John Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892) was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

His sister Mary Whittier sent his first poem, "The Deity", to the Newburyport Free Press without his permission, and its editor, William Lloyd Garrison, published it on June 8, 1826.

To raise money to attend the school, Whittier became a shoemaker for a time, and a deal was made to pay part of his tuition with food from the family farm.

[7] Whittier valued the opinion of the older and more established writer, pledging that if Neal did not like his writing, "I will quit poetry, and everything also of a literary nature, for I am sick at heart of the business.

"[9] Reading Neal's 1828 novel Rachel Dyer inspired Whittier to weave New England witchcraft lore into his own stories and poems.

During the 1830s, Whittier became interested in politics, but after losing a congressional election at age 25, he suffered a nervous breakdown and returned home.

The year 1833 was a turning point for Whittier; he resurrected his correspondence with Garrison, and the passionate abolitionist began to encourage the young Quaker to join his cause.

In 1833, Whittier published the antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency,[12] and from there dedicated the next twenty years of his life to the abolitionist cause.

The controversial pamphlet destroyed all of his political hopes, as his demand for immediate emancipation alienated both Northern businessmen and Southern slaveholders, but it also sealed his commitment to a cause that he deemed morally correct and socially necessary.

Whittier's political skill made him useful as a lobbyist, and his willingness to badger anti-slavery congressional leaders into joining the abolitionist cause was invaluable.

In May 1838, the publication moved its offices to the newly opened Pennsylvania Hall on North Sixth Street, which was shortly after burned by a pro-slavery mob.

[21] Around then, the stresses of editorial duties, worsening health, and dangerous mob violence caused Whittier to have a physical breakdown.

Even so, he continued to believe that the best way to gain abolitionist support was to broaden the Liberty Party's political appeal, and Whittier persisted in advocating the addition of other issues to its platform.

Being confined to his home and away from the action offered Whittier a chance to write better abolitionist poetry, and he was even poet laureate for his party.

Whittier produced two collections of antislavery poetry: Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between 1830 and 1838 and Voices of Freedom (1846).

[23] The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended both slavery and his public cause, and so Whittier turned to other forms of poetry for the remainder of his life.

[24] In 1867, Whittier asked James T. Fields to get him a ticket to a reading by Charles Dickens during the British author's visit to the United States.

[27] Whittier spent the summer of 1892 at the home of a cousin in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, where he wrote his last poem (a tribute to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.) and where he was captured in a final photograph.

Highly regarded in his lifetime and for a period thereafter, he is now largely remembered for his anti-slavery writings and his poems Barbara Frietchie, "The Barefoot Boy", "Maud Muller" and Snow-Bound.

The latter part of the poem was set in 1924 by Dr. George Gilbert Stocks to the tune of Repton by English composer Hubert Parry from the 1888 oratorio Judith.

His sometimes contrasting sense of the need for strong action against injustice can be seen in his poem "To Rönge" in honor of Johannes Ronge, the German religious figure and rebel leader of the 1848 rebellion in Germany: Thy work is to hew down.

"[33] Editor George Ripley, however, found Whittier's poetry refreshing and said it had a "stately movement of versification, grandeur of imagery, a vein of tender and solemn pathos, cheerful trust" and a "pure and ennobling character".

[34] Boston critic Edwin Percy Whipple noted Whittier's moral and ethical tone mingled with sincere emotion.

Whittier was one of thirteen writers in the 1897 card game Authors, which referenced his writings "Laus Deo", "Among the Hills", Snow-bound, and "The Eternal Goodness".

[42] In 2020, a statue previously erected in his honor in Whittier, California, was defaced with antislavery and Black Lives Matter slogans by vandals.