The new edition of Leaves of Grass pleased the critics as little as its predecessors, but had a wider circulation. Some four or five thousand copies had been sold before the house of Thayer and Eldridge went down in the financial crash which followed on the outbreak of the war.[323] Emerson came in again for some share of the critical assault, though his name was in no way connected with the new issue. Of Whitman himself a London journalist declared[324] that he was the most silly, the most blasphemous, and the most disgusting writer that he had ever perused.
But if it found fresh enemies, the new edition found also new friends; and notably in England, whither a few adventurous copies of the earlier versions had already penetrated. Both Emerson and Thoreau had sent them to their English friends—among whom was Carlyle—but apparently with scant acknowledgment. Ruskin’s correspondent, Mr. Thomas Dixon of Sunderland, had purchased a few examples of the first edition at Dutch auction; and some of these he forwarded to Mr. William Bell Scott, who again handed on one of them to Mr. W. M. Rossetti; an act which, as the story will show, proved to be of great importance to Walt Whitman.[325] It was the book of 1860, however, which first aroused the younger generation of English[Pg 172]men, among whom was the late Mr. Addington Symonds. “Within the space of a few years,” says he, “we were all reading and discussing Walt.”
The book appeared under the shadow of impending war. With the Presidential election of 1860, America came to the edge of the abyss; and the return of Abraham Lincoln was promptly followed by the organisation of secession. Whitman was still in Boston when, early in the spring, Lincoln first made his appearance in New York, W. C. Bryant introducing him to a great meeting at the Cooper Institute.
The famous speech which he then delivered lived long in its hearers’ memory; but even the personal impression which he made, remarkable as it was, hardly prepared New York to learn in the following May that it was Abraham Lincoln, and not W. H. Seward, the nominal leader of the Republican party, who had received the Presidential nomination at the great Chicago Convention.
Had the Democratic party been able to hold together, Lincoln could not have carried the election; but it was now split, and further weakened by the appearance of a Constitutional union Party.[326] The most dangerous of the opposing candidates seemed to be Lincoln’s old antagonist and subsequent loyal supporter, Judge Douglas, who represented his well-worn policy of local option, or “squatter sovereignty”. Breckinridge of Kentucky openly advocated the extension of slave territory; while Bell, the unionist, kept his own counsel.
Early in the summer of that great struggle, Whitman returned to New York. In June[327] he was among the immense crowd of interested spectators who filled Broadway from side to side, on the arrival of the first Japanese embassy to America; and he was of the thousands who welcomed the succession of distinguished visitors who came, that ominous summer, to the capital[Pg 173] of the West. There was the Great Eastern, that leviathan of the modern world, whose advent was so long and so eagerly anticipated; there was Garibaldi, fresh from the fields whereon Italy had become a kingdom—not indeed the sister republic of Mazzini’s ardent dream, who should have given the new law of Liberty to Europe, but at least something more than a memory and a geographical term.
Another, in whom Whitman felt an even warmer interest, was “Baron Renfrew,” otherwise the Prince of Wales. The fair royal stripling of those days attracted the stalwart Democrat, who like old George Fox, could recognise a man under a crown as readily as a man in rags. Whitman’s eyes were keen to read personality; perhaps we should rather say that the sense by which personality is distinguished was highly developed in him. And he to whom the attributes of rank were non-existent, fell in love with this young man[328] whose warm heart was to make him perhaps the best beloved of monarchs, as he afterwards fell in love with many a private soldier carried in wounded from the field. Albert Edward was one of those strangers in whom Whitman recognised a born comrade; and this fact at once raises his democratic sentiment out of the region of class feeling.
He was a witness, too, of the advent of other visitors even more brilliant, and burdened even more to the popular fancy, and perhaps to his own, with significance. He saw the extraordinary display of the heavens—the huge meteor, luminous almost as the moon, which fell in Long Island Sound, and the unannounced comet flaring in the north.
The autumn was loud with the electoral struggle. The presence of three opposing candidates was not enough to assure Lincoln’s success. The general expectation seems to have leaned towards an electoral tie, none of the candidates polling a majority of the votes; and this would have resulted, as on the similar occasion[Pg 174] of 1824, in the choice between them being left to the House of Representatives. Upon the result of such choice the slave party was willing to stake its hopes of success; anticipating that even though he were the popular candidate, Congress would not select Lincoln, but would put him aside, as it had passed by Jackson in its previous opportunity.
But to the consternation of the South, the “black Republican” rail-splitter polled a clear majority over all three antagonists combined. A majority, that is to say, of electoral votes, for the American President is not chosen directly by the people, but by the people’s delegates.[329] Each State elects its quota of Presidential electors, chosen not in proportion to the strength of parties in the State, but all of them representing the dominant party.[330] Thus it may happen that a candidate, like Judge Douglas, who polls a large minority of the total popular vote, will receive a mere handful of electoral suffrages, having failed to carry more than one or two States. Lincoln was chosen by 180 votes to 123; and though Douglas’s popular poll was two-thirds of Lincoln’s, and nearly as large as that of the two other candidates combined, his electoral support was only one-tenth of the voices against Lincoln. The Republican vote in the country fell short of the combined opposition poll by a million out of a total of less than five million votes. From the popular point of view, Lincoln was, therefore, in the difficult position of a minority President.
The result of the November elections was scarcely made public before a committee of Southern Congressmen issued a manifesto,[331] proclaiming the immediate need for a separate Confederacy of slave-holding States, if the institution upon which their prosperity depended was to be saved from the machinations of Northern politicians. They audaciously identified both Lincoln and the Republican party with the policy of Abolition; whereas the choice of Lincoln instead of Seward, the[Pg 175] Abolitionist, might in itself have been accepted as sufficient evidence that the North, while determined to preserve the union, was resolute against interference with the internal policy of the South.
The Manifesto was followed, on the 20th of December, by the secession of South Carolina, ever since Calhoun’s day the leader of revolt against Federal power. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana promptly joined her.
Although Lincoln’s election was assured in November, the executive power remained till the beginning of March in the feeble hands of Buchanan, who was the creature of advisers themselves divided in counsel, to the signal advantage of that section which supported the revolt. When, at last, the outgoing President made up his mind to dismiss his secessionist secretary of war, the Cotton-State Caucus called a Convention at Montgomery, the picturesque and sleepy old capital of Alabama; and this finally formulated a permanent constitution for the Confederacy precisely a week after the inauguration of the new President.[332]
In the meantime Lincoln could only stand a spectator of the wholly ineffective measures which were being taken to frustrate the active aggression of the slave power. But towards the end of February he set out for Washington. Passing on his way through Indiana and Ohio, he was received by an enormous crowd in New York; and here Whitman first saw him, not from his favourite seat upon a stage-coach, for the streets were too densely packed for traffic, but as one of the thirty or forty thousand silent pedestrian onlookers collected in the city’s heart, where now the post-office stands.
Whitman well knew what the ominous silence, which greeted that loosely-made gaunt figure, concealed;[333] and how different was the mood of New York that day from the holiday-making good-humour with which it was wont to greet the arrival of other illustrious guests. Under the speechlessness lurked a black moody wrath ready to break forth.
[Pg 176]
It was a pleasant afternoon, just twelve months after that other February day when Whitman and Emerson had paced up and down the slope of Boston Common in earnest colloquy. Lincoln went silently into the Astor House without any demonstration either of welcome or of open hostility; thereafter proceeding to his inauguration. He was compelled to pass secretly through Baltimore, where violence was only too ready to manifest itself on the slightest encouragement. The fact that the President-elect, in order to reach the capital, had thus to travel through a State which was only with difficulty retained for the union cause, shows how close that cause was to disaster. And though, as Lincoln stated in his inaugural address, the bulk of the American people opposed secession, and the party which favoured it was but a comparatively small minority; yet it could only be either an ignorant optimism, or on the contrary a firmly founded and earnest faith in the devotion of the great mass of the citizens to the ideals of their fathers, which could face such a situation without dismay.
The weight of numbers, however, favoured the North. A review of the census returns show that at their first compilation in 1790 the population of the Southern and the Northern divisions of the country was almost absolutely equal; but that from the beginning of the century the increase in the latter was the more rapid; so that in 1860 the free population of the North was more than double that of the South.
But in spite of this great numerical preponderance, the North itself was not united on the question at issue, as is clearly shown by the returns of the Presidential election, when Douglas polled a million Free-state votes. For though Douglas opposed secession, he did not oppose the extension of slavery. It is shown clearly, too, in the attitude of New York; of which more, later.
And beyond this the Southerner was in some respects better fitted, as well by his virtues as by his faults, for a military life. The qualities of leadership and of obedience are cultivated under an aristocratic ideal, as they are not under a democratic. And the South, which had[Pg 177] practically controlled the executive under Buchanan, and especially the department of war, was better prepared to take the field than was the North. On the other hand, the strength of the union lay in its cause, and in the latent idealism of the American people, which woke into activity at the first menace to the Stars and Stripes.
Whether the war really settled anything, whether it might possibly have been avoided, whether secession left to itself would not literally have cut its own throat, these are interesting philosophic speculations into which we need not enter. For already the spectre of war had long been abroad, stalking through the unharvested fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and gesticulating with horrid signs and mocking whispers in every corner of America. When the slave party had first raised its fatal cry of “our institution in danger,” it had raised the cry of war. And when at last men like Lincoln retorted with the declaration that the union was irrefragable—that secession could only be justified after some criminal use of the Federal power to override the rights of the minority—the battle was manifestly joined.
It is but fair to add that although the party of Lincoln had now truly become the party of the union, the first line of cleavage between North and South was marked out by a schismatic spirit in the North itself, by its support of its own sectional interests, when enforcing a policy of protection upon the whole country.[334] There can be little doubt that the mistrust felt in the South, while largely due to anterior causes, was born under this evil star. So true does it seem that when a nation’s policy is being shaped according to merely material interests, the seeds are being sown of future revolution.
The fatal movement of American destiny towards its crisis must have dominated much of Whitman’s thought at this time. Secession was in the very air he breathed;[Pg 178] for at its first proclamation an echoing voice was heard in New York itself.
Here Mayor Wood, after a short period of deserved seclusion, had returned to power. Unsatisfied with his patronage he dreamed of wider fields. Was it not the splendid vision of a Presidency which encouraged this fatuous person to declare for a second secession, the creation of a new island republic of New York? “Tri-Insula” was to have been its title,[335] and its territories would have comprised Mannahatta, Staten, and Long Islands. The proposal was enthusiastically received by the absurd creatures of Tammany, who then sat upon the City Council. But their complacent folly was of brief duration. It was dispersed by the first rebel gun-shot.
Whitman had been at the opera on Fourteenth Street,[336] and was strolling homeward down Broadway about midnight, on the 13th of April, when he was met by the newspaper boys crying the last extras with more than ordinary vehemence. Buying a copy and stopping to read it under the lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel, he was startled by the news that war had actually broken out. The day before, Confederate troops had fired upon the flag at Charleston Harbour and Fort Sumter. South Carolina had flung her challenge down.
The President immediately called for troops, and the response of the North was instantaneous. New York herself did not hesitate, but voted at once a million dollars and sent forward her quota of men.[337] Mayor Wood was among the many thousands of Democrats who became patriots that day—in so far as one can suddenly become patriotic.
Whitman was not among the volunteers, but his brother George, who was ten years his junior, was one of the first to offer.[338] He had been following the family trade as a Brooklyn carpenter, and henceforward[Pg 179] proved himself a brave and able soldier. He was neither braver nor abler than Walt, but the latter stayed at home, and there are those who have blamed him for it.
Picture of Walt at forty-four.
WHITMAN AT FORTY-FOUR
Putting on one side, as they have done, his subsequent service to the army, such blame springs from a misunderstanding of the man’s nature. There are some men wholly above the reproach of cowardice or indifference, whom it is impossible for us to conceive as shouldering a gun. And for those who knew him most intimately, Whitman was such a man. Many men who loved peace heard the call to arms and obeyed. Abraham Lincoln[339] himself—to whom America was entrusting the conduct of the war—had but now proclaimed its futility, while his whole nature revolted from its cruel folly. And had his destiny bidden him to join the colours one cannot doubt that Walt Whitman would have done so.[340] But that inner voice, which he obeyed, rather forbade than encouraged him.
And even in years of war there is service one can do for one’s country out of the ranks. No war can wholly absorb the energies of a civilised people, for the daily life of the nation must be continued. There are, besides, tasks that have a prior claim upon the loyalty of the individual, even to the defence of the flag. And Whitman had such a task, for he bore, as it were, within his soul the infant of an ideal America, like a young mother whose life is the consecrated guardian of her unborn babe. His book was now, in a sense, complete; but none could feel more strongly than he that even his book was only an inadequate expression of his purpose; while life lasted his days were to be devoted to the creation of an immortal comradeship, and a spiritual atmosphere in which the seeds concealed in his writings might germinate.
It must also be noted that, though in his open letter to Emerson[341] he had written of war almost as a soldier whose blood kindles at the sound of the trumpets, and though the spirit of his book is one which “blows battles[Pg 180] into men,” yet the last edition had been marked by a curious and significant approximation to Quakerism. It was in 1860, when war was so near at hand, that he substituted the Friendly numeral equivalents for the usual names of the months and days of the week; not, assuredly, because he objected to the recognition of heathen deities, like the early Friends, but in order to avow some relationship between himself and Quakerism. The increase of mystical consciousness may have made him more aware at this time of his real identity with this society of mystics to which he never nominally belonged.
We have had repeated occasion to note the Quaker traits in Whitman’s character, and here, at the opening of the war, it is well to emphasise them anew.[342] His love of silence, his spiritual caution, his veracity and simplicity of speech, his soul-sight, and the practical balance of his mysticism—that temperance of character upon which his inspirational faculties were founded—and, finally, the e............