Bedeviling Daniel Webster.(Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(John Greenleaf Whittier's Ichabod)

Robert Penn Warren called it "one of the most telling poems of personal attack in English." Vernon Parrington, Oklahoma Sooners football coach cum literary historian, judged it "the high-water mark of lyric indignation" whose author was "a bundle of Yankee nerves, responding only to moral stimuli."

The poem was "Ichabod," the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, and the subject of his versy scorn, Daniel Webster--"the Godlike Daniel" or "Black Dan" depending on whether you were friend or foe.

Webster's finest or most faithless moment was his March 7 speech in support of the Compromise of 1850, a key element of which was the strengthening of the fugitive slave law. Webster regarded his oration as essential to domestic tranquility; abolitionists despised it as the craven betrayal of an unprincipled man.

Among the outraged was John Greenleaf Whittier. We remember Whittier as the beloved poet of New England autumns and snowbound winters, but he also sung odes to abolition and called down execrations upon the slavocracy.

"Ichabod" communicates disappointment even in its name (which comes from 1 Samuel 4:21: "They named the boy Ichabod, saying, 'Glory has departed from Israel.'"). Whittier said that his poem was "the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the ... Fugitive Slave Law." If Webster had his way, Whittier feared, "the whole country" would be "made the hunting-ground of slave-catchers."

 
   So fallen! so lost! the fight withdrawn 
    Which once he wore! 
   The glory from his gray hairs gone 
    Forevermore!... 
 
   Let not the ...