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An excellent little piece at National Review Online:
A quote:
Whittier was not just a poet but also an abolitionist. He had been present at the first Anti-Slavery Convention in 1833 and thereafter wrote and spoke in defense of the cause. In 1842, he broke with the radicalism of the fiery abolition leader William Lloyd Garrison. His convictions about slavery did not change, though, and he continued to write poetry in support of abolition. At the outbreak of the war, he composed a poem patterned on Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." When sung in the Union camps in the early part of the war by the famous Hutchinson Family Singers (sort of a 19th-century Trapp Family), it aroused vociferous protests from the soldiers.
The poem portrays the Civil War the way it would later be seen by history, but not the way it was perceived by "Billy Yank" in 1861.
A quote:
Whittier was not just a poet but also an abolitionist. He had been present at the first Anti-Slavery Convention in 1833 and thereafter wrote and spoke in defense of the cause. In 1842, he broke with the radicalism of the fiery abolition leader William Lloyd Garrison. His convictions about slavery did not change, though, and he continued to write poetry in support of abolition. At the outbreak of the war, he composed a poem patterned on Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." When sung in the Union camps in the early part of the war by the famous Hutchinson Family Singers (sort of a 19th-century Trapp Family), it aroused vociferous protests from the soldiers.
The poem portrays the Civil War the way it would later be seen by history, but not the way it was perceived by "Billy Yank" in 1861.
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