To the First Slave Ship; Slavery: Written for the Celebration of the Fourth of July
By the time of her death, Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865) was the best-known woman poet in the United States, having published some fifty books of prose and poetry, and contributed hundreds of other pieces to various periodicals. Based in Hartford, Connecticut, and married to a man who first resented, and then depended on, her income from writing, she wrote for a popular audience and supported many reform causes, including rights for women and the abolition of slavery. “To the First Slave Ship” appeared in her first collected volume of Poems, published in Boston by S. G. Goodrich. Her ironic Fourth of July poem “Slavery” was published in her collected Poems in Philadelphia (1834) and reprinted the same year in a London collection entitled Lays from the West. The poem remained popular and was set to music by George W. Clark, who included it in his abolitionist anthology The Liberty Minstrel in 1844.
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To the First Slave Ship
First of that train which cursed the wave,
And from the rifled cabin bore,
Inheritor of wo,—the slave
To bless his palm-tree’s shade no more,
Dire engine!—o’er the troubled main
Borne on in unresisted state,—
Know’st thou within thy dark domain
The secrets of thy prison’d freight?—
Hear’st thou their moans whom hope hath fled?—
Wild cries, in agonizing starts?—
Know’st thou thy humid sails are spread
With ceaseless sighs from broken hearts?—
The fetter’d chieftain’s burning tear,—
The parted lover’s mute despair,—
The childless mother’s pang severe,—
The orphan’s misery, are there.
Ah!—could’st thou from the scroll of fate
The annal read of future years,
Stripes,—tortures,—unrelenting hate,
And death-gasps drown’d in slavery’s tears,
Down,—down,—beneath the cleaving main
Thou fain would’st plunge where monsters lie,
Rather than ope the gates of pain
For time and for Eternity.—
Oh Afric!—what has been thy crime?—
That thus like Eden’s fratricide,
A mark is set upon thy clime,
And every brother shuns thy side.—
Yet are thy wrongs, thou long-distrest!—
Thy burdens, by the world unweigh’d,
Safe in that Unforgetful Breast
Where all the sins of earth are laid.—
Poor outcast slave!—Our guilty land
Should tremble while she drinks thy tears,
Or sees in vengeful silence stand,
The beacon of thy shorten’d years;—
Should shrink to hear her sons proclaim
The sacred truth that heaven is just,—
Shrink even at her Judge’s name,—
“Jehovah,—Saviour of the opprest.”
The Sun upon thy forehead frown’d,
But Man more cruel far than he,
Dark fetters on thy spirit bound:—
Look to the mansions of the free!
Look to that realm where chains unbind,—
Where the pale tyrant drops his rod,
And where the patient sufferers find
A friend,—a father in their God.
(1827)
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Slavery
“Slavery is a dark shade on the Map of the United States.”
La Fayette.
WRITTEN FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH OF JULY
We have a goodly clime,
Broad vales and streams we boast,
Our mountain frontiers frown sublime,
Old Ocean guards our coast;
Suns bless our harvest fair,
With fervid smile serene,
But a dark shade is gathering there—
What can its blackness mean?
We have a birth-right proud,
For our young sons to claim,
An eagle soaring o’er the cloud,
In freedom and in fame;
We have a scutcheon bright,
By our dead fathers bought,
A fearful blot distains its white—
Who hath such evil wrought?
Our banner o’er the sea
Looks forth with starry eye,
Emblazoned glorious, bold and free,
A letter on the sky,
What hand with shameful stain
Hath marred its heavenly blue?
The yoke, the fasces, and the chain,
Say, are these emblems true?
This day doth music rare
Swell through our nation’s bound,
But Afric’s wailing mingles there,
And Heaven doth hear the sound:
O God of power!—we turn
In penitence to thee,
Bid our loved land the lesson learn—
To bid the slave be free.
(1834)