I
WHEN WHITMAN AT SIXTY-TWO came back for the last time to his birthplace, West Hills, near Huntington, Suffolk County, Long Island, he was reminded again of the rootedness in place his family had once known. His forebears on his father’s side were English farmers who came over in the mid-seventeenth century, some in the ship True Love, and lived in Connecticut before settling in Huntington township. Through grants and purchases they acquired about five hundred acres of fields and timber, a ducal property by Old World standards. The Van Velsors, on his mother’s side, were Dutch, with a recent admixture of Welsh blood and Quaker persuasion, and had settled early at Cold Spring in Nassau County, on the border between the opposed Dutch and English colonists. The Van Velsors farmed and bred mettlesome horses; like the Whitmans and other landowners on Long Island, they owned slaves. (Walt was eight years old when New York State abolished slavery.) Both families risked all when they took up the cause of American independence, and they passed on undiminished to their descendants the sacred purpose of 1776. The Revolution was very nearly lost that August, at the Battle of Long Island, when Sir William Howe drove the Americans from Brooklyn Heights. Walt believed a granduncle of his died in that engagement. “I remember when a boy hearing grandmother Whitman tell about the times of the revolutionary war,” he wrote. “The British had full swing over Long Island, and foraged everywhere, and committed the most horrible excesses—enough to make one’s blood boil even to hear of it now.” The farmers endured seven harsh years of enemy occupation; eleven thousand patriots died in the black hulks of British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay, by Whitman’s time the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“Two or three-score graves quite plain; as many more rubbed out,” the poet noted when he visited the Van Velsor burial ground in 1881. Aside from the belilaced cellar hole and some heaps of rubble “green with grass and weeds,” there was hardly a trace of his grandfather’s rambling gray house, his stables, pens and barn. “All had been pull’d down, erased, and the plough and harrow pass’d over foundations, road-spaces and everything.” On a slope above an apple orchard at West Hills, a few miles from Cold Spring, was the burial ground of his father’s family. “The Whitmans must have been a race of note,” Walt said on an earlier visit. “There are I should say as many as fifty graves there (on the Hill). . . . Besides this, many others of them must have been buried at Huntington village, for I remember seeing numerous old gravestones that were brought from their graves, at the time of the Revolutionary war—for the British encamped on Huntington hill, and took away grave stones for ovens and hearths, &c. The stones I saw were brought away, lest they might be despoiled, and somehow, when the war passed over, they were never returned.” The burial ground became a rank disorder of headstones broken, toppled, effaced, and overgrown—only two stones were intact and still legible. The neglected plot, the house nearby where he was born and the Whitman farms had long since passed into other hands; the old rootedness had given way to a steadily accelerating rhythm of subdivision, foreclosure and dispossession. By the time he was twelve years old, an apprentice printer in Brooklyn, Walt had lived in about a dozen different houses, each one more cramped than the last. Change and loss went hand in hand and had genetic counterparts. Of the eight Whitman children who survived infancy one was a mental defective and three were psychic disasters; three were normal, and one became the chief American celebrant of what William James called “the religion of healthymindedness.”
“A stalwart, massive, heavy, long-lived race,” Whitman said of his father’s side. “They appear to have been always of democratic and heretical tendencies.” Walter Whitman Sr. was born on July 14, 1789, the day the Parisians stormed the Bastille, and he believed in resisting much, obeying little. He named three of his six sons after heroes of the Republic, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, and he trained them as radical Democrats, on the side of the farmer, the laborer, the small tradesman, and “the people”—the banks and “the interests” were the enemy. He read books and journals of a dissenting cast and numbered among his heroes and acquaintances the patriot, pamphleteer, and antisuperstitionist Thomas Paine. When the elder Whitman met him in New York, Paine was a dying man, a pariah, and, some said, a drunkard. “From whence,” Paine had once asked with fine Voltairean edge, “could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple!” Paine looked to the inner light for guidance and was proud of his Quaker antecedents, but, as Walt said, in those times there was “no philosophical middle ground” for freethinking. And so Paine was “double-damnably lied about,” mocked even by schoolchildren:
Poor Tom Paine! there he lies;
Nobody laughs and nobody cries;
Where he has gone or how he fares,
Nobody knows and nobody cares!
The Whitmans revered Frances Wright, Scottish-born freethinker, feminist, and reformer, an intimate of the Marquis de Lafayette. With Thomas Jefferson as her authority, she announced that “Washington was not a Christian.” “The first and last thing I would say to man,” she wrote in her utopian tract, A Few Days in Athens, “is, think for yourself.” The elder Whitman owned a copy and subscribed to her paper, the Free Enquirer; Walt read these, heard Frances Wright lecture, and remembered her in feature, soul and thought as “more than beautiful: she was grand. . . . She possessed herself of my body and soul.” Walt’s father also owned a copy of The Ruins, a celebrated attack on Christianity and supernaturalism by the French savant Count Constantin de Volney. Like others who grew up on such literature, Abraham Lincoln among them, Walt believed that a long, dark tyranny over man’s mind and body was at last coming to an end; the Children of Adam would be able to walk in their parents’ garden. Leaves of Grass borrowed the insurgent and questioning spirit of these mentors along with literal quotations from their writings. Democratic and heretical from the cradle up, “quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall,” Whitman determined that he would some day “bear my testimony to that whole group of slandered men and women. . . . I may perhaps be the only one living today,” he said in 1888, “who can throw an authentic sidelight upon the radicalism of those post-Revolutionary decades.”
The English reformer William Cobbett, who spent a year of exile farming on Long Island shortly before Whitman was born, also determined to do justice to at least one of these “slandered men and women.” He had Paine’s bones dug up from an infidel’s grave in New Rochelle and took them to England, but the monument he planned to raise there in Paine’s memory was never built; Paine’s bones and his coffin passed into the hands of a furniture dealer and then vanished. During his stay on Long Island, Cobbett had noted the intellectual vitality of farmers and artisans like Walter Whitman, their ability to converse on almost any subject—every one of them, he said, “is more or less of a reader.” But he also noted less attractive traits: carelessness with their land, which they allowed to become overgrazed and cropped-out, and, conspicuously, their practice of taking hard liquor on any pretext and at any hour between sunup of one day and the next—“Even little boys at, or under twelve years of age, go into stores, and tip off their drams!” “It is very hard for the present generation . . . to understand the drinkingness of those years,” Whitman was to say. “I am familiar with it: saw, understood, it all as a boy.” His mother understood it, too. “When they get into that state then nothing can be done for the moment but give them the drink,” she said when she and Walt were accosted by a derelict, “it is but mercy to give it to them.” Whitman once told Burroughs his father had been “addicted to alcohol,” and he cited a line from Leaves of Grass—“I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother”—to suggest that was the reason for Eddy’s being “a poor stunted boy almost from the first. He had the convulsions . . . practically has never had any mental life at all.”
By early middle age Walter Whitman Senior’s slow, taciturn, and brooding nature had become dominant; he had spells of moody silence and depression. He was not cut out for success, and he developed an ironic and resigned expectation of failure. “Keep good heart,” he sometimes said, “the worst is to come.” As a young man he had learned carpentry from his cousin Jacob Whitman, completed his apprenticeship in New York, and worked there several years for wages before coming back to West Hills as a builder of houses and barns on contract. He leased some land from a farmer, Gilbert Valentine, and put up on it his own two-story cedar-shingled house. “He was a first rate carpenter,” Walt said, “did solid, substantial, conscientious work,” and this was evident in the stone masonry foundations he laid, the wide-planked floors, ample fireplaces, and hand-hewn timbers mortised and pegged in place; his house was
. . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams.
In June 1816, when he was twenty-seven, he married Louisa Van Velsor, vigorous, big-boned and florid, and brought her from her parents’ farm at Cold Spring to the new house.
Their first child, Jesse, named for his paternal grandfather, was born in March 1818. Their second, Walter—named for his father but always called “Walt” in the family—was born fourteen months later, on May 31, 1819. He was an exact contemporary of Herman Melville, born about thirty miles away on Pearl Street in New York; of James Russell Lowell, born at “Elmwood” in Cambridge; of the royal princess, Victoria, born an ocean away at Kensington Palace. Napoleon was dying of cancer on St. Helena. In the White House, recently rebuilt after the British burned it in the War of 181 2, was James Monroe, a Virginian of the old school—he still wore knee breeches. “If we look to the history of other nations, ancient or modern,” Monroe had said in his first inaugural address, “we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy.” But the financial panic of 1819, a massive contraction of credit and faith, brought in an era of ominous division over the issue of slavery. “Like a fire-bell in the night,” Jefferson said in 1820, the Missouri Compromise “awakened and filled me with terror”; he heard “the knell of the Union.” “In the four quarters of the globe,” mocked the Englishman Sydney Smith, “who reads an American book? . . . Under which of the tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell, and torture?” “Every one for himself,” Emerson wrote of this time of moral and relational chaos, “driven to find all his resources, hopes, rewards, society and deity within himself.” In place of “the social existence which all shared” there “was now separation.” “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors,” Tocqueville warned, “but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
“There was a child went forth every day,” Whitman wrote,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,
And that object became part of him . . .
Passive, dependent, merging object with subject, the external world with the unboundaried ego, the infant learned the reality of his mother through his skin, by touching and being touched, and thereafter, even in mature sexuality, never having altogether gone beyond that first traffic, he could say,
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
He was to concern himself with “the most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man”: “the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c.” and the “Not Me, the whole of the material objective universe.”
Crying, the child learned the sound of his voice and its power over others. Growing, he distinguished objects, sensations, rhythms. The sun rose in the morning, his father set out for work, pigs and chickens rooted in the apple orchard across the road from his mother’s kitchen garden. In the evening herds of mongrel cattle and rat-tailed sheep were driven homeward from their grazing on the Hempstead plains—years later he was still able to hear in memory the clanking of their tin and copper bells and smell “the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air.” He remembered too the choking smell of lampblack and oil on the canvas covering of the stage and market wagon his grandfather Van Velsor drove each week from Cold Spring to Brooklyn ferry. Words, when he acquired language, became life itself, links to the external world and to his unconscious. “I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment,” he was to say. “A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do any thing that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” Words were instruments of command and of relationship to a world waiting to be named for the first time. “Not only common speech,” he was to read in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “but Science, Poetry itself is no other . . . than a right Naming.” But words had a separate existence too, as “eluding, fluid, beautiful, fleshless, realities, Mother, Father, Water, Earth, Me, This, Soul, Tongue, House, Fire, . . . What a history is folded, folded inward and inward again in the single word I.”
In the quiet after storms he heard the roar of the Atlantic surf. Half a mile from the house, from the top of Jayne’s Hill, the highest point on the island, he could look out over Great South Bay, Jones’ Beach, and the ocean beyond—to the north he saw Long Island Sound and the Connecticut shore. A sturdy boy with black hair, he soon learned to swim, dig for clams, gather sea gulls’ eggs, fish through the ice on the bay. He heard tales of danger and adventure at sea—whaling ships that set out for the Horn from Sag Harbor and never returned, wrecks off the Hamptons, Fire Island and Hempstead beach;
I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and fainter.
All his life he had a recurrent dream: “A stretch of white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. . . . Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly.” The seashore was “an invisible influence” on all his poetry, he said, “a pervading gauge and tally for me.” From the time the symbolizing imagination developed in him he believed that he lived always at the water’s edge, with the land his father and his mother the unplumbed sea of self; one could drown there as easily as in water.
“He was a very good, but very strange boy,” Louisa Whitman said. He said, “The time of my boyhood was a very restless and unhappy one; I did not know what to do.” He was closest to her and to his sisters Hannah and Mary, both born right after him, but he stood apart from his father and most of his brothers. “We are not alike,” he said much later. “That’s the part and the whole of it.” He scarcely ever mentioned Jesse, unstable, violent, jealous, the only sibling who had a prior claim on their parents—it was a relief when Jesse went off to sea and Walt had no rival as his mother’s indisputable favorite. “Being a blood brother to a man don’t make him a real brother in the final sense of that term,” he said, and this applied to George and Andrew as well as to Jesse. Eddy was more like a son to him. So was Jeff, his one “real brother,” born in 1833 when Walt was fourteen. “He was a very handsome, healthy, affectionate, smart child, and would sit on my lap or hang on my neck for half an hour at a time. . . . O, how we loved each other—how many jovial times we had!”
The child (in Whitman’s poem) who went forth every day had a father who was “strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust,” given to “the blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure.” For the most part this was probably a generalized sex-typed representation rather than a literal character of Walter Whitman Senior. He tended to be the victim rather than the instigator of tight bargains and crafty lures, was fond of children and animals, quiet, and slow to react. But when aroused he was capable of “memorable vehemence,” and he had stormy scenes with Walt, who resented “undue parentalism” and appeared to be hopelessly indolent and stubbornly wayward. In a stormy scene that took place when he was about seventeen Walt categorically refused to do farm work; he chose instead to teach school and write stories, one of them about a farmer who falls a victim to alcohol and “wretched sensuality,” strikes his eldest son in “a fit of drunken passion” and is directly responsible for the invalidism and early death of his youngest. It was only after Walter Whitman died in 1855, within a few days of the publication of Leaves of Grass, that Walt the victor and survivor began to speak at all freely and affectionately about “my dear father” and to acknowledge, in however conflicted and grievance-heavy a way, the ties between them and his desire for reconciliation. “What is yours is mine,” he wrote in an 1859 poem of self-questioning, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”:
I throw myself upon your breast my father,
I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
I hold you firm till you answer me something.
Kiss me my father,
Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.
“All through young and middle age,” Whitman was to say, “I thought my heredity stamp was mainly decidedly from my mother’s side; but as I grow older, and latent traits come out, I see my father’s also.” For a long time he thought of himself as his mother’s child only. Louisa Whitman was not a reader like her husband, but she was “strangely knowing,” Walt said. “She excelled in narrative—had great mimetic power; she could tell stones, impersonate; she was very eloquent in the utterance of noble moral axioms—was very original in her manner, her style.” In ruddy complexion, features, gait, and voice he took after her—“favored her,” the people on Long Island said. He idealized her extravagantly, overlooked her chronic peevishness after she became a widow, and came to attribute to her every creative and feeling impulse in himself. “Leaves of Grass is the flower of her temperament active in me,” a reflection of her “reality,” “simplicity,” and “transparency,” of her mingled Dutch strain of the “practical and materialistic” and the “transcendental and cloudy.” “Mothers precede all”—he believed that the women of his ancestry had richer natures than their men.
He venerated Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller, George Sand, all of them feminists and agents of spiritual liberation. The “I” of Leaves of Grass is almost as often a woman as a man, and the book is a supremely passionate argument for the androgynous union of strength and tenderness, sagacity and impulse. But he had grown up so bound to his mother that oneness with her and separation from her were equally as terrifying as death and the ocean. “The child who went forth every day . . . now goes and will always go forth every day”—in his folded recesses that child remained a child.
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.
During an epidemic of foreclosures in 1821 Walter Whitman bought at a sheriff’s sale the rented property his house stood on. This attempt to remain in place, like others that followed it in his lifetime, proved to be at best a delaying action. As a result of the depression, new building in Huntington township had come to a standstill; the population was in decline, having been drawn away to the hinterlands or to New York, already “the great commercial emporium” of the New World. On May 27, 1823, a few days before Walt’s fourth birthday—“I was still a little one in frocks”—Whitman moved his family westward on Long Island to Brooklyn, a bustling market town of around seven thousand people. He settled them in a rented house on Front Street and went out expecting to find steady work at good wages.
Brooklyn was growing so fast that by 1855 it was the third-largest city in the United States and had a population of 200,000, which doubled in the fifteen years after. “The child is already born, and is now living, stout and hearty,” Walt was to write in the Brooklyn Standard in 1862, “who will see Brooklyn number one million inhabitants!” All through its magical translation from farmers’ market to metropolis Brooklyn had offered “treasures of speculation” in real estate, “richer than a California gold mine.” He figured proudly that within the past forty years certain choice downtown acres had increased in value a thousandfold. As a civic booster and civic historian writing for a Brooklyn newspaper he had no obligation to report that during those same forty years he and his father, trading in houses and house lots, had failed to obtain a modest share of speculative treasure.
Even in this boom city, with new houses and stores being put up every day, the elder Whitman had trouble making a go of it. “A Methodist elder,” Walt recalled, “contracted with my father . . . drawing up the contract so cutely from his own side—so shrewdly worded—as to make it possible for him, when the time for settlement came, to evade here a sum, there a sum, until my poor straightforward father was nearly swindled out of his boots.” (Walt’s autobiographical notes for those years mention other Brooklynites who figured in the family fortunes in the roles of “villain,” “miserable scoundrel,” or “old devil.”) His father had little better luck with the houses he bought or built for his own use. “We occupied them one after the other, but they were mortgaged, and we lost them”—the mournful and diminishing cadences of that sentence from Specimen Days speak for themselves. On an average the Whitmans moved once each year, and in later life he wrestled with the chronology of dislocation:
We moved to Brooklyn (Front st.) in May 1823
Moved to Cranberry st. (opposite the church) in ’24
” ” Johnson st. May 1st 1825 . . .
On Independence Day, a month after the move to Johnson Street, Walt saw and stood near the Marquis de Lafayette, chief living hero of the Sacred Army, and he remembered the event to the end of his days. Accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette, the Marquis had returned to the United States as the nation’s guest. He had made a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, pressed his lips to Washington’s lead coffin, and stood before it in silence; nearly half a century earlier, as a young major general, he had stood and fought at the Commander’s right hand. As he traveled the length and breadth of the country for sixteen months he was greeted everywhere with a fervor that went beyond patriotism and gratitude to an acknowledgment of the miraculous. The newspapers hailed him as “a venerated father, returned from the grave” to bless a grateful child.
Lafayette crossed over to Brooklyn on the ferry early in the forenoon of July 4. In a simple ceremony, staid, antique, and even austere, without brass bands, policemen, or military display, he was welcomed at the ferry landing by a few withered and bent veterans and then rode hatless in an old-fashioned open yellow coach up Fulton Street, the narrow commercial thoroughfare of Brooklyn usually congested with market wagons carrying Long Island meat, fish and produce to New York. The schoolchildren of the town followed the General’s carriage to Cranberry and Henry streets, where he laid the cornerstone of the Apprentices Library Building. Some of the smaller children had to be handed down into the cellar excavation. Recalling the occasion for the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1857, Whitman described “the childish pride [I] experienced in being one of those who were taken in the arms of Lafayette and reached down by him to a standing place.” Eventually he came to believe and repeat in a much practiced reminiscence that “as a little boy I have been press’d tightly and lovingly to the breast of Lafayette,” who kissed him before putting him down. Whether the kiss was history or, more likely, pseudo history, an early incident glorified and embroidered, Whitman remembered Lafayette’s visit that July for tacitly conferring on him grace and mission.
In October the boom of cannon in the harbor signaled the completion of the Erie Canal; along five hundred miles of inland waterway a ton of grain could travel from Buffalo to Sandy Hook in ten days instead of six weeks and for six dollars instead of a hundred. “Let us conquer space,” John Calhoun had said. Now canal, roads, coastal seaway, and the fast sailing packets of the Atlantic shuttle had made New York entrepot for the New World and the Old. “‘Our city,’” Whitman was to write in 1842, was “the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond.”
Moved across the way, (Van Dyke’s) were there 4th July 1826.
Americans who were alive on that day recalled it with awe and grief. As cannon boomed again in the harbor and across the land, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, two former Presidents, both signers of the Declaration, died within a few hours of each other—Thomas Jefferson, eighty-three, at Monticello, and John Adams, ninety, at Quincy. Their dying on that jubilee day, it seemed, had been a last heroic act intended to sanctify their republic and inspire their countrymen. The time of Whitman’s growing up was a long farewell salute to the receding world of the founders, a series of remarkable deaths, days of national mourning, acts of patriotic commemoration. In 1831, five years after Jefferson and Adams but, like them, on a July 4, died James Monroe, the last President to have served in combat in the Revolution, and over the next few years other emblematic Americans departed: Charles Carroll of Maryland, ninety-five, sole surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence; John Marshall, architect of constitutional law, in the thirty-fifth year of his chief justiceship (“His death at this time,” said the diarist Philip Hone, “is a greater national calamity than Washington’s was when it occurred”); James Madison, less happily remembered as fourth President than as father of the Constitution. Each year the circles left by British tents on the grass in Boston Common grew fainter, the band of veterans of Bunker Hill and Lexington, Valley Forge and Brandywine, smaller. When the last soldier of the Sacred Army was gone, and then in turn the post-Revolutionary generation, what father-heroes would take their place, Whitman was soon to ask; how would the faith of the founders be transmitted? The founders led a revolution, but they left a tradition. How could he reconcile tradition with the revolutionary imperative to be his single self alone?
Moved to Adams st. lived there spring of’27
””Tillary co[rner] of Washington, (Miller’s), 1st May 1827
””own house in Nov. . . .
By then there were five children (a sixth, born in 1825, died in infancy); Walter Whitman had achieved a temporary measure of economic stability; and Walt was a pupil in District School Number 1 at Concord and Adams streets, the beneficiary of a thrifty and rational scheme of education devised by an English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster. Assisted by hierarchies of student monitors, one teacher was able to distribute rote learning, together with fundamental social values and strict notions of the good and the useful, to two hundred and more pupils. Sometimes he invoked muscular Christianity and resorted to the birch rod, the cowhide strap, and, in Whitman’s words, “other ingenious methods of child torture,” mental as well as physical. He demanded unison, unquestioning obedience to regulations, undivided attention, and a physical discipline that dictated the precise way to hold and close a book during recitations and the position of hands when the pupils stood at parade rest. The Lancastrian method was designed to separate children from their ignorance as cleanly and impersonally as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin separated fibers from seeds. It proved to be stupefying even for pupils less jealous of their emotional freedom than Walt. In later years one of his teachers remembered him as a good-natured boy, clumsy and slovenly in appearance and too big for his age, but otherwise unremarkable; he expressed surprise that Walt had amounted to anything, but added, “We need never be discouraged over anyone.”
Walt’s most vivid recollection from his five or six years in the common school was a dull shock, something like an earthquake, he imagined, that jarred half the city one day in June 1829, when he was ten years old. The frigate Fulton, the first steam vessel to be built by a government, blew up at its mooring in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—a disaffected sailor, it was said, had fired the powder magazine. Forty or fifty of the crew died in the explosion. Their funeral a few days later moved the boy to tears. The procession started for the Fulton Street graveyard from St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at Washington and Sands streets:
It was a full military and naval funeral—the sailors marching two by two, hand in hand, banners tied up and bound in black crepe, the muffled drums beating, the bugles wailing for the mournful peals of a dead march. We remember it all—remember following the procession, boylike, from beginning to end. We remember the soldiers firing the salute over the grave. And then how everything changed with the dashing and merry jig played by the same bugles and drums, as they made their exit from the graveyard and wended rapidly home.
“With music strong I come,” he wrote in “Song of Myself,”
. . . with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.
. . .. . .. . .. . .. . ..
I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.
Five months after the Fulton explosion, on an evening in November, the ten-year-old boy accompanied his parents to the ballroom of Morrison’s Hotel on Brooklyn Heights, and in this opulent and worldly setting, with its sparkling chandeliers and velvet divans, heard a sermon by Elias Hicks. In the audience, along with working-class people like the Whitmans, were the city’s dignitaries and social leaders, merchants and judges, men and women of fashion, naval officers in uniform, and elderly Quakers in broad-brimmed hats and black bonnets. Some had come out of mere curiosity, others out of partisanship; Hicks was then at the center of the doctrinal storm that two years earlier had split the Society of Friends into liberal and orthodox communions. “The blood of Christ—the blood of Christ,” Hicks had said publicly, according to Whitman, “why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ in itself was no more effectual than the blood of bulls and goats,” and his hearers had risen to their feet and thumped their canes on the floor in anger. But that evening on Brooklyn Heights Hicks, a gaunt-faced man of eighty-one—he looked like a cross between an Indian and a black, “without a drop of white blood in his veins,” Whitman recalled—did not speak of doctrinal disputes but only of “the light within,” the single guiding principle, as it impressed itself on the boy, of man’s “religious conscience” and “moral nature.” As Hicks rose to the theme his “passionate unstudied oratory,” neither argumentative nor intellectual, turned into a naturally cadenced prose that at times seemed to strive to achieve the condition of poetry.
If there is, as doubtless there is [Whitman was to write], an unnameable something behind oratory, a fund within or atmosphere without, deeper than art, deeper even than proof, that unnameable constitutional something Elias Hicks emanated from his very heart to the hearts of his audience, or carried with him or probed into, and shook and arous’d in them—a sympathetic germ, probably rapport, lurking in every human eligibility, which no book, no rule, no statement has given or can give inherent knowledge, intuition—not even the best speech, or best put forth, but launch’d out only by powerful human magnetism.
Hicks’s presence persisted in Whitman’s passion for oratory and “natural eloquence,” in the loosely cadenced verse of Leaves of Grass, in his wooing of ecstasy and in his fundamental creed, that “the fountain of all naked theology, all religion, all worship, all the truth to which you are possibly eligible” was the single self and its inherent relations. In the making of a poet’s vision of reality and identity Hicks preceded Emerson and outlasted him—he was “a greater man than Carlyle,” Whitman said. As he himself neared seventy, his Quaker traits and mannerisms became more pronounced; and he labored against feebleness, ill health, and a wandering mind to set down on paper, in “Elias Hicks,” a fervent account of the “most democratic of the religionists,” “the democrat in religion as Jefferson was the democrat in politics.”
Hicks died in February 1830, when the entire country seemed to be in the grip of a great religious awakening. The following year a farmer in upstate New York, William Miller, predicted the imminent return of Christ followed by the end of the world, and many people prepared themselves for the final outcome.
That was the time of “Revivals” [wrote Whitman]. A third of the young men in Brooklyn, particularly the mechanics and apprentices, and young women of the same class in life, (and O, what pretty girls some of them were!) “experienced religion,” as it is still called. In many cases it was no doubt a reality; but in many, alas! it was but an ebullition of the moment; and as such soon became “backsliders.”
But the Whitmans remained immune to all this, even in Brooklyn, already known as a city of churches. They tended toward Quakerism but belonged to no meeting. Louisa Whitman attended church sometimes—“She pretended to be a Baptist,” George said, but “went almost anywhere”—and her husband never; religious exercises or observances did not figure in their home life; and when Walt was sent to Sunday school at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church it was because St. Ann’s offered a free supplement to the free education he was getting at the district school the other days of the week, and in any case the lasting effect on him was of a nondoctrinal nature. At St. Ann’s (and later, when he was an apprentice, at the Dutch Reformed Church on Joralemon Street), he was duly instructed in Scripture and catechism, but what remained with him was the Bible’s rhythms and imagery, and he grew up unscathed by the conviction of sin and damnation that oppressed so many of his contemporaries and made the Sabbath a day of gloom and horror for them.
When he was about twenty he debated with himself whether he should become a Hicksite Quaker, but he put this aside as impossible. “I was never made to live inside a fence”—he was certain Leaves of Grass could never have been written on the inside of anything. Judging from this outcome, the orthodox Quakers may have been right, after all, when they denounced Elias Hicks as being little better than a deist and a heretic, and for Whitman himself even this exemplary preacher—a “brook of clear and cool and every healthy, ever-living water”—could go only so far.
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
At eleven, all the formal schooling he was to have behind him, Walt worked as an office boy for a firm of lawyers, James B. Clarke and his son Edward, on lower Fulton Street. They gave him a desk and a window nook to himself, and he remembered gratefully that
Edward C. help’d me at my handwriting and composition, and, (the signal event of my life up to that time,) subscribed for me to a big circulating library. For a time I now revel’d in romance-reading of all kinds—first, the “Arabian Nights,” all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott’s novels, one after the other, and his poetry.
“If you could reduce the Leaves to their elements,” he was to tell Traubel, “you would see Scott unmistakeably active at the roots.” He read Cooper’s The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans and The Red Rover, a tale of insurgency and ocean adventure that stirred him up “clarionlike: I read it many times.” He became and remained “a most omniverous novel-reader.”
Running errands for the Clarkes (and later for a doctor) he explored the two cities along the East River. Downtown and waterfront Brooklyn had become a hive of shipyards and ship chandlers, distilleries and glass works, casting furnaces, white-lead factories, professional offices and mercantile establishments. But it remained fundamentally rural, its character more accurately suggested, in Whitman’s recollection, by homely village fixtures—venerable drugstores and grocery stores, a wooden church, the scene of many tearful revival meetings. Rows of elms shaded the grassy walks along Fulton Street. Boys baited bent pins for killifish in stagnant ponds and creeks and on hot days climbed up to Fort Greene, the site of the American defeat in August 1776 and of an American garrison in the War of 1812. They played on the grassy hill and looked out over the shingled roofs of the village, a sweep of river, bay and shipping, and six counties. Except for the area around the Navy Yard, Brooklyn had a reputation for stability and “a character for morals,” one of its leading editors said. On street after street below the Heights, mechanics, tradesmen and clerks, many of them employed across the river, built rows of trim boxlike houses on standard lots 25 by 100 feet and for the most part lived quiet lives. In Brooklyn, Whitman was to write, “men of moderate means” could find homes “at a moderate cost.” Writing for a city newspaper and loyal to his city, he added, “The most valuable class in any community . . . is the middle class.” Brooklyn, somewhat like Camden when Whitman came to live there, lacked those extremes of grandeur and squalor, high challenge and defeat, for which New York was already known the world over.
When he first crossed Brooklyn ferry to Manhattan as a child some of the boats were still powered by horses yoked to a capstan in the deckhouse. The gatekeepers and deckhands made a pet of him, and allowed him to deadhead back and forth and feed what was to become a lifelong passion for river crossings. Now, running errands for the Clarkes, he rode the steam ferry to New York. A few times he delivered legal papers to Aaron Burr, fallen archangel, at seventy-five practicing law again. Stately and courteous, Burr greeted him with “amused interest, alertness, smiling old eyes, and hearty laugh” and with small acts of generosity and favor not to be forgotten. “He had a way of giving me a bit of fruit on these occasions—an apple or a pear.” One January day the boy stopped in the street to take in the spectacle of the richest man in America, John Jacob Astor, bundled in furs and wearing an ermine hat, being helped by servants into his gorgeous sleigh; it was drawn by as fine a pair as Walt had ever seen, horses, like his grandfather’s, bred for speed and mettle.
Moved to Henry St. (Nr. Cranberry) the winter [1831–1832] before the first cholera summer.
It must have been in 1832 the bad cholera year, we (the family) were domiciled in Liberty street—all hands except me moved for several weeks out in the country leaving me alone in the house.
Cholera, the characteristic epidemic disease of the century, entered the cities of the eastern seaboard that June, and churchgoers in Brooklyn and New York awaited the scourge with days of fasting, prayer and humiliation. The Masque of the Red Death soon played out its familiar drama. Some victims lived only a few hours after the first warning symptoms; others dragged on through days of diarrhea and retching, dehydration and pain, their skin turning bluish-gray toward the end. At the height of the epidemic over a hundred people died each day, and nearly a third of the population had fled. They carried contagion to the country districts and left behind them a hushed Pompeiian metropolis where grass had begun to grow in deserted thoroughfares. “For various reasons,” Whitman wrote in an early story, “large numbers still remained. While fear drove away so many, poverty, quite as strong a force, also compelled many to stay where they were.” Walt, printer’s apprentice on a daily newspaper, was one of those who stayed where they were, “alone in the house.”
Moved from Liberty st. to Front st. (eastern part), and lived there in spring and early summer of 1833. Mother very sick.
President Andrew Jackson, waving a white beaver hat, his white hair brushed stiffly up from his forehead, rode up Fulton Street in an open barouche that June; the fourteen-year-old boy stood in the crowd that welcomed the Hero and Sage, Man of the People. Sometime around July, when Louisa Whitman gave birth to her eighth child, Jeff, her husband, having failed in Brooklyn, moved his family back out on Long Island. There he farmed and continued to pursue the building trade “with varying fortune,” Walt said. The Whitmans may have lived with Cornelius Van Velsor at Cold Spring and moved on after a short while because of domestic frictions—Van Velsor had recently remarried and, according to Walt, his new wife “was not a good investment.” Walt’s terse note on the family hegira signals the nominal end of his dependent boyhood—.
I remained in Brooklyn.