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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.
The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:
Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,…deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.
1 “Origins of Attempted Secession,” Stovall, Floyd ed., Prose Works 1892, Vol. 2 (N.Y., 1964), pp. 426–33Google Scholar. Whitman is, it must be remembered, here writing ten years after the conclusion of the conflict. His article is in many ways a creditable piece of special pleading; he argues in mitigation of the South's responsibility for the war and attempts, by distributing the blame more or less equally between the two parties, to prepare the way for true reconciliation and a genuine reintegration of the nation. But his analysis of the causes and character of the war, although adapted to the changed national circumstances of the seventies, is thoroughly consistent, as his incorporation into his essay of material written in the fifties proves, with his original pre-war and wartime convictions.
2 “The Eighteenth Presidency,” in Holloway, Emory ed., Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters (London, 1938), p. 592Google Scholar. (Identified hereafter as EP.) Aaron, Daniel notes that the pamphlet “prefigures [Whitman's] response to the War itself” (The Unwritten War, N.Y., 1973, p. 58)Google Scholar.
3 Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War (N.Y., 1968), pp. 8–9Google Scholar. In calling it a period of “cosmic optimism” he points out that this widespread anti-institutionalism was not simply an unconsidered form of utopianism but a pertinent expression of the spirit of a capitalistic society in a period of unprecedentedly rapid economic and geographical expansion.
4 Ibid., pp. 20–21. For an explanation of why, nevertheless, the Democratic party of the fifties continued to satisfy the political aspirations of large numbers of Northerners see Collins, Bruce, “The Ideology of the Ante-Bellum Northern Democrats,” Journal of American Studies, 11 (1977), 103–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But elsewhere Collins points out that there was during that decade much more dissatisfaction with, and many more defections from, the political system than historians have generally recognized. See Collins, , “Community and Consensus in Ante-Bellum America,” The Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 640–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Rubin, Joseph Jay, The Historic Whitman (London, 1973), pp. 39–44Google Scholar. The ideals of the Locofocos (or Equal Rights Party) also permeate the 1855 Leaves: see Rubin, , “Whitman: Equal Rights in the Foreground,” in Cameron, K. W. ed., Scholars' Companion to the American Renaissance, Second Series (Hartford, 1977), Part Four, pp. 20–23Google Scholar. The “negative liberalism,” or mistrust of state power, which characterized Democratic ideology and of which the Locofoco philosophy was an extreme version, is illuminatingly discussed by Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar, Chapter V. For Leggett see Hofstadter, Richard, “William Leggett, spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy,” Political Science Quarterly, 58 (1943), 581–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The ironic contradiction which Marvin Meyers finds in Leggett, 's thinking (The Jacksonian Persuasion, Stanford, 1957Google Scholar, Chapter IX) is reproduced in Whitman (see footnote 32 below): “As a free-trade radical, William Leggett assigns all evil formally to privilege; specifically to the consequences of privileged banking. And yet he packs in so much of the emerging economic order under his condemnation of privilege that it becomes difficult to imagine the two elements detached.… For political and moral support, it must be insisted, Leggett turns not to the enterprising ‘new men’ of America but to the ‘producers of the middling and lower classes’: farmers, laborers, mechanics, and shopkeepers” (Meyers, p. 155).
6 Quoted in Rubin, p. 141.
7 This description of early Republicanism relies heavily on the classic study by Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (London, 1970)Google Scholar, especially Chapter I; and on Silbey, Joel H., The Transformation of American Politics, 1840–1860 (New Jersey, 1967)Google Scholar. The complacency of the Republicans is well characterized by Collins, “Ideology,” p. 117.
8 See Aaron, pp. 59–62.
9 Collins, “Community and Consensus,” pp. 654–58. This is also Whitman's theme in EP, pp. 586–89. Collins, by his own admission, owes a great deal to Edward Pessen's challenging thesis that Jacksonian America, far from being the Age of the Common Man, was a “less than egalitarian society”. Extension of the suffrage led not to real social, political and economic equality but to a cynical use of populist rhetoric by the ruling-class cliques who continued to dominate the major parties Pessen, , Jacksonian America, Chicago, 1969, Chapter III)Google Scholar. Analysis of prewar Brooklyn shows that in 1841 one per cent of the population owned at least forty-two per cent of the wealth, and that the rich were crammed into one square mile west of Fulton Street. Similar evidence from other American cities leads Pessen to the conclusion that “far from being an age of equality, the ante-bellum decades featured an inequality that appears to surpass anything experienced by the United States in the twentieth century” (Pessen, , Riches, Class and Power before the Civil War, London, 1973, p. 42)Google Scholar. He therefore substantially agrees with those labor leaders of the eighteen twenties and thirties whose social views so impressed both Whitman and his father, that America was “the land of class conflict” (Pessen, , Most Uncommon Jacksonians, N.Y., 1967, p. 124)Google Scholar.
10 Miller, E. H. ed., The Correspondence, Vol. I (N.Y., 1961), No. 9i (14 08 1852)Google Scholar.
11 Fredrickson, p. 56. Aaron agrees that Whitman's interpretation of the war was unique; see Aaron, Chapter IV, especially “Sounding the Tocsin,” pp. 56–59.
12 Correspondence I, No. 47 (11 May 1863).
13 In this and in other respects it is worth comparing Whitman's impressions of Washington with those of William Russell only a year or so previously. See My Civil War Diary (London, 1954), ed. Pratt, F., pp. 17–46, 188–268Google Scholar.
14 Correspondence I, No. 32. Emerson, predictably, seems to have shared Whitman's initial dislike of Washington, “that least attractive (to me) of cities” (Correspondence I, No. 30, 12 January 1863).
15 Specimen Days, ed. Stovall, Floyd, Prose Works 1892, Vol. I (N.Y., 1963), p. 27Google Scholar. (Hereafter referred to as PWI.)
16 Whitman was for some time very ambivalent in his feelings towards the great (although still unfinished) public buildings of Washington. He included in a letter to his brother Jeff detailed descriptions of “the incredible gorgeousness” of some of the rooms in the Capitol: “by far the richest and gayest, and most un-American and inappropriate ornamenting… the style is without grandeur, and without simplicity… these days I say, Jeff, all the poppy-show goddesses and all the pretty blue & gold in which the interior Capitol is got up, seems to me out of place beyond any thing I could tell” (Correspondence I, No. 36, 13 February 1863). But very shortly afterwards, on 6 March, he could describe the same interiors to the same correspondent simply as “probably the most beautiful rooms, ornamented and gilded style, in the world” (Correspondence I, No. 371).
17 Aaron, “Lincoln's Man”, pp. 69–72.
18 In his letter of 19 March 1863 to his friends Nathaniel Bloom and J. F. S. Gay he noted his change of attitude towards the city: “Washington and its points I find bear a second and third perusal, and doubtless indeed many. My first impressions, architectural etc. were not favorable; but upon the whole, the city, the spaces, buildings etc. make no unfit emblem of our country, so far, so broadly planned, everything in plenty, money & materials staggering with plenty, but the fruit of the plans, the knit, the combination yet wanting – Determined to express ourselves greatly in a capital, but no fit capital, yet here – (time, associations, wanting, I suppose) – many a hiatus yet – many a thing to be taken down and done over again yet – perhaps an entire change of base – may-be a succession of changes” (Correspondence, I, No. 40). By July he could even tell his mother that “The great sights of Washington are the public buildings, the wide streets,” etc. (Correspondence, I, No. 56).
19 Whitman came to appreciate the physical beauty of Washington and its surrounding countryside in a new way as he became heavily involved in nursing: “Mother,” he wrote on 6 October 1863, “it is lucky I like Washington in many respects, & that things are upon the whole pleasant personally, for every day of my life I see enough to make one's heart ache with sympathy & anguish here in the hospitals, & I do not know as I could stand it, if it was not counterbalanced outside” (Correspondence, I, No. 83).
20 Correspondence, I, No. 91). Whitman's analysis of the deficiencies of the army is, of course, diametrically opposed to the official view, implemented successfully from 1863 onwards, that what was needed was “the schooling of the nation in military discipline” (Fredrickson, Chapter IX).
21 White, William, ed., Daybooks and Notebooks, Vol. I (N.Y., 1978), p. 734Google Scholar.
22 Prose Works 2, p. 772.
23 Whitman opposed all institutionalized response to suffering. See Fredrickson, pp. 106–07.
24 He goes on to claim that the common soldier comes from “the noblest elements in society … [a] vast, enduring, inexhaustible strata of them” (PWI, p. 323).
25 The several different versions of Drum Taps are conveniently distinguished by Blodgett and Bradley, in their Comprehensive Reader's Edition of Leaves of Grass (N.Y., 1965), pp. 278–79Google Scholar. All references to and quotations from Drum Taps hereafter will use the final (1881) version printed in that edition (cited here as LG).
26 After 1876 these lines were included in “The Wound-Dresser.”
27 This is the assumption made by Miller, James E. Jr in his influential reading of Drum Taps, in A Critical Guide to “Leaves of Grass” (Chicago, 1957), pp. 219–25Google Scholar. The modern reader is perhaps predisposed to look for such a pattern because it assumed such archetypal proportions in the poetry of World War I. It is the most obvious way in which “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on the subsequent life” (Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, London, 1977, ix)Google Scholar.
28 The fullest and most balanced discussion of Drum Taps has appeared in those works which, since they study many different responses to the war, are able to deal with it comparatively. See Aaron, pp. 56–74, and especially pp. 66–69; and Fredrickson, pp. 90–97. Fredrickson acutely argues for seeing in Drum Taps the contradictory reactions of a man who is both a “democratic imperialist” and a “democratic humanitarian.”
29 Contrast Melville who in Battle-Pieces consistently sees the new soldiers as “boys” (“Moloch's uninitiate”) about to be initiated through carnage into manhood:
Youth must its ignorant impulse lend-
Age finds place in the rear,
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,
The champions and enthusiasts of the state.
(“The March into Virginia,” Cohen, Hennig ed., The Battle-Pieces of Herman Melville, London, 1963, p. 43Google Scholar.)
30 This poem was moved from Drum Taps to “Bathed in War's Perfume” in 1871 and 1876, but restored in 1881 (LG, pp. 284–85).
31 Prose Works 2, p. 706.
32 He was clearly suspicious of the spirit of self-advancement and materialism which pervaded the whole of his society, but tended (in keeping, partly, with his Democratic origins) to try to exonerate the population at large and concentrate the blame on big business. (For the Democratic Party's attack on corporations etc. during the fifties see Collins, “Ideology,” pp. 114–15.)
33 “The Conflict of Convictions,” Battle-Pieces, p. 40.
34 He acts in keeping with the conception he advanced in the 1855 preface of the poet's vital, but lonely, duty: “The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady faith” (LG, p. 713). The image of himself as recruiting officer implicit in the last lines of this poem was used elsewhere by Whitman in an interestingly related way: “The poet is a recruiter. He goes forth beating the drum — O, who will not join his troop? He leaps over or dives under for the time, all the reforms and propositions that worry these days, and goes to the making of powerful men and women. – With these, he says, all reforms, all good, will come. – Without these all reforms, all good, all outside effects were useless and helpless –” (Furness, C. J. ed., Walt Whitman's Workshop, N.Y., 1964, p. 66)Google Scholar.
35 For a detailed account of New York's attitude towards the whole question of Secession during this period see Brummer, S. D., The Political History of New York State during the Civil War (London, 1911)Google Scholar. Whitman rejoiced in the upsurge of patriotism following Sumter, but continued to have doubts about the city, as his letters, as well as the poems, show. “Well, dear comrades,” he wrote to his friends at Washington during his brief visit to N.Y. in November 1863, “it looks so different here in all this mighty city, every thing going with a big rush & so gay, as if there was neither war nor hospitals in the land. New York & Brooklyn appear nothing but prosperity & plenty” (Correspondence, I, No. 94).
36 White, William ed., Daybooks and Notebooks, Vol. 3 (N.Y., 1978), p. 765Google Scholar.
37 This conflict of feelings lends a poignant quality to his last poems, as I try to show in a forthcoming article in the Walt Whitman Review.
38 Nevins, Allan, The War for the Union, Vol. II, “War Becomes Revolution” (N.Y., 1960), pp. 528, 310, 511Google Scholar.
39 Shapira, M., ed., Henry James, Selected Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 25Google Scholar. The first emphasis is mine; the second James'.
40 Conrad, , Lord Jim (Harmondsworth, 1949), p. 76Google Scholar. Marlow's other wry remarks are also relevant: “My weakness consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental – for the externals – no eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next man.… A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness but has been of no advantage to me, I can assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things” (pp. 75–76).
41 The poems at the centre (and heart) of Drum Taps seem to me to enact a physical and psychological experience similar to that which Zola describes in Germinal as Etienne goes down the mineshaft in the cage for the first time: “At length he felt a jerk, everything turned over, the things round him flew away and a sickening sensation of falling tugged at his bowels,… then, in the darkness of the pit, he was stunned and lost any clear idea of his sensation.… It was intensely cold, they were sinking into wet blackness. Suddenly they went through a blaze of light: in a flash there was a vision of a cave with men moving about. And then the void again” (trans. L. W. Tancock, Harmondsworth, 1954, p. 45). The poems are arranged to show Whitman, along with the ordinary soldiers, being tumbled, repeatedly yet seemingly at random, upon the reviving truth that in that darkness human qualities are solidly and steadily at work.
42 The renowned Civil War illustrator Theodore Davis once observed wryly that most civilians “seem to have an idea that all battlefields have some elevated spot upon which the general is located, and that from this spot the commander can see his troops, direct all their manoeuvres and courteously furnish special artists an opportunity of sketching the scene.” Quoted in The American Heritage Century Collection of Civil War Art, edited by Sears, Stephen W. (N.Y., 1974), p. 125Google Scholar.
43 Quoted in Furness, p. 152.
