Notes

1. Note on the text: The text in red, which is obscured in the newspaper printing represented here, is supplied by John Greenleaf Whittier, In War Time and Other Poems  (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 46.

1. "In War-Time" appeared on the same day in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of June 27, 1863. There are a number of differences in the newspapers' printings of the poem, including in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.
2. The Society of Friends' New England Yearly Meeting established a school for the region's young Quakers in the late eighteenth century. Situated in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, the first school remained open for only four years (1784–88). Moses Brown revived the project decades later; the Friends accepted his donation of a farm and land near Providence in 1814, and the New England Yearly Meeting Boarding School opened on New Year's Day, 1819. The school flourished (Rayner Wickersham Kelsey, Centennial History of Moses Brown School, 1819–1919 [Providence, RI: Moses Brown School, 1919]). Its alumni formed an association in 1859 with the aim of raising funds for scholarships and facilities, and renewing "cherished associations" between old members (Proceedings of the Alumni Association of Friends' Yearly Meeting School [Providence: Knowles, 1863], 9).
    
   John Greenleaf Whittier did not attend the school; the association elected him as an honorary member at its second meeting in June 1860 (Report of the Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Alumni Association of the New England Yearly Meeting School [Philadelphia: Collins, 1860], 26). He wrote "The Quaker Alumni" for the same occasion (each alumni association meeting included a lecture and a poem). He contributed "In War-Time" for the same purpose three years later.
   
3. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) dedicated himself to abolitionist activities in the early 1830s. He was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society (est. December 1833) and held the editorship of the Pennsylvania Freeman from March 1838 until February 1840. Convinced that the Constitution and the ballot could be used to attack slavery, he supported the Liberty Party and played an active part in its members' campaigns. Antislavery journalism continued to feature largely in his life; for thirteen years, he worked as corresponding editor for the National Era (1847–1860).
    
   Orthodox Quaker Whittier managed to reconcile his abhorrence of war with his support for conflict that furthered the antislavery cause; during the war he urged members of the Society of Friends to assist the war effort in non-combatant roles, as nurses in hospitals and as teachers among the freedpeople (Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier [London: Sampson Low, 1895], 2:440–41). Poetry had long been integral to his abolitionist mission. His first (unauthorized) collection of poetry, Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, between 1830 and 1838, was published by antislavery colleagues in 1837 (Randall Cluff, "Whittier, John Greenleaf," in American National Biography Online). He continued to champion abolition in verse throughout the war. His poems often appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (which he supported from its inception) and in the New York Independent, and were widely reprinted in serials with antislavery sympathies. "In War-Time" became the title piece in Whittier's collection In War Time and Other Poems (1864), which also includes "Mithridates at Chios." For "Mithridates at Chios," see the National Anti-Slavery Standard of May 16, 1863, and the Anglo-African of May 23, 1863.
   
4. The Quakers had a long-standing connection with the antislavery movement, as a result of their religious principles. Committed abolitionist Whittier believed that his antebellum contemporaries had lapsed in their antislavery mission and had fallen short of the immediate emancipationist examples set by their eighteenth-century predecessors, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet. Lincoln's decision to make emancipation a war aim in 1862 would test the limits of Quaker pacifism by forcing Friends to "choose between liberty for slaves and the preservation of the union" (Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–1865 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007], 121); "In War-Time" addresses this moment of choice as an opportunity for renewed activism.
5. Lincoln's Enrollment Act of 1863 authorized a national draft. Only in February 1864 did Congress make allowance for conscientious objectors (Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff, A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854–1877 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 202).
    
   Pacifism was a fundamental Quaker principle, yet antislavery Friends' support for violent resistance had increased in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 (Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–1865 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007], 125). At the beginning of the war, Whittier had urged members of the Society of Friends to support the war effort as relief workers: "Steadily and faithfully maintaining our testimony against war, we owe it to the cause of truth, to show that exalted heroism and generous self-sacrifice are not incompatible with our pacific principles" (Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier [Boston: Houghton, 1894], 2:441). He reiterated and elaborated on that call in his alumni poem.