Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Poems About Slavery

 Today’s blog entry is culled from my Africana scrap album. This is about a series of poems that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about slavery. I came across  an EBay list of an original copy of the poems in an Ebay auction several years ago. It was listed on EBay for $1, 900. Details of the book are as follows:

Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Title of the Book: Poems On Slavery

Publisher: John Owens

Place of Publication: Cambridge

Date: 1842

Longfellow was criticized for writing a series of poems s out Slavery. His response was that he felt it was a shame to deal with selling human beings.

You can read the poems on slavery for free at Project Gutenberg <www.gutenberg.org>

The 1842 poems on slavery includes:

The Good Part: That Shall Not be taken Away

The Quadroon Girl

The  Slave in the Dismal Swamp; The Slave Singing at Midnight; The Warning; The Witnesses; To William E. Channing.

You can also read the poems online at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : a Maine Historic Society Website. It includes a printer-friendly version. <www.MaineHistory.Org> ; www. Longfellow.org

The Main Historic Society website has detailed information about Henry W Longfellow, His works, his family , his homes . It also includes all the poems on slavery.

On Amazon: of course, you can buy a copy on Amazon.com, paperback version. 51 page 

For an interview article on Longfellow please visit “ interminable Rambling .com: Mediated Voices in Longfellow’s Poems On Slavery by Matthew Teutsch, an acknowledge authority on the works of HW Longfellow ( 1807-1882).

I think all African-Americans should read these poems because they touch off the suffering and anguish of our ancestors who were enslaved in the USA in South America and in the West Indies. The last stanza of The Quadroon














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