Lowell was a great admirer of Keats, and
in early life, like Whittier, was an imitator of Burns.
LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS
As might be inferred from the literature of this period--from Whittier's
early poems, Mrs. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Lowell's _The Biglow
Papers_, and from emphatic statements in Emerson and Thoreau--the question
of slavery was the most vital one of the time. From 1849, when California,
recently settled by gold seekers, applied for admission as a state, with a
constitution forbidding slavery, until the end of the Civil War in 1865,
slavery was the irrepressible issue of the republic. The Fugitive Slave
Law, which was passed in 1850 to secure the return of slaves from any part
of the United States, was very unpopular at the North and did much to
hasten the war, as did also the decision of the United States Supreme Court
in the Dred Scott case (1857), affirming that slaves were property, not
persons, and could be moved the same as cattle from one state to another.
Various compromise measures between the North and the South were vainly
tried. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, South Carolina
led the South in seceding from the Union.
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