Author Background

Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865) was born in Norwich, Connecticut and died in Hartford, Connecticut. Under the supervision and through the help of her father’s employers, Sigourney educated herself, established a school for girls, and published her first book, Moral Pieces (1815). It set the  tone for much of her voluminous later work; she published over sixty volumes of poetry and prose and thousands of periodical essays. She always maintained an interest in morality and virtue—a “proper” concern for women at that time.

She supported Republican Motherhood and often placed women’s work within the separate, domestic sphere. Women could work for public good, but in their relegated realm. She herself publicly supported schools for the hearing impaired, protested for Native American rights, and advocated for Abolition.

In 1819, she married Charles Sigourney, a hardware merchant. He discouraged Sigourney from publishing her writing—until they needed money due to financial losses in his business. At first, she published her work anonymously, in deference to her husband. As her reputation grew, though, she published once more under her own name.

In 1840, she traveled to Europe, seeking out literary lions and seeking to be lionized herself. Her travelogue Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1842) augmented her reputation and respect in America.

To the First Slave Ship  (1827)

First of that train which cursed the wave
And from the rifled cabin bore
Inheritor of wo,—the slave
To bless his palm tree’s shade no more
Dire engine!—o’er the troubled main
Borne on in unresisted state,—
Know’st thou within thy dark domain
The secrets of thy prison’d freight?—
Hear’st thou their moans whom hope hath fled?—
Wild cries in agonizing starts?—
Know’st thou thy humid sails are spread
With ceaseless sighs from broken hearts?—
The fetter’d chieftain’s burning tear,—
The parted lover’s mute despair,—
The childless mother’s pang severe,—
The orphan’s misery are there
Ah!—could’st thou from the scroll of fate
The annal read of future years
Stripes,—tortures,—unrelenting hate,
And death-gasps drown’d in slavery’s tears,
Down,—down,—beneath the cleaving main
Thou fain would’st plunge where monsters lie,
Rather than ope the gates of pain
For time and for Eternity.—
Oh Afric!—what has been thy crime?—
That thus like Eden’s fratricide,
A mark is set upon thy clime,
And every brother shuns thy side.—
Yet are thy wrongs thou long distrest!—
Thy burdens, by the world unweigh’d,
Safe in that Unforgetful Breast
Where all the sins of earth are laid.—
Poor outcast slave!—Our guilty land
Should tremble while she drinks thy tears,
Or sees in vengeful silence stand,
The beacon of thy shorten’d years;—
Should shrink to hear her sons proclaim
The sacred truth that heaven is just,—
Shrink even at her Judge’s name,—
“Jehovah,—Saviour of the opprest.”
The Sun upon thy forehead frown’d,
But Man more cruel far than he,
Dark fetters on thy spirit bound:—
Look to the mansions of the free!
Look to that realm where chains unbind,—
Where the pale tyrant drops his rod,
And where the patient sufferers find
A friend,—a father in their God

Indian Names (1834)

“How can the Red men be forgotten, while so many of our states and territories,
bays, lakes and rivers, are indelibly stamped by names of their giving?”
Ye say, they all have passed away,
That noble race and brave,
That their light canoes have vanished
From off the crested wave;
That ‘mid the forests where they roamed
There rings no hunter shout;
But their name is on your waters,
Ye may not wash it out.
‘Tis where Ontario’s billow
Like Ocean’s surge is curl’d.
Where strong Niagara’s thunders wake
The echo of the world.
Where red Missouri bringeth
Rich tribute from the west.
And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps
On green Virginia’s breast.
Ye say, their cone-like cabins,
That clustered o’er the vale,
Have fled away like withered leaves
Before the autumn gale:
But their memory liveth on your hills,
Their baptism on your shore,
Your everlasting rivers speak
Their dialect of yore.
Old Massachusetts wears it
Within her lordly crown.
And broad Ohio bears it
Amid his young renown;
Connecticut hath wreathed it
Where her quiet foliage waves.
And bold Kentucky breathes it hoarse
Through all her ancient caves.
Wachuset hides its lingering voice
Within his rocky heart,
And Alleghany graves its tone
Throughout his lofty chart;
Monadnock on his forehead hoar
Doth seal the sacred trust.
Your mountains build their monument,
Though ye destroy their dust.

Our Aborigines (1838)

I heard the forests as they cried
Unto the valleys green,
“Where is the red-brow’d hunter-race,
Who lov’d our leafy screen?
Who humbled ‘mid these dewy glades
The red deer’s antler’d crown,
Or soaring at his highest noon.
Struck the strong eagle down.
Then in the zephyr’s voice replied
Those vales, so meekly blest,
“They rear’d their dwellings on our side,
Their corn upon our breast;
A blight came down, a blast swept by,
The cone-roof d cabins fell,
And where that exil’d people fled,
It is not ours to tell.”
Niagara, of the mountains gray,
Demanded, from his throne.
And old Ontario’s billowy lake
Prolong’d the thunder tone,
“The chieftains at our side who stood
Upon our christening day,
Who gave the glorious names we bear,
Our sponsors, where are they?”
And then the fair Ohio charg’d
Her many sisters dear,
“Show me once more, those stately forms
Within my mirror clear;”
But they replied, “ tall barks of pride
Do cleave our waters blue,
And strong keels ride our farthest tide,
But where’s their light canoe?
The farmer drove his plough-share deep
“Whose bones are these?” said he,
“I find them where my browsing sheep
Roam o’er the upland lea.”
But starting sudden to his path
A phantom seem’d to glide,
A plume of feathers on his head,
A quiver at his side.
He pointed to the rifled grave
Then rais’d his hand on high,
And with a hollow groan invok’d
The vengeance of the sky.
O’er the broad realm so long his own
Gaz’d with despairing ray.
Then on the mist that slowly curl’d.
Fled mournfully away.

Fallen Forests  (1854)

Man’s warfare on the trees is terrible.
He lifts his rude hut in the wilderness,
And lo! the loftiest trunks that age on age
Were nurtured to nobility, and bore
Their summer coronets so gloriously,
Fall with a thunder-sound, to rise no more
He toucheth flame unto them, and they lie
A blackened wreck, their tracery and wealth
Of sky-fed emerald,madly spent to feed
An arch of brilliance for a single night,
And scaring thence the wild deer and the fox,
And the lithe squirrel from the nut strewn home,
So long enjoyed.
He lifts his puny arm,
And every echo of the axe doth hew
The iron heart of centuries away.
He entereth boldly to the solemn groves
On whose green altar-tops, since time was young,
The winged birds have poured their incense strain
Of praise and love, within whose mighty nave
The wearied cattle from a thousand hills
Have found their shelter ‘mid the heat of day;
Perchance in their mute worship leasing Him
Who careth for the meanest He hath made.
I said he entereth to the sacred groves
Where Nature in her beauty bends to God,
And lo! their temple-arch is desecrate;
Sinks the sweet hymn, the ancient ritual fades,
And uptorn roots, and prostrate columns mark
The invader’s footsteps.
Silent years roll on,
His babes are men His ant heap dwelling grows
Too narrow, for his hand hath gotten wealth.
He builds a stately mansion, but it stands
Unblessed by trees. He smote them recklessly
When their green arms were round him, as a guard
Of tutelary deities, and feels
Their maledictions, now the burning noon
Maketh his spirit faint. With anxious care
He casteth acorns in the earth, and woos
Sunbeam and rain: he planteth the young shoot,
And props it from the storm; but neither he,
Nor yet his children’s children shall behold
What he hath swept away
Methinks ‘twere well,
Not as a spoiler or a thief, to roam
O’er Nature’s bosom that sweet, gentle nurse
Who loveth us, and spreads a sheltering couch
When our brief task is o’er. On that green mound
Affection’s hand may set the willow-tree,
Or train the cypress, and let none profane
Her pious care.
Oh, Father! grant us grace
In all life’s toils so with a stedfast hand
Evil and good to poise, as not to mark
Our way with wrecks, not when the sands of time
Run low, with saddened eye the past survey,
And mourn the rashness time can ne’er restore

Sources

Kurant, Wendy.  Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution.  2019, English Open Textbooks, https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/19, CCA-SA 4.0

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley. “Fallen Forests.” Public Domain.

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley. “Indian Names.”  Public Domain.

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley. “Our Aborigines.”  Public Domain.

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley. “To the First Slave Ship.” Public Domain.