John Greenleaf Whittier

Other names/titles:
Gender: M
Ethnic origin: White

Biographical details

A US abolitionist, who opposed the 1846 Mexican war. He edited the weekly abolitionist journal, National Era. He wrote “The Angels of Buena Vista” a poem about the Mexican women who nursed the wounded soldiers. One woman, surrounded by the “maimed and suffering” of both armies, was seen ministering to their wants “with impartial tenderness”. He describes a Mexican “angel”, Ximena, who looks across the smoky battlefield and
“can see the wounded crawling slowly out from heaps of slain.
Now they stagger, blind and bleeding; now they fall, and strive to rise;
Hasten, sisters, haste and save them, lest they die before our eyes!”

Ximena gives “a bitter curse upon them … who led these forth, from some gentle, sad-eyed mother, weeping, lonely in the North!” (Johannsen, 211, 216)

Life Events

Other

1846

He opposed the US/ Mexico war.

References

Johannsen, Robert W., (1985), To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination

Publications

There is no writing by this subject in the database.

Links

Resource id #21 (2)

Resource id #25 (5)

Resource id #29 (127)

Gendering Latin American Independence

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