CHAPTER VI

HAVERHILL ACADEMY

It was a happy day for Whittier when his sister sent that stolen poem to the paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, for Garrison immediately took a fancy to the author. After printing the second poem sent, he learned from what part of Haverhill the poems came, and drove out fourteen miles to see the young author.

He was a neatly dressed, handsome, and affable young gentleman, and came with a lady friend. As it was a hot summer day, Whittier was at work in the fields, wearing doubtless little beside an old straw hat, a shirt, and a pair of overalls. His bashfulness made him wish to avoid seeing the fine city visitor; but his sister persuaded him. He slipped in at the back door and changed his clothes, and a long and interesting visit with Garrison followed. They became fast friends, and in later years were workers together in the cause of the slave.

Friend Whittier, the old gentleman, came into the room while the two were having their first talk, and Garrison told him he ought to send his son away to school. The old gentleman was not at all pleased by the turn affairs were taking, and told young Garrison that he ought not to put such notions into the boy’s head. As we have already said, Friend Whittier, being a matter-of-fact Quaker, did not approve of poetry anyway.

So this time passed by, and Greenleaf was kept at work on the farm. Garrison gave up his paper in Newburyport and went to Boston, and the young poet sent his verses to the _Haverhill Gazette_. A Mr. Thayer was the editor of this paper, and he conceived the same opinion of the lad that Garrison had. He also went to the old gentleman and urged him to give his son a classical education. An academy was to be opened in Haverhill that fall, and young Whittier could attend it and spend part of each week at home. Two years before, Greenleaf had seriously injured himself by undertaking some very hard work on the farm; indeed from this strain he suffered all his life. On account of this, his father considered the matter more favorably.

Mr. Thayer, the editor, promised to board the young man in his family; but it was a serious question as to where the small amount of money needed was to come from. There was a mortgage of $600 on the farm, and nearly all the ready money that could be obtained went to pay taxes and interest on the debt. The young man received permission to attend the academy; but he must pay his own way.

It was not an easy thing to pick up spare change in those days, as the elder Whittier well knew; but Greenleaf looked cheerfully about. An opportunity soon appeared. A hired man on his father’s farm occupied his winters in making a kind of cheap slippers, which he sold for twenty-five cents a pair. He promised to teach the young poet the art of making them. It was not hard to learn. During the winter of 1826-27 he made enough to keep him at the academy six months. He calculated so closely that he thought he would have twenty-five cents more than enough to pay his expenses of board, books, and clothes. At the end of the term, sure enough, he had that twenty-five cents left.

James F. Otis, a noted lawyer, read some of Whittier’s poems, and, like Garrison, determined to go and find him. He was told that he was a shoemaker in Haverhill. He says that he found him at work in his shoe shop, and making himself known to him, they spent the day together in wandering over the hills, and on the shores of the Merrimac River, talking about matters literary. Like Garrison, Otis later became an intimate friend of Whittier.

When the Haverhill academy was opened, Whittier was not only to become a pupil; but he contributed the ode that was sung. This gave him a sort of social send-off in the town, and henceforth he was something of a personage in Haverhill. In the year 1827 he contributed forty-seven poems to the _Haverhill Gazette_ alone, and forty-nine in 1828.

So the young poet that William Lloyd Garrison discovered and went fourteen miles to see was beginning to become famous.