Click the pictures for hidden information

Click the pictures for hidden information

By Michael Hegeman. The Mystic Trumpeter has inspired several musical compositions from jazz to classical.

We should remember that politics, great orations, and other public spectacles were not as separated from popular entertainment as they are now. There was as much commotion about running the government in 1856 as there is today in the prospects of a college football team. Whitman had previously penned a defense of James K. Polk, but had lately begun despairing of the nation’s direction.

In 1856 he called for a “Redeemer President of These States,” to be found in “the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie, the hillside….Some heroic, shrewd, fully-formed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.” Remember, this is not a twenty-first century, hired scribe fashioning an image for a political hack. These are the words of a poet in tune with the soul of a nation, anticipating the spiritual direction of the Great American Experiment.

There is a good case that Whitman came to see Lincoln as the embodiment of his “I” in the “Leaves of Grass,” the junction of his political and poetic muse.

From his notebooks, published much later in his “Specimen Days,” Whitman left us the following impression.

AUGUST 12, 1863 -- I see the president almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location some three miles north of the city, the Soldiers' home, a United States military establishment.

I saw him this morning about 8 1/2 coming in to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street. He always has a company of 24 or 30 cavaly, with sabres drawn and held upright over their shoulders. They say this guard was against his personal wish, but he let his counselors have their way. The party makes no great show in uniform or horses.

Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going gray horse, is dress'd, in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man. A lieutenant, with yellow straps, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men, in their yellow-striped jackets. They are generally going at a slow trot, as that is the pace set them by the one they wait upon. The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots toward Lafayette square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes.

I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.

General George McClellan

September 14, 2016

Whitman was our poet-observer of the Civil War, America’s crux. He kept notebooks so we can see what he thought about things. Yes, his life-long practice of revising his writings questions whether we are reading what he thought, or what he wished he’d thought. Often he mentions, maybe argues against, this uncertainty, but in any case his latest revisions are now over a hundred years closer to the events than we are today. His poetry and notebooks tell us what he thought of Lincoln. What about others?

Of Lincoln’s second general (after Winfield Scott), and Lincoln’s opponent in the 1864 election, George McClellan, Whitman had this to say. “It would take a great deal to persuade me from my conviction—my old conviction, born at the time and never by any later developments shaken—my old conviction that McClellan straddled. I was on the spot at the time—in the midst of all the controversy, the suspicion, the tension, and the patriotism; and from it all, fairly and sternly, I drew my estimate of McClellan.

“He thought: the time will come when these sections will be united again…then the lucky man…with the most power, will be the man who dealt most gently with the malcontents….McClellan contemplated the prospect of an early end of the war—felt that the man who dealt the softest blows all around would be the great man, the general idol, the savior. So he kept one foot on each side, waiting for the certain sure turn of events which was to give him his immortality….But events did not turn out the way he expected.”

Whitman leaves us other quick portraits, as well. “(Edwin) Stanton (Secretary of War) was another vehement figure there; he had a temper, was touchy, testy, yet also wonderfully patriotic, courageous, farseeing…had been a Democrat…(but) when shock came…dropped his old partial self away wholly and entirely without a murmur.”

Of our eventual eighteenth president he said, “The real military figure of the war, counting the man in, was Grant, whose homely manners, dislike for military frippery—for every form of ostentation in war and peace—amounted to genius….Grant was the typical Western man—plainest, the most efficient; was the least imposed upon by appearances; was most impressive in the severe simplicity of his flannel shirt and his utter disregard for formal military etiquette.”

Of Jefferson Davis: “I still hold my opinion formed at the time—Davis was representative, he must bear the onus of that….Davis is alive; he has perfect freedom…he is everywhere down South warmly received, applauded to the echo—the echo itself echoed….(I)n any other country on the globe the whole batch of the Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.”

Of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson: “Everybody in Washington wanted to think well of Jackson—I with the rest of them…. But Lige’s tale was so modestly told that I could not doubt it….” Lige Fox was a Union prisoner of war mistreated by Jackson personally. “I could never think the same of Jackson after hearing that….And think of it, too! Jackson was such a praying man—going off into the woods, flopping on his knees everywhere and anywhere to pray!”

In his collection of the notebooks for “Walt Whitman’s Civil War” Walter Lowenfels closes his chapter on “Of the Corps and Generals” from which these quotes come, with a poem that progressed into the “Leaves of Grass,” there titled “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” At one level it is a lyrical recollection of the war by a veteran. Its multi-layered reflections on adventure, triumph, melancholy and survival make it a fitting place to stop this post.

Jefferson Davis

A reading, less unctuous than some, of "The Artilleryman's Vision."

September 21, 2016

Walt Whitman and the Presidency-Nathan Faries

When Whitman summed up his accounting of the Civil War he acknowledged he was writing for a subsequent age that would certainly have evolved to  a different, more seasoned, reckoning of events. “Long, long hence, when the grave has quenched many hot prejudices and vitalities, and an entirely new class of thinkers and writers come to the argument, the complete question, can perhaps be fairly weighed.” But he wanted to testify to the conclusion of a witness: “The movements of the late Secession War and their results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends them, shows the popular democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts.”

As to the war's causes he found two. The first was not sectional, but both north and south, a decay of political integrity. “Four twenty-five years prior to the outbreak, the controlling “democratic” nominating conventions of our republic--starting from their primaries in wards or districts, and so expanding to counties, powerful cities, states, and to the great presidential nominating conventions--were getting to represent and be composed of more and more putrid and dangerous materials.”

He augments this theory with examples and polemic about the political conventions from 1840 (Harrison/Tyler) to Buchanan, composed of, “The meanest kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office seekers, pimps malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, customhouse clerks, contractors, kept editors, spaniels well trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the president, creatures of would-be presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruined sports, expelled gamblers,  policy backers, monte dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harolots’ money twisted together—crawling, serpentine men—the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.”

His second cause: “(I)t was from a resolute and arrogant determination on the part of the extreme slaveholders, the Calhounites, to carry the States’ Rights portion of the constitutional compact to its farthest verge, and nationalize slavery….”

Whitman gives us a summing up that shouts across the decades like the echo of a fervent plea. “And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been or may be to other—to me the main interest I found (and still, on recollection, find) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides, and in those specimens amid the hostpitals and even the dead on the field….Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors…of the Secession War….The real war will never get in the books…It was not a quadrille in a ballroom….The actual soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his  ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of same, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.”

Turn O Libertad

     TURN O Libertad, for the war is over,
     (From it and all henceforth expanding, doubting no
         more, resolute, sweeping the world,)
     Turn from lands retrospective recording proofs of the
         past;
     From the singers that sing the trailing glories of the
         past;
     From the chants of the feudal world, the triumphs of
         kings, slavery, caste;
     Turn to the world, the triumphs reserv'd and to come
         - give up that backward world;
     Leave to the singers of hitherto, give them the trailing
         past;
     But what remains, remains for singers for you-wars to
         come are for you;
     (Lo, how the wars of the past have duly inured to you,
        and the wars of the present also inure:)
     Then turn, and be not alarm'd, O Libertad - turn your
          undying face;
     To where the future, greater than all the past,
     Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.
     

Walt Whitman and the Civil War-Kenneth Price