Death of Sill: can't be worse than Ohio

In his 46 years, Edward Rowland Sill had lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, California, but he died in Cleveland, Ohio on February 27, 1887. Much of his career was spent in education as a teacher, a principal, and college professor, but he also published several books of poetry and prose. In his last few years, he was frequently ill. Nearly two months before his death, he wrote in a letter:

To live is more than to read, and one might know all things and miss of everything. And so, if life is endlessly manifold, we may hope for good and great things, here or hereafter.

Sill was planning to travel with his wife to Colorado Springs for the Spring. Suffering with gastritis, the inability to digest, aches all over his body, and a "fathomless depression of spirits," he wrote to a friend, "Knowest anything about Colorado in spring? I don't; but it can't be worse than Ohio." Instead, he traveled to New York to meet with doctors (and hear the symphony) before a stop in Cleveland for surgery, still hoping Colorado was next. After what was deemed a successful surgery, however, Sill relapsed and died three days later. Critics and friends alike lamented that he had not yet been recognized for his poetic talents.

His poem, "A Morning Thought":

What if some morning, when the stars were paling,
  And the dawn whitened, and the East was clear,
Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence
  Of a benignant Spirit standing near:

And I should tell him, as he stood beside me,
  "This is our Earth — most friendly Earth, and fair;
Daily its sea and shore through sun and shadow
  Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air:

"There is blest living here, loving and serving,
  And quest of truth, and serene friendships dear;
But stay not, Spirit! Earth has one destroyer —
  His name is Death: flee, lest he find thee here!"

And what if then, while the still morning brightened,
  And freshened in the elm the Summer's breath,
Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel
  And take my hand and say, "My name is Death."

Emma Lazarus and "the Hebraic strain"

When Emma Lazarus died at age 38 in 1887, the copyright of her poems was left in the care of her older sister, Josephine. She accordingly published a two-volume complete poems collection a year later. According to her biographical introduction, Josephine believed her sister was deeply private, but celebrate the family's Jewish heritage: "To be born a Jewess was a distinction to Emma Lazarus, and she in turn conferred distinction upon her race."

Emma's other sister Annie did not agree. 40 years after that statement, Annie was approached by a publisher who wanted to highlight Emma's various poems and translations celebrating her Jewish faith. On February 25, 1926, she declined permission, writing:

There has been a tendency on the part of her public to overemphasize the Hebraic strain of her work, giving it this quality of sectarian propaganda, which I greatly deplore, for I understand this to have been merely a phase in my sister's development, called for by righteous indignation at the tragic happenings of those days. Then, unfortunately, owing to her untimely death, this was destined to be her final word.

Annie had lived with Emma in Europe for her final years and, later, converted to Anglo-Catholicism herself. Her statement about her sister remains controversial — whether it truly reflected Emma's beliefs or Annie's.

In fact, Emma Lazarus's faith has become deeply intertwined with her public image since her death. In various biographical encyclopedias, her Jewish faith is nearly always mentioned; one referred to her melancholy as the result of "the unconscious expression of the inherited sorrow of her race" and a Jewish encyclopedia called her the "most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry." After the turn of the century, the New York Tribune called her "the most talented woman the Jewish race has produced in this country." Emma Lazarus and Judaism remain deeply interconnected even today (the image above is from the American Jewish Historical Society). In fact, Lazarus did have a strong "phase" at the end of her life in which she was deeply devoted to her Jewish faith, learned Hebrew, and translated poetry from that language. However, her faith was not exclusive to that period, nor was her religion her only interest.

*The majority of the information in this post was gleaned from a chapter called "The Myth" in Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters (1995) by Bette Roth Young.

Birth of Du Bois: to reap the harvest wonderful

He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, and named William Edward Burghardt DuBois, though he is better known as W. E. B. Du Bois. His father left the family when the boy was two; his mother died when he was 15. He was lucky, however, to grow up in a community quite free of racial discrimination. The members of his predominantly white church donated the money that sent him to Harvard. After his graduation (he was first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard), Du Bois went on to become a professor, editor, and author. He advocated particularly for equal rights for blacks, an effort which resulted in his co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also edited their journal, The Crisis (he is pictured above sitting in the office of that publication). He particularly believed that access to education would be a great equalizer and used his own learning and eloquence to empower fellow African Americans.

Du Bois's most famous work is likely his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The book collects several essays, including a few previously published, which lay out the author's view on race and how to address what he considers the main problem of the century: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." Each chapter includes a poem or quote as an epigraph (including ones from James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier). As he concluded in the book:

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END

The Gates Ajar: the happiest thing in the world

"One week; only one week to-day, this twenty-first of February." Thus begins the 1868 novel The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The book features a woman named Mary who has difficulty coping with the death of her brother, a soldier named Roy, who died a week before the story opens. Friends, in trying to cheer her, told her she should have been ready for anything, including his death: "Everybody knows by what a hair a soldier's life is always hanging." Mary, in response, notes, "I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any easier."

Presented almost as a diary, the book allows Mary to detail her sufferings in a first-person account. Eventually, through conversations with a widowed aunt named Winifred, she begins to discover the truth about heaven — that it is a very real and material place. "A new earth," her aunt says, quoting from the Bible. In fact, she uses various Bible passages and hymns to explain her belief not only to Mary but to others, including a Deacon, to prove that the afterlife is just a better version of life. These "spiritual lives" see sunrises, smell flowers, read books, talk with other spirits, build homes and families. As Winifred explains, her daughter Faith beside her:

A happy home is the happiest thing in the world. I do not see why it should not be in any world. I do not believe that all the little tendernesses of family ties are thrown by and lost with this life... Eternity cannot be—it cannot be the great blank ocean which most of us have somehow or other been brought up to feel that it is, which shall swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified way, all the little brooks of our delight. So I expect to have my beautiful home, and my husband, and Faith, as I had them here; with many differences and great ones, but mine just the same.

Phelps dedicated the book to her father Austin, a minister and educator, "whose life, like a perfume from beyond the Gates, penetrate every life which approaches it." The novel was extremely successful; one newspaper reported it earned the author $20,000 in one month (almost certainly an exaggeration). Whatever the numbers, the book was a huge seller, enthusiastically purchased by a country in grief after the recent horrors of Civil War. Several editions were printed, including an illustrated version with expensive Morocco binding. Phelps even produced a couple sequels.

Theologians were not as supportive of The Gates Ajar as the reading public. One critic in England wrote that the book's "wide circulation... does not speak well for the discrimination of its readers. It is simply a second-rate sensational novel, professedly of a religious character, but betraying so much positive error, and treating serious subjects in such a flippant, unhallowed strain, that no small amount of Christian charity is required to avoid the conclusion, that 'an enemy hath done this!'"

Death of Moulton: my first thought this morning

Publisher and editor William Upham Moulton died on February 19, 1898, leaving behind his wife Louise Chandler Moulton. They had been married just over 42 years. A well-known poet and author, Mrs. Moulton was deeply saddened by the loss of her husband and, two years later, on the anniversary of his death, she wrote in her journal:

Two years ago this day Mr. Moulton passed out of life. It was my first thought this morning, and the sadness of it has been with me all day.

Years earlier, Mrs. Moulton had considered the possibility that she might predecease her much older husband. Her poem "Wife to Husband" imagines such a scenario and grants permission for him to remarry, so long as she is remembered:

If I am dust while thou art quick and glad,
Bethink thee, sometimes, what good cheer we had, —
What happy days beside the shining seas,
Or by the twilight fire in careless ease,
Reading the rhymes of some old poet lover,
Or whispering our own love-story over.

When thou hast mourned for me a fitting space,
And set another in my vacant place,
Charmed with her brightness, trusting in her truth,
Warmed to new life by her beguiling youth,
Be happy, dearest one, and surely know
I would not have thee thy life's joys forego.

Yet think of me sometimes, where cold and still
I lie, who once was swift to do thy will,
Whose lips so often answered to thy kiss,
Who dying blessed thee for that bygone bliss, —
I pray thee do not bar my presence, quite,
From thy new life, so full of new delight.

I would not vex thee, waiting by thy side;
My shadow should not chill thy fair young bride;
Only bethink thee how alone I lie! —
To die and be forgotten were to die
A double death; and I deserve of thee
Some grace of memory, fair howe'er she be.

Despite these sentiments, Mrs. Moulton herself never remarried. Incidentally, though obituaries for Mr. Moulton referred to him as "a man of flawless integrity and the highest sense of honor," Fanny Fern might have disagreed.

Ruggles: upon the power of the PRESS

The final installment of David Ruggles's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of New York and Elsewhere in Behalf of the Press was included in the February 17, 1835 issue of The Emancipator. The essay, which was published in installments spread out over a month and four days, urged fellow free African Americans to support the press — even if they could not read. As he wrote, "Every paper that is circulated by your means goes forth as an Ambassador to settle the all important question of Liberty and Slavery."

Ruggles, who identified himself in his byline as "a man of color," believed that even free blacks were "but a short remove from that of two millions of our race who are pining in their bloody chains." The press was a weapon, he wrote, used to fight in the "midst of a moral revolution." In a different analogy, he calls the press an engine and urges blacks to help roll "the car of freedom" and not become "a clog to its wheels." Lest his readers not understand his point, he writes (capitals are original): "OURS is the cause of freedom — OUR CAUSE is sacred; its success depends upon the power of the PRESS under God." Ruggles used language that was sure to incite passion, emphasized further by typographical tricks like capital letters and well-placed italics. The government, reminds Ruggles, "proclaims all men are free and equal."

'Tis proclaimed throughout the world, the "Land of Liberty!" wherever the star spangled banner waves, or the national pennon floats on high; there proudly soars the eagle of liberty, announcing to every land, that America is the birth place of freedom. Why then shall we be slaves and lie down in supineness, with our arms folded, singing the song of degradation? I answer, because we are not united in sustaining the press.

Ruggles himself was a printer and bookstore owner and, as such, knew the potential influence of the printed word. Born free in Connecticut to free parents, he moved to New York as a teenager and became involved with anti-slavery publications like The Liberator in addition to The Emancipator. Among his many works for the abolitionist cause was an essay calling attention to white women that white men were taking black women as mistresses. He worked with the Underground Railroad where he hid a young fugitive slave known as Frederick Douglass. Ruggles's efforts earned many enemies, including a few that set fire to his business. He particularly attempted to stump those who attempted to retrieve escaped slaves. His work "so exasperated the slave hunters," William Lloyd Garrison recalled years later, that "they spared no pains to get him out of the way by foul means, and many and remarkable were his escapes as they hunted him as though he were an outlaw."

Curry: the better years begin

The Ohio-born Otway Curry was a lawyer, legislator, signer of Ohio's State Constitution, magazine editor and, on occasion, a poet. He earned some renown nationwide and was particularly praised for advocating culture in the West — the state of Ohio in particular. One of his poems written for the campaign of William Henry Harrison, "The Buckeye Cabin Song," is credited by some for the origin of Ohio's nickname as the Buckeye State. Curry's death on February 15, 1855 inspired statewide mourning.

Curry began publishing his poems in Ohio in 1827. His style is somewhat dreamy (and he has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe because of it). He never published a complete book in his lifetime. His poem, "The Sweet Hereafter," was one of several anthologized in Rufus W. Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America:

'Tis sweet to think when struggling
     The goal of life to win,
That just beyond the shores of time
     The better years begin.

When through the nameless ages
     I cast my longing eyes,
Before me, like a boundless sea,
     The Great Hereafter lies.

Along its brimming bosom
     Perpetual summer smiles;
And gathers, like a golden robe,
     Around the emerald isles.

There in the blue long distance,
     By lulling breezes fanned,
I seem to see the flowering groves
     Of old Beulah's land.

And far beyond the islands
     That gem the wave serene,
The image of the cloudless shore
     Of holy Heaven is seen.

Unto the Great Hereafter—
     Aforetime dim and dark—
I freely now and gladly give
     Of life the wandering bark.

And in the far-off haven,
     When shadowy seas are passed,
By angel hands its quivering sails
     Shall all be furled at last!

I do not remember my birth, you see!

Julia Caroline Ripley was born on February 13, 1825, in Charleston, South Carolina. While still a young girl, she moved with her family and eventually settled in Rutland, Vermont. In 1847 she married Seneca M. Dorr, with whom she moved to New York for a decade before returning to Rutland (where she eventually helped establish the public library). She experimented with writing poetry in private but it wasn't until her husband secretly sent one of her poems to a newspaper that she was published. She soon became fairly popular as a writer of both prose and poetry. She published several novels, travel books, and scores of poems, earning the admiration of fellow writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The poems of Julia C. R. Dorr, as she often signed her work, are mostly simple in style and, it is said, she purposely never wrote anything she would not feel comfortable reading to children. Her poem "My Birthday" was playfully addressed to her husband:

My birthday!—" How many years ago?
   Twenty or thirty?" Don't ask me!
"Forty or fifty?"—How can I tell?
   I do not remember my birth, you see!

It is hearsay evidence—nothing more!
   Once on a time, the legends say,
A girl was born—and that girl was I.
   How can I vouch for the truth, I pray?

I know I am here, but when I came
   Let some one wiser than I am tell!
Did this sweet flower you plucked for me
   Know when its bud began to swell?

How old am I? You ought to know
   Without any telling of mine, my dear!
For when I came to this happy earth
   Were you not waiting for me here?

A dark-eyed boy on the northern hills,
   Chasing the hours with flying feet,
Did you not know your wife was born,
   By a subtile prescience, faint yet sweet?

Did never a breath from the south-land come,
   With sunshine laden and rare perfume,
To lift your hair with a soft caress,
   And waken your heart to richer bloom?

Not one? O mystery strange as life!
   To think that we who are now so dear
Were once in our dreams so far apart,
   Nor cared if the other were far or near!

But—how old am I? You must tell.
   Just as old as I seem to you!
Nor shall I a day older be
   While life remaineth and love is true!

Death of Cary: I want to go away

Alice Cary was 51 when she died on February 12, 1871, never able to finish her final poem. Her last words were recorded as, "I want to go away." She was buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery; her pallbearers included showman P. T. Barnum and newspaperman Horace Greeley. Her sister and fellow poet Phoebe Cary died a few months later.

Alice knew her death from tuberculosis was coming soon and many of her later writings (and recorded conversations) refer to her readiness to die and her religious conviction. In a collection of her works published shortly after her death,  her last completed poem, excluding the incomplete one written a few days before her death, was included with the title "Her Last Poem":

Earth with its dark and dreadful ills,
    Recedes and fades away;
Lift up your heads, ye heavenly hills;
    Ye gates of death, give way!

My soul is full of whispered song,—
    My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
    Are full of life and light.

My pulses faint and fainter beat,
    My faith takes wider bounds;
I feel grow firm beneath my feet
    The green, immortal grounds.

The faith to me a courage gives.
    Low as the grave to go, —
I know that my Redeemer lives, —
    That I shall live I know.

The palace walls I almost see
    Where dwells my Lord and King.
O grave, where is thy victory?
    O death, where is thy sting?

A Principle which we call Love of Freedom

In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.

The quote is from a letter dated February 11, 1774, by Phillis Wheatley, recognized as the first poet of African descent published in the New World. At the time she wrote this letter, Phillis was about 20 years old, having been brought to the Massachusetts Colony without her permission when she was a young girl. Enslaved by the Wheatley family, her true name was forgotten and she was instead named for the slave ship which brought her from her native Africa. Her enslavers taught her to read and write and particularly helped develop her religious life.

Phillis was, by then, already a published poet and the novelty of an African poet made her somewhat popular. She was no less enslaved, however, and her letter expresses the tension against the system of slavery as the colonists were beginning to look for a revolution to protect their freedom. She saw the hypocrisy in the situation, and compared her fellow slaves to the Biblical Egyptian slaves, admitting that they shared the same desire for freedom:

God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite, How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a Philosopher to determine.

Some of her poems include subversive cries against slavery, but this letter is explicit. She is "impatient" and "pants" for freedom, and notes how obvious the problem should be. It was published in several newspapers as early as a month later. It would not be another four years before she was granted her freedom.

Chapman on Roosevelt: Life seems belittled

Theodore Roosevelt had been dead for about a month when his fellow Harvard alumnus John Jay Chapman presented a poem in his honor at the Harvard Club dinner in New York on February 9, 1919.

Life seems belittled when a great man dies;
The age is cheapened and time's furnishings
Stare like the trappings of an empty stage.
Ring down the curtain! We must pause, go home
And let the plot of the world reshape itself
To comprehensive form. Roosevelt dead!
The genial giant walks the earth no more,
Grasping the hands of all men, deluging
Their hearts, like Pan, with bright Cyclopean fire
That dizzied them at times, yet made them glad.

Chapman and Roosevelt had become friends as early as during the future President's tenure as a police commissioner in New York. They shared sorrow in the death of their respective first wives and, much later, the death of their sons during World War I. As such, Chapman's tribute to Roosevelt is emotional, personal and recognizes both the man's public life and his private life:

Where dwells he? Everywhere! In cottages,
And by the forge of labor and the desk
Of science. The torn spelling book
Is blotted with the name of Roosevelt,
And like a myth he floats upon the winds
Of India and Ceylon. His brotherhood
Includes the fallen kings. Himself a king,
He left a stamp upon his countrymen
Like Charlemagne.

                         Yes, note the life of kings!
A throne's a day of judgment in itself,
And shows the flaw within the emerald.
For every king must seem more than he is;
Ambition holds her prism before his eye,
Burlesques his virtues, rides upon his car
Clouded with false effulgence, till the man
Loses his nature in a second self,
Which is his role. Yet Theodore survived—
Resumed his natural splendor as he sank
Like Titan in the ocean.

                                       The great war
Was all a fight for Paris—must she fall
And be a heap of desolation ere
Relief could reach her? Sad America
Dreamed in the distance as a charmed thing
Till Roosevelt, like Roland, blew his horn.
Alone he did it! By his personal will.
Alone—till'others echoed—bellowing
From shore to shore across the continent,
Like a sea monster to the sleeping seals
Of Pribylov. Then, slowly wakening,
The flock prepared for war. 'Twas just in time
One blast the less, and our preparedness
Had come an hour too late.

                                           Ay, traveller,
Who wanderest by the bridges of the Seine,
Past palaces and churches, marts and streets,
Whose names are syllables in history,
'Twas Roosevelt saved Paris. There she stands!
Look where you will—the towers of Notre Dame,
The quays, the columns, the Triumphal Arch—
To those who know, they are his monument.

The rainbow comes but with the cloud

As she was on her death bed, Alice Cary allegedly wished she could live only ten more years. "I wouldn't ask for more time [than that]. I would live such a different life," she said, according to her sister Phoebe Cary, "I would never shut myself up in myself again." Her friends became her greatest delight. Shut out from the world in the final stage of tuberculosis, she took solace in hearing what others were doing, particularly their plans for the future. She began to see God in her friends, and anticipated meeting them again in the afterlife.

At the same time, Alice stayed committed to her role as a poet. One local publication expected a contribution from her every month and, diligently, on the first of every month she wrote a new poem. On the first of February that year, however, she was unable to write, nor even dictate a new poem. Finally, after a few days, she asked to be helped into a chair. It was February 7, 1871, and it was to be Alice Cary's last poem. Her hand trembled and she dropped her pen in the attempt. She only finished one stanza:

As the poor panting hart to the water-brook runs,
   As the water-brook runs to the sea,
So earth's fainting daughters and famishing sons,
   O Fountain of Love, run to Thee!

She attempted another poem which ended, "The rainbow comes but with the cloud." But Alice died peacefully in her sleep five days later. She was 51 years old. Her younger sister Phoebe joined her in death only a few months later.

Chapman: Life is ugly and necessary

The book, Practical Agitation, was described by its author as "an attempt to follow the track of personal influence upon society." The author, John Jay Chapman, wrote his preface on February 5, 1900 and believed "we can always do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than we can by making concessions to evil." The New York born author, a scholar of Dante, was a classicist generally who also studied the transcendentalists and had very real beliefs in good versus evil and the nature of sin.

To Chapman, an "agitator" is one who urges positive change through peaceful protest. He writes, for example, that an agitator uses "the machinery of government to make men more unselfish." Nevertheless, Chapman sees the potential danger of being an agitator: "Reform may have a thousand meanings, and be used to cover a thousand projects of doubtful utility." His own interests in reform range from the role of politics and the character of politicians to the educational system. His idealism, however, was tainted by his concern that the country was "full of maimed human beings, of cynics and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the diabolical intelligence of pure business." His focus in this book was mostly politics and the government, but Chapman believed that we had to look to literature for reform, which was only possible if we removed our cynicism:

In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both true and untrue, — true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. "The farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry. The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to enjoy both." The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.

Some saw Chapman's criticism as a "Civil Disobedience" for a new generation. William James wrote that Practical Agitation was "a gospel for our rising generation. — I hope it will have its effect."

Birth of Greeley: We are all born poets

Though born in New Hampshire on February 3, 1811, Horace Greeley made his biggest impact in New York. Founder of the New York Tribune, mentor and booster to people like Charles A. Dana, Margaret Fuller and Rufus W. Griswold, Greeley flourished at a time when journalists were powerhouses, and took his influence to a national scale when he ran for President of the United States just before his death.

He started his life on a poor farm in Amherst, New Hampshire but his father's bankruptcy forced the family to move to Vermont. Young Greeley knew early on that he wanted to get into the printing business and began looking for an apprenticeship at age 11. After stints with a couple newspapers, he finally made his way — partially by foot — to New York in August 1831. As he began earning some success as a printer and burgeoning newspaper man, he also began actively involving himself with Whig politics even while looking into more radical ideas, including Fourierism. In 1841, he produced the first issue of the New York Tribune (a venture he held for the rest of his life). After his death, he was honored in New York City and Chappaqua, New York.

Greeley recognized his humble beginnings even as he became famous and influential. His autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life, published in 1872, was dedicated to those who had the same potential:

To our American boys, who, born in poverty, cradled in obscurity, and early called from school to rugged labor, are seeking to convert obstacle into opportunity, and wrest achievement from difficulty

A deep thinker and political activist (as well as a frequent target for critics and caricaturists), with a great appreciation for literature and poetry, Greeley was often erudite. "We are all born poets," he once wrote. From the "Miscellanies" section of his autobiography:

The world is a seminary; Man is our class-book; and the chief business of life is Education. We are here to learn and to teach, — some of us for both of these purposes, — all at least for the former. Happy he, and greatly blest, who comes divinely qualified for a Teacher, —fitted by nature and training to wrestle with giant Ignorance and primal Chaos, to dispel unfounded Prejudice, and banish enshrouding Night. To govern men, in the rude, palpable sense, is a small achievement; a grovelling, purblind soul, well provided with horsemen and artillery, and thickly hedged with bayonets and spears, may do this

Forten: We are thy sisters

As part African American, Sarah Louisa Forten advocated for the abolition of slavery through several poems which she contributed to The Liberator. She used the simple pseudonym "Ada" when she published her "An Appeal to Women" in the February 1, 1834 issue of that newspaper. The poem plays off the 19th-century notion that women were particularly important as a moral compass for society and that all women were sisters, regardless of race:

Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour
Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power
Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,
That well befits a lovely woman's heart!
Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;
Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour
Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power
Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,
That well befits a lovely woman's heart!
Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;
Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, – God has truly said,
That of one blood, the nations he has made.
Oh, Christian woman, in a Christian land,
Canst thou unblushing read this great command?
Suffer the wrongs which wring our inmost heart
To draw one throb of pity on thy part;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

Oh, woman! – though upon thy fairer brow
The hues of roses and of lilies grow—
These soon must wither in their kindred earth,
From whence the fair and dark have equal birth.
Let a bright halo o'er thy virtues shed
A lustre, that shall live when thou art dead;
Let coming ages learn to bless thy name
Upon the altar of immortal fame.