1. Antislavery sentiment in the United
States began in colonial times, but in the thirty years before the Civil War,
the sentiment turned to militant action as blacks and whites began demanding
the immediate abolition of slavery. Abolitionist organizations, local and
national, were created to promote the emancipation of slaves and to aid
fugitive slaves. Abolitionist publications attacked slavery as a moral and
political evil, trying to raise the consciousness of northern whites and force
the issue of slavery onto the national agenda.
Although
they often worked together, the relationship between black and white
abolitionists was complex. Both groups hated slavery and fought for
emancipation, but the struggle was much more personal for black abolitionists,
who wanted not only their freedom but equal rights as well. Many white
abolitionists, while decrying slavery, could not accept blacks as their equals.
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was a sort of Martin Luther King,
Jr., for the 19th century. His life and
words have often been seen as a living example of the ideals of the New England
Transcendentalists. As a runaway slave,
he was virtually self-educated, and his journalism and lecturing connected him
to important developing media of the time, giving him a platform and a public. His life and work as an abolitionist came
to stand for the moralist as an individual above all else as is evident when he
broke with both William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, for example, in favor of
the power of his own vision.
Fugitive slave, abolitionist,
freethinker, and eventual advisor to presidents Douglass met many leading
Transcendentalist figures during the time that he lectured in Boston and
Concord. More importantly Douglass’ life was seen as a perfect embodiment of
Transcendentalist ideals. A runaway
slave and leader of the Underground Railroad, he was largely self-educated yet
became a bestselling author and counselor to Abraham Lincoln. He began publishing
The North Star, a widely circulated abolitionist periodical, during the
same year that the first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls. As
a lecturer, editor, campaigner for women’s rights, and political appointee,
Douglass revealed that the power of one person’s ideas might become the embodied
truth of an entire social movement.
By the time of his death at the end
of the century, he had come to represent the authority of a single soul trying
to bring about sweeping social change. In
the course of his long career, Douglass lectured in both Boston and Concord and
met Emerson, Thoreau, Dr. Channing, and
Theodore
Parker. Emerson spoke out in
public against slavery for the first time in 1844; by 1851, he attacked the
Fugitive Slave Law in front of the people of Concord: “An immoral law makes it
a man’s duty to break it […] Let us respect the Union to all honest ends. But
also respect an older and wider union, the law of Nature and rectitude.” Emerson concluded, and many abolitionists
came to agree, that the law that would lead to the recapture of runaway slaves needed
to be “wiped out of the statute-book; but whilst it stands there, it must be
disobeyed.” Douglass initially
joined these Concordians in support of John Brown; in fact, he became a
confidante of Brown up until the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. His great public power derived initially from
the effect of his oratory.
Douglass’ early speeches dealt
mainly with his own experiences; some refused to believe that he had been a
slave. Those who heard him speak
reported the dramatic power of the oratory. He described slave-owners beating
slaves of every sort, a young girl’s head “covered with festering sores,” and the
practice of breeding slaves like prized animals. Some of these details were
news at the time to northerners. “I have often been awakened at the dawn of day
by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [Mr. Plummer]
used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally
covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim,
seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed,
the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped
longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush;
and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cow
skin.” (Narrative, 1845)
Douglass used humor to good effect,
as in his retelling of the moment when he “broke the slave breaker” named
Edward Covey by fighting back, an-unheard-of response at the time.
Likewise,
he offered a laughable imitation of clergy in their pulpits promising slaves
that God would be angered if they dared disobey their owners and masters. From his birth into slavery until his
death as an international figure, Douglass fought tirelessly for the rights of
black Americans, and he linked those rights to the rights of all human beings. Born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland
in 1818, he was the son of a white man and a slave woman whom he saw only
several times in his life. He escaped
once and was recaptured, an event he recorded as
one
of his most terrible experiences: freedom achieved, then taken away. He escaped for good when he was 20 by
impersonating a sailor, but in certain places, he was still a fugitive for
decades until the Civil War ended. He
had met the free black woman Anna Murray while he was
still
enslaved; they married and moved north to Massachusetts to begin a family.
Douglass soon lectured for the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and met William Lloyd Garrison. His career as a public speaker and writer
flourished; who but a former slave could speak or write with this accuracy and conviction? Douglass began a related career in 1847 with
the first publication of The North Star, a weekly to rival Garrison’s Liberator;
Douglass’s masthead motto was: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is
the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”
In 1848 he attended the first convention for women’s rights held at
Seneca Falls, where he linked the struggles of slaves with the struggles of
oppressed women. Douglass traveled to
England, where he claimed to have felt fully free for the first time and where
he came to link the rights of slaves to the rights of oppressed people of all
kinds.
His lectures supported women, Irish
home rule, and the temperance movement. He returned to England later, when he was
worried about being linked to Brown’s raid and execution. By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was
enough of a public figure to be called to the White House for meetings with
Lincoln. Lincoln called him “my friend
Douglass.” Douglass’ influence also
helped him to become a recruiter for black soldiers, eventually totaling two
companies, including two sons of Douglass.
He went on to meet with Andrew Johnson after the war to discuss the
rights of former slaves and the complex issues surrounding Reconstruction.
After the end of the Civil War,
Douglass actively supported the constitutional amendments that made equal
rights a matter of law. The issue was by no means settled, however. Douglass consistently
lamented the lack of real opportunity for black people and the continuing
separation of the races. He claimed that
racism was not merely “a southern problem.”
Late in life, and after the death of
his first wife, Douglass married his white former secretary. He silenced
critics of this marriage by saying that his mother’s race was honored by his first
marriage, his father’s race by his second marriage. The legacy of Douglass was
widespread and powerful in America and beyond.
His writings were bestsellers, and he spoke out publicly until the end
of his life. Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) was his first book. My
Bondage, My Freedom (1855) described his first trip to England and added, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In 1881, he published the third of his
autobiographical volumes, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Each subsequent
volume added more details and more candor.
2. Walt
Whitman (1819–1892) saw himself as the “The Poet” described by Emerson in his
1844 essay. Emerson called for a
poet who could speak for the people and who would also be a public figure in
the life of the nation. Whitman had the
kind of expansiveness and inclusiveness that appealed to many
Transcendentalists and his career as a printer was central to his art. He personally set the type for parts of the
first edition; in fact, grass is a term that printers use to refer to
preliminary or experimental typesetting, drafts, less than final work. Transcendentalists would have applauded this
link between the practical and the artistic, as well as this open-ended aesthetic.
A poet and thinker whose works reveal direct links to ideas that
were flying from brain to brain in Concord and elsewhere during this era Whitman’s
poetry is, like Dickinson’s, a poetry of the individual, yet Whitman’s individual
is very different from Dickinson’s. Whitman clearly believed that he was “The Poet”
described by and hoped for by Emerson in his essay of the same name. Whitman
says as much in the preface to Leaves of Grass, his greatest single
volume of poetry and he insisted that he was a prophetic voice of, by, and for
the “People.” Even his poetic practice bears comparison with the
Transcendentalists. He would write short
snippets of immediate inspiration on slips of printer’s paper, the so-called “leaves”
of Leaves of Grass. He collected them only later and worked to organize
them into a unified whole. Emerson and Thoreau both visited Whitman in New
York.
The Civil War was a shaping
influence on a great deal of Whitman’s verse, culminating in his elegiac masterpiece
for Lincoln. Leaves of Grass, as
a number of critics have noted, brought two new subjects into American poetry,
the importance of sexuality and the value of human labor. Sex was part of nature,
as the more liberal Transcendentalists had taught, and all employment was
potentially noble, whether that of the lawyer, the seamstress, the ditch
digger, or even the prostitute. As the
critic Jerome Loving has noted: The poet reasoned that if—according to
transcendentalist doctrine—everyone was divine because nature was emblematic of
God, then all were equal, politically equal, including women, whom Whitman
treated equally with men […] This idea of equality and self-divinity also meant
that one could celebrate himself or herself. Whitman’s sensuousness caused him problems
throughout his career. He wrote about
the human body, and about sexual desire, in ways that had rarely been
attempted: “Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in
tendon and nerve; they shall be stript, that you may see them.”
Whitman offended many, including
many Transcendentalists, with his open and frank approach to sexuality: “Have
you ever loved the Body of a woman? Have you ever loved the Body of a Man?” His homosexual desire was implicit rather
than explicit, but it was evident to many readers. Emerson tried to present Whitman to the
respectable Saturday Club in Boston, but after such sexually explicit poems as “Enfans d’Adam” appeared in the 1860
edition of Leaves, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others
refused.
Emerson, on a famous walk around
Boston Common, tried to convince Whitman to tone down his overt sexuality, but
even after the poet refused, Emerson remained his defender. As
Whitman
wrote, “I could never hear the point better put—and then I felt down in my soul
the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.” Whitman relished the role of eccentric
outsider, but he linked that role with a very American view of the individual. As Emerson had requested, Whitman clearly saw
himself as a spokesman for America and for all Americans, from women to Indians
to freed slaves.
Whitman knew that some of the
positions he adopted would set him against culturally accepted ways of thinking
and acting. Romanticism had
sometimes depicted the poet as an outsider, almost too good for society, but
Wordsworth, among others, had written passionately about the lives of ordinary
people. Whitman may have solved the dilemma by saying, “If you
want
me again look for me under your boot-soles” (“Song of Myself”). He called
himself “a cosmos” but also “a loafer.” Whitman’s life came to be seen as
“Romantic” as his art. He was self-taught after being apprenticed to a printer
at age 14; his rough-and-tumble career as a journalist prepared him for the poetry
that was to come.
On Long Island, he worked as an
innovative schoolteacher who told his students to call him “Walt” and used
games to help teach math and spelling. He
traveled widely in the North and South and experienced slavery firsthand in New
Orleans. His career as a journalist and
editor included working for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New Orleans
Crescent, and a “free
soil”
abolitionist paper back in Brooklyn. Emerson and Thoreau visited Whitman in New
York and found him a uniquely remarkable figure. Emerson visited in 1855, but when the two
went to Emerson’s hotel, the elegant Astor, Whitman’s shabby clothes denied him
entrance to Emerson’s room. They met many times in the next three decades, and
their relationship mixed respect with
an
element of suspicion.
Thoreau and Bronson Alcott visited
Whitman a year after Emerson. Alcott recorded that each man was “surveying the other
curiously, like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do.” By the time of Leaves of Grass (1855),
Whitman’s unique style was fully formed: experimental, the long line, unrhymed,
no consistent meter, journalistic, biblical, prophetic, mundane, democratic,
dispersed, but unifying, like America itself.
His unconventionality of style and substance can be linked to a Romantic
and to a more specifically American view of the artist. Such artistic eccentricity or excess is often
seen as a sign of genius. The artist is
unable to fit into polite society or accepted standards of behavior.
Transcendentalists believe that any
idea is worth scrutiny if it leads to a vision of the truth and as Whitman,
like many with Romantic sensibilities, might say, the divine can appear in even
the most unlikely places; the ordinary is extraordinary. Whitman’s influence extends to us through
many artists and ideas. Ezra Pound, as early as 1915, declared Whitman to be a
father
figure
of Modernism. Poets from T. S. Eliot to
William Carlos Williams to Robert Frost have agreed with Pound’s high praise
and have cited Whitman’s influence. More
significant than the personality of the artist, however, and like many
Transcendentalists, Whitman gave voice to early versions of America’s gradual
progress toward racial, social, and sexual freedom.
