Those who love each other shall become invincible.
In an 1863 letter to his brother Jeff, Walt Whitman called the Battle at Fredericksburg the “most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s wars.”1 At times, Whitman could be rather easily excited, so you have to take his claim about military history with a grain of salt. Still, if you wander the battlefield at Fredericksburg, Virginia, as I did one sunny, chilly day in February, you can almost see what he means. Even if, like me, you know less than nothing about military strategy, from the vantage of the sunken road at the top of Marye’s Heights, overlooking the battlefield below, the Union campaign at Fredericksburg does indeed begin to look like one unprecedentedly bad idea after another.
In November 1862, the recently appointed General of the Army of the Potomac, Ambrose E. Burnside, moved his troops west toward the undefended city of Fredericksburg. Burnside hoped to reach Fredericksburg before the scattered Confederate Army could get there, at which point he could turn south and march on a direct road to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, and thus with any luck bring the war to a swift conclusion.
If not for bad luck, however, Burnside would have had no luck at all. He lost time and men trying to cross the Rappahannock River, which marked the far eastern side of Fredericksburg. And by the time he did cross the river, he faced a Confederate Army that had taken up a nearly impregnable position on the hills behind Fredericksburg. On December 13, Burnside mounted an attack on Lee’s right flank, which was fought to a deadly draw. But the real bloodshed came when he tried to attack Lee’s forces at Marye’s Heights, just beyond the town itself.2
In order to reach Lee’s heavily dug-in troops and artillery, Union soldiers had to cross four hundred yards of open field. Even today, when three of those four hundred yards are covered by a neighborhood of middle-class houses built around the turn of the twentieth century, you can see just how bad of an idea this was. From noon until dark, Burnside sent wave after wave of Union soldiers toward the Heights, but none got within forty yards of the Confederate line. The field of attack was raked “as with a fine-toothed comb,” a Confederate artilleryman reported.3 A Union soldier recalled: “Our men were slaughtered like sheep. The whole plain was covered with blankets, haversacks, wounded men and dead men.”4 In the course of a single hour of battle, the Union army lost almost 3,000 soldiers. All told, it lost between 6,000 and 8,000 men on that field of the battle. A Virginia infantryman pitied the Union soldiers. “What chance had flesh and blood to carry by storm such a position,” he asked, “garrisoned as it was with veteran soldiers? Not one chance in a million.”5 A Confederate artilleryman bragged, “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”6
But some Union soldiers did beat the odds to survive that day, including George Washington Whitman, younger brother of Walt Whitman. George Whitman enlisted in the Brooklyn Thirteenth Regiment (later the Fifty-first Regiment) in April of 1861, less than a week after the South fired on Fort Sumter. In the Battle of Fredericksburg, he made the charge against Marye’s Heights and, improbably, came away with just a small hole in his cheek. The New York newspapers, however, reported only that George Whitman was among the wounded, not the severity of the wound, or even whether he lived or died. Upon reading this news, and fearing the worst, Walt Whitman set out to find his brother.
The Battle of Fredericksburg looking down from Marye’s Heights
Whitman traveled to Fredericksburg by way of Philadelphia, where he had his pocket picked, and then Washington, D.C., where, after endless searching among military hospitals in the city, he received permission to travel to the front in Falmouth, Virginia, just outside Fredericksburg. There, Whitman found his brother, in good health and recently promoted to captain. But Whitman could not ignore the other sights of the camp, which would change utterly the course of his life.
If you got shot during the Civil War, as thousands did during the Battle of Fredericksburg, the bullet did not enter your body and pass cleanly through. Rather, it lodged there, shattering whatever bone it happened to grind its way into. By way of treatment, doctors simply amputated the injured hand, arm, foot, or leg, usually within twenty-four hours of the injury, before the wound could become infected. Outside the field hospitals where doctors performed these surgeries, the amputated limbs tended to pile up. Such was Whitman’s first exposure to war. “One of the first things that met my eyes in camp,” Whitman wrote his mother in December 1862, “was a heap of feet, arms, legs, & c. under a tree in front of a hospital, the Lacy house.”7
Used as a field hospital after the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Lacy House, also called Chatham Mansion, still stands, as does the tree that sheltered the heap of amputated limbs. (On my visit, I stood beneath the tree, then felt like an idiot because all I could do was stand there.) After finding his brother, Whitman returned to Lacy House to visit the wounded. In an article published in the New York Times in 1864, he recalled the scene in more detail:
Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion, on the banks of the Rappahannock, immediately opposite Fredericksburgh. It is used as a hospital since the battle, and seems to have received only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, toward the river, are fresh graves mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel-staves or broken board, stuck in the dirt.
The house is quite crowded, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. . . .
The Lacy House
I went through the rooms, down stairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talked to three or four, who seemed most susceptible to it, and needing it.8
While the heap of amputated limbs may attract our attention, the more important detail, as far as Whitman’s life is concerned, is the men who lay wounded or dying in the hospital. Whitman, it turns out, could not turn his back to such need. He devoted the next three years of his life to meeting it.
Instead of returning to Brooklyn, Whitman lingered for eight or nine days at the front in Virginia and then made his way back to Washington. There he found a job as a copyist in the Office of the Paymaster. By day, he copied government documents. By afternoon and night, he visited sick and wounded soldiers in the dozens of army hospitals that sprouted up in the city. Over the course of the war, Whitman estimated that he visited eighty thousand to a hundred thousand soldiers.
Whitman’s devotion to these soldiers matters for a couple of reasons. It inspired some of his most moving poems. It was a heroic act of altruism. But also, and perhaps most important, Whitman’s service to sick and wounded soldiers salvaged his hope for democracy in the United States. To understate it considerably, we could use some of that hope today.
Speaking for myself, nothing—not death, not money, not sex—provides such daily doses of malaise as the dysfunctional workings of our democracy and its failure to address—and occasionally even to acknowledge—the most pressing issues of our time. As I began writing the first draft of this chapter, in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Congress had just failed to pass even token gun control measures, like expanded background checks for gun buyers, a ban on assault weapons, or a ban on high-capacity magazines. This despite the fact that, as polls showed, an overwhelming majority of Americans support such measures.9 Not long after, in one of the more bizarre (and smelly) chapters in the history of American democracy, Republicans shut down the government for sixteen days in a last-ditch effort to undo the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Nothing except a great big expensive mess came of it. If, as the great American philosopher John Dewey believed, democracy is a machine for solving the problems a community faces, then as the examples of gun control and the government shutdown suggest, and countless more examples could confirm, our machine is kaput.10 It lies smoking on the side of the road. You pass it on your way to work.
As it happens, Whitman also suffered serious misgivings about democracy. Although we remember him as the poet of democracy and America, he was also, at times, their harshest critic. In this chapter I explore what saddened and angered Whitman about democracy in his day in order to see whether it bears any resemblance to what saddens and angers us about ours today. Ironically, Whitman found the cure for his malaise about democracy in the Civil War, when actually existing democracy violently and spectacularly failed. Specifically, he found his cure in the army hospitals, where the casualties from democracy’s failure washed up. Yet when Whitman describes his hopes for democracy in the United States, he is really just describing what he had already seen in the wards and among the wounded soldiers of the army hospitals. I ask what Whitman saw in those great army hospitals that sustained his faith in democracy. I do so in the hopes that it might sustain ours, too.
In later years, Whitman liked to say that the war saved him.11 When it comes to our ailing faith in democracy in the United States, Whitman in the war could well save us.
Man is a political animal, Aristotle wrote, and Whitman, strange as it may seem, was no exception.12 In his twenties, he was making a nice career for himself in the Democratic Party machine that ruled New York City. He published his early poems and short stories in their newspapers. He stumped for their presidential candidates. He once addressed a crowd of fifteen thousand at a party rally in City Hall Park. He wrote for and edited their newspapers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He even knew his way around Tammany Hall.
But slavery drove a wedge between Whitman and his party. Whitman belonged to the “Barnburner” faction of the Democrats, which opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories the United States acquired during the Mexican War. By contrast, the “Hunker” faction sided with Southern Democrats who hoped to expand slavery beyond the South. When the Hunkers won control of the Democratic Party, Whitman was politically vulnerable. In 1848, he was fired from his post as editor of the Daily Eagle. As a result, Whitman lost his taste for the compromises and betrayals of organized politics. From 1849 to 1855, except for one or two poems aimed at Doughfaces, Northern Democrats who favored the interests of Southern slaveholders, for the most part Whitman retired from politicking and journalism.
Of course, the poetry Whitman composed during the first half of 1850s had a political shade, including his unequivocal denunciations of slavery, his seemingly infinite capacity to sympathize with others, and his cheerleading for liberty, equality, and democracy. On the eve of the Civil War, too, he brought out the third edition of Leaves of Grass, which he hoped would hold the country together when all else—courts, constitutions, force—failed.
Despite going silent on most matters political for most of the 1850s, Whitman did eventually return to the subject in a remarkable series of essays written in the second half of the 1860s, which he later brought out as a book in 1871 called Democratic Vistas. In that book, he has some astonishingly jaundiced things to say about the state of democracy in his time. Before turning to what Whitman thought would save American democracy from its illnesses, then, it is worth exploring what he thought was making it sick—and might even finish it off.
Writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, Whitman worried that the United States would remain internally divided, something less than a fully integrated nation. “The fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close,” Whitman writes, “continually haunts me.”13 No “fervid and tremendous IDEA,” as Whitman put it, held the country together.14 And the one idea that did seem to hold the country together, its devotion to material prosperity, struck him as shortsighted, a means without an end.
In addition to the irreconcilable conflict between regions of the country, Whitman also feared the irreconcilable conflict that he saw developing between groups within the same regions of the country. Prophetically, Whitman could see the clashes between workers and employers that would soon, in less than a decade, overwhelm the country. (In 1877, a local railroad strike developed into the first national strike in American history. By the end of it, a hundred people had died and millions of dollars in property had been destroyed. Things only got worse after that.) “Even to-day,” Whitman writes, “amid these whirls . . . that problem, the labor question, begin[s] to open like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year.”15 “What prospect have we?” he asks, already sounding defeated.16 In the original edition of the book, he was even grimmer. “The immense problem of the relation, adjustment, conflict, between Labor and its status and pay, on the one side, and the Capital of employers on the other side—loom[s] up over These States like an ominous, limitless, murky cloud, perhaps before long to overshadow all.”17
In addition to the Labor Question, Whitman worried about what he elsewhere referred to as the Poverty Question. By the Poverty Question, he meant the crucial but unanswered question of whether democracy could coexist with large numbers of what he calls “the very poor, the ignorant, and . . . those out of business.”18 He somewhat improbably lumps these figures together because, for him, they have no attachment to the country, no concern for it, and vice versa. As I discussed in the second chapter, Whitman believed that democracy required prosperous citizens because only those who have an economic stake in a country will have a political stake in it. His analogy, as usual, was the celestial forces of the universe. Planets in a far-flung solar system are held together by gravity. In a far-flung democracy like the United States, something—for Whitman, shared prosperity—would need to hold otherwise diffuse individuals together. If it did not, if people were left out of prosperity—if, that is, they were poor—then they would float free of the gravitational hold of others and their nation. The poor would have, or so Whitman feared, no attraction toward their country, and the country, in turn, no attraction toward them. Through no fault of their own, the poor made for poor citizens, and their indifference to politics impoverished democracy.
Whitman has one more serious concern, which I address in a moment, but I should pause here to note that his misgivings will, alas, ring loudly true today. We too have been haunted by the ghost of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors. For proof, look no further than our maps of blue and red states, memorably rendered after the 2004 Presidential Election as “The United States of Canada” and “Jesusland.” To be sure, those maps exaggerate our regional differences. Not everyone in Pickens County, Georgia, votes for a Republican president, and not everyone in Berkshire Country, Massachusetts, votes for a Democratic one. And most people, in most states, say that religion is important to their lives. More accurate maps show pockets of blue and pockets of red amid a sea of deep, dark purple. Still, many of us cannot quite shake the sense that the West Coast, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast constitute one country, and that the interior, including the South, constitutes another. At times, especially when the solid South reports its election results, it can feel like the Civil War never ended. Rather, to reverse the famous von Clausewitz maxim, politics simply became the continuation of war by other means.
Those regions perhaps feel divided because the political parties that by and large represent them have definitively grown more divided. At no point in recent history have Democrats thought less of Republicans and Republicans thought less of Democrats. As Whitman feared, no fervid and tremendous IDEA holds us together—unless you count our self-righteous contempt for one another.
True, most of us, Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners, come together in a heartfelt if vaguely articulated devotion to liberal democracy, and we should not underestimate that shared commitment. But like a commitment to material prosperity, a commitment to liberal democracy can seem like a means without a clearly articulated end. No doubt some may prefer it that way. The great advantage of liberal democracy is that it leaves each of us more or less free to pursue the ends we feel deserve our efforts. But liberal democracy can also leave us, as Whitman feared, without a common skeleton, with nothing, no virtue or set of virtues, to knit us together. We lack, as Whitman put it, a “moral identity.”19 Americans may revere one moral foundation or another—selflessness, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, respect for the sacred—but we cannot agree on a single one or a single cocktail of them all.20 To that extent, we remain a democracy, but not a country that represents anything more than the combined and competing self-interests of its inhabitants.
To be sure, we have made some progress in the other realms of which Whitman despaired. As Whitman imagined it, the labor question no longer overshadows all. Workers strike less often than they ever have, and when they do, they do not, as they did starting in 1877, get shot by the hundreds or destroy property by the millions. Yet that does not mean the labor question is a settled one. It has simply settled down. Instead, we have class inequalities without the class conflict. We still struggle with the question of workers and their status and pay—and what this question means for democracy. As legions of journalists, economists, and protesters almost constantly remind us, economic inequality in the United States has risen to levels not seen for almost a century.
Much the same could be said for the Poverty Question. Here, what Whitman feared has largely come to pass. As measured by voting, the poor remain only marginally connected to their country. Among eligible voters aged 25 to 44 who live in families with incomes below $20,000, only 43 percent reported having voted in November of 2012. By contrast, nearly 80 percent of eligible voters aged 25 to 44 who live in families with incomes above $150,000 said they voted.21 For Whitman, this disparity matters. A majority of the very poor do not participate in the selection of those who will represent them in government. It should not surprise us then that their interests, for the most part, go unrepresented. But it should concern us, as it did Whitman, that a majority of the poor would feel so little connection to their democracy that they could not be bothered to vote. By Whitman’s standard, any such democracy is a failure, one in name only.
To most of us, much of this—the divided American public, the economic and political inequalities of modern American democracy—will not come as a great surprise. Moreover, most of us will readily agree with Whitman that such things are blots on our democracy. Below, I let Whitman have his say about how he thinks we ought to clear up such blots, though like most critics he is better at spotting problems than solving them. By far, though, the most surprising part of Whitman’s diagnosis of democracy in his day—and one that still surprises today—is not what he has to say about the divisions in American democracy, whether between regions or between classes, but what he has to say about the American people in and of themselves.
Whitman has a well-deserved reputation as the champion of the common man. But by the second half of the 1860s, when he wrote Democratic Vistas, he had his doubts—to say the least—about the people, about the ordinary Americans who would form American democracy. Whitman tells us that he wrote Democratic Vistas after reading the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s 1867 essay, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” In the essay, Carlyle attacks what he calls “swarmery.” By swarmery, Carlyle means what we would today call groupthink. For Carlyle, the Swarm, the conventional wisdom, more than anything else championed Democracy. But they had no real basis for that belief, Carlyle charges, only faith that it must be so. Writing in response to the Reform Act of 1867, which extended the vote in England to most workers in towns and cities, Carlyle attacked both democracy and those who reflexively swore by it:
Inexpressibly delirious seems to me, at present in my solitude, the puddle of Parliament and Public upon what it calls the “Reform Measure;” that is to say, the calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article.22
When you define democracy as “blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, and amenability to beer and balderdash,” you will not likely think—as Carlyle did not—that the more the better. To put it another way, Carlyle asserts that the cure for what ails England—“the universal rottenness, and quagmire of mendacities”—is surely not what sickened it in the first place.23 You do not treat cancer with more cancer, and for Carlyle, democracy is just that, a cancer. It is a malignant growth that starts small but soon spreads to the rest of the body politic, destroying life as it progresses. Under democracy, Carlyle fears, “every question and interest of mankind” was to be decided by “Count of Heads,” but nothing guaranteed that might (a majority) would equal right.24 Just the opposite. Foolishness, Carlyle believed, not wisdom, usually resided in the crowd.
Think what you will about Carlyle, he is right about one thing: no one says this about democracy anymore. At least not out loud. No one did then, either. And whereas Whitman ultimately disagrees with Carlyle over the wisdom—or lack thereof—of democracy, he concedes that he shares some of Carlyle’s misgivings. “I was at first roused to much anger and abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle,” Whitman writes, “so insulting to the theory of America—but happening to think afterwards how I had more than once been in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently cast, and seen persons and things in the same light, (indeed some might say there are signs of the same feeling in these Vistas)—I have since read it again . . . with respect.”25
If anything, Whitman understates how much his mood in Democratic Vistas at times resembles Carlyle’s. Indeed, his denunciations of democracy and its various constituents come as a shock. Early on, sounding very much like Carlyle, he acknowledges “the people’s crudeness, vice, caprices.”26 Later, in a long passage that occurs early in the book, he expands on these criticisms:
Society, in these States, is canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten. Political, or law-made society, is also. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously enfeebled or ungrown.27
Yet Whitman was just warming to his theme. He continues:
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States not believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling.28
Whitman tells us that he has it on good authority, from “an acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investigate frauds,” that
the depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration.
And just when you find yourself grateful that at least the judiciary escapes Whitman’s wrath, he adds: “and the judiciary is tainted.”29 Shoot. “The great cities,” Whitman writes, “reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism.”30 “The best class we show,” he says, after attacking those interested in nothing but “pecuniary gain,” “is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians.”31
But it gets worse. Everyone expects government and businessmen to disappoint. No surprises there. No, what truly shocks a reader of Whitman’s essay is what he says about the common man. “Confess,” he writes, as though willing himself and his readers to admit something they would rather not,
that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas’d, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoy’d), probably the meanest to be seen in the world.32
In truth, I find it hard to believe that Whitman could write these passages, especially the last. It seems so out of character; so petty, so prim, and so full of contempt. Abnormal libidousness? This from a man who boasted of making love to his own soul?33 And lack of manners? From a man who claimed to “cock my hat as I please indoors or out”?34 Where is the poet who speaks lovingly of the “divine average”?35 Where is the Whitman who heard America singing? Gone, apparently, washed away by the stench given off by American democracy and the infidels and jezebels who constitute it.
Perhaps I do not want to believe that Whitman wrote these passages because these doubts about the people hit a little too close to home. From day to day, I might lament what the filibuster and gerrymandering are doing to democracy in the United States, or marvel at how far off the rails the Republican Party can apparently go. And I might further bemoan how, as a result of all these developments, little gets done in our democracy concerning the problems that we do talk about, like unemployment and the deficit, and even less gets done about the truly perilous problems besetting our country, like childhood poverty, economic inequality, and global warming, to name but three of the injustices and ticking time bombs we currently face. Yet every so often, usually come election season, or when I think about the audience for reality TV or, worse, the hordes eager to take their turn on it, or if I wander into a Walmart, I stumble onto a less comforting thought. Namely, that perhaps the common man (and woman) is not as noble or as wise as I have wanted to think or been led to believe.
This elitism mortifies me, not least because it cuts against the grain of everything I hold dear. Many of us on the political left, and I am guiltier than most, might as well be stuck in the 1930s, when every man is a Forgotten Man and no populism can possibly be populist enough. My heart flutters every time I see Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech painting from 1943, with its undistinguished yet Lincoln-esque common man rising to address, humbly but no doubt wisely, his fellow citizens at a town hall meeting, and I would rather not think about how the portrait may distort reality. (Today, that man is likely to bring an assault weapon to the meeting.) In other words, for those of us raised on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, in which angelic common men and women battle diabolic capitalists and their racist minions, it pains us to be reminded, especially from someone like Whitman, that the world does not divide as neatly as we would like between the noble and the barbaric, the pure and the rotten, the good and the bad, the folk and the elite. People can inspire you, but they can also disappoint you.
At first glance Democratic Vistas does not save your vision of democracy—it sours it still further. Whitman describes exactly how democracy fails, and you realize that it has continued to fail in much the same ways since he wrote about it over 150 years ago. Rather than relieving our malaise about democracy in the United States, Whitman piles it on. If American democracy disgusted someone as sanguine as Whitman, what chance do I have?
Yet Whitman did not write Democratic Vistas just to air his grievances against democracy, or to stoke our occasional dismay at the benighted antics of everyday God-fearing Americans. Rather, dismay is simply his starting place. In general, Whitman seeks to defend democracy from critics like Carlyle and from the cynical and misanthropic moods that Whitman occasionally shares with Carlyle. Happily, in doing so, he does ease us of some of our worst fears about democracy.
Given all that Whitman observes about the failings of democracy in the United States, and the failings of its ordinary citizens, you might wonder how he can possibly go on to defend American democracy. Yet defend democracy he does, and the answer as to how, given the aspersions he casts on the present, and the people who make it up, lies in his title: Democratic Vistas, with an emphasis on Vista, the long view, the far-off.
Ingeniously, Whitman argues that the justification for democracy is not that people can wisely rule themselves now, today, but that democracy will give people the opportunity to develop into the kind of people who can wisely rule themselves tomorrow, or someday anyway. “We endow the masses with the suffrage,” he writes, “for their own sake.”36 Refuse them that opportunity, though, and they will remain as “full of perverse maleficence” as ever, and as unfit to rule as ever.37 That is, Whitman does not so much defend actually existing democracy in the United States as he defends what democracy might develop into in the future.38 “America,” he writes at the outset of the book, “counts, as I reckon, for her justification and success (for who, as yet, dare claim success?) almost entirely on the future,” adding, “Nor, is that hope unwarranted.”39
Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech, 1943
Whitman can look to the future because he thinks the present has gotten some things right. Like many other people, then and now, Whitman thinks that when it comes to the form of government you could not do much better than representative democracy. Whitman believes that the United States is not likely to improve on what he calls “the political foundation rights of immense masses of people.”40 He reveres “the Declaration of Independence and, as it began and has now grown, with its amendments, the Federal Constitution.”41
Unlike those who might agree with him on this point, Whitman does not believe that representative democracy triumphs over other forms of government because it maintains order, secures property, or enables material prosperity, nor even because it honors the inalienable rights of man. It does do these things, but, to be judged a success, it has to do more. It has to create a thoroughly democratic culture, the purpose of which, in turn, would be to create thoroughly democratic citizens. “The President is up there in the White House for you,” Whitman writes in an early poem, “it is not you who are here for him,” and he means, of course, that the government, including the President, is supposed to represent you, not the other way around.42 As Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, in lines that Whitman immediately recognized as brilliant, we have “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” But Whitman placed special emphasis on the “for the people” part of that equation. Government exists, he believes, and the President is up there in the White House, for your sake, to enable your development. Only democracy can give individuals the opportunity—and the responsibility—to develop as individuals.
This is why Whitman is so concerned, in Democratic Vistas and elsewhere, with the moral conscience (or its lack thereof) among ordinary Americans—because that is the final proof of democracy. He believes that “mentality, taste, belief” matter “far more than the popular political suffrage” and produce “results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses.”43 In other words, who we are, and not who or what we vote for, is what truly matters. And who we are matters because if you get the character right, everything else—voting, lawmaking, and law-enforcing—will come out right, too. “That which really balances and conserves the social and political world,” he says, “is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, &c.”44 To put it another way, laws do not keep the peace, stop the rush to war, or build a just society. People do.
Below I say which virtues, and which ones in particular, Whitman thought made for a good character, and for a good democracy. For the moment, however, what matters is how Whitman thought those virtues would come about: who made them, where they came from, and how—and who—the people would learn them from.
The answer to the question of where virtues would come from, laughable as it may seem, is poets. And Whitman is dead serious. In fact, if you look hard, you can almost see his point. If, like Whitman, you believe that who people are matters for democracy far more than whom they vote for, and that voting might even be the least part of democracy, then you will take more than a passing interest in how people form their characters. For Whitman, this formation happens in and through the family, which explains what, to our ears, seems like his creepy obsession with motherhood in Democratic Vistas. Equally important, he believed people formed their characters in and through culture, which made it more important than perhaps anyone suspected.
Whitman acknowledges the many forms of culture that shape people: art, schools, theology, theater, oratory. But he thinks that literature matters the most: “Few are aware how the great literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes, at will.”45 To most observers, Whitman writes, world history seems to turn on big events: wars, uprisings, downfalls, new inventions, and the doings of heroic figures. “These of course play their part,” he admits, “yet it may be a single new thought, imagination, abstract principle, even literary style, fit for the time, put in shape by some great literatus, and projected among mankind, may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous merely political, dynastic, or commercial overturn.”46 In short, ideas matter. And the creator of ideas matters, too.
Poets, Percy Shelley observed in a phrase Whitman would have eagerly endorsed, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The problem for Whitman is that though the United States may have evolved politically beyond feudalism, its culture, including its poetry, remained thoroughly feudal. For example, Whitman reveres Shakespeare. But he thinks that Shakespeare, like the other artists and writers of the feudal past, is “poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.”47 He is “artist and singer of feudalism in its sunset.”48 Shakespeare, however, is just the tip of the iceberg: “The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of prince’s favors.”49 By “ultramarine,” Whitman simply means coming from beyond the sea, and to him, that is the problem. “What has fill’d, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy” he writes, “furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign.”50 Even his contemporary artists and writers, Whitman observes, remain in thrall to feudalism. “Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse?” He responds, answering his own question, “I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.”51
Therefore, what the country needed, what the age demanded, was not Shakespeare or genteel little American poets but what Whitman calls “the poet of the modern.”52 In short, democratic poets for a democratic people. “Our fundamental want to-day in the United States,” he believes,
with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision . . . radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing . . . a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States.53
Whitman’s metaphor is of foundations. A nation without a great literature is like a house without a foundation. Neither will stand for long. “For know you not, dear, earnest reader,” he continues, “that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote—and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?”54 For Whitman, poets would supply the main things.
Alas, Whitman’s appeal to the future and to the poets may not reassure you about American democracy. Speaking as the vista toward which Whitman looked, democracy in our time does not differ all that much from democracy in his, and this may darken the mood considerably. If Whitman perceived these problems (regional and class divisions, the moral turpitude of the people) in his day, and they continue to bedevil us, then the outlook has not improved. To switch metaphors, these must not be bugs in the democratic software but features. If we endowed the masses with suffrage for their own sake, as Whitman argued, it is not altogether clear what uses they have made of it. For anyone who follows American politics closely, the spectacle is still appalling.
Worse still, not only have we failed to arrive where Whitman said we must. His hope for what would take us there, poetry, has not fared well, either. If you think about it for any time at all, Whitman’s argument seems absurd. The spectacle of American democracy, then and now, is appalling, and the cure for this spectacle is . . . poetry? Why not juggling? Or baking? Or line dancing? At least Americans like those things. And I say that as someone who loves poetry and who tries to share that love with others. But what I have learned from my attempt to share it with others, at least in the classroom, is that it is hard enough to get people to read poetry, let alone understand it, let alone let it alter who they are and, far down the road, whom they vote for.
In sum, if our hopes for a balanced budget, ending poverty, and surviving global warming rely on poets, God help us.
So Whitman’s thesis has some problems. Nevertheless, I think there is something to what he says. To start, Whitman’s theory of democracy would invite us to shift our attention away from the back-and-forth of everyday political life and toward the more fundamental issue of character, and I find that change of outlook extraordinarily refreshing. Like Whitman, we might be better off taking the long view. (At last, that reason you have been looking for not to read the New York Times!) After all, if Whitman is right, what truly influences politics in a democracy is character, and character does not change over the course of a day, week, month, or even an election cycle. It changes over the course of a generation, and it changes in unpredictable ways and for unpredictable reasons. In other words, we could, following Whitman, take our eye off the effect (daily political life) and focus on the cause (the character of the American people). The view may be no better, but it could not be much worse.
Further, if Whitman is right that intuition and character ultimately matter, then perhaps he is also right that poets—or culture more generally—are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the world. How do people form the intuitions that lie behind their beliefs? At least in part from what they read, especially when they are young. Or from their parents, who also draw on what they read. So what and who should they read? Poets, says Whitman, and perhaps we should not laugh so quickly. After all, he is essentially describing the premise of this book in general and this chapter in particular. Our democracy is ailing. What do our poets have to say?
You can try this out for yourself. For example, what kind of person would you be if you read Whitman’s poetry? You can guess based on the previous chapters of this book. For Whitman, an ideal democratic citizen—and a careful reader of his poetry—would intuitively believe in the immortality of the soul and not fear death. Why might this matter? Whitman believed that, in addition to getting the metaphysics wrong, conventional religions did not instill independence and self-reliance in their practitioners, virtues that were crucial for democracy. An ideal democratic citizen would value money and making money but also know its limits. He or she would know enough not to devote his or her life to it. And an ideal democratic citizen would believe in the sanctity of our bodies and our sexuality and use them accordingly. Moreover, an ideal citizen would recognize that the communal nature of our bodies—remember “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”—means we are more or less equal, at least when it comes to what (our souls, our bodies, our status as citizens) matters the most. We would not believe that anyone was intrinsically better than anyone else or had more or less right to anything on earth than anyone else. An ideal American citizen, that is, would swear by equality.
Would our democracy be better off if each of us believed these things? Would our fights over taxes and gay marriage burn off like the morning fog? Possibly, but you could believe what Whitman tells you and still think that taxes are robbery by another name, that government has grown too big, or that the poor leech off the rest of us.
Yet there is one more virtue that Whitman articulates in his poetry that, if taken seriously, would do more to cure our democracy of its various ills than any other virtue he describes. Whitman referred to this virtue by various names: adhesiveness, companionship, comradeship, manly love. He developed it over the course of the “Calamus” sequence of poems, and he developed it on the eve of and in response to the divisions portended by the Civil War. As late as Democratic Vistas, he still described it as essential for democracy: “It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.”55 Indeed, when Whitman tries to imagine what America would look like in one hundred years, he predicts that “comradeship” will be “fully express’d.” He believes that it, and nothing else, “promised . . . the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States.”56
What is more, he believed he had witnessed the flowering of comradeship on the battlefields and especially in the hospitals of the Civil War, where he spent countless hours tending sick and wounded soldiers. To see what he means by comradeship, our hope and safety, let us, like Whitman, go and make our hospital visit.
Since opening in 1840, the Patent Office Building in downtown Washington, half a dozen blocks east of the White House and just north of the Mall, has done many duties. It began life by housing and displaying models of the thousands of patents the federal government issued over the years. In the 1840s, it was also a “Museum of Curiosities.” Tourists came to see the original Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin’s printing press, George Washington’s sword, and Andrew Jackson’s uniform. In the 1850s, the Patent Office Building expanded and took in other offices under the Department of the Interior: the General Land Office, Pension Office, Census Bureau, and Office of Indian Affairs. (For about six months in 1865, until he was fired for being the author of an indecent book, Whitman worked as a copyist for the Office of Indian Affairs. His desk was in the basement of the East Wing of the Patent Office Building.) In March 1865, the building hosted President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. In 1932, the Patent Office left the building, and the Civil Service Commission moved in. In 1955, President Eisenhower saved the building from demolition, and today it is home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.57
The U.S. Patent Office, ca. 1855
Interesting as they are, none of these purposes, not even Whitman’s basement office, drew me to the building in the middle of a long, gray Washington winter. Instead, I came because the Patent Office Building is one of the last, and certainly the grandest, of the buildings that served as a military hospital during the Civil War. From late 1861 to April 1863, thousands of sick and wounded soldiers, including casualties from the Battle of Fredericksburg, passed through the building, lying in cots among the cases displaying patent models. It was also in the Patent Office Building—and other, now destroyed hospitals—that Whitman began his service to sick and wounded soldiers during the Civil War.
In one of his first articles for the New York Times, in February 1863, Whitman described the scene:
A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings, the Patent office, was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded, and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there several times. It was a strange, solemn, and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I went sometimes at night to soothe and relieve particular cases; some, I found, needed a little cheering up and friendly consolation at that time, for they went to sleep better afterwards. Two of the immense apartments are filled with high and ponderous glass cases crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine, or invention it ever entered into the mind of man to conceive, and with curiosities and foreign presents. Between these cases were lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide, and quite deep, and in these were placed many of the sick; besides a great long double row of them up and down through the middle of the hall. Many of them were very bad cases, wounds and amputations. Then there was a gallery running above the hall, in which there were beds also. It was, indeed, a curious scene at night when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the sick, the gallery above and the marble pavement under foot; the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in the various degrees; occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repressed; sometimes a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eyes, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friends, no relative—such were the sights but lately in the Patent office.58
Soldiers lying in bunks in the Patent Office before the building was turned into a hospital (1861)
That last detail—that the poor fellow died with “no friends, no relative”—seems to have touched Whitman the most, for soon enough he would commit his life to befriending these soldiers.
In his journal from this period, he jotted a couple of notes from his January visit to the Patent Office Hospital:
Patent Office Hospital Ward 1 & 2—bed 53 James E.
Woodmansee (co. C 114th N.Y. Rev. Ray Woodmansee
Norwich Chenango co. N.Y.
61. Camp. (something to read a good book)
Saml. F Taries co. G 1st Delaware
+ 27 wants some figs and a book and some cakes ginger
+ 23 & 24 wants some horehound candy59
The entry was obviously written quickly, but you can tell a great deal about what Whitman did in the hospitals from it. The first is an address. Presumably, James Woodmansee asked Whitman to write his family, who likely did not know that he was wounded or how he fared. (Norwich is the county seat of Chenago County, New York.) “Camp.” probably means Campbell, who apparently wanted “something to read a good book,” as did the soldier in bed 27, who also wanted some figs and cakes ginger. Whitman seems to have merely noted Samuel F. Taries’s name, perhaps so he would remember him on subsequent visits. The soldiers in beds 23 and 24, meanwhile, wanted some horehound candy, a throat lozenge. Usually, on his return visit, a day or a few days later, Whitman would bring the men what they asked for. As these entries suggest, he was less a nurse to the soldiers, and more a wandering friend. It suited him perfectly.
By the end of the war, Whitman estimated that he had made some six hundred visits like the one he made to the Patent Office Hospital in January 1863. On each visit, he performed many of the same tasks. He would hand out paper and stamped envelopes so soldiers could write home, or he would write letters for those who could not. He handed out tobacco, newspapers, fruit, and small sums of money. He lent out books. Once, on a hot day in June, he bought ten gallons of ice cream and distributed it among the patients of Carver Hospital. He paid for the gifts out of his own salary, and others raised money on his behalf, though his reputation sometimes hurt his cause. Ralph Waldo Emerson tried (and failed) to raise money from among his Boston circle for Whitman’s hospital work. “There is a prejudice ag[ain]st you here among the ‘fine ladies’ & gentlemen of the transcendental School,” Emerson’s friend, James Redpath, wrote Whitman, reporting on Emerson’s efforts. “It is believed that you are not ashamed enough of your reproductive organs.”60
The most important aid Whitman offered, however, usually required no money at all. Occasionally, he would dress wounds. (His moving poem “The Wound Dresser” is about just this.) To those who asked, he would, he reported, offer “passages from the Bible, expounding them, prayer at the bedside, explanations of doctrine, & c.” Of this last service, he knowingly observed, “I think I see my friends smiling at this confession, but I was never more in earnest in my life.”61 (The joke is that though Whitman had a spiritual side, he was never a conventional Christian.) He would declaim poems, though never his own. (He seems to have told no one of his own poems.) With a large group of soldiers, he played Twenty Questions.
Often, he simply sat with soldiers who, sick or wounded, faraway from home, some for the first time in their lives, were understandably frightened and dejected. “Most of them,” Whitman observed of the soldiers, “are entirely without friends or acquaintances here—no familiar face, and hardly a word of judicious sympathy or cheer, through their sometimes long and tedious sickness, or the aggravated pangs of their wounds.”62 More than anything else, Whitman offered soldiers judicious sympathy and cheer. In short, he gave himself.
His accounts of these scenes are heartrending. In his Memoranda During the War, published in 1875 but drawn mostly from his notebooks and diaries of the period, he writes:
In one bed a young man, Marcus Small, Co. K, Seventh Maine—sick with dysentery and typhoid fever—pretty critical, too—I talk with him often—he thinks he will die—looks like it indeed. I write a letter for him home to East Livermore, Maine—I let him talk to me a little, but not much, advise him to keep very quiet—do most of the talking myself—stay quite awhile with him, as he holds on to my hand—talk to him in a cheering, but slow, low, and measured manner—talk about his furlough, and going home as soon as he is able.63
Like most soldiers in the Washington hospitals, Marcus Small fought for the North, but Whitman visited everyone, even those from the South. Although he despised the political leaders of the South, whom he blamed, along with spineless politicians in the North, for causing what he invariably referred to as the Secession War, Whitman could not withhold sympathy from Southern soldiers, who, wounded and captured on the battlefield, also washed up in Washington hospitals. “I staid tonight a long time,” Whitman writes,
Mathew Brady’s photograph of Walt Whitman, ca. 1862
by the bed-side of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years, W.S.P., (2nd Md. Southern,) very feeble, right leg amputated, can’t sleep hardly at all—has taken a great deal of morphine, which, as usual, is costing more than it comes to. Evidently very intelligent and well bred—very affectionate—held on to my hand, and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave. As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, “I hardly think you know who I am—I don’t wish to impose upon you—I am a rebel soldier.” I said I did not know that, but it made no difference. . . . . . . . Visiting him daily for about two weeks after that, while he lived (death had mark’d him, and he was quite alone,) I loved him much, always kiss’d him, and he did me.64
Both too much, and not enough, can be made of these gestures of affection between Whitman and hospitalized soldiers. As I detail in the chapter on Whitman’s sexuality, such gestures between men, while not exactly common, were not unusual, either. In any case, few people seem to have thought of them as sexual, and that context seems even less appropriate here. To be sure, as I will underscore in a moment, Whitman relished the affection he could show to these young men, and the affection they showed him in return. In one or two cases, he seems to have formed close personal relationships with soldiers he visited in the hospitals and who subsequently recovered from their wounds or illnesses. And it is true enough that his thinking about “adhesiveness,” manly love, and comradeship prepared him well to offer the affection that soldiers apparently needed and returned. But I doubt very much, as critics sometimes imply, that Whitman held the hands of dying young men because he viewed it as an opportunity to act on his homosexual impulses, and the suggestion that he did seems to cheapen what he did do, which is to comfort very lonely, very scared young men.65
Given the time he spent with them, Whitman was often with soldiers when they died. When they did, he occasionally wrote their families with the news or with more details. Although probably too long to be quoted in full, I will because these letters reveal a great deal about Whitman and his service during the war. In May of 1865, for example, a Pennsylvania soldier, Frank H. Irwin, died, and Whitman wrote his mother not long after:
Dear Madam: No doubt you and Frank’s friends have heard the sad fact of his death in Hospital here, through his uncle, or the lady from Baltimore, who took his things. (I have not seen them, only heard of them visiting Frank.) I will write you a few lines—as a casual friend that sat by his death bed.
Your son, Corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near Fort Fisher, Virginia, March 25th, 1865—the wound was in the left knee, pretty bad. He was sent up to Washington, was receiv’d in Ward C, Armory Square Hospital, March 28th—the wound became worse, and on the 4th of April the leg was amputated a little above the knee—the operation was performed by Dr. Bliss, one of the best surgeons in the army—he did the whole operation himself—there was a good deal of bad matter gather’d—the bullet was found in the knee. For a couple of weeks afterwards he was doing pretty well. I visited and sat by him frequently, as he was fond of having me. The last ten or twelve days of April I saw that his case was critical. He previously had some fever, with cold spells. The last week in April he was much of the time flighty—but always mild and gentle. He died first of May. The actual cause of death was Pyaemia, (the absorption of the matter in the system instead of its discharge.)
Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing, & c. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him, and soothing him, and he liked to have me—liked to put his arm out and lay his hand on my knee—would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of—said, “I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.” At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem’d to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word or thought or idea escaped him. It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his sense was not half as good as Frank’s delirium.
He was perfectly willing to die—he had become very weak and had suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpass’d. And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is a text, “God doeth all things well,”—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.
I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him. I am merely a friend visiting the Hospitals occasionally to cheer the wounded and sick.66
I have stopped reading this letter aloud in class when I teach Whitman because I do not trust myself to make it through without tearing up, especially if I did not get much sleep the night before, which, for some reason, makes the tears flow more freely. What gets me is how profoundly and thoroughly decent Whitman is in reporting the death of this soldier to the soldier’s mother. Whitman does not spare—or does not seem to—any of the details of the son’s wounds. He “had suffer’d a good deal,” Whitman admits. Yet he also assures Mrs. Irwin that her son received the best care, and that everything that could be done for him was done for him. Crucially, Whitman does not ignore the tragedy of his death. But he also provides Irwin’s mother with a text, “God doeth all things well,” which, though he might not believe it, nevertheless might comfort her. The passage from Scripture also reassures Irwin’s mother that her son died for a purpose. Whitman does not specify which purpose, whether defending the Union or abolishing slavery, but the purpose was part of God’s plan. In any case, her son did not die in vain. Whitman also testifies to what I imagine every mother would want to hear of her son; namely, that he was, even in his delirium, a good person. Finally, and perhaps most important, Whitman reassures Irwin’s mother that her son did not die alone. Someone “who loved the young man”—Whitman—“sat by his death bed” and “was with him at the last.”
The letter is more than “worth while,” as Whitman puts it. Under the circumstances, you could not ask for a better letter. You believe Whitman when he says that he loved the young man, and his love almost makes the death of the young man bearable. If I had a son who died far away from me, I would want to know just the things that Whitman writes, and I would be eternally grateful that someone like Whitman was with him when he died.
After reading Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, his diary-like accounting of his Civil War years, most people come away feeling as I do, which is overcome by, perhaps slightly in awe of, Whitman’s fundamental human decency. In his First Inaugural Address, Whitman’s political hero, Abraham Lincoln, spoke of the better angels of our nature. To me, Whitman is the incarnation of that better angel.
The question, however, is what any of this has to do with democracy. Whitman’s service to soldiers during the Civil War may have been admirable, even saintly, but it does not seem political in any ordinary sense of the term. Yet Whitman certainly thought of his hospital work as a matter of democracy, and the answer as to how or why lies, I think, in his letter to the mother of Corporal Frank H. Irwin. Although he admits that he did not know the soldier’s past life, Whitman nevertheless concludes that Irwin “must have been good.” Whitman drew the same conclusion about most if not all of the young men he visited during the Civil War, and he rejoiced in the discovery and what it meant for the United States. “I now doubt whether one can get a fair sense of what this War practically is,” he wrote early in the Civil War, “or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience as this I am having.”67 Fatefully, his experience confirmed his intuitions about what he elsewhere called “the divine average,” the common man.
While once again visiting the front in Culpeper, Virginia, in February of 1864, Whitman awoke in the middle of the night to watch a line of soldiers marching back from a deployment. “It may have been odd,” Whitman remarked of the experience, “but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American common people proper. It fell upon me like a great awe.”68 “Before I went down to the Field and among the Hospitals,” Whitman admits in Memoranda During the War, “I had my hours of doubt about These States; but not since. . . . Curious as it may seem, the War, to me, proved Humanity, and proved America and the Modern.”69 The hospitals propped up his faith in the common man when everything else seemed to erode such faith. “Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the American races, north or south,” he writes in Democratic Vistas, rebuking critics of democracy like Thomas Carlyle and even himself, “to one who has been through the war in the great army hospitals.”70 With young men like Corporal Irwin, Whitman thought, democracy could not go wrong.
Specifically, Irwin and other soldiers displayed the character and the virtues that Whitman thought necessary to a democracy. After having been in the hospitals for only a few weeks, Whitman wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson that “I find the masses fully justified by close contact, never vulgar, ever calm, without greediness, no flummery, no frivolity—responding electric and without fail to affection, yet no whining—not the first unmanly whimper have I yet seen or heard.”71 And, as we have seen, Whitman wrote Irwin’s mother that “under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he [Irwin] behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate.” As these passages suggest, Whitman admired soldiers for their courage and their willingness, including those who fought for the South, to sacrifice their lives for an abstraction like freedom or union or sovereignty. By contrast, in his darker moments, he feared that most Americans thought first and foremost of their material interests, of their property, their money, and their lives, which they would never sacrifice to something as immaterial and profitless as an idea. Soldiers, however, proved him wrong. They, as he put it, proved humanity.
Whitman also admired how stoically and courageously soldiers accepted death. In his letter to Emerson, he relates that the chief surgeon in the Patent Office Hospital “told me last evening that he had not in memory one single case of a man’s meeting the approach of death, whether sudden or slow, with fear or trembling—but always of these young men meeting their death with steady composure, and often with curious readiness.”72 For someone who had previously written that “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier,” this news of soldiers composedly and readily meeting death must have warmed his heart.
In short, the soldiers whom Whitman encountered during the war seemed to embody each of the virtues he had tried to reflect—and inspire—through his poems. In doing so, they renewed his faith in the possibilities of democracy in the United States.
Perhaps the most constant and enthusiastic refrain in his descriptions of soldiers, though, is how they respond to and offer affection. In his letter to Irwin’s mother, he mentions it twice. Irwin was “affectionate” and “so sweet and affectionate.” In his letter to Emerson, the masses respond “electric and without fail to affection.” (This from the author of a poem titled “I Sing the Body Electric.”) Moreover, it—affection—is the subject of Whitman’s greatest Civil War poem, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.” The poem is spoken by a soldier who watches a fellow soldier die in battle at his side. (The speaker of the poem refers to this fellow soldier as “my son and my comrade,” which suggests that the two may be father and son, but elsewhere “son” is used metaphorically, so their relationship is not entirely clear.) Because he must continue onward in battle the living soldier can only pause to exchange a meaningful look with his dying comrade and to touch his outstretched hand. That night, however, the soldier returns to keep vigil over the body of the fallen soldier, and his address to him is heartbreaking:
Found you in death so cold, dear comrade—found your body, son of responding kisses (never again on earth responding);
Bared your face in the starlight—curious the scene—cool blew the moderate night-wind;
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading;
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet, there in the fragrant silent night;
Vigil of silence, love and death—vigil for you, my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole;
Vigil final for you, brave boy (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living—I think we shall surely meet again);
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head, and carefully under feet;
And there and then, and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited;
Ending my vigil strange with that—vigil of night and battle-field dim;
Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth responding);
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain—vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,
I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.73
You can detect a bit of Whitman in the older man who keeps vigil over the dead body of a younger man. After all, Whitman did it many times in the hospitals. Yet Whitman also admired the affection he witnessed between soldiers, which the poem tenderly portrays. Notice how the speaker repeats himself, over and over, repeats exact phrases, in fact, which suggests that he is unwilling or unable to move on from the death. Just as he was forced to leave his comrade only to return to him later, his speech leaves a phrase only to return to it later. Notice, too, the care with which the speaker buries the body. The metaphor is of sealing and sending a letter. His form is “envelop’d,” the blanket is tucked carefully over head and carefully under feet, and his body is “deposited” in the rude-dug grave, just as a letter is deposited in a mailbox. The comrade is being buried in the ground, but like a letter he is also being sent someplace, somewhere, the speaker believes, where they “shall surely meet again.”
To my way of reading it, the most striking aspect of the poem is its syntax, which might seem like an odd thing to say, but once you see it, it makes sense. Most sentences have a subject-verb-object structure. “I read the book.” “Stars stole upward.” “I buried the body.” But notice that Whitman consistently alters conventional syntax. Sentences do not proceed subject-verb-object but, usually, and somewhat awkwardly, object-subject-verb. Look at the title: “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.” Usually, one would just say “I kept a strange vigil on the field one night.” Instead, Whitman puts object (vigil) before subject (I) and verb (kept). Or later in the poem, instead of writing “I wrapt my comrade in his blanket,” he writes, “My comrade I wrapt in his blanket.” The shift, I believe, makes Whitman’s point about affection. Instead of occupying the position of authority, boldly commanding the world and its objects, as subjects usually do in sentences, the subject in the sentences of Whitman’s poem subordinates itself to the object. It serves them, just as—and here is the crucial part—the speaker subordinates himself to his object, his comrade. The form of the sentences reflects the content of the poem. Grammar becomes ethics. In both poem and syntax, what matters is not the self but the self in relation to someone or something else. At the end of the poem, normal syntax returns, almost as though once the body is in the ground the speaker needs to reassert himself as a subject. But the return to normal syntax only highlights how strange the earlier variations really are.
So what Whitman says matters, but so does how he says it. Both contribute to what I believe Whitman means by affection, manly love, adhesiveness, comradeliness, and what makes that virtue by whatever name so crucial to his notion of democracy. In affectionate relationships, you subordinate yourself to others. You put their interests above your own. Or, to put it another way, you make their interests your own. In short, you care about and for them. That is what Whitman did for soldiers, and that, in “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” is what soldiers did for each other.
For Whitman, that affection, and only that sort of affection, would form the basis of any democracy worth the name.
As discussed in the chapter on Whitman’s sexuality, around the same time that he published Democratic Vistas, he wrote: “In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west—it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future, (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union.”74 “Manly friendship,” he elsewhere observed, would have “the deepest relation to general politics.”75
This is all well and good, but what would a democracy founded on affection look like? At a very basic level, it implies a robust welfare state. In order to survive, human beings need food, shelter, clothing, warmth, and medical care. When individuals cannot, or even will not, supply those needs for themselves, we, through the mediation of the state, must supply them. Needs, the philosopher Michael Ignatieff has written, make rights, and the welfare state exists to meet those needs and honor those rights.
Yet, as Ignatieff recognizes, our needs as human beings exceed those things (food, shelter, and clothing) that merely allow us to survive. In order to flourish, we need other, less tangible things: fraternity, love, belonging, dignity, and respect. A welfare state frees each of us from charity, whether providing it or taking it. It therefore serves the needs of freedom. It does not, however, or only very indirectly, serve the needs of comradeship. Even under the most robust and generous welfare state, a society can remain a society of strangers.76 Above all, Whitman wanted to transcend that society of strangers. He did not want the state to look out for us (he lived before very many people even thought of that as a possibility), but wanted each of us to look out for the other. Or, to put it slightly differently, the state could meet some of our needs, but only comrades could meet our last and most important needs.
Consider what Whitman did and did not do for sick and wounded soldiers in the Civil War hospitals. As well as could be expected, their material needs—food, housing, medical care—were provided for by the state. What Whitman offered soldiers, by contrast, was something less yet also something more. By writing letters for them, by finding them something to read, by giving them spending money, by sitting by their side when they were frightened and alone, Whitman treated soldiers with dignity and respect. He loved them, and they loved him back. We have difficulty speaking of, say, the need for love as a right, but those unspeakable needs do not matter any less because of that. The basic needs matter first, but the other needs matter equally, if that is not too oxymoronic. Think about the corpse in “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.” It no longer needs to survive, yet it still deserves the dignity and respect offered by the surviving soldier.
Do not get me wrong. I would trade almost anything for a more robust welfare state than the one Americans currently pay for, and much in Whitman’s poetry implies the need for one and thus the right to one. But a democracy—a nation—is more than a robust welfare state. You can, for example, define democracy in a minimal way. It exists to protect the rights of individuals, to give elected leaders the legitimacy needed to make decisions on our behalf, and to grant the electorate the right to throw the bums out, which will keep the bums honest, or honest enough, anyway. Or you can define democracy in a slightly larger way. Public discussion and the popular vote is a way for us to achieve the common good, including the common good that comes from closing the distance between the wealthy and everyone else. I think most of us, especially liberals, think of democracy in this slightly larger way, and say that it succeeds to the extent that individuals participate in it and problems get solved.
But it is possible to conceive, as Whitman does, of democracy larger still. For Whitman, democracy is a way of being; in particular, it is a way of being with others. From this perspective, democracy has relatively little to do with what Congress does, what the president promises to do, what laws the Supreme Court finds constitutional or unconstitutional, who you vote for or even whether you vote or not. Instead, it has much more to do with how you approach your fellow men and women. Do you respect them? Do you acknowledge their dignity? Do you identify your interests with theirs? In short, do you love them? Not all of them, of course, not even very many, really, but enough of them that everyone is included in the chain of affection, enough so that no one gets left out. If you do, and if you are so loved, Whitman believes, then, politically speaking, everything else will take care of itself.77
In “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” a poem written before the Civil War but altered afterward, Whitman writes, “Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet.”78 Fittingly, the poem began life as one of the “Calamus” poems, those pre–Civil War poems devoted to manly love, but in later editions Whitman included it in the Drum-Taps section, his poems about the Civil War. For Whitman, democracy requires affection, and affection alone would bring about true democracy.
Sounds good, you might think, but realistically, do Americans have such affection in them today? Would a visit to the wards of a Veterans Hospital and conversations with the casualties of our own wars make us feel better about our fellow Americans or the appalling spectacle that is democracy in the United States today? I have my doubts, but not fully. Of course, I do not expect universal love to triumph any time soon, and a trip to the mall can still stoke my doubts about the common man. Tragically, too, Americans’ homophobia may have undone much of the capacity for affection to which Whitman looked to save democracy.
Even so, at bottom, I think we do care about each other, not always, and not consistently, but sometimes. In which case, we might well believe that the spectacle of democracy is as appalling to us as it was to Whitman, and perhaps that it will be appalling for the foreseeable future. But we might also draw comfort from the fact that, thanks in part to Whitman, we know where democracy in the United States must head: toward affection, toward friendship, toward a nation founded on care. I do not know how, or even whether, we as a country can get there, but I am daily grateful to Whitman for offering such a clear and compelling vision of where we must head. We might also draw comfort, as Whitman did, from the fact that though much of our politics and culture conspires against it, somewhere within them Americans have sufficient reserves of affection to get us there.
