Herman Melville completed and published the novel for which he has been most revered since the Melville Revival of the 1920s: Moby-Dick. By 1877, he had completed and published a work comparable in scope to Moby-Dick that would have been exceedingly difficult for his readers in 1851 to predict: Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, an 18,000-word-long poem. The years 1851–1877 marked a movement from Melville as a frustrated but still popular novelist raging against the publishing constraints of his era to a Melville who wrote extraordinarily ambitious poetry with no apparent interest in acquiring an audience beyond his own circle. The author of the “Great American Novel,” as many readers have described Moby-Dick, had become an obscure American poet, capable of work of great value that, unlike Moby-Dick, 1853’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and the posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor, would not lend itself easily to recovery after the Melville Revival of the early twentieth century.