Ean High, Northwestern University, “Whittier’s Storms”The Civil War was a great trial for American Quakerism. Countless members of the Religious Society of Friends had risked life and home for the causes of abolition,... [ view full abstract ]
Ean High, Northwestern University, “Whittier’s Storms”
The Civil War was a great trial for American Quakerism. Countless members of the Religious Society of Friends had risked life and home for the causes of abolition, but the continuance of peace was at the core of the community’s religious thought and practice. In his collection In War Time (1863) the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a lifelong Quaker, queries the causes and ends of “war” as he attempts to reconcile the Quaker’s Peace Testimony with the belief that a Union victory would bring the end of slavery.
My paper takes the conference theme as an occasion to revisit In War Time for the ways it frames the American Civil War as a prevailing national climate and renders violence intelligible as an atmospheric act of divine intervention into slavery. Throughout the volume Whittier casts the war as a series of preternatural storms, full of thunder and shadow and bloody rain—all the while seeking God’s hand and justice in the storm clouds. Nature provides the collection’s stormy thematic, while also furnishing Whittier with a model of patient endurance and calm that rises-up in the pause between cannon blasts.
My paper explores Whittier’s wartime storms and his search for calm and meaning in them. My time on the panel will situate Whittier’s work within the history of Quaker pacifism, highlighting unpublished letters from Quakers written to the poet during the war. I believe that my paper would contribute to a panel discussion on the Civil War, poetry, religion, or reading publics.
