John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 5 August 1876
loc.01856.001.jpg
Meltonsville Ala
Aug 5 1876
Walt Whitman 431 Stevens St Cor West Camden New Jersey
loc.01856.002.jpg
If all people could derive a practical Theory of Living, from the incident noted 20 years ago, of the European Nobleman, who being imprisoned solitarily in a dark dungeon; conquered his tedium, by continually throwing away and recovering a lot of brass pins! How often restlessness produces criminality! How fortunate to leave to be content with doing nearly nothing—with [illegible] My soul, for twenty [illegible] purturbability!"— [illegible] remain gentlemanly [illegible]
J. N. J.Correspondent:
John Newton Johnson
(1832–1904) was a colorful and eccentric self-styled philosopher from
rural Alabama. There are about thirty letters from Johnson in the Charles E.
Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919 (Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.), but unfortunately there are no replies extant,
although Whitman wrote frequently for a period of approximately fifteen years.
When Johnson wrote for the first time on August 13,
1874, he was forty-two, "gray as a rat," as he would say in another
letter from September 13, 1874: a former Rebel
soldier with an income between $300 and $400 annually, though before the
war he had been "a slaveholding youthful 'patriarch.'"
He informed Whitman in the August 13, 1874, letter
that during the past summer he had bought Leaves of Grass
and, after a momentary suspicion that the bookseller should be "hung for swindling," he discovered the mystery of
Whitman's verse, and "I assure you I was soon 'cavorting' round and asserting
that the $3 book was worth $50 if it could not be replaced, (Now
Laugh)." He offered either to sell Whitman's poetry and turn over to him all
profits or to lend him money. On October 7, 1874,
after describing Guntersville, Alabama, a town near his farm from which he often
mailed his letters to Whitman, he commented: "Orthodoxy flourishes with the usual lack of
flowers or fruit." See
also Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and
Friend (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1915), 125–130.