"I met some time ago during the American war an eminent citizen of the State of Massachusetts, who told me that he thought that there was no man in the United States whose writings at the time and for some years before the war had had so great influence upon public opinion in that country as the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier. And no doubt that arose partly from this—that he wrote strongly on the subject of freedom, and strongly against the system of slavery which was about to involve that great country in a great civil war ... Whittier himself when he attacks the question of negro slavery and the horror and the curse of it, writes in a manner which must have roused the indignation and excited the animosity of the people for whom he wrote against that enormous evil."