Mogg Megone.
Inscribed by Thankful Southwick to her Sister
[Southwick, Thankful]. Whittier, John Greenleaf. Mogg Megone. A poem. Boston: Light & Stearrns, 1836.
16mo.; lightly foxed; light war to extremities; patterned green cloth, stamped in gilt. In a specially cloth slipcase.
First edition: BAL 21697. A stellar association copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Mary K. Southwick from Sister Thankful. Whittier travelled in the same high-profile New England social circle as the Southwick family and like the Southwicks, was an advocate of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. In her memoir, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “The home of the Southwicks was always a harbor of rest for the weary, where the anti-slavery hosts were wont to congregate, and where one was always sure to meet someone worth knowing. Here too, for the first time I met Theodore Parker, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, Hawthorne…[and] Frederick Douglas” (Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897, New York: European Publishing Company, 1898).
Mogg Megone was first published in two parts in the March and April 1835 issues of The New-England Magazine. The epic poem tells the story of the legendary Indian warrior Mogg Hegon, though Whittier’s retelling strays considerably from the actual facts of Hegon’s life. Whittier did not feel the poem was one of his better works—in a letter to Century Magazine published in May of 1882, he wrote, “[Mogg Megone] was written in my boyish days when I knew little of colonial history or anything else” (Century Magazine, vol. XXIV, no. 1).
Though not much has been written about the life of Thankful Southwick, a lengthy footnote in The History of Woman Suffrage describes her involvement with the abolitionist cause:
All survivors of the old Abolition band will remember Thankful Southwick as one of the earliest, the noblest, and the most faithful of that small army of moral combatants who fought so bravely and so perseveringly for the deliverance of the down-trodden…wherever working or thinking was to be done for our righteous cause, there was Thankful Southwick ever ready with wise counsel and energetic action. (p. 341)
Stanton also describes an incident known as the “Baltimore Slave Case,” wherein Southwick helped two slave girls from Baltimore who were captured in Boston run away again. Southwick and her husband Joseph assisted runaway slaves, often hiding them in their Boston residence.
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