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Walt Whitman's Reconstruction
POETRY AND PUBLISHING BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY
By Martin T. Buinicki
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-069-4
Chapter One
Walt Whitman's Reconstruction I cannot let my momentous, stormy, peculiar Era of peace and war, these States, these years, slip away without arresting some of its specimen events—even its vital breaths—to be portray'd and inscribed from out of the midst of it, from its own days and nights—not so much in themselves (statistically and descriptively our times are copiously noted and memorandized with an industrial zeal)—but to give from them here their flame-like results in imaginative and spiritual suggestiveness.... In another sense (the warp crossing the woof, and knitted in,) the book is probably a sort of autobiography; an element I have not attempted to specially restrain or erase.—Walt Whitman, from "Note at End of Complete Poems and Prose," 1888
On May 23rd, 1865, the combined might of nearly the entire Union army gathered for one last march. Two hundred thousand strong they came, wending their way through the streets of Washington, D.C., for a magnificent Grand Review in the nation's capital. It would take two full days for this mass of men and machinery to complete its final task before disbanding. Many soldiers would return home, while some would go on to take up their duties in the southern states. Out of sight of the cheering crowds, still others lay dying in Army hospitals. For now, however, the occasion was a celebration, to be sure, and a momentary homecoming—schoolchildren waved signs, including one that read "The Public Schools of Washington Welcome the Heroes of the Republic." The review was also a show of strength for a country that had only a month before been shocked to its core by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In a demonstration of governmental continuity, the newly installed president, Andrew Johnson, attended the review flanked by his generals and cabinet. It is hard to imagine that this new president could serve as anything but a reminder that, while the war was finally over, the hard work of bringing the nation back together after four bloody years had only just begun, and the outcome was anything but a sure thing.
The poet Walt Whitman was among the throng that watched the spectacle unfold over the course of those two warm summer days and, as he had done throughout the war, he reported on the event in detail in a letter to his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman:
Well, the Review is over, & it was very grand—it was too much & too impressive, to be described—but you will see a good deal about it in the papers. If you can imagine a great wide avenue like Flatbush avenue, quite flat, & stretching as far as you can see, with a great white building half as big as fort Greene on a hill at the commencement of the avenue, & then through this avenue marching solid ranks of soldiers, 20 or 25 abreast, just marching steady all day long for two days, without intermission, one regiment after another, real war-worn soldiers, that have been marching & fighting for years—sometimes for an hour nothing but cavalry, just solid ranks, on good horses, with sabres glistening, & carbines hanging by their saddles, & their clothes showing hard service, but they [are] mostly all good-looking hardy young men—then great masses of guns, batteries of cannon, four or six abreast, each drawn by six horses, with the gunners seated on the ammunition wagons—& these perhaps a long while in passing, nothing but batteries—(it seemed as if all the cannon in the world were here)—then great battalions of blacks, with axes & shovels & pick axes, (real southern darkies, black as tar)—then again hour after hour the old infantry regiments, the men all sunburnt—nearly every one with some old tatter all in shreds, (that had been a costly & beautiful flag)—the great drum corps of sixty or eighty drummers massed at the heads of the brigades, playing away—now and then a fine brass band—but oftener nothing but the drums & whistling fifes—but they sounded very lively—(perhaps a band of sixty drums & fifteen or twenty fifes playing "Lannigan's ball")—the different corps banners, the generals with their staffs &c—the Western Army, led by Gen. Sherman, (old Bill, the soldiers all call him). (Corr, 1:260–61)
Although the poet claims the review is "too impressive" to describe, his letter suggests both the scale of the march itself and the traces of the conflict that the soldiers carried with them. Whitman later drew upon his description of this day for other purposes, including similar phrases in his collection of war writing Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) and then again in his 1882 autobiography Specimen Days. For now, however, the poet's time and attention were consumed both by the spectacle of the mass of soldiers marching—"good looking hardy young men" filling the streets—and, as his journals attest, the many wounded still lying in a far worse state in Washington's hospitals. Like President Johnson, these soldiers were a reminder of the war and its costs, while the presence of the freed slaves marching through the capital suggested the many and varied tasks still facing the country, foremost among them stitching the Union back together and integrating the freed African Americans into the postwar nation.
This work would extend from schoolhouses and statehouses in the South to the halls of Congress in Washington and, in a kind of historical shorthand, came to be known as "Reconstruction." In the federal government, it would include amending the United States Constitution, guaranteeing all citizens equal rights before the law and ensuring the voting rights of African American men. For federal troops, it meant taking up positions in the South to support the newly established state governments and to protect the freed slaves from reprisal and exploitation. Over the course of the next twelve years, the Reconstruction era would see the impeachment and acquittal of Andrew Johnson, the election and reelection of General Ulysses S. Grant to the American presidency (in spite of numerous scandals), the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the growing oppression of African Americans in the South, and a disputed national election in 1876, the resolution of which would see the final collapse of Republican governments in the South and the end of federal troop intervention there. While the controversial agreement that enabled Rutherford B. Hayes to become president in 1877 marked the end of official Reconstruction, the work of binding the nation's wounds following the cataclysm of the Civil War, and of securing equal rights for all of its citizens, are challenges the United States has continued to face down to the present day.
For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., in the years immediately following the war's end, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years with his fellow citizens, but also coming to terms with his own memories of the war, marked by the sight of innumerable casualties and the stories of remarkable courage told to him by the soldiers he treated in the hospitals. Preserving what he felt to be the essence of these experiences became a central concern for the rest of his life. A critical time for the nation, the postwar years were also a time when the poet dealt with significant personal losses and physical illness even as he expanded and cemented his place in the American literary landscape. Just as national Reconstruction would continue long past its ostensible end in 1877, Whitman's own reconstruction would continue until his death in 1892.
The poet's work following the war was profoundly influenced by the remarkable changes taking place in the publishing industry in the postwar years. The exponential growth of periodical publications fed by new technologies and new markets was transforming the publishing world and the profession of authorship that the poet had pursued for well over two decades. Whitman's increasingly numerous appearances in periodicals as both author and subject demonstrate how he adjusted to these changing realities in an effort to reach out to the wider audience now available to him. The years after the war would see Whitman transformed from newspaper editor and staff journalist to celebrity contributor and nationally recognized public lecturer, a transformation driven as much by material developments in the nation as by his own professional and poetic ambitions.
While all of these developments are vital to any understanding of Walt Whitman's personal reconstruction, they are inadequate if not examined in the context of the considerable poetic and personal re-imagining that is the hallmark of these years. Numerous critics have discussed the editions of Leaves of Grass that Whitman produced after the war in terms of this process, most significantly the 1881 edition, and biographers have carefully documented the personal setbacks, including a stroke and his mother's death. Surprisingly, however, to date there has only been one book-length study that examines the poet strictly in terms of Reconstruction, Luke Mancuso's important "The Strange Sad War Revolving": Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1865–1876. Mancuso discusses each of the poet's major postwar publications specifically in terms of Reconstruction legislation, focusing primarily on the congressional debates regarding amending the Constitution to preserve the rights of the newly liberated slaves. Given the importance of the issue of African American citizenship, Mancuso's choice makes a great deal of sense. At the same time, however, his work's scope does not account for the interplay between the politics that marked the present moment and the poet's evolving response to his memories of the cataclysm from which the nation had just emerged.
Similarly, M. Wynn Thomas devotes two chapters of his important work The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry to the poet's response to the war and to his efforts to come to terms with his experiences in the hospitals. In studying the poet's writing, particularly the "Drum-Taps" poems and Whitman's response to Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Thomas offers a subtle reading of the poet's psyche, suggesting that some of the poet's memories "threatened his mental equilibrium." At the same time, he highlights how Whitman worked to preserve his painful personal experiences as part of a national history and memory, becoming, in Thomas's evocative phrase, "the prophet of the past" (Lunar Light, 278), seeking to preserve the memory of the war to inform the future. Thomas offers a compelling and significant close reading of much of Whitman's major Civil War writing, both in terms of how it reflects the poet's personal struggles with his memories and how they came to inform his larger poetic project.
Whitman's response to his memories was unquestionably affected by the material changes taking place around the poet as he pursued his profession. The reconstruction of "one of the roughs," as he described himself in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, into a widely recognized public figure was facilitated by the nature of the press during the years after the war. In very concrete ways, the ability of writers to reach a mass readership and influence the reception of their work changed dramatically following the conflict. The struggle had produced a transportation and media infrastructure that could at last accommodate the kind of national audience that Whitman had long imagined in his writings. The number of rail lines had greatly increased to transport troops and supplies, and these improvements allowed for far easier transport of goods, including books and periodicals. In 1865, approximately seven hundred magazine titles were in publication, a number that almost doubled by 1870. The increase in subscribers as well as in advertising revenue also made magazines much more stable venues than they had been in the earlier part of the century, even with the increased competition. Whitman quickly seized this increasing opportunity to reach his readers. He was no stranger to the periodical press, of course, having begun his career as a journalist and editor, but, following the war, magazines served as an important vehicle for pursuing his aims. As Amanda Gailey has recently observed, "In the 10 years between the 1871–72 and 1881–82 editions, Whitman dramatically increased his rate of publishing poems in periodicals.... By this point in his career, Whitman was deftly and frequently using periodicals as a way to give his poetry and himself an ongoing public relevance beyond the pages of Leaves of Grass."
Much of that relevance in the postwar period was a result of the poet's well-known service in the Union hospitals, and Whitman approached the war in his writing as a crucial moment both in the nation's history and in his own, part of a shared narrative that his writing both reflected and shaped. For Whitman, Reconstruction was not simply an act of moving forward from the wreckage left behind by the war or of reconciling two opposing sides. For the poet who is often thought of as looking toward the future—who "laid in [his] stores in advance"—his postwar writings are frequently preoccupied with "backward glances," attempts to make sense of his memories and to integrate them into his work and the arc of his life and career as well as into the triumphant story of the nation. The poet's concern for what he derisively called the "cold and bloodless electrotype plates of History" (quoted in Thomas, Lunar Light, 234) forces us to consider how Whitman regarded the war in the far less concrete form of memory, the inexpressible impression of events that eludes the historian's pen. If, as he famously lamented, the "real war will never get in the books," he still never accepted that the real significance of the conflict would consequently be lost; indeed, his own writing dwells on precisely those kinds of episodes that he repeatedly asserts can never adequately be described. Even when he claims his words fail him, then, he nevertheless insists on documenting the gaps, as when he notes "[The war's] interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested" (MDW, 7). Never suggested, save by Whitman himself, who, as Thomas notes, strove to see "the present and future put in touch (that sense so vital to Whitman) with the real 'interior history' of the past" (Lunar Light, 234).
The tension between attempting to retain some sense of these lost moments by creating what Pierre Nora terms lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), while simultaneously documenting in specific terms the heroism of the soldiers and the events in the hospital, is evident in the changes between the 1875–1876 text Memoranda of the War and his 1882 autobiography Specimen Days. The poet who witnessed and did his best to record the unspeakable suffering in the hospitals and listened to the harrowing tales of the battlefields stands between the representational work of history as he rendered it in his personal archive—the names, dates, and events in his notebooks—and the finally unrepresentable agony of those years signified in the mute bloodstains that he claimed spot those same notebooks. Along with his memoranda, Whitman came to see the traces of the war in his own stroke-ravaged body, his weakened physical condition providing a form of silent testimony, a sign forever indicating the war's cost.
But this physical memory contrasts sharply with the historical record of the conflict that became a prominent public preoccupation during the 1870s, a fascination with events that Whitman tapped into with his writing and with his lectures on Abraham Lincoln. The poet's early interest during the late 1860s in recasting the Civil War in terms of the Crusades demonstrates that, at least in the beginning, the poet was searching for a way to view the conflict in a historical framework. As he researched the project, Whitman hand-copied a passage from a May 1844 article on the Crusades from the North British Review and noted in the margin, "The analogy between all this & the exciting scenes at the breaking out of our own war." He would repeatedly link the Crusades to the United States in his notes, as he did when he jotted the line, "The Crusades of the 12th & 13th centuries are tallied by the American war of the 19th." As he initially considered how he would construct the history of the war, then, the poet went quite far afield in looking for a suitable framework.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Walt Whitman's Reconstruction by Martin T. Buinicki Copyright © 2011 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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