I
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1845 Walter Whitman Senior gave up farming at Dix Hills, rented a house on Gold Street in Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard, and listed his occupation in the city directory as “carpenter.” During the ten years of life remaining to him he was to continue his struggle for security with diminishing vigor, which after 1850 trailed off into invalidism. Walt came back to Brooklyn at about the same time as his father, to work again for the Star. Four years earlier the paper had mocked Whitman for presuming to teach politics to “those big children of Tammany Hall” and recommended that he come back and finish up his apprenticeship. Edwin Spooner, the founder’s son, was willing to put aside past and present differences in order to acquire the services of a seasoned editor who had the beginnings of a literary reputation.
Whitman wrote about fifty pieces for the Star, mainly on music, theater, books and education, and he stayed on for five months before he left in circumstances that were superficially similar to those of his parting of the ways with his Aurora employers. The Star, “incarnation of nervelessness,” he wrote, was in so terminal a stage of “inanimation” that it needed help just to “lean against the wall and die.” Spooner saluted him from a distance as a disreputable “country schoolmaster” and “hectoring scrivener” whose political convictions and utterances invariably “throw his Democratic friends into convulsions.” But this latest blowup inaugurated a period of stability in his profession and in his personal life. William B. Marsh, editor of the Daily Eagle, Brooklyn’s leading paper, died suddenly at the end of February 1845; by early March Whitman had been hired to succeed him; and he was to remain with the Eagle for nearly two years, his longest tenure as a daily journalist.
Even while the Whitmans as a family were still living out on Long Island Walt assumed the role of guardian of his brothers and sisters. Now he became his father’s surrogate or regent. In October 1844 the elder Whitman made a down payment of twenty-five dollars on a mortgaged lot on Prince Street in Brooklyn; the following May he paid an additional one hundred dollars on the property; and by the beginning of 1846 the family had moved from Gold Street to the new house, Number 71, that he built at Prince Street. Yet from the start Walt was at least a part owner; the original document of indenture and various receipts for down payments and mortgage interest bear his endorsement. In June 1847 he took title in his own name to the Prince Street property and assumed responsibility for the $900 mortgage held by the Long Island Insurance Company, the semiannual interest payments of $31.50, and the city taxes. He asserted his new primacy in other ways, buying a silver watch for ten dollars, a gold ring, a gold pencil, and a proper suit with a frock coat (the outfit cost him thirty-two dollars, a sizable sum). Probably for his mother or sisters he bought a carnelian pin, some fancy thimbles, a purse. He bought new boots for his brothers and paid to have the old ones repaired. He paid for domestic odds and ends at Prince Street—$56 worth of masonry work, eighteen gilt picture frames, some furniture, an engraved front-door nameplate, emblem of someone who had come to stay; he set out trees and shrubs.
Whatever transformations were ahead, in 1846 “The Poet of America” eagerly awaited by Emerson was a dutiful son, newspaper editor, and citizen of Brooklyn. He was active in the councils and affairs of the Democratic Party of Kings County, was secretary of its General Committee, officiated at an open-air rally. At parades he marched in the vanguard with other dignitaries and occupied a place in the reviewing stand. On July 4 veterans of the War of 1812 fired off an artillery salute from Fort Greene, and church bells rang; just before the benediction closed the patriotic exercises at the fort an “Ode” by Whitman was wrenchingly accommodated to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
O, God of Columbia! O, shield of the Free!
More grateful to you than the fanes of old story,
Must the blood-bedewed soil, the red battle-ground, be
Where our fore-fathers championed America’s glory!
Then how priceless the worth of the sanctified earth,
We are standing on now. Lo! the slopes of its girth
Where the Martyrs were buried: Nor prayers, tears, or stones,
Mark their crumbled-in coffins, their white, holy bones!
These halting verses, dealing as usual with the neglect of graves, were part of a successful campaign Whitman waged in the Eagle to save Fort Greene from the developers. Patriotic emotions came easily to him. In one of his Eagle columns he concelebrated Washington’s farewell to his army.
When the last of the officers had embraced him, Washington left the room followed by his comrades, and passed through the lines of light infantry. His step was slow and measured—his head uncovered, his large breast heaving, and tears flowing thick and fast as he looked from side to side at the veterans to whom he then bade adieu forever. Shortly an event occurred more touching than all the rest. A gigantic soldier, who had stood at his side at Trenton, stepped forth from the ranks, and extended his hand, crying, “Farewell, my beloved General, farewell.” Washington grasped his hand in convulsive emotion, in both his. All discipline was now at an end! the officers could not restrain the men, as they rushed forward to take the Beloved One by the hand, and the convulsive sobs and tears of the soldiers told how deeply engraven upon their affections was the love of their commander. Reaching the barge at Whitehall, through this most sad avenue, the retiring Leader entered it; and, at the first stroke of the oar, he rose, and turning to the companions of his glory, by waving his hat, bade them a sad adieu; their answer was only in tears; officers and men, with glistening eyes, watched the receding boat till the form of Washington was lost in the distance.
The same charged episode, much compressed in the retelling, was to appear in one of Whitman’s major poems of 1855, “The Sleepers.”
He stands in the room of the old tavern, the well-belov’d soldiers all pass through,
The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns,
The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them on the cheek,
He kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another, he shakes hands and bids good-by to the army.
“I had one of the pleasantest sits of my life” on the Eagle, Whitman said, “a good owner, good pay, and easy work and hours.” Daylong outings sponsored by grateful holders of public franchises and contracts took him to Coney Island for a tumble in the surf and a clambake with champagne. In the gleaming new omnibus “Excelsior” drawn by six white horses he rode out to Greenwood Cemetery with children from the orphan asylum, played and loafed on the grass with them, enjoyed strawberries, cake and lemonade. He was a guest of the Long Island Rail Road on “a flying pic-nic” to Green-port, whaling and resort village a hundred miles away. “The company was excellent—no small portion being ladies. A car was attached, filled with first-rate refreshments; and the obliging waiters served the passengers just as the latter might have been served in an ordinary public dining or ice-cream room.” At Greenport he visited his sister Mary, who lived there with her shipwright husband Ansel Van Nostrand and their children. He was treated to a dinner, “not to be beat,” at the Peconic House and was back home in Brooklyn later the same day, happy and tired, carrying flowers.
Soon after Whitman was appointed editor, the Eagle acquired new readers, larger quarters, new type, and a Napier cylinder press, “about as pretty and clean-working a piece of machinery as a man might wish to look on,” Whitman wrote. His desk vibrated to the thump and roar of papers printing fast and steady on the floor below. News traveled “‘in the twinkling of an eye’”—“The Governor’s message, which we publish today, was transmitted, (5000 words) from Albany to New York yesterday . . . by magnetic telegraph, after 12 o’clock, and was in type, printed, and for sale in Brooklyn and New York, by 4 o’clock!” Papers of the Whig opposition, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and even Spooner’s Evening Star conceded that the Eagle was “exceedingly well got up” and contained “a brilliant lot of editorials and original articles.” On the Eagle’s front page, previously given over to six unrelieved columns of advertisements, Whitman introduced a literary miscellany—among work by various European and American authors he reprinted eleven of his own stories.
“The people of the United States are a newspaper-ruled people,” he wrote in the Eagle. They had cut their ties to “kingcraft,” “priestcraft,” and “the old and moth-eaten systems of Europe.” But they depended on their editors to lead them, sometimes against their wills, to “light and knowledge” about such orthodox Democratic principles as free trade and annexation, and to “noble reforms” concerning the oppression of women and wage laborers, capital punishment, education of the young by rote and rod, the iniquities of the English in Ireland. The editor was also an agent of culture. As the Eagle’s book reviewer, Whitman introduced readers to Carlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, George Sand and Schlegel, as well as a hundred native authors of practical, historical, scientific and literary works. In the course of his reading and reviewing he acquired a formidable literary and intellectual culture, ancient and modern, and a close knowledge of the English tradition in poetry, from Chaucer to Tennyson. In the end, of course, he was to strip his writing of “stock poetical touches,” disavow the old culture, proclaim a new one, and represent Leaves of Grass as antiliterary. Some of his comments as Eagle reviewer point the way to this metamorphosis. “We think this man stands above all poets,” he said about Coleridge. “He was passionate without being morbid—he was like Adam in Paradise, and almost as free from artificiality.” His review of Goethe’s Auto-Biography (Parke Godwin’s translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit) was virtually a prospectus for the generic autobiography he was to attempt in his own book.
What a gain it would be, if we could forego some of the heavy tomes, the fruit of an age of toil and scientific study, for the simple easy truthful narrative of the existence and experience of a man of genius,—how his mind unfolded in his earliest years—the impressions things made upon him—how and where and when the religious sentiment dawned in him—what he thought of God before he was inoculated with books’ ideas—the development of his soul—when he first loved—the way circumstances imbued his nature, and did him good, or worked him ill—with all the long train of occurrences, adventures, mental processes, exercises within and trials without, which go to make up the man—for character is the man, after all.
On May 11, 1846, citing enemy incursions in Texas, recently annexed from Mexico, and the consequent shedding of American blood on American soil, President James K. Polk asked Congress for a declaration of war—“The cup of forbearance has been exhausted.” General Zachary Taylor’s troops crossed the Rio Grande and inaugurated the unequal contest that ended when Winfield Scott took Vera Cruz and Mexico City. Santa Fe fell to Colonel Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West; Commodore John Sloat’s Pacific Squadron raised the American flag over Monterey and claimed all of California for the United States. “Annexation is now the greatest word in the American vocabulary,” Philip Hone said in his diary. “‘Venividi-vici!’ is inscribed on the banners of every Caesar who leads a straggling band of American adventurers across the prairies, over the mountains, up the rivers, and into the chaparral of a territory which an unprovoked war has given them the right to invade.” Greeting with a sick heart the day of the snake and the lizard, Emerson asked.
. . . who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind,
Of better arts and life?
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife.
James Russell Lowell saw the Mexican adventure as “essentially a war of false pretenses . . . it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.” “I call it murder,” said his cracker-barrel Yankee, Hosea Biglow—
They jest want this Californy
So’s to lug new slave-States in
To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,
An’ to plunder ye like sin . . .
Chaps that make black slaves o’ niggers
Want to make wite slave o’ you.
On occasion Whitman had taken issue with saber-rattling articles that came out in O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review. “If our fame and honor could come in no other path except the path of the cannon-balls,” he said about the long-festering Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain, “and if our advance is to be signalized by the smoke of cannon and the groans of dying men—we could turn our faces aside and almost say, let us never be a great nation!” But when Polk’s war message came over the telegraph from Washington, Whitman, a Democratic regular writing for a Democratic paper in support of a Democratic President, took up the rant of the war party. “Yes: Mexico must be thoroughly chastised!” He demanded “prompt and effectual hostilities. . . . Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as well as how to expand.” In October he attended an open-air meeting of the Democratic party of Kings County and, as secretary, recorded a resolution that had been enthusiastically proposed and enthusiastically adopted:
Resolved, that while we deplore the existence of war at any time, we acknowledge its necessity when our territory is invaded or hostilities are threatened by an enemy—and that the invasion of Texas, peaceably and lawfully annexed to this country by consent of its people who had achieved and then professed their independence, and the declarations of Mexico that it considered such annexation a war measure, required from our national administration the prompt and energetic measures which they have pursued against the latter country.
His army outnumbered by three to one on the sun-baked plains of Buena Vista, Zachary Taylor, agent of manifest destiny, flung back the enemy general’s demand for surrender—“Tell him to go to hell!”—and won a victory that stood “Bright Among the Brightest Emanations of American Glory,” said Whitman, comparing Taylor with Caesar and with George Washington. Continentalism and Union were to shape Whitman’s poetic vision. (“I am large, I contain multitudes.”) “California’s shores” were not only the Western boundaries of the Union—they were the boundaries of the found and the “yet unfound,” the measure of his psychic growth. (“Eastward I go only by force,” Thoreau said, “but westward I go free.”) “The daring, burrowing energies of the Nation will never rest till the whole of this northern section of the great West World is circled in the mighty Republic—there’s no use denying that fact!” Whitman wrote this after a visit to Governors Island to watch a regiment of volunteers training for the invasion of California. These raggletaggle conquistadors, scarecrow youths and toothless old bachelors in military castoffs, were right out of The Pickwick Papers, but even as he laughed at their tanglefoot drills he could not help musing on the emergence of American empire and the beauties of New York harbor, “one of the most magnificent views God ever spread out for mortal eyes to admire!” Whitman’s day at the “California camp” ended in the mood of a fete:
The band of the station, (and a fine band it was), brought out their music, and practiced some choice German and Italian marches. The drummer boys, and juvenile fifers, collected together. A large body of the regulars were paraded on the green, and went through their evolutions like clock-work; that was indeed discipline. Then the drums beat for roll call—after which the men were dismissed. After which we saw a famous game at foot ball, incident to the same being any quantity of mishaps and tumblings down—all, however adding to the glee of the time.
On a hot Saturday evening, August 8, 1846, the House of Representatives prepared to approve an administration bill appropriating, as a step in the direction of a negotiated peace, two million dollars for the purchase of disputed territory from Mexico. Routinely recognized by the chair, a hitherto inconspicuous Democratic member from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, introduced a proviso: “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said country.” (Wilmot later explained that he had “no morbid sympathy for the slave,” only the desire to protect white men from “the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”) President Polk puzzled over Wilmot’s “mischievous and foolish amendment. . . . What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to conceive.” But a week later opposition papers in the North had no such difficulty understanding what the Proviso had achieved. “As if by magic,” said the Boston Whig, “it brought to a head the great question which is about to divide the American people.”
Whitmans and Van Velsors had been slaveowners for a century and more. Sarah White, one of Walt’s great-grandmothers, chewed tobacco, swore like a squire, and rode out daily to oversee her field hands; when she became an invalid and was confined to her chair and bed she kept order by shying chunks of wood at her house-slaves, “a whole troop of ’em,” he said. Hannah Brush Whitman, his paternal grandmother, told him she used to see a dozen or more slave children at supper in the kitchen of the main house. Some of these children were the half-breed offspring of Long Island’s other subject race, the dispossessed Indians, “degraded, shiftless, and intemperate, very much after the lowest class of blacks.”
Many of the free blacks he saw in Brooklyn when he was growing up were unemployed and did odd jobs or begged in the streets. When he was twenty-two he began hearing rumors, based on statistics in the sixth United States Census, that the incidence of insanity and idiocy among free blacks was some ten times higher than it was among slaves. These statistics were later discredited, but not before they had been found to be useful in supporting the a priori conclusion that blacks could never be assimilated into American life (“Nature has set an impassable seal against it,” Whitman wrote in the 1850s) and were unfitted for freedom (“No race can ever remain slaves if they have it in them to become free. Why do the slave ships go to Africa only?”). “The African race here is a foreign and feeble element,” said William H. Seward a few months before he became Lincoln’s Secretary of State, “like the Indians incapable of assimilation. . . . A pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields.” In Whitman’s day-to-day social policy and conduct he was no different from most Northerners, including abolitionists, who deplored slavery in principle and in practice denied free blacks the most rudimentary civil rights. “You loathe them as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs,” St. Clare says to his New England cousin in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “You would not have them abused; but you don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves.”
Whitman’s stereotypical black person was a muddle of ascriptive traits. The slave Margaret, whom Franklin Evans marries in his drunken passion, is sexual, magnetic, calculating, vindictive, murderous—“the fire of her race burnt with all its brightness in her bosom.” One Leaves of Grass fragment speaks for the anger and despair of slaves:
I am a curse: a negro thinks me;
You cannot speak for yourself, negro;
I dart like a snake from your mouth.
My eyes are bloodshot, they look down the river,
A steamboat paddles away my woman and children.
Another fragment suggests a benign helplessness:
Poem of the black person.—Infuse the sentiment of a sweeping, shielding protection of the blacks—their passiveness—their character of sudden fits—the abstracted fit . . .
In one of his Aurora editorials Whitman commented on a popular lithograph of the period that contrasted “Slavery as It Exists in America” with “Slavery as It Exists in England.” As pictured, life in the slave quarters of the Cotton Kingdom was cheerful, contented and secure, while the English laborer either starved in his hovel or was driven into the parish workhouse. “The British,” Whitman wrote, “have within the borders of their own country miseries compared to which those of the southern slaves are as a wart to Ossa.” Nevertheless, banded together under the powerful slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” English reformers were sending over money for abolitionist lectures and propaganda. While neglecting their own enslaved masses, these reformers had the temerity to export benevolence and teach Americans “what is our duty to ‘our colored brethren.’” In Whitman’s eyes the villains were the abolitionists. Their “ranting” and “abominable fanaticism” defied “all discretion, the settled law of the land, the guaranteed power of citizens,” “free thought,” and “liberal sentiments.” The chief issue for Whitman was not black slavery in itself but the oppression of spirit that black slavery, and all other forms of servitude, fostered in what Emerson called “the republic of Man.” Whitman remembered hearing Emerson say at the end of a lecture, “What right have I to speak of slavery? Are we not all slaves?”
The New York lawyer and civic leader George Templeton Strong, a practical man above all, also denounced abolitionism as “false, foolish, wicked and unchristian,” and he was even willing to argue that “slave-holding is no sin.” Still, when the time came, he made a crucial distinction. “N. B. The question of the expediency of slave-holding, and of the policy of upholding the institution, is a very different affair.” Whitman’s attitudes crystallized early in the long debate over the extension of slavery into the territories. “Set Down Your Feet, Democrats!” he wrote in the Eagle on December 21, 1846.
If there are to be States to be formed out of territory lately annexed, or to be annexed, by any means to the United States, let the Democratic members of Congress, (and Whigs too, if they like,) plant themselves quietly, without bluster, but fixedly and without compromise, on the requirement that Slavery be prohibited in them forever.
The Eagle had been “the very first Democratic paper” to take a decisive stand on the issue of Free Soil, Whitman claimed; he claimed also that the party in the North had become “one solid unbroken phalanx.” What appeared, briefly, to be a coalition of conscience had been joined even by Daniel Webster, “a cynical, bad, corrupt man,” as Whitman had described him a year earlier, “indebted to the brandy bottle for his indignant eloquence and to the ill-got funds of the Whigs for the supplies of his pocket book.” Webster, the arch-Whig, was now a supporter of the Wilmot Proviso in the Senate. Abraham Lincoln, a one-term Whig member of the House, figured he voted for it “as good as forty times” before it was killed. In one form or another the Proviso was debated for a decade and a half before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Instead of setting down their feet in unity, the Democrats of New York State first declined to take any stand at all—according to Whitman they lost the November 1847 local election as a result—and then, in 1848, nominated for President Michigan Senator Lewis Cass, largely on the strength of his assertion that only the people living in the territories, not the Congress, had the power to decide the slave issue there.
Meanwhile the Free Soil Democrats bolted, leaving the party in control of “Old Hunkers” like Isaac Van Anden, who was treasurer of the General Committee in Kings County as well as publisher of the Eagle. The party regulars compared the dissidents to the farmer who set fire to his barn in order to get rid of the rats. The Barnburners merged with abolitionists and anti-slavery Whigs at a national convention in August 1848 and nominated Martin Van Buren for President under the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.” (The victor in November was the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor.)
On January 3, 1848, in the last Barnburner editorial he was to write for the Eagle, Whitman assailed Cass’s popular-sovereignty doctrine and demanded from him “a better show of sense.” On the eighteenth the Brooklyn Advertiser reported that a “great disturbance” had recently taken place at the Eagle office; this was possibly a cryptic reference to an episode that the Advertiser subsequently detailed: “When personally insulted by a certain prominent politician, Mr. Whitman kicked the individual down the editorial stairs,” as if the prominent politician had been just another Benjamin Carman interfering with the editor’s freedom to fish in troubled waters. Several Brooklyn and New York papers reported Whitman’s dismissal along with the news that the Eagle had turned a political somersault back into the Old Hunker camp. On the twenty-first, brazening it out, Van Anden denied any change in the Eagle’s political coloration, conceding only that in the course of “business arrangements” he “has found it necessary to dispense with one of its editors.” And “business,” meaning party business, was as fair an explanation as any of a change that involved little personal rancor on either side—during the spring Van Anden published at least seventeen pieces by Whitman and went out of his way to compliment him.
It was only after Whitman had been gone for a year and a half that Van Anden, responding to the mounting bitterness of the party schism and to renewed gossip about Whitman’s firing, felt that he had to take a familiar rhetorical tack. “Slow, indolent, heavy, discourteous, and without steady principles,” he wrote in the Eagle, “he was a clog upon our success, and reluctant as we were to make changes, we still found it absolutely necessary to do so. . . . Mr. W. has no political principles, nor, for that matter, principles of any sort. . . . Whoever knows him will laugh at the idea of his kicking any body, much less a prominent politician. He is too indolent to kick a musketo.” Whitman’s account in Specimen Days is closer to the level truth. “The troubles in the Democratic party broke forth . . . and I split off with the radicals, which led to rows with the boss and ‘the party,’ and I lost my place.”
According to Bryant’s Evening Post and Greeley’s Tribune on the twenty-first, the Brooklyn “radicals” were planning to start their own paper and put Whitman in charge of it. But that scheme hung fire until summer, and in any case he had had his fill of local politics for a while. In the lobby of the Broadway Theatre he ran into a man from New Orleans, J. E. McClure, who was starting up a new daily there, the Crescent, and needed a chief editor. Over drinks during the intermission McClure made him an offer, and less than forty-eight hours after the final curtain went down Whitman was on his way south with a two hundred dollar cash advance in his pocket to bind the agreement and pay for travel. His fourteen-year-old brother Jeff, an apprentice printer, accompanied him.
“Left Brooklyn for New Orleans, Feb. 11th ’48,” Walt noted. Until then he had never been much west of the Hudson or south of Sandy Hook; with the exception of trips to Virginia during the Civil War, it was not until he was in his early sixties, when he visited Colorado and Canada, that he again ventured far from home; like Thoreau, he never went to Europe. But now, because of a casual meeting and a decision made quickly in a theater lobby, the future poet of continentalism looked beyond familiar scenes. By the time he returned to Brooklyn from New Orleans he had traveled five thousand miles and seen democratic vistas of city and wilderness, river and lake, mountain and plain. In 1855 he was to celebrate the American “space and ruggedness and nonchalance” that had been awaiting “the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.”
II
At Cumberland, eastern terminus of the National Road, trade artery to the Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys, Walt saw Tartar encampments of white-canvased juggernaut-wheeled Conestoga wagons by the hundreds loaded with freight; wagon men and drovers, a race of giants and heroes, warmed themselves by stupendous fires of soft coal. The nine-passenger coach of the National Road and Good Intent Stage Company toiled and clattered across the Alleghenies to Wheeling, 131 miles between sunset and dawn, stopping every ten miles for fresh teams of horses. A mountain relay station visited an hour after midnight was a challenge to native Michel-angelos and Caravaggios. “There were some ten or twelve great strapping drovers,” Whitman wrote in his notebook,
reclining about the room on benches, and as many more before the huge fire. The beams overhead were low and smoke-dried. I stepped to the farther end of the long porch; the view from the door was grand, though vague, even in the moonlight. We had just descended a large and very steep hill, and just off on one side of us was a precipice of apparently hundreds of feet. The silence of the grave spread over this solemn scene; the mountains were covered in their white shrouds of snow—and the towering trees looked black and threatening; only the largest stars were visible.
Two and a half days out of New York, at Wheeling on the Ohio River he boarded the steam packet St. Cloud, bound for New Orleans from Pittsburgh and calling at Cincinnati, Louisville, Cairo (no “‘great shakes’ except in the way of ague”), Natchez and innumerable dismal landings and woodyards populated by loafers, children, and an occasional group of “tall, strapping, comely young men.” For the most part the river voyage was twelve days of yellow-brown muddy water, barren winter-blasted landscapes, and social monotony relieved to some extent by the St. Cloud’s handsome accommodations and first-rate food.
Mother you have no idea of the splendor and comfort of these western river steam boats [Jeff wrote]. The cabin is on the deck, and staterooms on each side of it, their are two beds in each room. The greatest of all these splendors is the eating (you know I always did love eating) department. Every thing you would find in the Astor house in New York, You find on these boats. I will give you a little description of the way we live on board. For breakfast we have: coffee, tea, ham and eggs, beef steak, sausages, hot cakes, with plenty of good bread, sugar &c &c. For dinner: roast beef, d[itt]o mutton, d[itt]o veal, boiled ham, roast turkey, d[itt]o goose, with pie and puddings, and for supper every thing that is good to eat.
Passengers gobbled up these feasts as if they were in a railroad station buffet with five minutes between trains.
Below Louisville, where the Ohio dropped twenty feet in three miles, the St. Cloud’s pilot by-passed the canal on the Kentucky side and caromed the ship down the river’s boiling chute. “The fright we all had,” Jeff wrote, “some of the passengers went to bed, others walked the cabin floor, looking as gloomy as if they were going to be hung. Altho I was frightened a good deal, it was not so much as some of the men were. If the boat had sunk we were within a few feet of the shore, but I dont think we could have got there, the current was so swift.” It had been an “ugly part of the river,” Walt wrote—he voiced his own apprehensiveness about the voyage, and perhaps about the new life ahead of him, in a poem he published in the Crescent.
River fiends, with malignant faces!
Wild and wide their arms are thrown,
. . . the river a trailing pall,
Which takes but never again gives back.
Late Friday, February 25, after two weeks and 2,400 miles of almost continuous travel by train, stage and steamer, Whitman arrived in New Orleans, spent the night on board the St. Cloud, and the next day took a room for himself and Jeff at a boardinghouse in Poydras Street. “You could not only see the dirt, but you could taste it, and you had to too if you ate anything at all,” Jeff complained to his mother—he already missed her compulsively tidy housekeeping. “And the rooms too, were covered with dirt an inch thick.” They moved out of the Poydras Street establishment on March 4, after Walt found that nine dollars a week could buy them decent food and good beds at the Tremont House. It was around the corner from the handsome park in Lafayette Square and directly across St. Charles Street, the Broadway of New Orleans, from the Crescent offices at Number 93. “Walter will get the first number of his out on Sunday next,” Jeff wrote home on February 28. On Monday March 6 the Crescent began publishing on a regular weekday schedule. Whitman was in charge of a staff that included an editorial writer, a city news reporter who was “amiable-hearted . . . but excessively intemperate” and died young, and a general hand who translated foreign items and was the grandson of Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Jeff, hired as office boy and printer’s devil at five dollars a week, earned an additional dollar or two bundling and selling for newsprint the exchanges the Crescent received from other papers.
Across the street the octangular barroom of the St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans’ showiest and most expensive example of Greek Revival architecture, served snow-topped cobblers, champagnes, and French brandies. Planters and cotton traders at tables in the recesses did steady business with each other—auctions, conferences, deals of one sort or another—while the bar was two or three deep with officers returned victorious from the war in Mexico and in a mood to celebrate and be entertained. Gaming houses, fancy brothels, and a year-long spirit of Mardi Gras had already made New Orleans famous as the wickedest city in Christendom.
Among the tamer attractions during Whitman’s stay were Dr. Collyer’s Model Artists, fresh from “the Royal Academies of London and Paris” by way of a successful run in New York. They presented, at the St. Charles Theatre, breathtaking tableaux of Adam’s first sight of Eve, the Temptation, the Medici Venus, and similar subjects. When the house lights went up on Collyer’s flesh show one night they revealed, seated in the dress circle and flanked by uniformed aides, a plain-looking man, in civilian clothing, with a wrinkled, dark-yellow face and an easy laugh, Major General Zachary Taylor. The orchestra struck up “Hail Columbia,” and the audience stood in ovation to the hero of Buena Vista and, many predicted, the next President of the United States. (Writing in the Crescent, Whitman doubted the wisdom of raising a man to the presidency “merely because he has shown courage and skill in maneuvering men, horses, and cannon.”)
Victorious war with Mexico had added Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California to the national domain, an acquisition of over 500,000 square miles, second in size only to the Louisiana Purchase. During nearly two years of war New Orleans had served as “our channel and entrepot for everything going and returning,” troops, ships, supplies, booty and news, Whitman said, and had taken on “a strange vivacity and rattle.” The city’s jubilant mood was a response not only to American victory but to what promised to be victories for democratic nationalism all over Europe in 1848.
“For a few weeks after I commenced my duties at New Orleans, matters went on very pleasantly,” he noted in a diary. “People seemed to treat me kindly.” McClure and his partner needed him to get their paper launched and were willing, at least for a while, to put up with his Free Soil politics. The Crescent solicited advertising from slave traders, reported their arrivals and their auctions, and in other ways was committed to serving the interests of a city in which every sixth person was a slave. Visionaries like James De Bow, professor of political economy at the new University of Louisiana, believed that the Crescent City, already a sort of second Athens (even the saloons looked like Greek temples), was proof that a great civilization could again be raised on a foundation of human bondage. Working for the Daily Crescent and savoring New Orleans life for its existential delights Whitman felt no more compromised in principle than another visitor from the North, Henry Adams, trained from the cradle in Boston and Quincy to abhor slavery as “the sum of all wickedness” and slave states as “dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious!” Like Emerson and Bronson Alcott, both of whom lived for a while in the South, young Adams discovered that “the picture had another side,” frankness, courtesy, grace and ease. His indignation yielded before a brooding, indolent sensuality that hung in the air heavier than wistaria and the scent of catalpas. “Quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love!”—these were some of the memories Whitman was to invoke in a poem of 1860, “O Magnet-South.”
In the steamy imaginings of Franklin Evans, Whitman had prepared himself for a place of sexual license, and after his downriver passage he moralized his safe arrival in New Orleans.
But when there comes a voluptuous languor,
Soft the sunshine, silent the air,
Bewitching your craft with safety and sweetness,
Then, young pilot of life, beware.
Suspending conclusions, Whitman gave himself over to the city.
Went into St. Mary’s Market, saw a man, a good old man in a blue jacket and cottonade pantaloons, with a long stick of sugar cane in his hand. Wondered who he was, and much surprised to find that he was a lawyer of some repute. At the lower end of the market there was a woman with a basket of live crabs at her feet. . . . Came down town—shops all open—and heard the news boys calling out the names of the different papers that they had for sale. . . . Went down town further—all was business and activity—the clerks placing boxes upon the pavements—the persons employed in fancy stores were bedecking their windows with their gaudiest goods, and the savory smell of fried ham, broiled beef-steaks, with onions, etc., stole forth from the half unshut doors of every restaurant. . . . Passed down Conti street and looked at the steamboat wharf. It was almost lined with steamboats; some were puffing off steam and throwing up to the sky huge columns of blackened smoke—some were lying idle, and others discharging sugar, molasses, cotton, and everything else that is produced in the great Valley of the Mississippi. Came to the conclusion that New Orleans was a great place and no mistake.
Allegiance and the senses were wooed at every turn. His parents huddled by the stove and heard the windows rattling in their house at Prince Street, but in New Orleans the peach trees blossomed in spring sunlight. Sailors and stevedores worked bare-legged and shirtless by the wharves. “Dark Creole beauties” at Holy Thursday Mass in the Cathedral of St. Louis approached the communion rail “with an air that seemed to say that beauty was part of their religion.” When they strolled along St. Charles Street their gowns brushed against baskets of roses and violets offered for sale by other beauties. Standing in the gaslight of theater and hotel entrances, the flower girl plied her timeless trade.
She sells her flowers, and barters off sweet looks for sweeter money [Whitman wrote in the Crescent]. She has a smile and a wink for every one of the passers-by who have a wink and a smile for her. . . . What becomes of the flower-girl in the day time would be hard to tell: perhaps it would be in bad taste to attempt to find out.
When the talk one evening in September 1888 turned to the subject of mixed blood in the South, Whitman described the flower-girl class of New Orleans with unusual explicitness.
The Octoroon was not a whore [he told Traubel] and yet was, too: a hard class to comprehend: women with splendid bodies—no bustles, no corsets, no enormities of any sort: large, luminous, rich eyes: face a rich olive: habits indolent, yet not lazy as we define laziness North: fascinating, magnetic, sexual, ignorant, illiterate: always more than pretty—“pretty” is too weak a word to apply to them.*
His letter to John Addington Symonds about his “times South” and his six illegitimate children introduced a mystery he promised to unravel but never did. Thirteen years after Whitman’s death an English biographer, Henry Bryan Binns, supplied the omission: he came up with a class-bound but—as demonstrated in several subsequent biographies—irresistible surmise about the New Orleans period.
It seems that about this time Walt formed an intimate relationship with some woman of a higher social rank than his own—a lady of the South where social rank is of the first consideration—and that she became the mother of his child, perhaps, in after years, of his children; and that he was prevented by some obstacle, presumably of family prejudice, from marriage or the acknowledgement of his paternity.
In support of this conjecture Binns cited a poem by Whitman.
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
According to Binns this encounter was responsible for the “quickening of emotional self-consciousness” that, along with other changes, led Whitman to write Leaves of Grass. Binns’s method was to accept as literal, truth-bound testimony lines by a poet who represents himself elsewhere in Leaves of Grass as growing up in Virginia and Texas and hunting polar bears in Alaska. In justice to his method Binns’s hypothesis should have suffered a terminal setback in 1920, when another biographer, Emory Holloway, discovered the manuscript of “Once I Pass’d through a Populous City.” It appears that Whitman intended originally to celebrate “adhesiveness” or manly love, for the second line read,
But now of all that city I remember only the man who wandered with me, there, for love of me.
The “woman who passionately clung to me” was a
. . . rude and ignorant man who, when I departed, long and long held me by the hand, with silent lip, sad and tremulous.—
Even in the face of this discovery, the New Orleans mistress survived in the biographies, and as late as 1960 Holloway himself, like the bereft whaling ship Rachel at the end of Moby Dick, was still deviously cruising in search of Whitman’s children.
“The actual journey has no interest for education,” Adams said about his trip south. “The memory was all that mattered,” and it is the memory that matters for Whitman, too. Regardless of whatever romances he did or did not have there, New Orleans stood for a heightened recognition of the self and its needs.
I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
“If you only keep well till I get home again, I think I shall be satisfied,” Walt wrote to his mother on March 28. “I began to feel very uneasy, not hearing from you for so long.” Since leaving early in February he had received only one letter from home and relied on a friend at the Eagle for family news. “O how I long to see you,” he said a month later, but he was also thinking of the mortgage payment about to fall due on the Prince Street property—“Hannah must get $31 ½ from the Bank to pay the interest.” Sometimes he worried about whether his trees and shrubs had survived the winter, but in general he considered himself “quite happily fix’d” where he was and with bright prospects “in the money line.” “He thinks this place agrees with him very much,” Jeff reported, “and says he feels better than ever he did in New York.” But Jeff had lingering attacks of “the disintery” and summer complaint and was desperately homesick from the start—his family’s strange silence probably attributable to a break in postal service from the North, made the distance from home intolerable. “This will be the eighth or ninth letter we have sent you, and we have not received a single one from you,” he scolded. “Do write to us, Father, even half a sheet would be better than nothing.” He continued to sound the same tearful note. “Mother, Just think what you would think of us if we had writtin you only one letter since we came away. . . . If you do not write to us pretty soon we will do something but I don’t know what.”
After two months, the Crescent owners decided that their founding editor had outlasted his short-term function and was likely to be an embarrassment to the paper in the coming presidential elections. (The major political parties either supported or tolerated the extension of slavery.) McClure and his partner now treated him with “a singular sort of coldness” and began to bully Jeff, as if holding him hostage against his brother’s departure. On May 27, three days after a final squabble with McClure over a cash advance, the Whitmans were on their way home.
Walt celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday aboard the steamer Pride of the West near Memphis. He was bound for St. Louis, Chicago, and then New York by way of the Great Lakes and the Hudson River. When he returned in mid-June he was “more radical than ever,” the Advertiser said, and once again embroiled in antislavery politics. In August he addressed a meeting of Brooklyn Barnburners and was chosen a delegate to the national convention of the recently formed Free Soil Party. On September 9, after two months of recruiting backers and subscribers, he began to publish the Brooklyn Freeman, a weekly dedicated to the election of Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams and to opposing, “under all circumstances the addition to the Union, in future, of a single inch of slave land, whether in the form of state or territory.” “How he hated slavery!” Whitman wrote about Thomas Jefferson in his first editorial. “He hated it in all its forms—over the mind as well as the body of man.” Leaves of Grass was to grow in “Free Soil.”