On this day in 1892, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier died at the age of 85. He had come a long way from his Quaker boyhood on a struggling farm in Haverhill. He began writing poetry as a teenager but sacrificed his literary career to the greater cause of abolition. For nearly 30 years, controversy over his passionate opposition to slavery made it difficult for him to publish his poems or earn a living. Only after the Civil War did he become a popular poet. During the last decades of his life, he was such a beloved figure that Massachusetts made his birthday a school holiday. The man who had been reviled for his abolitionist politics was now considered a national treasure.