Poetry Codex

American

James Monroe Whitfield

1822–1871

James Monroe Whitfield (1822–1871) was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, and made his living as a barber in Buffalo, New York. A free Black man who wrote in the intervals of his work, he became a prominent voice of the antislavery movement, and his verse appeared in Frederick Douglass's newspaper The North Star.

America and Other Poems (Buffalo, 1853), inscribed to Martin R. Delany, is his best-known collection of verse and opens with its famous indictment of the United States as a land of liberty that tolerates slavery. In the mid-1850s Whitfield turned from protest to emigrationism, the belief that Black Americans should seek a future outside the country. He moved to California in 1861 and died in San Francisco in 1871.

Poems (24)

  1. America
  2. Christmas Hymn
  3. Lines on the Death of John Quincy Adams
  4. To Cinque
  5. New Year's Hymn
  6. To A. H.
  7. Love
  8. How Long
  9. The Arch Apostate
  10. The Misanthropist
  11. A Hymn (Vine Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Buffalo)
  12. Yes! strike again that sounding string
  13. To ——
  14. Prayer of the Oppressed
  15. To S. A. T.
  16. Delusive Hope
  17. To M. E. A.
  18. A Hymn (Michigan Street Baptist Church, Buffalo)
  19. Self-Reliance
  20. Ode for the Fourth of July
  21. Midnight Musings
  22. Ode to Music
  23. Stanzas for the First of August
  24. The North Star

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