Walt Whitman & the Irish

1.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Ask most Americans at what point their nation's history first touched Ireland's and the answer will likely be, "At the time of the Irish famine when all the immigrants came here." Few realize the Irish were in America before the American Revolution and that many were involved in the revolution. In fact, countless episodes of Irish history, and the history of the Irish in America, remain obscure to the average American. While nineteenth-century Ireland is somewhat scantily known for its Fenianism and for Charles Stewart Parnell, twentieth-century Irish history has been so romanticized in film and song as to cast it, as well, into a shadowy light. With this in mind, and conscious that the narrative of Walt Whitman's connections to and influence on the Irish must be placed against a backdrop of historical events, a brief overview is offered of events pertinent to that narrative.

The earliest point at which America can be said to have played a role in Irish history was when the Irish saw in England's distraction, at the time of the war between France and England from 1793 to 1802, an opportunity to press their own claims. Because of the similarities between their colonial status and that of the North Americans, Irish sympathy lay heavily with the colonies at the time of their rebellion. When American independence signaled to England the instability of its position relative to its colonies, there was a movement on the part of the Westminster Parliament to allow the Irish Parliament legislative autonomy. Ireland's parliamentary government was a product of the Middle Ages and represented the acknowledgment of a common need among the disparate peoples of that time. Under England's rule, however, the Dublin Parliament had lost the freedom to legislate for its own people.

Concessions made by England revived the spirit of a people who, in ancient times, had belonged to independent kingdoms until raiding Danes and Norsemen disturbed their civilization. The great Irish hero Brian Boru routed the Danes in the eleventh century, but by 1171 Henry II, with the blessing of a papal bull, began the conquest of Ireland for his Norman lords. For another hundred years the English and the Normans fought to retain hold of Ireland, with the English barely managing to hang on and, by 1400, reduced to inhabiting a circumscribed area around Dublin known as "the Pale."

Under succeeding kings, England managed to gain greater advantage and exert increasing control over the Irish, but things took a radical turn in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII separated his country from Roman Catholicism and established himself as head of the Church of England. The Irish, however, remained loyal to Rome. When Henry VIII made the Protestant Church of Ireland their official church they suffered for their resistance by having their lands taken from them and by being denied the right to hold public office. Never ceasing to agitate and never deserting their faith, the Irish rebelled repeatedly and each time were punished by the loss of more freedoms. The worst such punishment came when Oliver Cromwell landed at Dublin in 1649 and conducted a campaign of conquest that included the massacre and dispossession of thousands of Irish.

In the decade between Cromwell's arrival in Ireland in 1649 and the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Joseph Whitman moved, in 1657, from Connecticut to Huntington, Long Island, New York. Joseph was nephew to John Whitman, who had arrived from England in 1635 on the True Love and settled in Massachusetts. Before long Joseph Whitman would own a very sizeable portion of the West Hills area surrounding Huntington, where Walt Whitman was born.

Later in the century Ireland thought it saw an opportunity to gain ground by welcoming England's Catholic king, James II, when he was forced to abdicate; however, both the Irish forces and James's were beaten at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This defeat, bitterly remembered by the Catholic Irish, was triumphantly celebrated by the Protestant Irish on each anniversary of the date. In the nineteenth century these celebrations, brought by immigrants from both sides of the religious conflict to the streets of American cities, became the cause of violent riots. The defeat at the Boyne would echo through the streets of New York City every July for a good part of the nineteenth century, with at least one such reminder terminating in a riot severe enough for Walt Whitman to comment on. On these occasions Ulster Orangemen (named for William of Orange, James II's Protestant son-in-law who helped drive the king from his throne) paraded through the most densely populated Catholic Irish areas of the city, a practice continued in Northern Ireland to this day.

The penal laws that followed the defeat of the Jacobites aimed at eradicating Catholicism in Ireland. Meanwhile, Scottish Presbyterians, who were planted in northern Ireland after what is known as the "Flight of the Earls" (the exodus of the most powerful northern families after their defeat in a futile effort against a southern enemy), took control of the land so that the 59 percent of Irish soil that had been owned by Catholics in 1641 fell to 14 percent by 1703.¹ 

In 1780, just a year after the birth of Walter Whitman Sr. and two years before Cornwallis's surrender to the revolutionary forces in America, Henry Grattan, a member of Parliament from Dublin, moved for an independent Irish legislature. Although the motion failed, it was successful in 1782, and for a time relations between the two parliaments improved. The revolution in France, however, reawakened a thirst for independence, which led an Irish barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone, to argue for sweeping reforms of a kind the English Parliament was not ready to grant. Tone saw an advantage in uniting the interests of two groups, Irish Catholics and Protestant radicals who refused the claims on their allegiance of the established Anglican church. He also sought the help of France and in 1798 undertook a rebellion, which failed when the small number of French who arrived in August of that year were defeated along with the Irish revolutionaries in September. The rebellion was brutally put down, and Tone committed suicide rather than allow the English to hang him. In New York Rufus King, then serving as United States minister to England, learned that the British planned to banish the captured Irish rebels to America and protested against the United States becoming a new penal colony for England. In 1803 Robert Emmet attempted to revive the revolutionary fervor of 1798 but was hanged and beheaded for his fruitless efforts. While no direct evidence of this exists, it seems likely that Walter Whitman Sr. would have been as supportive and admiring of this revolutionary attempt as he was of all others directed against European tyrannies. It was in this democratic and dissenting atmosphere that Walter Jr. spent his formative years and which led to his veneration of such freethinkers as Thomas Paine and Frances Wright. Later he would add to these the Irish who fought to secure for themselves their own native land.

The immediate result of the 1798 rebellion was an enforced Act of Union in 1800 that created a United Kingdom in which Ireland's Catholic population was a minority among the combined Protestant populations in England, Scotland, and Wales. This United Kingdom of Great Britain lasted until Ireland gained independence in 1922. Ireland's north became the industrialized region, and Belfast soon took precedence over Dublin. Under the Union, Protestants were privileged over Catholics in all social and political institutions; most egregious was the stipulation that Catholics were not allowed to serve in Parliament, a provision that was remedied in 1829 with the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill for which Daniel O'Connell, a Catholic lawyer and head of the Catholic Association, had fought for more than a decade.

Once emancipation was won O'Connell soon took his fight in a new direction, leading a movement to repeal the Act of Union by constitutional means. Though the movement was slow to gather momentum, by 1840 he had enough support to launch a Repeal Association. The association attracted a group of young literary men, Catholic and Protestant, who acquired the name "Young Ireland." This group was not interested in constitutional reform, and saw repeal as only a half-way measure toward full separation of Ireland from England. In the event of such a separation, however, they wished to see neither religious faction gain an ascendency in Ireland, so they sought to focus attention instead on a common national culture of history and literature.

One of their leaders was a Protestant attorney, Thomas Davis, who, with Charles Gavan Duffy, founded the Nation, a periodical devoted to fostering their ideals. Through the pages of the widely read Nation Davis became the spokesperson for a cultural nationalism, the aim of which was to free the Irish people of their cultural dependency on Britain and provide them with a set of values that were distinctively Irish. After Davis's death in 1845 Duffy assumed leadership of the group and split with O'Connell over the issue of O'Connell's determined belief in constitutional nationalism as the only viable position.

In these same years Walt Whitman was making his first impress on the city of New York, soon to become the refuge of thousands of Irish. In May 1841 he went to work in the printing office of the New York New World, a weekly newspaper, and in July he gave a speech at a Democratic Party rally in City Hall Park. These newspaper and political activities were leading Whitman in new directions so that he came to know such Irish champions of democracy as Mike Walsh, of the New York Spartan Band and one of the "Bowery b'hoys," and John L. O'Sullivan. O'Sullivan, best remembered for originating the words "Manifest Destiny," owned and edited the highly influential United States Magazine and Democratic Review, where Whitman published fiction pieces. After becoming editor of the New York Aurora in 1842, however, Whitman came out against the Irish in New York, a position he took because of strong democratic reasons of his own.

Soon after, in Ireland, both the Repeal movement and Young Ireland were overshadowed by a natural disaster of such proportions that it swept away all other concerns. In 1845 the potato crop was destroyed by a fungal disease that caused black spots to appear on the leaves of potato plants and the potatoes to wither and rot. These were the first signs of the famine that would blight large portions of Ireland in that year and again in 1846, 1848, and 1849. By the end of the decade the population of Ireland had declined by 1.6 million people who died of famine-related disease and starvation or who left the country. During these famine years mass emigration brought thousands of Irish to America, most of them from the country's southern counties where Catholics predominated. In New York Whitman became increasingly aware of the plight of these immigrants, finding himself particularly sympathetic to the public exposure of Irish women seeking employment.

The famine destroyed O'Connell's Repeal Association, and with his death in 1847 the movement came to an end. Young Ireland attempted an uprising in 1848, and a number of its leaders, notably John Mitchel, were arrested while others fled the country, some finding refuge in America. Mitchel was sent to prison in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) but escaped and made his way to New York in 1853. There, among the large population of Irish immigrants and with the help of other revolutionaries who had fled Ireland, he began raising funds for an organization that would undertake to free Ireland. Many years later, in 1881, Walt Whitman formed a close friendship with a veteran of that same prison in Van Diemen's Land, John Boyle O'Reilly, who, like Mitchel, had been sent there for revolutionary activities and had likewise escaped to America.

When Mitchel had sufficient funding he returned to Ireland, in 1858, to found the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood; a year later an American branch of the brotherhood, the Fenian Brotherhood, was established in New York. The dreamed-of revolution never took place and, except for the production of such remarkable leaders as John O'Leary and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, the brotherhood languished in Ireland. It rapidly gained momentum in America, however, where small militia groups formed and a rhetoric of Irish liberty developed. After the American Civil War began these militia quickly swelled the ranks of enlisted men (in armies of both North and South) in the belief that America's gratitude for such service would lead to full support of a military action against Britain. While serving as a hospital visitor in Washington, D.C., throughout the war years, Whitman met and tended to many an Irish and Irish American soldier. When he published Drum-Taps, a collection of poems related to the Civil War, he included his poetic tribute to Ireland, "Old Ireland." During these same years Whitman developed intense friendships with two men of Irish ancestry, Peter Doyle and William Douglas O'Connor.

At the war's end many former soldiers returned to Ireland ready to fight for its freedom. They were dependent on their American counterparts for arms, however, and with insufficient support from the American Fenians the idea collapsed. Before that, in 1866, the Irish Fenians undertook an attempted assault on Great Britain by invading Canada. The invasion was thwarted, but another attempt was made in 1870; equally unsuccessful, it heralded the decline and eventual end of the Fenian Brotherhood.

In Ireland, the decade of the 1880s was dominated by the land wars. The Protestant ascendancy of the late eighteenth century had been largely the result of their landownership. A century later these landlords controlled the Irish Parliament, while most of Ireland's large population in the south was forced by lack of industry to subsist mainly by land tillage. Industrial growth in the north gradually led to that region's becoming the provider of goods for both north and south, and the earlier reliance on land there was diminished. In the famine years, thousands in the south who were unable to pay rent were evicted; many never really had an opportunity to catch up even after that disaster had passed. In the postfamine years a change in family practices of land transfer, which posited ownership with one son rather than parcelling the land among many, proved to be a move toward stabilization and toward focusing greater power within the ranks of tenant farmers. Such stabilization was needed, for an unofficial policy developed of agrarian disturbance, which sometimes became violent, directed against landowners, many of whom were English. This unofficial policy was replaced in 1879 by the founding of the Irish National Land League, which sought specific objectives and had as its ultimate goal Irish ownership of Irish land. Though not Irish himself, James Redpath, friend and active supporter of Whitman, became a partisan of and fundraiser for the Land League, bringing to it the full force of his skills as writer and speaker.

It was two former Fenians, Michael Davitt and John Devoy, both of whom had been imprisoned for their activities in the brotherhood, who saw in the question of land distribution an issue that could influence the outcome of the larger political objective, Home Rule for Ireland, which in the minds of most Irish meant complete independence. The president of the Land League, Charles Stewart Parnell, took up what had been mainly an issue in the western counties and made it the Irish land issue by advocating fixed rents and an eventual right of landownership by the peasant population. In short, the object of the Land League was the abolition of landlordism and the return of the land to those who worked it. Parnell went to America in 1880 to raise funds for the Land League. While there he addressed Congress on the Irish issue and organized an American Land League that was strongly supported by the Irish population in America. A more revolutionary movement in both Ireland and America was the Clan na Gael, founded in 1867 and later led by Rossa, who instituted a terrorist campaign of dynamite sabotage against Londoners in the 1880s.

By this time Walt Whitman had gained a following among students and professors at Trinity College, Dublin. Included was Thomas W. H. Rolleston, who wrote letters to Whitman in which he told of the purposes and activities of the Land League, winning for this cause Whitman's heartfelt support. Land League activities included boycotting, or shunning those who took up tenancy on a farm from which a poor farmer, unable to pay rent, had been evicted. In this way the league exerted a moral force, but mass rallies at which Parnell pushed the objective of Irish land for the Irish people brought the league and its president into direct conflict with England's prime minister, William Gladstone. Gladstone became prime minister in 1868 and, with the help of the Liberal Party, which took up the cause of Irish Catholics as part of its opposition to the Whig Party and its support of the Protestant ascendancy, in 1869 succeeded in disestablishing the Church of Ireland, the first of many steps Gladstone would take to ameliorate conditions in Ireland. Ultimately, Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 went a long way toward correcting the rent problem, but before that was accomplished, continued disturbances led to severe action by the government.

In 1881, just a year before Whitman welcomed Oscar Wilde in Camden, New Jersey, Parnell was arrested for publicly denouncing these repressive measures. His imprisonment called forth the Land League's "No Rent Manifesto," exhorting no payment of rents until the government acceded to the league's land policies. Gladstone was forced into releasing Parnell early and had to agree to work with him in formulating legislation that would further address the land problem. A brief setback to this spirit of cooperation came just after Parnell's release from prison in 1882, when two government officials were murdered in Phoenix Park by extremists acting in the cause of independence. But Parnell was now ready to take another, nonviolent, step toward independence, the Home Rule movement.

In 1884 the Irish National Land League was superseded by the National League, with Parnell at its head, and Home Rule, or self-government, became the avowed objective. Two years later Gladstone introduced a Home Rule bill that included provision for an Irish Parliament that would attend to all Irish matters, leaving other matters to the English Parliament. It was defeated by Gladstone's own Liberal Party, whose members feared an independent Ireland. Again, in 1893, Gladstone offered the third Home Rule bill, which was also defeated. Home Rule was defeated by more than the Liberals, however; it fell along with Parnell, who suffered disgrace and the loss of his position when, in 1890, he was named in a divorce action by the husband of Katharine O'Shea, Parnell's mistress for many years.²  In America Whitman was among the many who supported Parnell, but he came to believe that for the good of the cause of Home Rule Parnell must step aside. The point became moot when Parnell died in 1891 of natural causes, contributed to, no doubt, by the disgrace he suffered.

There was no political leader to take Parnell's place, and Irish politics splintered into dissenting groups. Strangely, it was a literary force that gave direction in the early years of the twentieth century by attempting to replace political nationalism with cultural nationalism. The Irish literary revival had its beginnings as early as Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland published in 1878. Although nationalist, like the earlier Young Ireland movement, its aim was to revive the submerged culture of the Irish and thus foster a new sense of nationalism. O'Grady was among many of the writers and thinkers in Ireland who in these years were admirers of Whitman. Their leaders, mostly Protestants, held to a firm belief that Ireland needed its educated Protestant class in order to command respect from other nations.

The clear leader of this literary movement was William Butler Yeats, early on a Whitman follower who later turned away because of what he perceived as Whitman's failure to gain an audience among his countrymen and women. Yeats's nationalism had been awakened by contact with the great Fenian revolutionary John O'Leary. While Yeats revered O'Leary's devotion to Ireland, he believed that the Young Ireland and Fenian movements had been far too romantic in their vision of Ireland and too uncritical of its reality. Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 where he and others attempted to wrestle with questions of what constituted Irish culture and Irish literature and what each of those entities would be in the future. Their objective was an Irish literature that would take its place among those of other nations and command their respect. Though a nonspeaker of Irish, as were most of those who followed him in the revival, Yeats supported the Gaelic League, which sought to revive that language and to produce a literature in Ireland's own tongue.

In 1905 Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Fein (Ourselves alone). A nationalist movement, it had as its vision an independent Ireland unified politically as well as culturally. This vision was opposed by the Ulster unionists, who prized their connection to the United Kingdom. While the question of Irish independence continued to dominate the national discourse, a labor movement was forming strength under the leadership of James Larkin and James Connolly. Connolly, a socialist, had attempted to establish an Irish Labour Party, a move that challenged the Labour Party of Great Britain. He and Larkin were successful, however, in organizing the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. In 1913 and 1914 Larkin and Connolly led strikes during which they attempted to inspire the workers with Whitman's words. The strikes caused widespread disruption in Ireland but brought little change for the workers.

The year 1916 is indelibly stamped in Irish history by the events in Dublin during the Easter Rising, a rebellion against the British government. The nationalist Sinn Fein believed that the Irish volunteers fighting in the World War should not have been so engaged anywhere until the battle for their own national independence had been won. The Sinn Fein were joined in rebellion by an Irish Citizens Army, formed to protect strikers during the 1913 lockout. The strikers, members of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, were aided by other republican organizations and may have received aid and support from Fenian Irish Americans. The rebellion centered on the capture of the General Post Office, from the steps of which one of the rebel leaders, Patrick Pearse, read a proclamation declaring an Irish republic. The rebellion lasted only six days before being put down by the British.

The British moved swiftly against the rebels, and court martial trials of key figures in the rising were followed by executions that roused the passions of the Irish populace. James Connolly was one of those executed; another who was sentenced to die, Eamon De Valera, was spared because of his American citizenship, a consequence of his New York birth. As a result of the Easter Rising, Sinn Fein became the political force of revolutionary nationalists, eventually replacing the Irish Party and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1917 de Valera was elected president of Sinn Fein.

In 1918, with the British army taxed heavily by the war, the United Kingdom decided to extend conscription to Ireland, which had been exempted until some form of Home Rule could be enacted. The Irish refused to accept Prime Minister Lloyd George's conditional offer of partial Home Rule, and conscription was not instituted. However, in 1919 an underground military force made up of the Irish Republican Army and, under Michael Collins, the Irish Republican Brotherhood began a guerrilla war against the British government. The objective was to prove to the British that they were not capable of governing Ireland, and in this the guerrillas enjoyed the wide support of the populace. The British retaliated by sending additional forces, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans, the latter so named for the colors of their uniforms, who were responsible for atrocities against the general populace as well as against the rebels.

Late in 1920 the Government of Ireland Act ended the hope of a united independent Ireland by acceding to the Ulster resistance to Home Rule, partitioning the country into north and south, and establishing parliaments in Dublin and in Belfast. These two bodies were empowered to exert control in local matters, but the United Kingdom Parliament could still interfere and held supreme authority. The following year, in the face of continued agitation in the southern counties, the United Kingdom offered a treaty stipulating dominion status similar to that of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It amounted to near independence for the southern counties, though with sworn allegiance to the king and continued separation for Northern Ireland.

A team of negotiators, including Michael Collins, agreed to the offer, but de Valera and the Republicans rejected it because a Free State was not a republic. They further rejected the oath of allegiance to the king required by the terms of the treaty. The Irish Parliament accepted the treaty, as did a majority of the Irish people. Conflict over the two positions led to a civil war of largely guerrilla actions. Despite the Republican rejection, the Anglo-Irish treaty held, and in 1922 Ireland became the Irish Free State. The loss of the dream of an Irish republic was a terrible blow to the revolutionaries, for whom the division of the country was of lesser importance.

In 1937 the Irish Free State's (Eire's) constitution became effective, and in 1949 Eire was formally declared a republic, the Republic of Ireland. The division of north and south remained in place, with Northern Ireland still a part of the United Kingdom until such time as its Parliament should demand a change. In November 1985 the British and Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement by which the British allowed the Irish government some sway over the affairs of Northern Ireland in exchange for Irish cooperation in rooting out terrorists. The terrorism, mostly directed against the British army in Northern Ireland, continued, and long years of violence ensued. Whitman's prayer of "God-speed," uttered in support of the Land League, appeared to have been thwarted by the enduring enmity of the two sides.

2.

Time Line

3.

New York City

Although the events of 1871 are not especially memorable in American history, the year offers a good starting place for a consideration of relationships between Walt Whitman and the Irish. Essential to this consideration are two letters written by Whitman in the summer of that year, each of which suggests he had found in New York's Irish community verification of his long-held faith in the gradual absorption by his country's immigrants of the principles and practices of democracy. It could not have come at a better time for the poet of democracy, who in the same year published Democratic Vistas, a somber prose meditation revealing a generally bleak outlook on the nation's future. That we should see in Whitman's private letters a glimmer of hope occasioned by the sight of New York City's Irish policemen, even while he publicly castigated American society as "canker'd, crude, superstitious, and rotten," is not something to be ignored.¹  The glimmer is especially significant because Whitman had not always been so sanguine about the city's Irish immigrants, especially the Irish Catholics. Indeed, his earliest published utterances on them were filled with the kind of venom most often associated with nativism. Unfortunately, the alteration was not so public as had been his earlier attack, appearing as it did in private correspondence rather than, as before, in a public newspaper. In truth, it must be allowed that his warming toward the Irish may have been somewhat influenced (since Whitman was susceptible to such influences) by a show of appreciation for his work coming at about this time from a group of writers and scholars in Dublin. Certainly he was influenced by his deep love for particular Irish friends, some of whom were born in Ireland and others born in America. But there is no reason to doubt that Whitman was also genuinely impressed in 1871 by the changes that time had wrought in the condition and the character of New York's largest ethnic group. There is, in fact, reason enough to believe he welcomed the thought that his early belief in the democratic impulses of the Irish immigrants was vindicated by those changes.

Whitman's exposure to the Irish in the cities of Brooklyn and New York spanned the years before and after the great migration spurred by the famines in Ireland that began in 1845. In New York the pre-famine Irish population has been estimated as high as twenty-five thousand, or one-fourth of the city's total.²  Mostly Protestant, either Anglican or Presbyterian, the earliest immigrants joined the middle class in Brooklyn and New York. Some of those who came after the 1798 uprising, men like Thomas Addis Emmett and William James Mac Nevin, were by their culture and refinement considerably more aristocratic than their revolutionary activities would indicate. De Witt Clinton, United States senator, mayor of New York City, and governor of New York, was of Irish descent. When he initiated New York's great engineering project, construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825), he coincidentally opened up employment opportunities for hundreds of Irishmen.

Whitman seems not to have been completely immune to this line of reasoning. Though he was in the safer regions of Brooklyn and Long Island while the epidemic raged in 1832, he later worked it into one of his fiction pieces, presenting the disease in such a way as to somewhat uphold the belief that epidemics can function as a means of moral cleansing. In the summer of 1845 he published "Revenge and Requital; A Tale of a Murderer Escaped," in John L. O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. It is the story of Philip Marsh, a man who commits murder and escapes the law before punishment can be meted out. Marsh finds redemption for his guilty soul by nursing cholera victims in the "dirtiest and wretchedest section of the city, between Chatham and Centre streets." The location was on the fringe of Five Points, in the Sixth Ward—known as the "Bloody Ould Sixth"—where the poorest of the city's Irish were congregated, the same area to which Jacob Riis would turn for material for his 1890 exposé of conditions among the city's poor. Though it is unlikely it was his first visit, given his journalistic career, Whitman mentioned going to the Five Points area in September 1868, claiming the visit was "instructive but disgusting."⁷  While Marsh's redemption, gained through selfless contact with contagion, is not the interpretation of cholera's purgative effects adopted by the morally righteous of the city, it partakes of the generalized belief that such widespread disasters can offer opportunities for moral redemption and cleansing; indeed, Whitman describes the murderer as an "unterrified angel of mercy and charity" and as a "messenger of health."⁸ 

In 1849 when cholera struck New York again, Whitman became concerned for the inhabitants of Brooklyn and two years later wrote an article in that city's daily Advertiser ( June 28, 1851) on the need for pure water to be supplied by the city, as New York had done for its citizens by building the Croton reservoir. Later, in "Song of Myself," Whitman identified not with the healer, as in his story of Philip Marsh, but with the victims of the disease:

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp,

      but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl . . .

      away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,

I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

Since the subject of cholera is encompassed in the poem by a wider identification with other unfortunates, such as the imprisoned and street beggars, it is possible to see in these lines an oblique reference to the city's Irish, who in their poverty are embraced by the poem's persona as selflessly as are the cholera victims by Philip Marsh. Whitman's identification with the Irish poor may have stemmed from an early association with them in Brooklyn, where he and his family barely managed to remain above the level of poverty that obtained in the immigrant neighborhoods. Brooklyn's "Irish Town" was located near the navy yard, not far from where the Whitmans lived in the 1820s and where Walt's brother Jesse worked for a time. The family was still in Brooklyn in 1855 when the Irish made up Brooklyn's largest foreign-born element, numbering 56,753 out of a population of 205,250.¹⁰ 

In the 1850s when he was fashioning the all-encompassing poetic voice he believed America needed, Whitman experimented by assuming a fluid, flexible persona. Among the many tentative lines written in this manner in his notebook is one in which he directly associates that persona with the newly arrived Irish: "The poor despised Irish girls and boys immigrants just over."¹¹  New York was by then at a saturation point, having absorbed thousands of famine exiles in the preceding four years, and the newly arrived Irish were indeed poor and despised. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, however, contained a direct reference to these immigrants that subtly reminded them that for all their troubles in America, they were still better off here than at home. The reference appears in the poem later titled "The Sleepers," a marvelous evocation of sleep and its dreams, where the narrator is capable of entering the night visions of the sleepers whose dreams he describes. Among such visions are those in which "ships make tacks in the dreams . . . the sailor sails . . . the exile returns home, / The fugitive returns unharmed," and "the immigrant" (suggesting the many songs of exile fashioned by the Irish in America) "is back beyond months and years; / The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood, with the well-known neighbors and faces, / They warmly welcome him . . . he is barefoot again. . . . he forgets he is well off . . ."¹² 

As the immigrants were forced into ever tighter precincts the Irish neighborhoods of the midcentury became the worst slums of the city. In 1871, however, by which time the United States had absorbed, subsequent to the 1845 famine, some 2.5 million Irish emigrants, conditions had improved considerably for most of New York's Irish. They formed 21 percent of the city's population, and as a consequence of their numbers and their political aspirations, they had moved into the mainstream of its life. In fact, the Irish had become a potent force in what was still a workers' city. They had moved ahead in the workforce to become tailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, and masons, while still filling those roles they had earlier claimed as carters, coachmen, housemaids, longshoremen, and ferrymen. The city's largest union, the Laborers' Union Benevolent Society, was made up mostly of Irish members, and by the end of the 1860s nearly all the officers of New York's unions were Irish, either native or descendent.¹³  By 1872 the "Tammany Tiger" was headed by its first Irish Catholic leader, John Kelly, paving the way for the election in 1880 of New York's first Irish mayor, shipping magnate William Grace.

The years just prior to 1871 also had wrought some changes in Whitman's life, not all of them welcome. Most had been within his family structure. Thomas Jefferson Whitman, or Jeff, the brother to whom he had felt closest since their six-month sojourn in New Orleans in 1849, had moved to St. Louis with his wife and two daughters. There Mattie, Jeff's wife, had developed a persistent throat ailment from which she would die in 1873. Louisa Whitman, the poet's mother, widowed since 1855, was also beginning to show signs of poor health and of wearing down under the pressures of caring for her son, Edward, who had mental and physical disabilities, and worrying about the deteriorating mental health of another son, Jesse, her eldest.¹⁴  The child of yet another son, Andrew, who died in 1863, had been run over and killed by a cart while playing in the street, the result of his mother's drunken neglect.

As counter to these there were the upswings in Whitman's authorial life. Leaves of Grass had seen its fourth edition in 1867, and he continued to work on poems to be added to the next edition. Through the good offices of the publisher of the magazine Galaxy he had published two essays in 1867, "Democracy" and "Personalism," which had been fused into the soon to be published Democratic Vistas (1871). In the same year he would produce Passage to India, the title poem of which is arguably the last of his great poems. Since the publication of some of his poems in England in 1868, he had become a focus of attention for a number of prominent figures there, among them a female admirer, Anne Gilchrist, who sent an impassioned marriage proposal he did not accept. In the summer of 1871 Edward Dowden, professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, issued a significant essay, "The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman," which reflected a growing admiration for the American bard among Irish literati. In 1871 he would also be hailed by the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and receive warm letters from that country's poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Although he had lived in Washington, D.C., since 1863, Whitman was still a son of "Mannahatta" and returned often to visit friends there and his mother in Brooklyn, as he did in 1871. New York, then as now, had a tendency to believe itself the center of the world, but Whitman would have been quite conscious of the fact that the District of Columbia had been provided for the first time with a form of territorial government. Other events that would not have escaped his attention in 1871 included the establishment of the first Civil Service Commission, though Congress, not able—until the assassination ten years later of President Garfield—to see the need to replace the spoils system, failed to continue its support; the organization of the country's first professional baseball association, displacing amateurs; and the fire in Chicago that destroyed an area of more than three square miles, consuming human lives and property including the original draft of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Of more immediate interest to the vacationing Whitman would have been some New York events of that summer: work on the bridge between the cities of Brooklyn and New York entered the second of its fourteen years; more than a hundred people were killed when a boiler exploded aboard the Westfield, a Staten Island ferry; and at least fifty people were killed in a riot involving Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. All of these events would have impressed Walt Whitman, but we have his comments on only one, the Irish riot.

The riot in New York on that July day in 1871 was actually a repeat of what occurred at the previous year's Boyne Day. Orangemen, originally members of an Ulster Protestant Society in Ireland dating to 1795, were, in the United States, members of an ethnic organization whose principal activity was its annual celebration of the Battle of the Boyne. The 1870 observance had been given an extra boost by the fact that in May President Grant had declared the government would no longer tolerate the Irish Catholic Fenian Brotherhood functioning as a kind of separate government within the United States.¹⁹  Actually, it was an empty gesture, for the Fenians had ceased some years before to wield the force of numbers they had once commanded, but the Orangemen took it as a token of further Catholic defeat. On July 12 they had a procession up Eighth Avenue to a park located at Ninetieth Street, where a picnic and dance were to be held. One report credits twenty-five hundred men, women, and children with parading to tunes of "Boyne Water," "Derry," and others "obnoxious to the Catholics."²⁰  As it passed a road construction site where a large number of Irish were employed, the procession attracted unfavorable attention and was soon followed by the workers and other Irish Catholics. The Metropolitan Police were notified, but by the time they reached the park a shower of stones was falling on the Orange-men. A general melee followed, with clubs, sticks, and anything that could serve as a weapon being brought to bear. The militia were called, but by the time they arrived the injured were scattered about the streets. Groups from both sides of the combat tried to crowd into horsecars to escape, and as the fighting continued it brought wreckage to the cars and animals as well as to innocent passengers. Eight people died as a result, fifteen were wounded, and only six arrested; a subsequent investigation cast doubt on the willingness of the city's police to put down the rioters.²¹  New York's Irish waited to see what the following year would bring.

At the time, the New York Irish were as closely linked to the powerful Tweed Ring as any politically motivated ethnic group could hope to be. William M. Tweed was Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, deputy street commissioner of New York City, and New York state senator. Peter Barr Sweeny, one of the original Ring organizers, was a Tammany sachem and city chamberlain, and Richard B. Connolly was the city comptroller. The Irish had been in America long enough to be able to see some of their number move up into the ranks of the well-to-do, and some even became Republicans. For example, in 1871 Edward Gleason, superintendent of the Union League Club, a highly respectable Republican political group, was able to build a house on 128th Street near Fifth Avenue. Though the location was considered "in the country," the house was designed by the prestigious architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Withers. Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, and he and Withers had just completed the plan of the spacious estate Olana in Hudson, New York, for landscape artist Frederick Church.²² 

Despite the evidence of economic gain, most of the city's Irish still toiled as laborers at low wages, competing always with the latest immigrants and with free blacks. Labor activism among Irish immigrants throughout the midcentury had focused mainly on improved wages, and this limited objective hampered any strides toward overall improvement of working conditions. In addition, Irish workers originally impeded their own progress by forming rival groups and secret societies whose memberships were determined by place of origin in Ireland.²³  Only gradually did the idea of benevolent societies replace these secret organizations. Benevolent societies, forerunners of organized labor unions, had political and religious as well as occupational roots. In March 1846 Whitman wrote in the Eagle of a meeting of laborers held at Carroll Hall (a conservative Catholic political society often opposed to Tammany Hall) for the purpose of forming a benevolent society that would care for sick members and bury its dead, "as well as to regulate the prices of work." One speaker who, Whitman says, addressed the gathering "in very animated language" was Michael F. O'Connor. A partial victory was claimed by reading aloud letters from contractors who had agreed to the demanded wage, among them Messrs. Collins, Brady, S. and P. O'Donnell, Quinn, and Burns. While Whitman makes no mention of this, note the Irish names of the contractors, who may have been Americans born to immigrant parents and who are indicative of entrepreneurial advancement possible in a labor-dominated economy that was beginning to break down, creating the need for unions.

Craft workers, among whom the prefamine Irish immigrants numbered highly, were essential to the working class that developed in New York from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Whitman was part of this working class; because of his particular craft, printing, he was aware of the encroaching mechanization that would revolutionize the very character of work and create a new social and economic order based on what Sean Wilentz has labeled "capitalist conceptions of wage labor as a market commodity," where the worker's labor was no longer his or her own.²⁴  In the mid-1830s the city's unions had maintained that those workers who attained the status of journeymen had the right to determine the worth of their labor, which was said to be their own "property."²⁵  By the time Whitman was writing about unions in the Eagle, in 1846, unions represented not just the city's craftworkers but also laborers such as the stevedores and dock builders, where the influx of Irish was just beginning to be felt.

In his Eagle article Whitman warmly supported the organization of a benevolent society but denounced the attempt to regulate wages, which he saw as similar to tariffs, fair trade laws, and other such restrictions on business, to all of which he was opposed. He examined the case of the workers, however, and found it worthy of attention, pointing out that they labored from sunrise to dark for sixty-four and a half cents and were docked exorbitantly for being only minutes late. "And," he exclaimed, "many of these men have families of children to feed, and clothe, and educate—and potatoes are a dollar a bushel, and flour and beef unusually high! . . . Let our philanthropists not go to oppressed England and starving Ireland for samples of scanty comfort."²⁶  A month later Whitman was not so sympathetic. He editorialized that the new Laborers' Association had not only set its own prices and hours but the men now refused to work unless all were employed, which, he says, the city's requirements did not at the time justify. He regretted that the laborers were "going to the very excess of injustice which they complained of in their own former employers."²⁷ 

The following day the editor reported that several of those in the association had called upon him and made him realize he had not done its members justice, for they were in fact ready to receive any work when available. One supposes that the contingent of workers with whom he met included more than a few Irish, for Whitman went on to a lengthy discussion of the condition of Irish laborers. Whigs and nativists, he claimed, say the Irish are a "low ignorant set" who do not belong in the country. He argued that though they were ignorant in "book-lore" and "perhaps uncouth in manners," they had come here "pining and panting for a new and better home" and were opposed to "all kinds of tyranny." Largely because of this last-named quality, Whitman professed to have felt great pride when in a political meeting he had seen "a mortar-stained laborer coolly taking his prominent part in the proceedings." He thought he was witnessing "the budding in a fellow creature's long darkened breast, of the seeds of freedom, and of a knowledge of his own rights." There is, Whitman claimed, a glory to such a dawning "even in the despised hod-carrier."²⁸ 

The same spring of 1846 brought a strike at Brooklyn's Atlantic Dock by Irish dock construction workers seeking higher pay. There was violence, especially when the construction firm brought in German workers to replace the striking Irish. In the Eagle Whitman claimed the disturbances were not caused by Brooklyn workers but by "blustering rowdies" from New York "who seize every occasion to fan the flames of riot."²⁹  Late in his life Whitman claimed to have been familiar with the dockworkers, "the Be-Jesus boys," he called them, "in New York—stevedores on the wharves: I am soft for them, too—the real genuine fellows: but there's a rough gang, set, in New York . . . a dangerous gang."³⁰  Dangerous they no doubt were, and the violence of their strikes was far from Whitman's vision of comradely workers. In the Atlantic Dock strike German workers were attacked and badly beaten, for which a number of Irish were indicted. The indictments broke the strike, and though many of the Irish returned to their jobs, the workforce was carefully set at half Irish, half German, which meant that many Irish workers lost jobs. Most devastating, however, there was no increase in salary for the laborers on land, who were mostly Irish, while the dredgemen, all Germans, received an increase of five cents an hour, bringing their hourly rate to eighty-five cents, five cents more than the Irish were paid.³¹ 

In editorializing on the worst aspects of the dock strike Whitman pointed out that, "with all their faults, the Irish are a warm-hearted people." He then told of a striking Irishman who found some forty or so non-English-speaking Germans (scabs called in to replace the strikers) who had finished work but were fearful of crossing the picket line to get to the ferry and return home to New York. The Irishman took the Germans to the boat and saw them safely across the river, where, with no common language in which to do so, they made every effort to convey to him their gratitude.³² 

Consideration of this type did not extend to black workers, however; the Longshoremen's United Benevolent Society, formed in 1852, operated exclusively for the Irish dockworkers but proclaimed its willingness to accept any white workers it deemed worthy of working the docks. The key word here is "white," for in 1850 the Irish dockworkers had gone on strike to force the firing of a black worker. Subsequent strikes, in 1852, 1855, 1862, and 1863, though undertaken for higher wages, also involved violence aimed at black workers brought in to replace the strikers.³³ 

On principle, in the 1840s and 1850s Whitman did not support the idea of organized labor, which he saw as an attempt to interfere with business and manufacturing. There was always the hope, however, that the narrowness of focus that shaped the views of most immigrants would expand under the influence of democracy. About 1856 Whitman noted to himself what he believed to be the "Gist" of his work: "To give others, readers, people, the materials to decide for themselves, and know, or grow toward knowing, with cleanliness and strength."³⁴  Below this he lists a number of New York newspapers and their street addresses, perhaps with a view of finding in at least some of them outlets for his proposed educational program. The only ethnic paper on the list is the Irish-American, at 116 Nassau Street, and while there is no direct evidence that Whitman actually published in it, the paper was the one Irish newspaper in New York that would have welcomed such a liberal approach.³⁵ 

The Irish-American began publication in New York in the summer of 1849; its owner and editor was Patrick Lynch, former editor of the Boston Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot. In Boston Lynch had used his paper to support revolutionary movements in Europe and repeal of the enforced union of England and Ireland. These positions made him unpopular with the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Boston, who feared seeing their people in the States thrust into dangerous situations if they adopted Lynch's views. Lynch learned from his experience, and in moving to New York to begin publication of the Irish-American, he made an effort to reconcile Irish American republicanism and Roman Catholic interests. In the first issue of the paper he indicated he would support democratic-republican principles but would not forsake Catholicism, and in later editorials he scrupulously defended the honor of the Church.³⁶  Nevertheless, Lynch's republican tendencies were strong, and though his newspaper bore on its masthead the motto "neutral in religion and politics," it was not long before it clearly demonstrated its editor's leanings. These sympathies may have led Whitman to see the paper as a possible outlet for his own democratic proselytizing, a way of placing in the hands of its readers "the materials to decide for themselves" and thus hasten the democratization of the Irish in America.

The process of democratization, Whitman knew, had begun long before among the Irish Protestants who had arrived in the States earlier. It could continue among the more recent Catholic arrivals, he believed, if the influence of their priests could be overcome. The Irish had started coming to North America before that continent boasted a free and independent nation. The first to arrive were mostly Protestants—Ulster-Scots who were Presbyterian (Andrew Jackson's parents were among these) and others who were Church of Ireland or Anglican. Many proved themselves valiant in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. A slow but steady immigration rate continued, with an upsurge early in the 1840s that seemed to signal the spiraling rate of increase that would follow the famines in Ireland. Among those who came in the years of a declining economy in the southern counties of Ireland, immediately preceding the famine, were Catholics who then found themselves at odds with the already established Protestant Irish when such issues arose as the controversial move to fund parochial schools with public tax monies. The famine, of course, brought the great waves of Catholic immigration. In the years between 1847 and 1851, 848,000 Irish entered New York City's port. So many of them remained in the city that in 1860 New York was the most Irish city in the United States, with the Irish population totaling some 200,000 out of a total population of 800,000.³⁷ 

Census figures for 1870 show a New York City Irish-born population of 201,999.³⁸  At that time roughly 75 percent of New York's Irish voted Democratic (the remainder, Protestants for the most part, made up the Irish wing of the city's Republican Party), though there was some discontent that the Democrats did not see fit to run an Irish candidate for mayor.³⁹  Nonetheless, the Irish vote in New York (11 percent of the state's total population and 21 percent of the city's) was strong enough to secure the elections in 1870 of Democrats A. Oakey Hall as mayor and John T. Hoffman as governor.⁴⁰ 

The Irish had played a vital role in shifting the political power base away from Albany and toward New York City. The earliest Irish immigrants found their way into whichever of the parties suited their political philosophy, but as the immigrant population increased and especially as it became clear that the immigrants intended to remain in the city, they were viewed by the Democratic Party as a means of gaining power through sheer force of numbers. This brought the Irish into the rivalry between upstate and downstate politicians in which Albany Whigs, later Republicans, sought to keep the city submissive to the state government. Already highly politicized when they arrived in America because of their own country's forced subservience to England, the New York Irish allied with the Democrats, who were fighting to gain control of city politics. When the doors to the Tammany Society and the Democratic Party were opened to them they entered in great numbers, eventually finding their way, by 1870, to Albany. For some years William Tweed wielded great power in the state legislature. Of its fewer than thirty members, nine were native Irishmen, the parents of another eight had been born in Ireland, and three had other Irish family connections.⁴¹ 

Tweed's power extended into the streets of the city, where his Irish backers formed the largest group of municipal workers. In 1871 Tweed introduced in the state legislature a new charter for New York City which was opposed by a group of anti-Irish dissidents calling themselves the "Young Democrats." Hoping to curb Tweed's control of the party, the group planned a coup. With the help of the Metropolitan Police, however, Tweed was able to prevent the meeting at which the takeover was to occur, an indication not only of his influence on the police force but of the large number of Irish who marched in its ranks. Other powerful forces were at work as well, led by wealthy reformers who, stimulated to action by disclosures in the Republican New York Times of massive fraud and financial misdealings within the city government, now sought to oust Tweed and restore fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, any threat to Tweed was seen by the Irish political bloc as a threat to them.

By the time the July 1871 observance of the Battle of the Boyne arrived, the city's Irish were already roiling. In January their rival political factions, Catholic and Protestant, had vied for the honor of welcoming five Fenian prisoners recently released from English jails. Among the five were Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, who within a few years would command the distinction of being Ireland's most public, and most radical, exile, and John Devoy, the lifelong Irish freedom fighter. Devoy was a longtime associate of another exiled Fenian, John Boyle O'Reilly. The city's contending Irish sectarians were each eager to convey the rebels to the parade and festivities that awaited them. So fierce was the competition between the Tammany Catholics and the Orangemen that the exiles, who were interested only in gaining support for Ireland's cause, eschewed all convoys, turned away offers of swank hotels to stay at the less prestigious Sweeney's Hotel, and publicly chastised the New York Irish for their disunion.⁴² 

Spring brought its own troubles. In May there had been labor unrest, with Irish workers striking for pay increases. By July the city's Irish on both sides of the religious fence were smarting with the memory of the previous year's riot. The Catholics sought to have the mayor issue an order restraining the Orangemen from parading, but Hall chose to hide behind his superintendent of police and had him issue the ban. This cowardliness, as well as the ban itself, stirred the non-Irish of the city to public outcry. In an effort to quiet things, Governor Hoffman issued a proclamation sanctioning the observance. Resentment at this edict coming from the governor they had elected spilled over into the streets as gangs of Irish laborers set upon the marchers with results much as Whitman described them. At the height of the riot, with the procession of Orangemen determinedly advancing on their tormenters, a shot was fired from a nearby window, and the militia of the Eighty-fourth Regiment, called out by the governor, fired into the crowd killing and injuring scores of people. The count of dead and injured on this one July day was in the neighborhood of 165.⁴³  It was, the Times said, "a day never to be forgotten in the history of the City of New-York." Certainly it was a day to arouse memories of the previous decade's draft riot, another stain on the city's history in which the Irish had figured prominently. One account of the Orange Riots, published in 1873, evoked the draft riot by way of praising "the almost universal faithfulness of the Roman Catholic Irish police to their duty. In this [the Boyne Day riot], as well as in the draft riots, they have left a record of which any city might be proud."⁴⁴ 

Such praise was a tribute to the members of a largely Irish police force that all but owed its existence to the need, real or perceived, to hold in check the city's Irish. In nineteenth-century New York, street riots were a form of public exhibition, an "acting out" of frustration and grievance and so much a part of the cityscape that Whitman includes "the fury of roused mobs" in his descant on the city in "Song of Myself." Riots, along with increased crime, created a need for a fully staffed municipal police force to replace the system of part-time wardens and watchers considered sufficient early in the century. For a time, after the police force was established, members of the city's governing body, the Common Council, were allowed to appoint men to serve two-year terms as police officers, thus initiating a political connection to law enforcement not easily corrected. In 1845 the Democrats then in power brought into existence a force of eight hundred paid police; by 1856 the city's "Civic Army," as it was called, numbered twelve hundred, but, fearful of such an army in their midst, citizens insisted they be unarmed and without uniforms.⁴⁵  Uniforms were introduced soon after, however, in the hope they would command respect from the roughs of the city. With the Democratic Party's continued hold on city politics, jobs on the police force became a part of the party's patronage offered most often to the Irish on whose support the party relied. Though there were times when they were accused of favoring their own, over the years the Irish police came to win the respect of most of the city's citizens.

Whitman appears to have been looking at the police from a dual perspective, both of which aided his newly acquired respect. For one thing, he associates them with veterans of the Civil War, a group he held in the highest regard and personal affection. In so doing, he sees, perhaps for the first time, beyond their ethnic "stock," viewing them not as Irishmen but as Americans—or at least as "American-looking."⁴⁸  From the vantage point of this new regard, he can clearly delineate them from the scurrilous politicians at whose behest they function. Indeed, most New Yorkers were beginning to see those at the head of the city's political organization, the Tweed Ring, in the same light as Whitman does here, as villains. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871 was the way in which they hastened a public recognition of rampant political infamy so that, amid mounting evidence of fraud and corruption, 1871 saw the end of the Tweed Ring and its hold on the city's politics.

What we cannot fail to notice in Whitman's account is the personal reaction he registers, the pleasure he derives from observing the police, an emotion which is "something new to me," he says. If we connect this to his comment on their "stock," an obvious reference to their Irish roots, we recognize an admission of a change of mind, perhaps even of heart, about the presumed character of these Irishmen.

The question of character was a subject on which most nineteenth-century New Yorkers held opinions, since character and its national determination had come very much to the foreground of public discourse, largely as the result of the great influx of Irish. At the time of Whitman's letters, the individual who most fully epitomized the adverse image of the Irish politician as possessed of incorrigibly low character was one of the villains to whom Whitman obliquely refers, Irish-born Richard Barrett Connolly, known as "Slippery Dick," who came to America in 1826 and rose to become comptroller of New York City in the years 1867 to 1871. Connolly was the principal factor in the downfall of the Tweed Ring because of financial malfeasance from which he personally profited, to the tune of some six million dollars he is believed to have taken with him when he fled the country to avoid a jail sentence. Amid the general blatancy of the Ring members' wrongdoing, Connolly stood out for what was described as his low cunning, his greed, and the way in which he had distinguished himself in the course of his political rise by a shrewd use of his ethnicity to further his career.⁴⁹ 

Connolly moved through the ranks, keeping pace with the political advancements being made by New York's Irish. In 1839 he was elected to the Tammany Society and worked his way up. He latched on to the campaign of the former Democratic United States Senator Fernando Wood when Wood sought Irish support for his bid for mayor of New York in 1854. So fully was Connolly later identified with the city's Irish that when Whitman wrote his 1871 letter to O'Connor, contrasting the upright behavior of the New York police with the chicanery of their leaders, he may well have had in mind the Irish-born Connolly. Whitman wrote his letter on July 14, just six days after the New York Times (its owner having refused a bribe from Boss Tweed not to publish) had begun printing the full record of Connolly's impropriety.

Whitman's improved perception of Irish police may also have been helped by his deep attachment to Peter Doyle and his family. Pete's brother, Francis, was a police officer in Washington, D.C. In May 1871, before leaving Washington for New York, Whitman had prepared an editorial defending Francis Doyle against newspaper claims of brutality in the arrest of a young boy on theft charges. Evidently the newspaper had taken up the case as something of a cause, for Whitman refers to a persistence in reportage that "amounts to persecution." The reprimand by Doyle's superiors is enough, he claimed, to bring the matter to an end, but Whitman could not resist adding his own admonition, that the attempt to make "martyrs and heroes of the steadily increasing swarms of juvenile thieves and vagabonds who infest the streets of Washington" is a disservice to the citizenry. As to Francis Doyle, he is described as "a little stern perhaps" but the bearer of "an excellent reputation" who "served the Union cause, as soldier or sailor, all through the war."⁵⁰  The article remained in Whitman's notebook, unpublished, perhaps at the request of the officer himself or of his family, who may have wished to avoid exacerbating the situation. Before the year was out Francis Doyle was dead of a gunshot wound inflicted by Maria Shea (known as the "Queen of Louse Alley") when he attempted to recover articles she had stolen. Whitman attended Doyle's funeral on New Year's Eve 1871 and must have found it a sad ending to a year that had seen the Irish caught up in too many instances of violence in American streets.⁵¹ 

The larger issue in the Whitman letters is his changed attitude toward the Irish in general. No longer the "coarse, blustering rowdies," as he described the union organizers he had once condemned, the Irish had come to mean to him such beloved friends as Peter Doyle and William Douglas O'Connor. If the events of that year moved Whitman to recall earlier ones involving New York's Irish, he could not have failed to note the distance he had covered in his personal reactions to this immigrant group. It was a leap shared by many Americans, for whom the Civil War and the heroic participation of thousands of Irish-born immigrants proved a turning point in attitudes. But despite his changed attitude, there is little reason to believe Whitman would not have continued to justify his intent, if not his rhetoric, in the New York Aurora in 1842 when he publicly reviled the Irish and took on no less a figure than the Reverend John Hughes, bishop (later the first archbishop) of New York. His intention would have been the same in 1871, for the one constant in Whitman's attitude toward the Irish is revealed in his description to Peter Doyle of a segment of the Boyne Day rioting, "the Irish lower orders (catholic)." It was their allegiance to Roman Catholicism, rather than the Irish themselves, that Whitman could not accept, for he viewed their church not only as undemocratic but as antidemocratic. When he could dissociate the Irish from their religion he found much about them to his liking, even identifying his poetic persona with them in Leaves of Grass. Privately, as in the cases of Doyle and O'Connor, he could love them above all others. But an Irish friend's Catholicism could remain a stumbling block, so much so that, as shall be seen in the case of John Boyle O'Reilly, Whitman felt forced to deny its existence.

Whitman's furious and unguarded attack on New York's Catholic Irish in 1842 might be offered as evidence of strong anti-Irish feelings had it not occurred when he was still quite young and opinionated, if it did not also suggest the matter was part of the ongoing viciousness common to the city's newspaper business, and, most significantly, if it did not reveal cultural influences he could hardly be expected to have withstood. Recent verifications of Whitman's journalism and the availability of the full texts of his Aurora editorials are helpful in understanding the matter.⁵²  Coupled with a historical background on the public school issue and placed within a biographical framework, they allow a more complete narrative to emerge.

When the twenty-three-year-old Whitman joined the staff of the Aurora in 1842, first as the writer of a series of articles and then as editor, the two-penny daily was one of many newspapers produced in New York City. Among the others were such popular papers as James Gordon Bennett's Herald and a relative newcomer, Horace Greeley's Tribune. Most of the newspapers of the time aligned themselves with a political party, and the Aurora was mildly Democratic, though it concentrated more on the city's social scene than on its politics. As editor, Whitman would alter this. He was no novice to the field, having already racked up at least ten years' experience on Long Island papers—the Patriot, a Democratic organ; the Whig Star; and the self-proclaimed Democrat. For one year, 1838–1839, he was owner, editor, and printer of his own paper, the Long Islander, produced near his birthplace in Huntington. In Manhattan he had worked on weeklies, Park Benjamin's New World and the somewhat idiosyncratically named Brother Jonathan. The jingoistic but literarily discriminating Democratic Review, owned by John Louis O'Sullivan, published some of Whitman's early short stories and poetry. In his late years Whitman recalled O'Sullivan as "a handsome, generous fellow. He treated me well."⁵³  To be treated well in the rough and tumble world of New York journalism of the time was not a small matter, but neither was Whitman's move into the heady atmosphere of the democratic crusade spearheaded by O'Sullivan and the Democratic Review.

John L. O'Sullivan was not typical of any of the Irish who came to America either in the prefamine or the famine years. While most Irishmen who arrived in the decade he did, the 1820s, were Ulster Protestants who fell into the broad category of artisans and craftworkers, the O'Sullivan family could boast an assortment of men who made their living and their mark as soldiers and rebels, fighting in various European countries (most often on the losing side) generally, though not always, in opposition to England. John Louis was born on a British warship off the coast of Gibraltar in 1813 and was brought to New York in 1827. Though baptized a Catholic, he was an Episcopalian for most of his life, before returning to the Catholicism of his family.⁵⁴ 

O'Sullivan's true religion was democracy, which he believed was the future of all countries and the world's most needed form of political advance. Despite his own scholarly achievements, he eschewed the fields of teaching and the law to enter the world of newspaper and magazine writing. Early work in New York City led to the launching of a paper in Washington, D.C., in 1835. O'Sullivan decided to use its location in the nation's capital and its favored position with the newly elected Martin Van Buren to turn it into a national journal of literature and politics intended to further the advance of democracy and of the Democratic Party. O'Sullivan quickly gathered into his fold some of the country's outstanding writers and thinkers by promising them a truly democratic forum in which they might express any political idea, while he as editor would uphold the party line. In practice, the latter consideration pretty much limited the published materials to those written from a Democratic perspective, but the magazine also had a strong literary goal, which was to present the very best that a democratic society could offer. While the New England writers, with the exception of Nathaniel Hawthorne, generally sniffed at his invitation to write for the Review, O'Sullivan was really interested in the kinds of materials that were more likely to emanate from such democratic—and Democratic—centers as New York City. In 1841 he moved the Democratic Review to Manhattan. By then he was a member of the New York state legislature, and the magazine's ties to the Democratic Party were stronger than ever.

In addition to the party's aims, O'Sullivan hoped to advance those of the Young America movement, which in these, its early years, were principally literary and cultural. Young America had no real connection to the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, but it shared a common nationalistic fervor, which in Ireland, of course, took the form of promoting Irish culture over the claims of the dominant English culture. O'Sullivan and the Young America group promoted the development of an American culture that would reflect the working-class interests and attitudes most evident in cities such as New York. Small wonder that Whitman felt himself to have been well treated by O'Sullivan, for Whitman's social, cultural, and political views accorded with his. In fact, Whitman's first entry in the Democratic Review, "Death in the School-Room (A Fact)" in 1841, not only denounced corporal punishment of children but probably also was intended to support O'Sullivan's stand in the state legislature against capital punishment.

Whitman had already been initiated into the turbulent world of politics, both through his experiences with newspapers that served as party organs and via his own involvement as an appointed Democratic electioneer on behalf of Van Buren. In the 1840 presidential campaign he took part in political debates and gave speeches for the party and its candidate, achieving some local recognition though his oratorical skills were somewhat lacking.⁵⁵  He was also quite familiar with Tammany Hall and its political objectives. The Tammany Society, originally a fraternal group named for a Native American chieftain, had its origins in late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals, which quickly became Jeffersonian principles. Its benevolence toward the indigent and the working poor of the city led to support from that quarter for Tammany's later political aspirations. In the 1820s the society offered membership to the Irish, and a decade later they and it were dedicated Democrats. By 1840, when the society supported Van Buren for president, its political influence reached deep and wide in the city, where it had become synonymous with the Democratic Party. Whitman's electioneering for Van Buren in that campaign brought him into close contact with Tammany. In 1877 he remembered learning much about Thomas Paine from a personal acquaintance of the great infidel, Tammany member Colonel John Fellows. It was, he recalled, "some thirty-five years ago, in New York city, at Tammany hall, of which place I was then a frequenter."⁵⁶  That would have been around 1842, about the same time he went to the Aurora. By then Whitman's philosophical and political ideas had been shaped by an early exposure, via his father's liberalism, to such socialistic and anticlerical reformers as Robert Owen and Frances Wright. His later absorption of firsthand accounts of one of his father's heroes, Thomas Paine, well may have served to fuel the anger evident in his Aurora editorials when Irish Catholics became a dominating influence on Tammany and the Democratic Party. At the time, Catholicism was antithetical to those who believed, as did Whitman and his father, in individual liberty and freedom of thought.

Given his political background, it is not surprising that the new editor of the Aurora would move the paper into the political sphere. Nor is it surprising that the issue that would capture his attention strong opinions on the subject. His role as schoolteacher had come about not by his own choosing. When the great fire of August 1835 swept through the printing district of New York, only two of the city's six large morning newspapers survived the flames. Along with the print houses and newspapers lost in the fire went the jobs of many, like Whitman, who were employed within its precincts. Having attained the position of printer only a short time earlier in that year, Whitman's was a case of last hired, first to go, and he had reluctantly turned to schoolteaching. It was an alternative he preferred to working with his housewright father, but it thrust him back to Long Island which, after his years of city life, he found irritating. Letters to a sympathetic friend describing his torments at Woodbury, Long Island, in the years 1840 and 1841, though written partly in jest, reveal his dissatisfaction with life as a country school teacher forced to sleep in the homes of his pupils and partake of such rural pleasures as "huckleberry pic-nics."⁵⁷  Despite this dissatisfaction, Whitman took seriously the whole subject of education and later wrote articles and editorials advocating better education of teachers and improved methods of instruction. His very popular short story "Death in the School-Room (A Fact)" was written while he was teaching on Long Island, the year before his involvement in the Bishop Hughes school affair.⁵⁸ 

While Whitman was still teaching on Long Island in 1840, New York City's Bishop John Hughes approached the city's Public School Society seeking funds for Catholic schools. The society was a private philanthropic agency instituted in 1805 to administer school funds drawn from the state budget and allocated by the city's Common Council. Since the hundred or so city schools were not part of the state's district school system, the society was also charged with providing general supervision of the city's schools. Attendance at city schools was not mandated by law, which meant that thousands of children did not attend any school and thus received no education. When the bishop informed the Whig governor William Seward that many Catholic children were kept from school or were sent to church schools by parents who saw it as a matter of conscience, the governor was genuinely, as well as politically, motivated to do something. He proposed reforms that would make the city's schools, including the eight church-funded Catholic schools educating approximately three thousand children, part of the state system and allow for the establishment of additional public schools that would satisfy the desires of Catholic parents.⁵⁹ 

The reason why many Catholic parents felt conscience bound to keep their children from the public schools had to do with the generally accepted Protestant culture that permeated the schools, including hymns, readings without interpretation from the King James Bible (Catholics believed the Scriptures needed to be interpreted by clergy), textbooks that presented history from a Protestant viewpoint, and many teachers and supervisors who looked down upon their "unenlightened" Catholic charges. Perhaps the most blatantly offensive textbook was the widely employed The Irish Heart which, using poor imitations of an Irish brogue, presented Irish characters who in every way justified the claim of the book's preface: Irish emigration was making America "the common sewer of Ireland."⁶⁰ 

Since the Irish made up the city's dominant Roman Catholic group and had the formidable Bishop Hughes as their leader, they became the center of the storm of protest that developed over the school fund issue. The protest began when, on the strength of the governor's proposals, Hughes went to the Common Council seeking funding for his schools. The Democratic-controlled council reacted by accusing Seward of trying to win Irish Catholic votes, which, through Tammany Hall, the Democrats were able to command. While the council considered Hughes's request, the Presbyterian Church and the Jewish community let the council know that they, too, would be looking for their share of the public funds; they were soon followed by the Baptists, Methodist Episcopalians, and Dutch Reformed. With this kind of stimulus, the council took a hard look at earlier state legislation (specifically the 1824 law nullifying the 1813 statute that had allowed sectarian schools to partake of public funds) before denying the Catholic request in January 1841. It concluded that Catholics had a right to send their children to Catholic schools, but Catholic schools did not have a right to public funds. At this Hughes went into high gear, issuing letters to the general public in which he argued the Catholic position and using the pages of the Catholic weekly newspaper, the New York Freeman's Journal, to advance his cause.

Irish-born John Hughes, who became bishop of New York in 1842, was not a careful and reasoned contender but an emotional one, and he saw injustice to his parishoners in this and many other aspects of the city's political life. His response to the council's decision was that since the state legislature had given the council and, through the council, the Public School Society, the right to administer state funds, only the legislature could rule on the matter. Hughes was counting on Seward to wield influence in Albany.

The Catholics presented their petition to the legislature, which turned it over to the state's highest educational officer, John C. Spencer. Spencer eventually recommended that the state district school system be extended to include New York City. Under this plan the districts would choose their own representatives to administer the district school, thus ethnic and religious concerns would be addressed on a local level. Hughes was delighted with this recommendation. It was submitted to the legislature for action but was delayed largely because of complaints from the Public School Society, which feared its own imminent demise under the new system. The nativists also began to rumble their displeasure, and with what seemed like a strong negative reaction to the proposal—and with an election looming in November—both the Whig and Democratic parties turned against the Catholics. Hughes took a desperate measure and offered a slate of independent candidates under the banner of Carroll Hall. His aim was really to push the Democrats into endorsing the Catholic position on the school issue, but they failed to give in. As a result, the Carroll Hall candidates, all of whom were elected, split the Democratic vote, allowing the Whigs to take City Hall. Only those Democrats who had not had Catholic backing were defeated, which proved Hughes's point to the party. At the state level the Whigs lost control of both houses as well as numerous other posts and began to fear both the power of Hughes's leadership and the Catholic vote.

The Democrats were equally fearful of losing the Catholics, and the Democratic majority in the state legislature soon was ready to pass whatever school bill would placate them. Seward first proposed Spencer's plan but, seeking a compromise, altered it to provide for the continuation of the Public School Society. Hughes gathered over twelve thousand signatures on a petition backing the governor's plan and presented it to the State Assembly in January 1842. The Public School Society, still fighting to retain control, asked for a delay and for an investigatory committee of state and city education officials. The committee, under the leadership of Assemblyman William Maclay, reported to the assembly that the Public School Society was not doing a good job of educating children, or of gaining the trust of parents, or of handling school funds. The assembly then engaged in a general debate of the bill and began writing rules of organization by which the new district schools would operate. March 1842 was the crucial time when New York City was engulfed in turmoil over this matter, and it was then the new editor of the Aurora entered the picture.

Whitman began by pointing out his familiarity and experience with the state district schools; he also claimed to have over the previous six months visited every public school in the city. He promised that the Aurora's position would be based on "wholesome judgement of the city's truest advantage."⁶¹  The paper's position proved to be squarely in favor of the Public School Society, which the editor claimed was educating all the city's children with no prejudice. He provided details of enrollments in various schools, including percentages of Catholic students, adding that there were many Catholic teachers. The following week Whitman began his attack on Bishop Hughes: the petitions Hughes had garnered did not contain legitimate signatures; on his instructions Catholics kept their children out of school when state officials visited in order to support his case; and, getting to the heart of the matter, "this cunning, flexible, serpent tongued priest has had the insolence to appear in the political forum."⁶²  Whitman continued to write editorials on the subject, questioning the wisdom of the state legislators who he claimed lacked experience to judge the matter, insisting that Hughes controlled Catholic politicians by the threat of excommunication, blaming priests for stirring up Catholic parents who were otherwise satisfied with the schools, and pointing out the intelligence and decorum of female students at a public school in Five Points, one of the worst Irish neighborhoods.

On St. Patrick's Day his editorial was headed, "Insult to American Citizenship!" It dealt with a rally held at City Hall Park the day before by supporters of the Public School Society and claimed the rally was overrun by its opponents using the rowdiest of mob tactics. Whitman describes them as "foreigners," "filthy wretches," "blear-eyed and bloated offscourings from the stews, blind alleys and rear lanes," who broke up the meeting with "howlings in their hideous native tongue." Priests were there, he says, "sly, false, deceitful villains" who encouraged the mob. He calls on citizens to rise up against the "hypocritical scoundrel Hughes, and his minions."⁶³  The following day Whitman published extracts from a letter he had received that defended Hughes, but he claimed his paper would continue to fight religious "fanaticism."⁶⁴ 

On March 24, 1842, however, his Aurora editorial began to widen the focus of his attack in ways that need to be taken into consideration. He points out the bind in which Tammany finds itself for its heavy reliance on the Irish vote, which now places Tammany in Hughes's hands. He also attacks the party organ, the New Era, and its editor, Levi Slamm, for having gone over to the side of the Catholics.

With this piece Whitman appears to have begun a not-so-subtle campaign to discredit the New Era and, by suggesting the need for a "truly American" paper to represent the party, to posit the Aurora as a suitable replacement.⁶⁶  Whitman's attention to the school bill had been dwindling because for a time it appeared the bill would not become law. Instead, he stepped up his attack on the New Era, claiming it hoped to dictate to the Democratic Party its own support of foreigners, "a large portion of whom are now in open rebellion." Later in the month he would remind his readers of the party's already expressed dissatisfaction with its journalistic organ and asserted the Democratic Party will "never" be ruled by "foreign priests" and the New Era.⁶⁷  On March 29 he reviewed "The New York Press," evaluating each newspaper, and proclaimed the Aurora "by far the best newspaper in the town." Obviously hoping to displace the New Era, on the following day Whitman offered a definition of his paper's position relative to nativism, a position he no doubt believed would bring it into line with the Democratic Party. Claiming it is not "antiforeigners," the paper is, he says, pro-America in that it sees this republic as possessing the capacities for solving the problem of how far humans can evolve in self-perfection and self-government.⁶⁸  This definition, really of his own beliefs, is not to be discounted, for it reveals a genuine concern of Whitman's that remained with him throughout his life.

With an April 12 election looming that involved all the seats on the city's Common Council, the Democrats held an inconclusive strategy meeting at Tammany Hall on April 5. The next day Whitman implored the party not to follow the dictates of the New Era and its Irish Catholic cohorts but to stand by its democratic principles.⁶⁹  Hughes, however, was not waiting for the party to make up its mind. Once again he declared an independent Carroll Hall ticket of nominees for city offices but conceded the ticket would be withdrawn if the Maclay bill was passed. Whitman pleaded in the Aurora with the state Democrats to stand firm against these tactics, but the party was too fearful of losing the city's Irish vote to heed such pleas. After numerous amendments the legislature passed a school bill that did not allow public funding of religious schools but did proscribe all sectarianism in the public schools and made the city schools part of the state system with a board of education to oversee them. The school bill was passed (by a vote of 13 to 12 when New York City Democratic Senator John Scott, who opposed it, deliberately avoided the roll call), and the Carroll Hill candidates returned to the Democratic fold. The Aurora editor was so disgusted by his party's capitulation that he strongly urged Democrats not to vote for either party in the city election. Robert Morris, the Democratic mayor, was reelected, and the Whigs, who gained control of the Common Council, joined forces with the Native American Party to urge a repeal of the new school law. Whitman vented his fury crying, "Has it come to be, that Irishman is a better title to office, here, than American?" He warned that the Catholics would continue to press their advantage, which Tammany, having gone this far, would not be able to withstand.⁷⁰  His final word on the subject was titled "Americanism," where he firmly repudiated the doctrines of the Native American Party but confessed a desire to see Americans remain free of foreign influences whether from within or without the country.⁷¹ 

While Whitman's attacks on Bishop Hughes and Irish Catholics are highly offensive to readers today, they were exceeded by editors in other city papers, especially by James Gordon Bennett of the Herald, who engaged in personal vituperation bordering on mania and who believed Hughes was attempting to organize an Irish political party. The highly respected Evening Post warned Catholics against "priestly influence in the sphere of politics," and the Whig Tribune branded the actions of the Catholics "cowardice, insult and treachery."⁷²  All of these papers and their editors, including Whitman, were deeply concerned for a basic principle of democracy at stake in this issue, the separation of church and state, which they believed would have been compromised by the use of public funds to teach religion in the schools.⁷³  The matter of "priestly influence in the sphere of politics" was one that Americans eventually came to understand as a legitimate right of clergy in a democracy, but at the time it was frightening. Most important, what the Protestant majority, including Whitman, had to learn to accept was the justice of demands by minorities for full inclusion in the political process, not just—as was the case with the Democratic Party—to provide dependable votes. American history, of course, reveals that succeeding generations of varying majorities have had to learn to accept this idea, that it is part of the process of democratization and is perhaps most common to the urban experience.

In 1842, however, when he saw the highly political Catholic immigrants rallying to their priests' cries, he clearly feared the worst for the future of the Republic. It was a reaction in which he was far from alone. Newspapers such as the Aurora reflected more than the thoughts and attitudes of their writers, they reflected the popular society within which they found an audience. The language Whitman employed was that of his readers, and the image his words evoked was one already familiar enough to be recognizable to them. His horror at the mix of Irish Catholicism and politics and his descriptions of the Irish as subhuman violent rioters point to the figure of "Paddy," invented by antebellum Americans faced with an influx of immigrants unlike any that preceded them. Whitman's characterization of the Irish as disturbers of peaceful political meetings goes right to the heart of the fear that gave rise to the stereotype: the perception of the Irish as politically subversive and, in their Roman Catholicism, a fundamental threat to democracy. One study of the stereotypical Paddy distinguishes between its two principal icons: extrinsic and intrinsic characteristics. Extrinsic characteristics, those that are manifest and demonstrable—having to do with inherited qualities and physical traits, economic conditions, religious and political convictions, and such behavioral dispositions as violence and "rowdiness"—constituted the popular image of Paddy in the 1840s and 1850s. This was a calamitous move away from an earlier perception that defined the Irish by intrinsic characteristics pertaining more to intellect, morality, and a love of freedom. The usual year of demarcation between the two is 1845, the year of the Irish famine; however, in New York City, where Irish immigration was heavy even prior to the famine, the change occurred a few years earlier, which places it at about the time of the 1842 public school debate.⁷⁶  In fact, we find Whitman using the word "Paddies" that year in the Aurora.

What occasioned the use of this particular ethnic slur was a bloody street fight that escalated into the kind of mob behavior so easily ignited in New York's troubled neighborhoods and just as easily turned into rioting. On the afternoon of the April 1842 city elections a band of Protestant Irish, nativists, and other anti-Irish Democrats, all of whom felt themselves to have been ignored by their party in favor of the Irish Catholics, descended upon a Catholic neighborhood and beat its inhabitants fiercely. The Catholics retreated but regrouped a few hours later, and the fighting resumed. Mayor Robert H. Morris and the police came to restore peace, but by some accounts the police did more harm to the Catholics than had their opponents. More and more combatants joined the action. When the Catholics retreated to their homes, they were followed by members of the Spartan Band (the principal instigators of the day's battles) who invaded the Irish Sixth Ward, even entering private homes and destroying the first floor of the Sixth Ward Hotel where a polling place was still open. The Spartans next headed for the bishop's residence behind St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street. Hughes was not at home, so the mob vented its anger on the first floor of the building by smashing windows and threatening to burn the residence, a threat they might have made good but for the arrival of police.

Whitman commented editorially on the disturbances a number of times in the next few days, casually remarking, with regard to the damage to the bishop's residence, "Had it been the reverend hypocrite's head, instead of his windows, we could hardly find it in our soul to be sorrowful."⁷⁷  The following day he visited the Sixth Ward Hotel and, while admitting some destruction to property and individuals, denied it was extensive and accused the Catholics of having started "the whole rumpus, merely to generate sympathy for their cause, and to make capital of."⁷⁸  He also accused the "bog trotters" of having roamed the streets on election day seeking trouble and "grossly insulting" Americans. Even before the election day riot Whitman had briefly noted a "great fight" between some Sixth Ward Irish and members of "Mike Walsh's Spartans." "The Spartans routed the Paddies in magnificent style," Whitman reported, adding, "We like this young Walsh, and his society."⁷⁹ 

The Spartan Band was led by Mike Walsh, a Protestant Irishman and friend of Whitman, who also wrote for the Aurora on occasion and who later would go far in Democratic politics. At this point he and his friend "Yankee" Sullivan were street brawlers and rioters, the very things that should have qualified them as Paddies, but because they were Protestants and, like Whitman, disaffected Democratic Party members, their behavior was excusable in his eyes.

Despite the disappointments he had experienced in 1842, Whitman regained his faith in the Democratic Party and proved himself so loyal to it that four years later he was rewarded with the editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle. One of his first pieces bears out his earlier contention in the Aurora that he was not a nativist. In the first week of March 1846 Whitman wrote in the Eagle of visiting New York docks where he saw ships at anchor that had weathered the cruel winter storms in the Atlantic the preceding months. The "dangers and escapes" these ships had endured were not lost on him, and he marveled at the condition of one, "[H]er spars, sails, and rigging are actually drooping." Two weeks later he was present when a Liverpool packet arrived, "her decks covered with emigrants." He was glad on their account that after their stormy passage the weather was fine, so that their impressions "of the strange land they had chosen for their home" might be sunny ones. The immigrants were, he says, "a robust good looking set, mostly Hibernians and, spite of Nativism, we sent them a hearty welcome to our republic, and a wish that they might indeed find 'better times a-coming!'"⁸⁰ 

These are the same sorts of emigrants Herman Melville described in Redburn (1849), where his young sailor makes his first transatlantic voyage from New York to Liverpool and back. On the return trip the ship transports a number of emigrants, most of whom are leaving Ireland. While the conditions of their passage are stringent, it is clear from Melville's description, as well as Whitman's, that the "coffin ships" with their cargoes of starved and disease-ridden refugees had not yet begun to arrive in New York, so that Whitman could plausibly imagine the immigrants concerned only for good weather. It was no doubt the later arrivals of starved and sickened souls who moved him to write, in Leaves of Grass, of the sacredness of every individual, "no matter who, / Is it a slave? Is it one of the dullfaced immigrants just landed on the wharf? / Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the welloff. . . . just as much as you."

Not yet aware in 1846 of the desperation that in many cases impelled the immigrants, what Whitman welcomed was a desire for political freedom that he read into the act of Irish emigration. A few months later this understanding of their situation was altered by his reading of a report on the Irish Coercion Bill of 1846 against which Daniel O'Connell fought a final battle before his death the following year. The copy was provided for him by one of the members of the Laborers' Association, several of whom earlier had taken him to task for his criticism of their association. The report proved something of a revelation to Whitman, who claimed never to "have realized the wrongs and destitution of Ireland so vividly" before reading it. "What a black and dreary narrative it furnishes," he exclaims, "of a nation having the truest and fullest resources, both in the natural talent of its citizens, and in the facilities of the country—and yet all crushed for the want of a judicious and liberal government!"⁸¹ 

It is obvious that Whitman saw signs of inherent good character in the Irish, so when he pointed to them as a stumbling block to the possibility presented by democracy for a human evolution into a more perfect form he was pointing to an extrinsic quality not rooted in character but in behavior, specifically the seeming refusal of the Irish to participate in this evolutionary process. This apparent refusal was especially frustrating to those who shared Whitman's more liberal view that a free society could not compel the individual; thus the Irishman who remained unwilling to change must be allowed to flourish in what Americans such as Whitman believed to be willful ignorance. To them the Paddy demonstrated not an inherent lack of character and intelligence but a determined preference for ignorance by clinging to his Roman Catholic faith, obeying its clergy, and maintaining a belligerent form of sectarian and political activity.

Distinctions such as those Whitman made between Paddies and the type of Irishman suggested by the nickname "Yankee" Sullivan (with the fusion that would later give rise to the hyphenated American) were of the kind that had transformed the earlier image of the Irish, and its generalized ethnic application, to more specific differentiations between Ireland-born long-term residents, recent immigrants, and Irish Americans. The distinctions would also explain Whitman's disavowal of the Native American Party, for, as he insisted, he was not antiforeigner and would not exclude any from the blessings of liberty and democracy. But he did expect the foreigner, once admitted, to seize the opportunity to improve his or her character and condition. An undated notebook entry gives evidence of Whitman preparing a speech, perhaps intended for a gathering of nativists, which expressed his feelings: "It is mentioned that the Irish and German and other foreigners mix in our politics.—Gentlemen with perfect respect I say you can think what you choose about this:—It is a credit to men and no disgrace to them to take an eager interest in politics."⁸²  A similar note finds Whitman addressing his imagined audience as "Proud sirs!" and mockingly adopting their tone in mimicry of their patronizing attitudes: "How those niggers smell!—How dare that Paddy ride in the same omnibus with me?"⁸³  Apparent contradictions fall away when these varied statements are viewed as part of the process of developing a wholistic concept of democracy and as part of Whitman's attempt to satisfy himself as to the role of the immigrant in its achievement.

Perhaps the opportunity he received to live away from New York for a time helped to enlarge Whitman's vision. When he lost his editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1848, Whitman left New York to work on the New Orleans Daily Crescent. There he produced a series of character sketches drawn from that city's exotic types, one of them an Irishman named Patrick, but no Paddy. "Patrick McDray" is a sketch of a "hardy-looking Hibernian" who by dint of his industry in the hauling of goods to and from the levees has raised himself to the position of, as the fictitious name suggests, independent drayman, working the docks and streets of the South's most important port city. Whitman's Patrick may have been one of the Irish laborers who had earlier dug the canals young Jeff Whitman admired in the city. Many of the draymen had made their first mark in New Orleans as laborers on the canals before moving into the carting business, where they quickly pushed aside the blacks who previously had done this work.⁸⁴  Though some in the city complained of an Irish recklessness on the roads, Whitman is openly admiring of "Pat's" industry and the eagerness with which, once landed in "our rightful land," he has improved, so that he is now "Mr. Patrick McDray, who owns his own team and drives it like a gentleman."⁸⁵  The emphasis on McDray's title indicates Whitman's desire to suggest what Paddy might become in America—a capitalistic owner of his own business and worthy of being called "Mister." Unstated is the fact of slavery, which supported the economy into which Patrick McDray has bought himself a place.

There were few questions of more general interest to antebellum America than character. The possibility held out by democracy for character formation and reformation led the states and their citizenry, especially in the North, into all manner of reform movements and attempts at social engineering. In the more high-minded New England states such movements were truly reformist, but in New York City they often took a political bent. Such was the case with the temperance movement, to which Whitman briefly lent himself out of a need for money. After leaving the Aurora Whitman accepted seventy-five dollars from Park Benjamin, owner of the New World, to produce a novel to be published as a supplement to the newspaper. Thus was born Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, A Tale of the Times, a temperance novel. Whitman later offered a few different versions of its creation, one being that he wrote it while under the influence of rum, but he was clearly embarrassed by the novel and always insisted it was done for the money. Part of his embarrassment may have been for Evans's purple prose (though it sold well both in the newspaper and in a subsequent book publication), but it may also have had to do with the politics surrounding New York's temperance movement at the time. Though the Washington Temperance Society was nationwide, temperance became a political issue in nineteenth-century New York State when, under the guise of reform interests, the Republicans attempted to pass legislation that would regulate the sale of liquor and limit the number of licensed saloons. This was aimed at New York City, where Democratic political power was closely tied to the high number of Irish saloon owners. By the mid-1850s nearly 15 percent of those Democratic officeholders whose occupations are known were saloon keepers.⁸⁸  The Tammany Society and the Democratic Party frequently held meetings in saloons, especially in Irish wards, where recruits were sought from among the ever-increasing numbers of newly arrived immigrants. Often, in return for the use of their premises for such purposes, saloon keepers were made ward captains and eventually became nominees for political office. Organizations such as the Washingtonians, which later published Whitman's novel, became part of the campaign to limit alcohol because their interests dovetailed with those of the Republican Party. In the 1840s they even made inroads among city firemen who, often in large numbers, took the pledge in Protestant churches.⁸⁹  In the New York Aurora in March 1842 Whitman reported that the Washingtonians led a procession of New York City firemen past City Hall, followed by "an immense number of citizens, formerly intemperate men, but now worthy members of society."⁹⁰  The Republican effort to legislate the sale of liquor in saloons failed, at least in part, because of the opposition mounted by such New York Democratic worthies as Mike Walsh and "Yankee" Sullivan. While Whitman was writing Franklin Evans and Protestant churches were pledging firemen to temperance, Sullivan was opening his saloon, the Sawdust House, to firemen in Engine Company 27, who made it their headquarters.⁹¹ 

Reformers who did not commit themselves to specific areas, such as temperance or the penitentiary movement, often brought to bear on the subject of character reformation advances being made in science, especially in the field of what later was called eugenics. Whitman's interest in character formation as it pertained to the development of a society made up of morally superior individuals inevitably led him to considerations of the nature/nurture theme, which would have had particular application to immigrants. Embedded in this general theme were such questions as, Was it enough for individuals to be transplanted to a democratic soil? Could their characters be freshly nurtured and perfected simply by partaking of freedom, or environments? If the latter, could their children overcome this inheritance to become the kinds of perfect Americans Whitman describes in "Starting from Paumanok": "A new race, dominating previous ones and grander far."

One of the places Whitman looked for answers to questions such as these was in the writings of German philosophers (which he read in translation), whose arguments often were predicated on physiological principles.⁹²  From them and from such American homespun theorists as Oscar Fowler he pieced together his own notions of progressive science and fashioned a hope for a future democracy based on a race of healthy, wholesome individuals capable of acting freely in a free society. As did many Americans in the 1840s and 1850s, Whitman looked to such contemporary sciences as phrenology and physiognomy for an understanding of the interplay of eugenics and character. These two closely related fields claimed to offer much needed assistance in determining the character of individuals and were taken very seriously in their time.

Because such theories supported the general reform movement alive in America throughout much of the nineteenth century, they were believed to have application beyond mere self-improvement. That Americans more than those in other nations felt the need to understand the connections between character and environment can be directly laid to the freedom afforded individuals in the United States and to the presence within the country of peoples from various national backgrounds. One instance of this was the concern focused on the freedom the country offered to take advantage of others, either in such entertaining ways as those of P. T. Barnum or in the criminal intentions of a confidence man. This freedom lent an urgency, especially in large cities, to the search for some obvious way of gauging the character of another—perhaps by observing head formations or facial characteristics. While the immigrant also could have benefited from such useful knowledge, it was more often the native born who sought ways to anticipate the probable outcome of encounters with the foreigner. Beyond this lay a more far-reaching concern for the influence on democracy of the "racial" characteristics, as they were then termed, of ethnic Americans.

Originating in Germany, phrenology came to the United States via the lectures of Johann Spurzheim. It enjoyed enormous success in the 1840s, with thousands flocking to learn its principles. In essence, it promised to provide information about individuals by means of craniology, measuring the skull, and then, by charting the skull's formation and contours, drawing conclusions about the brain, which was believed to be the principal factor in determining character. Whitman was introduced to this methodology in 1846 when he heard a lecture in New York by Orson Fowler, who with his brother, Lorenzo, formed a team that expounded the "science" and made it popular through lectures, publications, and private readings of heads. Fowler did not claim that character traits were permanently set by the brain's formations but that through learning what portions of the brain were most developed one could encourage desirable traits by exercising that capacity and repressing less desirable traits. Though Whitman dismissed Fowler's assertions of phrenology's total creditability, he saw a sufficient amount of truth in it to have his head read in July 1848 by Lorenzo Fowler, a reading that indicated he was high in self-esteem, caution, combativeness, and in both amativeness, that is, love for the opposite sex, and adhesiveness, the capacity for same-sex love.⁹³  For many years Whitman attempted to improve himself by either enlarging or "depressing," as he called it, some of these capacities, most notably by depressing his tendency toward adhesiveness when he felt it leading him too strongly.⁹⁴ 

Physiognomy, an outgrowth of phrenology, was a simpler method of determining character, for it depended on observation and interpretation of facial features and expressions. Here one sees the potential for racial stereotyping reaching beyond that offered by phrenology. Phrenology demanded the use of measuring tools and charts, but anyone could engage in physiognomy merely by observing the faces of others. One of the poems (later called "Faces") in Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass draws its inspiration from this system, though it does not include references to specifically racial features. Such racial characteristics as flat noses, slanted eyes, high or low cheekbones and foreheads, and lip size could all be interpreted by the physiognomist in ways that developed a hierarchy of national groups. The simian-faced cartoon depictions of Irish males that became popular in New York newspapers and elsewhere left little doubt of where the Irish fit in this hierarchy.⁹⁵ 

Orson Fowler took up physiognomy along with phrenology but, recognizing its limitations, moved beyond it to observations of the entire body in what was called physiology. Not surprisingly, the taller Anglo-American stature was privileged over that of other ethnic groups, and from this was drawn a conclusion of national and moral superiority. Again, reference to depictions of the Irish stereotype reveals Paddy's diminished physical stature. Obviously, the physical condition and appearance of many Irish were more attributable to poverty than to ethnicity, but such distinctions were easily blurred under the dictates of pseudoscience.

The influence on Whitman of these theories is clear, not only in his own adoption of phrenology as a self-directed discipline but also in his insistence on physiology via his body-based poetry. In an 1868 poem, "One's-Self I Sing," he makes it clear that he has moved beyond the exclusive tenets of phrenology and physiognomy and has taken up physiology: "Of physiology from top to toe I sing, / Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far." What this meant to his developing thoughts about the various ethnic groups arriving in the United States, the Irish in particular, is not certain, but the indications are that even before this he had become more of what we today would term a behavioralist, one who observes and values behavior over appearance or psychological characteristics as an indicator of character. The 1848 character sketch of the New Orleans drayman is a brief portrait of individualized character demonstrated in the behavior of one Irish immigrant. From it, as well as from other indications of approval of Irish individuals, it is possible to detect a movement away from his earlier fear that the Irish posed a threat to democracy.

As is often the case with Whitman, one finds the softening of attitude related to the female, either within his own personality or in those of others. If we return to the partially quoted stanza from "One's-Self I Sing" and complete it, we find the claim, "The Female equally with the Male I sing." But even prior to this Whitman had extolled the female and included the Irish female. The most sympathetic depiction of the Irish Whitman ever penned was of Irish women, though it never got beyond the pages of his notebooks. In a lengthy sketch probably intended for a newspaper and written sometime around 1850 or earlier but never published, Whitman presents a composite picture of Irish immigrant women seeking employment as servants, the occupation with which they became all but synonymous. Seeing in domestic service an opportunity to better themselves while living within the security of a middle-class home, Irish women—whose migration was not so often famine-driven as it was a desire for gainful employment—were happy to take positions that were scorned by American women. In the 1840s and 1850s when Whitman wrote his account, an estimated 80 percent of women employed as servants in New York City were Irish born.⁹⁶  Because of their vast numbers, they could only expect to earn from four to seven dollars per month in the city, though elsewhere in the country they commanded more.⁹⁷  If wages were lower, some compensation was found in the freedom with which the women could leave houses where they were made to work too hard or for too many hours and seek better positions. The demand for "help" was great, and since women in other immigrant groups sought marriage at an early age, the Irish women, who in general preferred to remain single and maintain their independence, quickly learned to advertise their availability once they had acquired some experience.

Directing the reader's attention to the society's offices, he describes low basement rooms crowded with Irish women arrayed on long benches, "perpetually standing or seated in that way, waiting for some master or mistress to come along and give them a 'call.'" Mike Walsh, by then a Democratic state assemblyman, similarly complained of the state-controlled Board of Commissioners of Emigration claiming that, at its behest, respectable Irish females were "put to sit on benches, shivering and shaking like so many aspen leaves."⁹⁹  Walsh's complaint may have been made mainly for political purposes, but Whitman's indicates a true feeling for the women subjected to public display: "To the Irish girl, out of a situation, the Intelligence Office is a place of public seeing and being seen." Seldom do we find, even among the sentimental writings of those who commiserated with the plight of the immigrant, such a sensitive awareness of the objectification endured by a lower-class immigrant group, especially its women. Indeed, Whitman offers here a Foucauldian insight into the hierarchy implicit in the act of looking, or gazing, at another.

Later Whitman displayed a similar sympathy for females engaged in prostitution, an occupation that included a disproportionate number of Irish, an unhappy consequence of the large number of unattached Irish females in the city.¹⁰⁰  In this case, his sympathy may have stemmed from a connection close to home, for the wife of his brother Andrew, Nancy McClure Whitman, was Irish and was suspected of playing the prostitute even while married.¹⁰¹  After her husband's death in 1863 she took to the streets openly, and Walt's mother wrote to him that Nancy "goes it yet in the street," which eventually led to the birth of illegitimate twins.¹⁰²  Despite the disgrace that his mother felt so keenly, Whitman continued to send loving greetings to Nancy in his letters home and remembered her in his will.

Whitman's easy familiarity with his housekeeper may not have extended to the Irish women who came to help her. These women commanded, and received, the kind of respect they no doubt felt was their due, especially from the poet of democracy. In 1888 he discussed with his friend Horace Traubel the way of life Englishmen enjoyed with "wives, sisters, mothers—veritable and abiding providences," who, along with a "watchful valet," freed them from the details of daily life and made it possible for the men to achieve "a wealth of performance." Fortunately, he went on, in America there were no such persons waiting on the men, and they had to learn to care for themselves. He then recalled an incident involving his English artist friend Herbert Gilchrist, when Gilchrist and the American William Sidney Morse were both executing likenesses of Whitman at the house in Camden. Morse one day was blackening his shoes, and Gilchrist remarked that the Irishwoman who was that day working at the house should be asked to do the task. Whitman remembered, "I put in, that if we dared do such a thing the woman would probably up and curse us and leave the house." Gilchrist's explanation was that at home in England "the girl they had would feel hurt if not allowed to shine his boots"—to which Whitman says he could only reply that "this was democratic America—another state of society—in respects, another age, etc." Traubel then voiced his preference "for the independent instinct of the Irish woman," with which Whitman heartily concurred: "Yes—so do I: I abate nothing of my democratic sympathies."¹⁰⁵ 

In his poetic persona Whitman foreswore partialities by making the conscious choice to represent all aspects of American society and to bridge the two worlds developing along the country's economic lines. In New York this consciousness of two cities, represented by its wealthy and by its poor, largely immigrant population, manifested itself at about midcentury in a number of books and articles emphasizing the contrast. Notable among these were Matthew Hale Smith's Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1868) and George G. Foster's New York by Gas-Light (1850). By 1860 the concern reached Harper's Weekly in Winslow Homer's engraving The Two Great Classes of Society. Whitman was a Bowery habitué, where the working class went to play in beer gardens, theaters, and dance halls. Thanks to his working-class attitudes, he would have been fully aware of the social division occurring in the city even without the protestations of his Irish friend Mike Walsh, who, now far removed from the days of his leadership of the Spartan Band, had become increasingly more socialistic though still a member of the Democratic Party. Drawing his support from the lower level of the city's workers, Walsh, who earlier had attacked both the Democratic Party and Tammany for their attempts to win over members of the city's banking and business industries, took up the most radical of labor reform measures, eventually opposing not just unfair practices but the capitalist system itself. Though Protestant, he led the attack on Trinity Church which, using its original 1705 land grant from England's Queen Anne as a base, had amassed enormous wealth. Walsh refused to honor the fenced-in privacy of the church's adjoining park and encouraged workers in the vicinity to do the same.¹⁰⁶  In addition to Trinity Church, Walsh singled out John Jacob Astor as the symbol of what he termed a "legalized system of plunder," by which the labor of a working man, his own property, was stolen.¹⁰⁷  Many of these attacks were made in speeches that helped elect Walsh to the state assembly in 1846, where he served two terms. Whitman also made a dig at Astor in the Eagle in April of that year with a two-line comment: "J. J. Astor has given $500 to the Fund for Firemen's widows and orphans. How on earth could he spare it?"¹⁰⁹  The year before Whitman had also aimed a blow at Astor in his essay "Tear Down and Build Over Again," where he deplored the American tendency to tear down buildings and erect new ones every few years. Arguing for the preservation of those edifices and places imbued with cultural significance, he avers, "There are those who would go farther to view even Charlotte Temple's grave, than Mr. Astor's stupid-looking house on Broadway." To such as these, he argues, "greatness and goodness are things intrinsic," adding, "[C]an Irishmen forget where their Emmet lies buried, though it should be marked by no grave-stone, and the proudest columns loom up everywhere around?"¹⁰⁹ 

Walsh's attack on John Jacob Astor may have awakened in Whitman's mind a memory he would later include in Specimen Days, how as a teenager, in about 1832, he once saw the elderly Astor carried from his home to be placed in his sleigh. He remembered the old man "swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck'd in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop'd in other furs."¹¹⁰  The description emphasizes the enormous privilege of Astor's life and, if Whitman's remembrance of the year as 1832 is correct, underscores as well the contrast between this privilege and the suffering that was soon to descend on thousands of the city's poor in the ensuing cholera epidemic. In a report of Astor's death in the New Orleans Daily Crescent, Whitman says he recalls seeing the old man "two winters since," which, if the same incident, would obviate a cholera connection. But in this account he draws a direct parallel between the old man's condition, "bent down with age and sickness . . . entirely unable to help himself," and that of Astor's groom, "a hearty young Irishman, with perhaps not two dollars in his pocket [who] looked with pity upon the great millionaire!"¹¹¹ 

Whitman neither attained nor desired Walsh's degree of radicalism, and indeed the two men later separated over the Free Soil issue. When Walsh was imprisoned for libel in 1846, however, Whitman used his position as editor of the Eagle to point out that an "intelligent majority of all parties" believed six months in the penitentiary too severe and that the governor "could not do a more commendable act, in its way, than to remit the sentence of Mike Walsh."¹¹²  Walsh and Whitman were close enough friends to lend credence to the speculation that it was Whitman who wrote Walsh's obituary in the Brooklyn Daily Times on March 18, 1859, where Walsh's talents were honestly evaluated.

While the politics of a Mike Walsh were held suspect by many New Yorkers, the familiar figure of Paddy was making its way into popular culture and, in its stage manifestations, helping to ameliorate suspicions of the Irish. In the 1840s and 1850s Whitman went often enough to New York's theaters to be aware of the stage Irishmen whose descriptions were most often summed up in the word "unlucky." Usually displaying wit, charm, and a good-natured, rustic disposition, the stage Irishman was a confused, unlucky blunderer in an unfamiliar American setting.¹¹³ 

The stage "blunderer" is traceable to Thomas Sheridan's The Brave Irishman: A Farce (1754), though Sheridan actually attempts an examination of the prevailing English conception of the Irishman as a characteristically blundering fool, a conception similarly questioned by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth in Essay on Irish Bulls (1802).¹¹⁴  In his American stage appearances the Irish blunderer was not considered responsible for his poor condition in life and was laughed at with a high degree of pity. When the blunderer persisted in his ignorance, however, refusing the advice of others, he often brought disaster upon himself and them, a dramatic outcome that could engender anxiety in an audience. Thus, even through such popular forms as the theater, the stereotype of Paddy could be a double-edged sword as a comic figure turned swiftly into an impediment to democracy.¹¹⁵ 

New York's theater scene was also the setting for an incident that reinforced another image of the Irish, as fiercely violent. The Irish formed a large part of the mob that rioted on May 10, 1849, when the English actor William Macready appeared at one of Whitman's favorite theaters, the Astor Place Opera House, on the same evening that Edwin Forrest—"The American Tragedian"—appeared at the Broadway Theatre. Nationalism and hatred of England raised the level of passion far beyond what the matter called for, and twenty-two people died in the melee. Late in his life Whitman remembered the date of the riot and that he was at that time publishing the Freeman. He recalled attending both theaters, the Broadway and the Astor Place, and listed Macready and Forrest among those he had seen perform, recalling Forrest in specific roles "as Metamora or Damon or Brutus."¹¹⁶  Whitman also saw the very popular Charlotte Cushman as Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance, a comedy hit written by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, and may have seen the foremost Irish comic, John Brougham, who performed at the Park Theater in the 1840s and 1850s.¹¹⁷  Brougham frequently performed one-man shows in which he impersonated famous Irish orators such as Daniel O'Connell, a type of performance that would have attracted Whitman, who at this time had longings of his own for a career as an orator. In addition to his stage roles, Brougham was also a playwright, rivaling Boucicault in the number of his works.¹¹⁸  Not to be forgotten is Whitman's fondness for Gerald Griffin's Irish novel, The Collegians, which surely would have led him to see Boucicault's stage adaptation, The Colleen Bawn.

The city also offered instances where image and reality intertwined to lend credence to popular conceptions of the Irish. The "Bowery b'hoys," a city phenomena, were visible on the streets of New York as well as on its theater stages, so that one image fed into the other, erasing the line between them. Mike Walsh was a leader of the b'hoys, who owed their name to the Irish brogue of so many of their number and who were city roughs sufficiently distinctive to create a culture of their own. The b'hoys were working class, many of them mechanics (including carpenters, cabinetmakers, and shipwrights), most of them Irish, who by this time made up approximately half of the city's mechanics and thus were distinguished from the lower-class Irish who ran with gangs such as the Dead Rabbits.¹¹⁹  When later reminiscing about his early days in New York, Whitman remembered the kinds of laborers who were b'hoys, "the young shipbuilders, cartmen, butchers, firemen," and their stage re-creations, "the old-time 'soap-lock'" (referring to the slicked-down hairstyle preferred by the b'hoys), "or exaggerated 'Mose' or 'Sikesey,' of [Francis S.] Chanfrau's plays," and how the originals would be present in the audiences for these performances.¹²⁰ 

So attracted was Whitman to the b'hoys in their dandified regalia and their streetwise manner (one thinks of the figure cut in twentieth-century films by the Irish American movie star James Cagney) that he openly identified with them on more than one occasion. First he adopted the name "Mose Velsor," a combination of his Velsor ancestry and a popular b'hoy name, for some of his newspaper articles. Later in Leaves of Grass, he presented a word picture of a b'hoy and referred to him fondly as "The boy I love."¹²¹  It is small wonder that at least one critic of the first Leaves, in the New York Examiner of January 19, 1882, spoke of him as "the 'Bowery Bhoy' in literature."

Blended into the mixture that included the b'hoys were other groups with whom Whitman associated, in fancy though not in fact. The general category of "roughs," the city's workers, among whom Whitman proudly numbered himself, always included the Irish. Another group that would have included at least some of the city's more prosperous Irish who had arrived in the early years of the century was loosely referred to as "loafers," young men whose pose assumed a blasé attitude of studied nonchalance. Their stance seems to have been an attempt to outwardly convey a deliberate rejection of the city's business-engendered exertions in the pursuit of wealth and advancement. The attitude is demonstrated in the engraving Whitman chose as a frontispiece for the first edition of Leaves of Grass, where he appears loosely attired and with one finger hooked casually into a hip pocket. The easy, swinging gait he adopted at about this time and even the way in which he seems at times to have encouraged those opinions that—despite his steady employment in a variety of trades—labeled him "lazy," point to his desire to be thought of as one of the city's loafers.

We know little of the events of Whitman's life in the years just prior to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but he tells us that its "gestation years" were not spent in withdrawn composition but rather "in the way of first merging one self in all the living flood and practicality and fervency of that period," including "all the scenes, sights and people of the great cities of New York and Brooklyn," Broadway, the Bowery, shipyards, and all the life in and around New York.¹²²  This suggests Whitman was aware of all that was happening in the cities of Brooklyn and New York, much of which had to do in one way or another with the Irish. Among the events was the particular upsurge of nativism in these years, which found a focus in the rivalry between two of the city's "roughs," "Butcher Bill" Poole, a member of the Native American Party, and the Irish-born prizefighter John Morrisey, a Democrat from the Irish Sixth Ward.¹²³  In 1854 these two held a boxing match in the open air of a New York dock, with Poole the winner. In February of the following year some of Morrisey's followers shot Poole in a Broadway saloon. When he died two weeks later (his last words reputedly being, "I die a true American!"), his funeral became a full-scale event, with a procession led by a fifty-two-piece band and thousands of mourners.¹²⁴  Horace Greeley warned in the Tribune that such demonstrations encouraged young men "to prefer idleness, riot, vice, crime to labor, steadiness, respectability, and virtue," but such public mourning, like the riots that occurred throughout the century, was part of the street theatrics of New York City life.¹²⁵  Morrisey went on to become the proprietor of a successful gambling enterprise, a state senator, and a United States congressman.

The recent Irish immigrants made up a large part of those to whom Greeley referred, the city's street gangs, including the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, and the Rabbits' enemies, the Roach Guards. By 1855 it was estimated that at least thirty thousand men in the city owed allegiance to the gang leaders, who in turn owed allegiance either to Tammany Hall or to the Native American Party (and the Know-Nothing movement).¹²⁶  At elections the gangs were employed by rival political factions to disrupt voting and to vote often for the party paying them. The Bowery Boys (not the b'hoys) were most often aligned with the Native American Party, while the Dead Rabbits are said to have played a particularly large role in securing the mayoralty for Fernando Wood in 1854.

The Irish were also the major constituency of the large crowds that ran alongside the fire engines, simultaneously lending aid and bringing added confusion to the scene of a fire. For many years the city firemen were volunteers (numbering 1,661 in 1844), headed by a few paid supervisors.¹²⁷  As they increasingly sought the votes of the city's Irishmen, the Democrats opened the ranks of volunteers to them. Later, when the Irish had gained considerable political power, they moved into the newly created uniformed ranks of city firemen. Long before either of these were open to them, however, they formed a major part of an unofficial auxiliary to the volunteers which became infamous. Called the "fireboys," they were as much feared as they were appreciated. Though they made themselves essential by their assistance in times of great disasters, such as the fire in 1835 that destroyed the printing district where Whitman worked, they often hampered the activities of the legitimate firemen and volunteers and certainly did much to impede traffic when whole swarms of them would take off in the direction of a fire. Drawn for the most part from the street gangs that infested the oldest of the city's wards, the "fireboys" made looting a part of the city's fire-fighting history.

The Irish entered the volunteer ranks of the fire department in such large numbers that soon firemen were referring to extinguishing a fire as "painting it green."¹²⁸  With the Irish now officially in place, singing while fighting fires quickly became part of the city scene. James Hurley, known as the "Sweet Singer of the Dry Dock," would sing an Irish ballad with the refrain "Shule, shule, shule agra" ("Walk, walk, walk my love") to encourage the firefighters.¹²⁹  Whitman also sang the song of the New York firemen, beginning with the earliest version of what was later the "Song of Myself," where he offers a graphic depiction of their labor: "The ring of alarm-bells . . . the cry of fire. . . . the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and colored lights" and enters into their danger:

I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken. . . . tumbling

      walls buried me in their debris,

Heat and smoke I inspired. . . . I heard the yelling shouts of my

      comrades,

I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;

They have cleared the beams away. . . . they tenderly life me

      forth

I lie in the night air in my red shirt. . . the pervading hush is for

      my sake,

Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,

White and beautiful are the faces around me. . . . the heads are

      bared of their firecaps

The kneeling crowd fades away with the light of the torches.

When not fighting fires the Irish were especially adroit at many of the activities in which firemen engaged, such as engine races that pitted their company engines against each other or the turning of their water hoses on rival companies. The company engines had names, and the companies often were referred to by the engine's name. The fire engine belonging to Engine Company 44 at Houston Street was named Live Oak.¹³¹  Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," which speaks of his loneliness in New Orleans while far from his New York friends, may have been prompted by his learning the name of the tree, a name which perhaps reminded him of home. One of the most noted engines was the "Washington," or "Lady Washington," of Engine Company 40 housed in Mulberry Street. Among the firemen assigned to the "Washington" was Moses Humphreys, model for the stage character "Mose, the Fireman." The company's rival was Engine Company 15 to which the actor Frank Chaufrau belonged. In 1842 the two companies engaged in playful battle until Engine 40 surrendered; it is believed that on this occasion Chaufrau conceived the idea for his stage creation, "Mose." Despite its popularity, his impersonation did not win the hearts of all. America's Own, or the Fireman's Journal took the actor to task, praising his ability but adding, "The effect of this character upon the juveniles who visit the theater is plainly visible, as they take every opportunity to imitate the character. Its effects on the Fire Department are serious, in the estimation of those who are not acquainted with its members, as they set every fireman down as a 'Mose,' degrading to youth."¹³² 

With or without the help of Chanfrau's "Mose," New York's firemen became a sort of easy reference to indicate that which was unruly and wild. It was this wildness that Ralph Waldo Emerson meant to convey, no doubt, by his comment (reported to Whitman by John Trowbridge in 1856) that there were "few who wrote English greatly—'there is also Walt Whitman, but he belongs yet to the fire clubs, and has not got into the parlors.'"¹³³  The remark stemmed from Emerson's visit to Whitman, believed to have been in the winter of 1855, when the two had dinner in a New York hotel. After dinner Whitman took his guest to "a noisy fire-engine society," which has been identified as Firemen's Hall, a Mercer Street social club for New York firemen.¹³⁴  It is probably safe to speculate that there were a good many Irish about, which would have contributed considerably to Emerson's estimate of Whitman.

On another occasion when Emerson was briefly in the city before going on to a speaking engagement in Newark, New Jersey, he called on Whitman at his home in Brooklyn. The year would have been 1856 or 1857, not long after the publication of English Traits (1856), where Emerson had said of Ireland that while it enjoyed the same climate and soil as in England, it had "less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence, small tenantry and an inferior or misplaced race."¹³⁵  The two walked three miles to the Astor House, on Broadway in Manhattan, where the Bostonian was staying. The failure of a waiter to admit Whitman to Emerson's room while the latter went to check on railroad schedules to Newark caused Emerson to become annoyed, though Whitman assured him the man had only done his duty.

The Irish figured in other aspects of the life of the city as Whitman knew it in the 1840s and 1850s. He may have been aware of the dance contest that took place in 1844 between a black man, William Henry ("Juba") Lane, and the Irish dancer "Master" John Diamond. Baseball, a sport Whitman enjoyed watching, had its fair share of Irish players. As Ed Folsom has reminded us, baseball, as we know it, was invented in New York City in 1845 with the Knickerbocker Club and not as myth would have it in rural, upstate Cooperstown, New York.¹³⁸  Teams consisted of working men, often from one occupation, so that those Irish who were established as mechanics, masons, or other laborers were prominent on teams as well as among the spectators. A Brooklyn Daily Times account, identified as Whitman's, of a ball game played in June 1858 between the Putnams and the Atlantics, Long Island's (Brooklyn's geographical location) champion team, is complete with box scores and names of players. The Atlantics boasted two O'Briens and one man with a surname that said it all, Ireland.¹³⁹ 

Most certainly Whitman was familiar with one segment of the population of Brooklyn and New York, the newsboys, large numbers of whom were Irish. The newsboys slept in the corner of the press room and, at about 1:00 a.m. when the papers were printed, leaped to their feet and headed for the distributor to purchase their evening's supply of papers to be hawked on the street corners.¹⁴⁰  Distributors paid about $1.75 per hundred papers and sold them to the newsboys for $2.00. According to one account, the most successful distributors in the city were Irishmen who had started as newsboys and moved up, such men as Mark Maguire, Mike Madden, Tommy Ryan, and Pat Lyons.¹⁴¹ 

These names are so similar to others that appear in Whitman's notebooks for 1861–1862 that the unidentified entries may well have included newsboys. Certainly they include numerous Irish among the long lists of names, mostly of men he met in his city rounds. Little can be made, in the way of critical interpretation, of these unexplained lists. Perhaps the most suggestive comment appeared in Paul Zweig's 1984 study of Whitman, where Zweig addressed the subject directly by raising the question, "Were these men Whitman's lovers?" and offering by way of answer a nearly incredulous, "Possibly, but so many?"¹⁴²  The response is incredulous in more than one sense, for while Zweig seems to find the possibility hard to believe, given the sheer numbers involved, a reader aware of the lifestyle that prevailed in New York City's gay scene precisely at the time of Zweig's writing, and chronicled in Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On (1987), wonders at his disbelief. More recently, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall has set forth his belief that Whitman was actively gay in the years these notebook entries were made, which, if true, would strongly suggest a more than passing interest in "Tom Kinney," "James Doyle" (described by Whitman as a "plumpish young fellow, always smiling"), Pete Calhoun, and Neil McBride, a "young Irishman I met at the corner of Raymond—Myrtle Ave."¹⁴³  Doubtless there are others included, whose names are not so obviously Irish. All, however, seem to have been part of the democratic comradeship, described in terms of "adhesiveness," which was the overriding desideratum of the 1860 Leaves of Grass.¹⁴⁴ 

One notebook entry lists the nicknames of various omnibus drivers, including "Graball," who was actually Patrick McMakin.¹⁴⁵  In similar, though longer, lists made about 1857 the men are often identified as "Irish" or of "Irish descent," sometimes with annotations such as "Tom Riley (handsome Irish fighter)," "Bill (23) round faced, blue eyes, light Irish skin," and "Tom Harvey (5th av.) smallish, timidish, Irish." That Whitman found Irish men attractive is clear from such notes as "John Kiernan (loafer young saucy looking pretty goodlooking)" and "Patrick Corr 26 (Irish boy good looking).¹⁴⁶  As late as 1888, when he was sixty-nine years old, Whitman still found Irish men attractive. In the summer of that year the journalist Richard Harding Davis came to see him in Camden. Whitman did not realize who he was until Traubel identified the young man as the son of author Rebecca Harding Davis. Whitman was surprised, telling Traubel, "I thought him an Irish boy: I liked him—he was so candid, so interesting. Such tall, wholesome looking fellows are rare among American youngsters."¹⁴⁷ 

Quite often Whitman's notations of young men he met include references to occupations—policeman, prizefighter, fireman, stage driver. The last of these, the stage drivers, played an important role in his New York life. While his later relationship with the Washington streetcar conductor Peter Doyle was exceptional, perhaps even unique, Pete was of a type that Whitman had always been drawn to. There were many Irishmen like him on the horsecars in New York and on the ferries that moved between Manhattan and Brooklyn, the kinds of young laboring men Whitman made his friends and in whom he took such genuine interest as to further their neglected education by teaching them himself. So fully did he share their hardships that if they were injured—as they often were on the dangerously crowded streets of Manhattan—or ill he would regularly visit them in the hospital.

Whitman's later reminiscenses of the city drivers were of those years in New York when all his experiences were being stored up, part of "the gestation of 'Leaves of Grass,'" as he put it.¹⁵¹  These experiences surface in the first edition of Leaves in the poem later to be known as "Song of Myself," where they are part of the cityscape Whitman draws: "The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor." The "interrogating thumb" is explained in his "Broadway, the Magnificent!" where he describes the drivers in their boxes set high up on the front of the coaches, looking for passengers and urging them to board by crooking a thumb.¹⁵²  In the same edition of Leaves, in a poem later to be titled "To Think of Time," the funeral of "an old stagedriver" is depicted, including the touching gesture of laying the driver's whip on the coffin as it is lowered into the grave. The driver is memorialized in words that well might apply to any one of the city's Irish drivers:

He was a goodfellow,

Freemouthed, quicktempered, not badlooking, able to take his

      own part,

Witty, sensitive to a slight, read with life or death for a friend,

Fond of women,. . . played some . . . eat hearty and drank

      hearty,

Had known what it was to be flush . . . grew lowspirited toward

      the last . . . sickened . . . was helped by a contribution,

Died aged forty-one years . . . and that was his funeral.

Though the omnibuses were still to be found on city streets in 1881 when he was writing his remembrances, Whitman acknowledged that "the flush days of the old Broadway stages, characteristic and copious, are over." The loss was part of the transition from private to public transportation in New York and other American cities, brought about by the need for large numbers of workers to travel to work. Until about 1825 horse-drawn carriages, or stages, offered for hire by individuals were the only method of transport other than walking, and though these carriages were plentiful along Broadway, they were expensive and limited in their capacity. Following the success of omnibuses in Paris, New York granted a license to Abraham Brower in 1826 to operate a transport service along Broadway, which offered inexpensive rides (about ten cents per ride) to twelve passengers at a time. The idea caught on so quickly that by 1846, 255 of these vehicles were licensed and crowding the streets; just seven years later there were twenty-two companies operating 683 cars.¹⁵⁴  In 1862 Whitman went to hear a lecture on the Paris "omnibusses" and took notes that no doubt were intended for an article that was never written.¹⁵⁵  About the same time he began a sketch of himself, "the pet and pride of the Broadway stage-drivers," atop a Fifth Avenue omnibus.¹⁵⁶ 

Whitman consistently blurred the distinction between stages and omnibuses, but the explanation for this probably lies in the reminiscenses of another New Yorker, Dr. D. B. St. John Roosa, of the medical staff at New York Hospital, who knew Whitman from his regular hospital visits to sick and injured stage drivers in 1860 and 1861. Roosa claimed that "the real New Yorker never said omnibus," prefering to speak of them as "stages."¹⁵⁷ 

This felicitous association between public and drivers changed as the century progressed. A comprehensive survey of New York published in 1873 claims the job of streetcar driver (referring to the street railway, which was then the public transport) was most often politically obtained, and the result was a brutal treatment of passengers by men who were simply "ruffians."¹⁶⁰  By the 1870s the Irish were well established in the city's political life and heavily represented among the drivers of the streetcars Whitman rode when visiting Brooklyn and New York, but he has not left us his opinions of them or of the city politics that favored them.

The involvement of the Irish in high-level city politics was initially solidified when the Irish helped elect Mayor Fernando Wood in 1854, the year before the first Leaves of Grass. Earlier, when serving as congressman, Wood had been especially mindful of the Irish by seeking help for Irish political prisoners in England.¹⁶¹  This was not forgotten by the city's Irish when he ran for mayor on the Democratic ticket. New York State, however, was controlled by the Republicans, and two years after his election Wood found himself stripped of a good deal of power by the Republican regime in Albany, which instituted a new municipal charter for New York. By its terms municipal agencies were reshuffled along with their executive controls, and the mayor lost command of the fire and health departments as well as the board of education. The charter also took away the mayor's patronage privileges with the school system and the police department, the two largest employers in the city.¹⁶²  The Municipal Police, with a force of two thousand, whose badges and copper-buttoned jackets were the closest thing to a uniform New Yorkers would countenance, had been one place where Wood was able to show his appreciation for Irish support. When the state assembly passed the Metropolitan Police Act, which established a state-administered police force, the Municipal Police were no longer empowered to maintain order in the city. Throughout the spring of 1857 matters grew increasingly tense, with both police groups claiming jurisdiction over the city's police stations. On June 16 the contending forces (the state's Metropolitans in their uniform frock coats and plug hats) joined in battle at City Hall in what quickly was termed a "police riot."

While the largely Irish Municipal Police were thus engaged, the city's largely Irish street gangs saw an advantage. Noting the preoccupation of the police, the Dead Rabbits set upon their rivals, the Roach Guards, with clubs, sticks, and revolvers. When police did attempt to quell the resulting melee they were attacked by both gangs, and it took the Seventy-first Regiment of the militia to beat back the mob. This gang eruption was instrumental in bringing Mayor Wood to the point of relinquishing his hold on the Municipal Police but had no lasting effect on the continued existence of gangs in the city. Though Wood temporarily surrendered, he appealed the case and was upheld.

On the day of the police riot Whitman wrote in his notebook, "The Mayor this forenoon issued an order to the various Captains, directing them to call in the men at 4 o clock this afternoon and have them deliver up the city property—the Captains to hold on to the Station Houses till the further action of the Common Council."¹⁶³  This was followed by two brief entries concerning possible poetic themes, and then, "for a Great City . . . A city may have great temples, avenues, etc., but in its common people, their personality, heroism, ruggedness beauty & strength," and finally, "The greater the reform, the greater the personality that is needed."¹⁶⁴  Whitman seems to have been ruminating, perhaps moved to do so by the events in the city, on the need for reform of individuals along the lines of those ideas he would later develop in Democratic Vistas, where he drew the intersecting lines between the highest individual development and the advancement of democracy. But the notes seem also to echo lines from his 1856 "Song of the Broad-Axe," where Section 5, which presents the conditions for "a great city," is introduced in the preceding section by the simple qualifier, "A great city is that which has the greatest men and women." The thought, set down in the notes and expressed in the poem, bears remembering, for it will recur near the end of this study when we shall find the "defiant deed" of rebellion called for in the poem enacted in the streets of Dublin.

Whitman's admiration for New York's police forces, expressed in his 1871 letters to Doyle and O'Connor, does not come near equating them with this ideal, but the obvious pleasure he derived from observing the policemen—many of them Irish or, as he says, of "Irish stock"—and his declaration that they are "in the main magnificent" register the mental distance he had traveled from his earliest published references to the Irish at the time of the 1842 public school controversy. Most significant in tracing this distance is his language, principally for the way it departs from that used thirty years earlier in the Aurora. Always of importance, language is particularly so when used to describe an individual or group seen as "other." As Dale T. Knobel points out, in the language used to describe the Irish in antebellum America (which would include Whitman's in the Aurora editorials) can be found the key to the stereotypical Paddy that developed.¹⁶⁶  Whitman's 1871 consignment of the Roman Catholic rioters to the "lower order" is a clear indication of his still strong anti-Catholic feelings, but the precise language, the phrase "lower order," is used to assure his Irish friends, Doyle and O'Connor, that he does not refer to all Irish and to underscore his admiration that these particular lower-order specimens had become, perhaps because of their being policemen, "American-looking." By "American-looking" may be understood not just the appearance of the policemen but their acquired perceptions, their new, American way of looking at and understanding events, which wins Whitman's approval. Brief though the reference is, it suggests his recognition of an assimilation of American values by members of a previously scorned ethnic group, which offers Whitman a prospect more promising than the view of America he expounds that same year in Democratic Vistas.

Though Whitman published Democratic Vistas in 1871, he had been writing it from about 1869 and thinking about it for much longer. Perhaps because it was so long generating, or perhaps because it is a composite of previously written essays, the work itself is difficult to follow; then, too, Whitman as a writer of prose often seems to share his poetic persona's cavalier attitude toward self-contradiction. In this work he simultaneously clings to the idea of democracy as the world's last best hope and denounces the American society that has developed in democracy. He claims to have a wondrous view of an ideal democracy rooted in comradeship, but it is a distant, futuristic vision, and the present masses that he sees before him are far from achieving his ideal.

How to achieve the vision is the basic question underlying all of Democratic Vistas. At one point Whitman says that after an absence he is "now again (September 1870) in New York city and Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation."¹⁶⁷  While walking about the cities he feels that "not Nature alone is great," but, in the profusion of city life, "the work of man too is equally great." Yet still missing, he believes, are individuals worthy of what nature and people have produced in this country, and he proceeds to a discussion of what he has introduced as the major consideration of his Vistas, "the important question of character, of an American stock personality, with literatures and arts for outlets and return expressions, and, of course, to correspond, within outlines common to all."¹⁶⁸ 

This question of "an American stock personality," referred to a number of times in Democratic Vistas, was one that absorbed Whitman in the post-Civil War years, when Reconstruction policies and the teeming immigrant populations seemed to him double threats to the future of the Republic. The question of individual character was directly tied, in Whitman's mind, to the survival of democracy and to its future course and seems to have awakened in him some of the same fears he had known in the days when Bishop Hughes and his constituents were demanding to be recognized. The old questions arose: How was the ideal democracy to be realized with these disparate and ill-prepared peoples as its constituents? How best to meld them into the fusion of individual with society that he believed right and necessary?

One way might have been to adopt the authoritarian model of certain European countries and institutions, to accept the Carlylean sneer at the "swarmery" of the masses. In Boston, an Irishman Whitman would not come to know for another decade, John Boyle O'Reilly, editor of that city's influential Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, wrote a lengthy editorial condemning both sectarian groups of Irish involved in the 1871 New York riot. He had done the same thing the year before, but this time the editor felt condemnation was not enough. Though O'Reilly had too much respect for his fellow Irish to consider their actions, even though riotous, "swarmery," he believed something definitive had to be done to forestall further riots. The Irish on both sides might agree never to parade "for Irish political objects" or, and this he believed to be the better solution, the one that "must come in the end, when America, tired out and indignant with her squabbling population, puts her foot down with a will and tells them all—Germans, French, Irish, Oranges—'You have had enough now. There is only ONE flag to be raised in future in this country and that flag is the Stars and Stripes.'"¹⁶⁹ 

This would have been one way of handling the problem, but it was not the one Whitman would have urged. Despite his fears, his answer to the problem as set forth in Democratic Vistas amounts to a reiteration of his abiding faith in a gradual process by which individual character would be shaped by the democratic environment, while itself contributing to that environment. Ultimately, the individual would fuse with the masses in a manner similar to the way individual states fused with the union of states. Looking to "the elements of the American masses" for renewed faith that this fusion was possible and would occur, Whitman seems to have recognized in the "American-looking" New York Irish policemen, so respectable in their uniforms and having proven themselves responsible citizens, a validization of the democratic process as legitimate, for all its urbanity, as that which Frederick Jackson Turner later attributed to the frontier experience.

Of course, it was the police uniforms that reminded Whitman of the war, which had served to shape the "outline common to all" by bringing New York's Irish into the American mainstream of the city they had made their own. But in these particular Irish faces above the copper-buttoned uniforms, Whitman appears to have glimpsed the working out of American democracy he had long believed in, for here was Paddy rising above the sectarianism of a few hundred years and on his way to becoming what Whitman called "an American stock personality."

4.

Boston, 1860

In February 1860, with no apparent instigation on his part, Walt Whitman received a letter from the Boston publishers Charles Eldridge and William Thayer proclaiming, "We want to be the publishers of Walt Whitman's poems."¹  The tone of the letter was exciting, with a kind of electric quality about it that appealed to Whitman. The writers, both still in their twenties, claimed to have read Leaves of Grass at its first publication when they were clerks in the firm they now owned; they declared it "a true poem and writ by a true man." Whitman had an idea from the letter just how effective they might be in their advertising of books, for the writers declared, "We are young men. We 'celebrate' ourselves by acts. Try us. You can do us good. We can do you good—pecuniarily."²  Thayer later claimed to have been the sole writer of the letter, executed with his partner's approval. So proud was he of it that in his unpublished autobiography he says Whitman later showed the letter to Emerson, who expressed his delight that Boston had such a free press in the hands of such capable young men.

Whitman had hoped to find a publisher for another edition of Leaves and had been actively seeking publication outlets for individual poems preparatory to the event. Now, suddenly, the opportunity presented itself, along with an invitation to come to Boston and oversee the edition himself. These, then, were the circumstances that brought Whitman, for the first time, to the city that was not only the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation but the city with the second largest Irish population in America. More significantly, it brought him into a hotbed of antislavery activity supported by the intellectual transcendentalist faction to whom, on this matter, the Boston Irish were adamantly opposed. Predicting which of the two groups Whitman would side with seems not to be difficult, given his desire to continue to impress Emerson and his eagerness to publish another edition of Leaves; but, as it turned out, Whitman's working-class attitudes overrode all other considerations, and while he was not openly supportive of the Irish point of view, it becomes clear that he shared their sentiments.

Thayer and Eldridge were very much involved in Boston's rampant radicalism, especially abolitionism, which they hoped to advance through their publications. They were full of plans and enthusiasm, "go-ahead fellows," as Whitman described them, of the sort he had been hoping to find. With the exception of some copyrights and stereotype plates acquired at the time they purchased the publishing house, all of their publishing ventures, other than Leaves of Grass, were in the antislavery cause. Among these was to be a novel, "an American Novel," as Eldridge emphasized to the neophyte novelist chosen to produce this marvel, William Douglas O'Connor, who signed a contract with the firm in the same month as Whitman.⁴  O'Connor's book proved to be Harrington: A Story of True Love, a romance about a slave who escapes the South and makes his way to Boston, only to find there conditions of gross inequality. Through this plot device O'Connor managed to rebuke both North and South for mistreatment of blacks. It was an even-handed yet bold attack aimed at the very seat of abolitionism and was typical of O'Connor, a fiery young Irishman who was to play a significant role in Whitman's life.

Unfortunately, according to Thayer, Harrington did not sell well. A Boston review referred to it and Leaves of Grass as mere "sensation books," which the reviewer claimed were "now the rage." Harrington was dismissed by this critic as "absolutely sickening" for its "manworship" (its glorification of Phillips, Garrison, Parker, and other abolitionists) and Leaves as "the veriest trash ever written, and vulgar and disgusting to the last degree."⁵  Despite poor reviews and low sales, Thayer claimed in his autobiography that the firm realized a "profit of $17,000 in the first year," out of which they had to pay all their expenses, including $800 for stereotype plates for Leaves of Grass. There were other expenses, as well, which may have contributed to the firm's bankruptcy in 1861 and which perhaps were not manifest in its account books. Thayer and Eldridge were part of a band of what Thayer called "fighting Abolitionists," who "formed a little society in the back part of our store where we had concealed, but ready for use, pistols and ammunition, knives and bludgeons. Our members wore around the collar a narrow black ribbon as a distinguishing mark. We knew each other as 'Black Strings.'"⁶ 

As part of their activities in this society, Thayer and Eldridge put up money to help finance an expedition into Virginia led by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The object was to rescue two of radical abolitionist John Brown's coconspirators, Aaron Stevens and Albert Hazlett, who, along with Brown, had been condemned to death but were being held in a Virginia prison; Brown himself was hanged in early December 1859. Late in January 1860, Higginson went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was to meet Charles Tidd, the one member of Brown's band who was still free. Higginson recruited journalist Richard J. Hinton to this effort and, according to Thayer's account, Thayer went along and delivered "first class burglar's tools" to Tidd, though, he insists, Tidd was "no thief." The attempted rescue, which cost nearly two thousand dollars, failed, and Hazlett and Stevens went to the gallows.⁷  On February 10, 1860, Thayer, back once more in his publishing house and perhaps still excited from his adventure, wrote his invitational letter to Whitman.

Three other titles issued by Eldridge and Thayer before their firm succumbed to financial disaster were all by the same author, James Redpath, a Scotsman by birth who would later become a staunch advocate of the Irish National Land League. Redpath had come to the United States in 1850 and settled in Michigan. As a correspondent for the New York Tribune he met and quickly became a partisan of John Brown. In 1856 Redpath had attached himself to Brown's band of followers in Missouri, where they were fighting "Border Ruffians" who were attempting to make Kansas a slave state. Though Brown was widely believed to have been responsible at that time for the deaths of five men in Kansas, he was not prosecuted and came to Boston in 1857, where he became a favorite of Emerson, Thoreau, and just about everyone in their Concord and Boston coterie.⁸  It was at this time that some of the country's outstanding abolitionists, including Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, became Brown's ardent supporters, raising both sympathy and funds for his cause. The uses to which these funds were put, to purchase weapons and ammunition, were known to some but not all of the New England abolitionists.⁹  Brown eventually made his way to Virginia and in October 1859 seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, from which point he hoped to lead an armed attack on the South and free its slaves. Captured and hanged, Brown became a martyr to the abolitionist cause. Redpath's The Public Life of Captain John Brown, an abolitionist hagiography, was followed by Echoes of Harper's Ferry and Southern Notes for Northern Circulation, all from Thayer and Eldridge.

Also attached to John Brown's Kansas camp was Richard J. Hinton, another New York journalist and a friend of Redpath. Hinton went to Kansas as correspondent for both the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Traveller and thereafter was heavily involved in abolitionist activities, even serving for a time as bodyguard for Wendell Phillips and eventually writing John Brown and His Men (1894). In the Civil War Hinton served as an officer with the Second Kansas Colored Volunteers. He and Whitman met first in Boston and then again in a Washington hospital after Hinton was wounded.¹⁰  In 1862 Hinton formed the Kansas Emancipation League, which raised funds for slaves who fled to Kansas in the first year of the war, and after the war he edited papers in New York, Washington, and San Francisco.¹¹ 

Hinton claimed to have been the one who brought Whitman to the attention of Thayer and Eldridge and this may be the case, but there is evidence of an awareness of Whitman's poetry among New England abolitionists as early as 1850.¹²  In a letter to the Boston Transcript dated May 17, 1850, William Lloyd Garrison defended himself against a charge of blasphemy and ended by quoting nineteen lines from a Whitman poem, "Blood-Money," without identifying the author. Depending on his source, it is possible that he did not know who the author was, for though the name "Walter Whitman" had appeared in the New York Tribune in March, the only identification when it was reprinted in the Evening Post in April was "Paumanok."¹³  "Blood-Money" was a product of Whitman's heartfelt fury at what he considered Daniel Webster's act of betrayal in lending his support to the slavery compromise with the Southern states.¹⁴  Other examples of Whitman's explosive anger had already appeared in print, each more bitter than the last, until he abandoned the divisive political arena for the more reconciling poetical stance he assumed in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. It is this renunciation of extremism that makes all the more ironic the circumstances that led him to be involved in the highly political, even radical, world of Boston abolitionism.

Whitman's political disillusionment came about gradually. Despite his anger in 1842 at its capture by the New York Irish, he had continued his support of the Democratic Party both in his personal politics and in his public statements in newspapers.¹⁵  Eventually, however, slavery was the issue that caused him to break with the party. Not that he was an abolitionist, for this seemed to him too radical a stance; rather, he took the Free Soil position arrived at via his belief that the Wilmot Proviso would ameliorate the vexing situation by preventing the spread of slavery into territory gained from Mexico and in new states to be formed in the West. In large part Whitman's opposition to the extension of slavery was predicated on his support of the white laboring class, which, like many white Northerners, he felt needed to be protected from slave labor in the newly opened West and, in the Northern cities, from the competition posed by freed blacks if slavery were abolished. Even without such competition, Whitman saw new conditions arising in the industrial and capitalistic cities, creating a wage slavery to which the workers were bound. Complicating this situation even further were the masses of emigrants willing to work at anything for any wage and thus lowering the standard of living for all workers.

Years earlier Whitman had advocated in the Brooklyn Eagle some organized means of transporting at least some of the two thousand or so emigrants arriving daily in New York to "the 'far west'" where they could settle down "in an agricultural way." He acknowledged, however, that such a plan would have to offer advantage "to all parties."¹⁶  Much later, in 1878, the Irish Catholic Colonization Society of America attempted just such a system of transport, but it failed, as Whitman had surmised such schemes would, because of a lack of interest "to all parties." Not only did the potential settlers cling to their familiar city life, but the potential contributors preferred to support the National Land League and gave their money for the purchase of land for Irish peasants rather than helping to settle Irish emigrants as landowners in the American West.¹⁷ 

Whitman's Free Soil position eventually brought him into conflict not only with the Democratic Party but also with the Irish American politician who was in all likelihood instrumental in securing for him the editorship of the Eagle. The man was Henry Murphy, whom Whitman had met years earlier at his first job in a newspaper office. When Whitman was twelve he was apprenticed as a printer's devil to William Hartshorne and learned to set type in the basement of the Fulton Street building that housed the Long Island Patriot, the official organ for the Kings County Democratic Party. Whitman learned there not only how to set type but how to be a good Democrat. Among the many local party hopefuls who visited the premises of the "Pat," as it was called (not an Irish reference, but short for Patriot), was Henry C. Murphy, born in Brooklyn of Irish parents, a young man then in his teens who was studying law and who sometimes wrote for the paper. In later years Whitman remembered playing pranks with Murphy, but the young Irishman had serious objectives. He became a ward leader, then Democratic boss of Kings County, later a member of Congress, and eventually was appointed ambassador to the Hague. It was while he was county political boss that he controlled the Eagle, and, since Whitman had proven his party loyalty, Murphy no doubt helped him attain the editorial post.

That loyalty was severely tested, however, by the slavery issue. Among Whitman's editorials for the Daily Eagle, written between March 1846 and January 1848, only one addresses the subject of slavery, and it limits itself to a condemnation of the international slave trade, while avoiding the subject of slavery as an economic system within the United States.¹⁸  What we do find, however, is a review of a lecture on the latter subject given at the Brooklyn Institute by a Unitarian minister, the Irish-born Reverend Henry Giles, an abolitionist who sufficiently tempered his message to allow Whitman to applaud its humanitarianism.¹⁹  While it is clear that Whitman was horrified at the evils of the slave trade, he was equally horrified at the extremism of most abolitionists. For one thing, he viewed them as obstacles in the gradual progress of democracy, which he fully trusted would prove the instrument by which manumission would occur and slavery disappear from the United States. Much closer to his interests was the condition of the American laboring class, but it was precisely because of this that Whitman felt the slavery issue pressing on him, as it was on everyone in the nation. In the summer of 1846, when Whitman was writing of the need to speed the immigrants westward, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed legislation that would exclude slavery from any land taken from Mexico. President Polk thought the idea preposterous, but there were many like Whitman who saw the Wilmot Proviso as the compromise they had been seeking. The young editor threw his full support behind the proviso, continuing to do so even after the Democratic Party split over it, with the majority rejecting it.

Whitman's friend Henry Murphy, then in Congress, opposed Wilmot. It must have been particularly galling to him not to have the support of his county's party newspaper, all the more so if indeed he had helped put its editor in that post. The party pressured the paper's owner, Isaac Van Anden, to dismiss Whitman, and it is almost certain that Murphy was one of those applying pressure. Whitman seems not to have held a grudge, however, for his later remembrances of Murphy were of good times shared at the "Pat" office and on clambakes. He even lauded Murphy's skills as a historian by pointing out the settlement of a minor point of Brooklyn history thanks to Murphy's scholarship.²⁰ 

When Whitman lost the editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle he did a six-month stint on a New Orleans newspaper, then returned to Brooklyn. Back in New York, he became involved with the political splinter group the Barnburners (people who, it was said, would burn down the entire Democratic Party to rid it of those they detested), then joined the Free Soil Party, which in 1848 was supporting Martin Van Buren against the Democratic candidate for president, Lewis Cass. Whitman started a newspaper that was intended to be the Free Soil organ, the Freeman. Unfortunately, the paper's first issue was its last, for the print shop burned in a fire that appears not to have been deliberately set. When the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, won the election, Whitman turned away from politics to the role of worker-poet, opening a combination bookstore and print shop in Brooklyn.

Though he had removed himself from active participation in politics, the Compromise of 1850 drew from Whitman a deliberately insulting lyric, "Song for Certain Congressmen," published in the New York Evening Post. This was followed by "Blood-Money," a scathing poetic comparison of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot to the betrayal by those, such as Daniel Webster, who argued for passage of the Fugitive Slave bill.²¹  When William Lloyd Garrison quoted the poem in 1850 as part of his defense against a charge of blasphemy leveled by an anonymous writer to the Boston Transcript, he claimed not to know what his attacker, "Sigma," meant by the accusation. It is fairly clear, however, that the objection was to a particular rhetorical device widely employed by abolitionist speakers and writers, the application of scripture to secular, political circumstances.²²  In "Blood-Money" Whitman wrote, "Again goes one, saying, / What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you? / And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver."²³  The poem's biblical rhetoric would have made Whitman appear, once he had been identified as its author, to be fully party to the abolitionist cause, an assumption furthered by the appearance of still another caustic poem in the New York Tribune of June 14, 1850, "The House of Friends," which revealed Whitman's bitterness at the involvement in the Compromise of 1850 of some trusted Northern politicians.

From that time until the publication of the first Leaves of Grass Whitman worked at printing and house building, only occasionally publishing articles in New York newspapers. In the summer of 1856, when Richard Hinton was in Kansas with John Brown, Whitman issued a tract titled "The Eighteenth Presidency!" in which he bitterly denounced President Franklin Pierce and all those in the federal government who supported the proslavery movement in Kansas.²⁴  This and the publication of Leaves of Grass must have made it seem to Hinton and his friends Eldridge and Thayer that in Walt Whitman they had found not only a poet radical enough in his rejection of traditional poetic form but a voice defiant enough of slavery to warrant his inclusion in their publication plans.

Ten lines alone of the longest of the twelve poems (later called "Song of Myself ") in the 1855 Leaves of Grass would in themselves have seemed to put Whitman in the abolitionist camp, lines that tell of a runaway slave who appears at the door of the poem's persona. The slave, "limpsey and weak," is taken in, bathed and clothed, his wounds attended, and a clean bed provided. During the week they spent together before the slave continued north the narrator claims, "I had him sit next me at table . . . my firelock leaned in the corner."²⁵  The reference to the firearm ready to defend the fugitive suggests sympathy with the abolitionist cause and is intensified later in the poem by the persona's identification with the "Hell and despair" of a "hounded slave":

I am the hounded slave. . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me. . . . crack and again crack the

      marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence. . . . my gore dribs thinned with the

      ooze of my skin,

I fall on the weeds and stones,

The riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close.

They taunt my dizzy ears. . . . they beat me violently over the

      head with their whipstocks.

But there was even more to catch the attention of Thayer and Eldridge. Among the twelve poems in Leaves, one would have been of particular interest to them, the one that in the 1860 Boston edition would be titled "A Boston Ballad." Here Whitman registered his disgust at the capture and trial in Boston in 1854 of Anthony Burns, a slave who had escaped his Virginia owner only to come afoul of the Fugitive Slave Law, which demanded his trial and return to slavery. In 1854 the slavery issue moved explosively onto the national scene, and for that reason the Burns case received wide attention. This and events such as the hanging of John Brown were effective in winning many to the abolitionist cause who had not to that time felt deeply about slavery. Final arguments in the Burns case were offered on May 31, Whitman's thirty-fifth birthday, and the coincidence may have in some way personalized the issue, making the impression of gross injustice all the greater for him.

The poem supposes the presence of its narrator, Jonathan, in Boston on the day Burns is marched through the streets to the ship that will return him to Virginia and slavery. At first Jonathan mistakes the gathered crowd as spectators at a parade and eagerly finds himself a good vantage point, only to see pass before him a company of phantoms in Revolutionary War attire. Ultimately, Jonathan seeks to banish them in favor of a more fitting observer to the shameful spectacle that plays out before him, the specter of England's George III. He cries out to this imagined royal apparition with bitter irony, "You have got your revenge, old buster—the crown is come to its own, and more than its own." Small wonder, on this evidence, that Whitman seemed an obvious candidate for inclusion in a catalog of abolitionist publications.

A series of letters between New York and Boston, following the initial invitation, had established the terms of Whitman's contract with his publishers. By mid-March 1860, manuscript in hand, the poet was in Boston ready to begin work on the third edition of Leaves of Grass. He settled into a boardinghouse, and, almost immediately, Emerson came to call, renewing the friendship begun in 1855 when Concord's most eminent citizen traveled to Brooklyn to meet the poet whose work he had hailed with the words, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."²⁷  Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott were also eager to renew acquaintances begun in Brooklyn, and there were new friends, his publishers, Thayer and Eldridge, William Douglas O'Connor ("personally and intellectually the most attractive man I had ever met," Whitman said of him), James Redpath, and later, John Townsend Trowbridge, a journalist and novelist who was not part of the abolitionist group.²⁸ 

In this regard Trowbridge was in a decided minority, however, for Whitman found that the transcendentalists in Concord and Boston were almost entirely absorbed in antislavery ideology. Indeed, on April 4, 1860, Whitman was a silent spectator in Boston's courthouse when the young schoolteacher and ardent abolitionist Franklin B. Sanborn (then head of the Concord Academy where Henry David Thoreau had once taught) was tried for his involvement as one of six secret conveyors of funds to John Brown for the Harpers Ferry attack.

Whitman observed a great deal of Boston in his short stay, and, typically for him, it was mostly the life of the city as he encountered it in its streets and thoroughfares. One of the things he noted was that there were fewer blacks seen in Boston than in New York but that here they were of "a superior order" and were treated with no distinction, being seated and served in restaurants, employed as clerks in the state house, and, in nearby Worcester, even serving on juries.³¹  This is in obvious contrast to the widespread exclusion of blacks from the city's white society as described by William Douglas O'Connor in his novel Harrington. Jerome Loving has noted the similarity between the situation in which O'Connor's fictional Harrington finds himself and that of the actual slave Anthony Burns. Loving points to O'Connor's eloquence in picturing the poor conditions of Boston's blacks—their exclusion from meaningful work, from public schools, from places of assembly and entertainment, even from decent housing.³²  Whitman noted a different scene, however. The difference in perspective between Whitman and O'Connor, rather than the accuracy of either, is significant, for it forecasts opposing viewpoints on blacks that would shadow their relationship for years. O'Connor's total dedication to what was then called "the Negro cause" commands respect, but Whitman's conservatism, which kept him from committing to the abolitionist enthusiasm of his new friends, had the remarkable effect of leading him to a place where he could reject all exclusive points of view in favor of the attempt at reconciliation evident in Leaves of Grass. The persona he adopted there, expressed most often by the first-person singular that pervades the poetry, had become the means by which the poet identified with all conditions and all opinions, and he was not about to abandon it for Boston's sake.

To fully appreciate the source of the difference between Whitman and the circle of abolitionists who met in the back room of Thayer and Eldridge, it is helpful to review briefly some of the political tangle in New York which Whitman had turned his back on a few years earlier. The origin of the tangle lay in the public school controversy of 1842, which was a bitter experience for Whitman. In the wake of the controversy two factions arose within the Democratic Party, the Barnburners, who were radical Democrats opposed to the extension of slavery and with whom Whitman sided, and the Hunkers, conservative Democrats, many of them Irish officeholders, who opposed any agitation of the slavery question and who sided with the slave states. The quarrel between the two groups involved city, state, and eventually national politics, with Tammany Hall supporting the position of the Southern states until the firing on Fort Sumter.

Whitman's fellow Barnburners became Free Soilers after being all but run out of Tammany Hall by the Hunkers, but to gain political office they formed a fusion with the Hunkers to choose nominees for state offices. Some Hunkers, among them Mike Walsh and James T. Brady, formed a Democratic-Republican Executive Committee to oppose the fusion. The committee succeeded in splitting the fusion, and out of it came two more groups, each claiming to uphold the original Tammany Society principles. One group was led by Fernando Wood, suspected of being a Hunker but who did not want to risk losing votes by openly opposing the Barnburners. As a result of his careful manipulations, Wood, whom Whitman heartily despised and whom the city's Irish strongly supported, became mayor of New York in 1854 and was reelected in 1856. The other group was an outgrowth of the Democratic-Republican Executive Committee and was the first body in the North to denounce the Wilmot Proviso, which Whitman strongly supported. The consequences of the proviso's failure included Bloody Kansas, the organization of the Republican Party, and the decline of the Democratic Party. With this confusion of orchestrated and plastic political belief behind him, it is small wonder that Whitman refused to be won over into the radical camp of abolitionism. But he was not disinclined to have an abolitionist publishing firm produce Leaves of Grass.

The Boston that Whitman arrived in was a city of great tension, most of it arising from the slavery issue and a good deal of it from the antagonism between the city's Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics. Strong anti-Catholic feelings in Boston dated to the time of the Know-Nothings in 1854. At that time Catholics were so suspect that a "Nunnery" Committee was formed by the city's Know-Nothing government, and an investigation was launched into Catholic girls' schools run by nuns. When the lines were drawn nationally over the issues of slavery, Kansas, and the emergence of the Republican Party, the situation in Boston was exacerbated by anti-Catholicism and the Irish adherence to the Democratic Party.

The Boston Irish remained at the bottom of the economic scale in 1860, still working as low-paid laborers, dockhands, cartmen, truckmen, domestics, and in whatever other occupations were open to them. The situation here was very different from that in New York; in Boston the Irish were not only seen as dirty and ignorant but as a moral danger to the Protestant City on a Hill. Strong elements of the Puritan ideal of a sanctified community were yet in place, translated into the language of transcendentalism by some, by others into the ethical Christianity of Unitarianism. The Irish presented a threat to both. Without such leveling influences as theater, where the comic Paddy, though an offensive stereotype, could at least assume less villainous proportions, Boston continued to emphasize the least favorable aspects of the immigrant Irish. Among the abolitionists this sometimes reached a level of demonization because of the Irish refusal to support their cause.

A fact of Boston life that Whitman did not comment on in 1860 was the large number of Irish living and working in the city, though he could not have failed to see them operating the "carts, drays, trucks, express wagons, . . . vehicles of all sorts" that he noted on Commercial Street.³⁴  Of a total population of 138,788 in 1850, the Irish in Boston numbered 46,000. Because they wielded little or no political power, historical accounts of the slavery issue in and around Boston have focused on the educated, white, Protestant faction and seldom register the Irish point of view.³⁵  This deficiency also reflects certain contemporary attitudes, such as the failure of white Protestants of the time to comment on Irish exploitation in the mills and factories of New England while attacking Southern slavery. Even Whitman's "Boston Ballad" can be seen as something of a case in point. Though Anthony Burns does not appear in the poem, being made invisible by the events real and imagined of the narrative, Albert J. Von Frank has made us aware of another missing figure, missing not only from Whitman's poem but from most accounts of the Burns trial—the Irishman James Batchelder, an assistant to the United States marshal in Boston who the abolitionists killed in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from jail.³⁶ 

Batchelder, born in Ireland, was twenty-four when he died. He had been a truckman at the Boston Custom House, but at the moment of his death he was volunteering his services along with a number of other laborers like himself, most of them Irish or Italian. They were all dependent for employment on the local Democratic Party machine headed by Mayor J. V. C. Smith. On May 26, 1854, a crowd of some five hundred people gathered at the courthouse, the door was rammed, and a small band led by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson forced their way into the upper passageway, where they hoped to remove Burns from the premises and to safety. Batchelder placed himself squarely in the passageway and was stabbed in the groin, dying within minutes.³⁷ 

When Batchelder placed his body in the path of the determined abolitionists, he acted out an Irish opposition to New England Protestantism's antislavery stance that had begun more than a decade earlier. The spur to this resistance originated not in New England but in Ireland, in the form of an 1841 petition carrying sixty thousand signatures of Irishmen urging the Irish in America to take a public stand against slavery. Behind this lay a series of exchanges between Ireland and the worldwide antislavery movement involving the great Irish freedom fighter Daniel O'Connell. Bolstered by Ireland's long antislavery tradition and by the plaudits of American abolitionists, O'Connell denounced slavery in America and did not hesitate to publicly revile the nation that allowed it to continue.

In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention brought to London Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and other leaders of the American abolitionist movement. From England they journeyed to Ireland to meet with their counterparts there, and in 1841 a statement titled Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America was written jointly by the Americans and Irish. The two Irish authors were Richard Allen and Richard Davis Webb, both prominent members of the movement in Ireland. As shall be seen in a later chapter, Whitman subsequently corresponded with Alfred Webb, Richard's son.

The Address called upon all Irish in America to join the abolitionists, "the only consistent advocates of liberty," and "to cling by them" thereby doing "honor to the name of Ireland" in America.³⁸  First presented in Boston at an 1842 abolitionist meeting, the petition was reported in Garrison's Liberator on January 30, 1842, as having been enthusiastically received by an audience of four thousand people, including a good number of Irish, and to have met with no resistance. This complacencey was short-lived, however, for the Irish in America were not inclined to put themselves in a position of seeming to condemn the nation where they felt themselves to be only shakily established, nor did they wish to be drawn into a conflict where they would be expected to flout its laws. Further, and perhaps most important, as Noel Ignatiev has shown, the Irish needed to adopt a strategy "to secure an advantage in a competitive society," and the refusal of the abolitionist cause was part of their strategy.³⁹ 

The first outspoken rebuff of the Address came from New York and from the person with the greatest influence on America's Irish, Whitman's soon-to-be nemesis Bishop John J. Hughes. This was in January 1842, the same year in which Whitman would use the editorial pages of the Aurora to attack the bishop over the matter of public funding of Catholic schools. Since the Aurora was a newspaper that concerned itself almost exclusively with the New York scene, its editor had little occasion to express views on the national question of slavery, so if the incidents surrounding the Irish Address made any impression on Whitman we have no way of knowing. Whitman briefly addressed the slavery issue only once in the Aurora, in April 1842, ostensibly at the instigation of a New York Irishman.

About the time that O'Connell in Ireland was beginning to feel himself squeezed between opposition from Americans in the Southern states to his Repeal movement and pressure from abolitionists in the North to demand more forcefully an Irish American condemnation of slavery, an editorial titled "Black and White Slaves" appeared in the Aurora. It began by describing a lithograph received "from A. Donnelly, 191/2 Courtlandt Street" (the lithographer whose studio was at that address) and inscribed with the words Whitman uses as his title. The print, produced in 1841, offered representations of two supposed localities, one in England and the other in America. The first was the destitute family of a laborer, with the wife, Whitman says, "lying dead upon a heap of straw, an infant endeavoring to draw moisture from her breast, two or three famished children near by," and the laborer seated helplessly on a low stool with three other children clinging to him. A "fat, pompous, lordly parish officer" looms above them, issuing his command, "Come, pack off to the work house; that's the only fit place for you!" The second scene depicted what Whitman called "domestic life at the south. A gentleman and lady, with two children, come to pay a call at the shanty of a family of their slaves. Everything bears the impress of cheerfulness and content." Whitman draws from these contrasting scenes a simple moral: "It would be well if the English abolitionists were to reflect upon [their laboring class]" rather than becoming "sentimental" about American "negroes" whose condition is superior to that of "nine-tenths of the population" in England. "Let our transatlantic neighbors take the beam out of their own eyes—and then they can reasonably find fault with the mote in ours," he admonishes before concluding with a slap at the institutions that "make Britain but one vast poor house."⁴⁰ 

The lithograph and others like it were numerous at the time and followed closely the line of attack taken by such Southern writers as George Fitzhugh in his Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). The book was an outgrowth of Fitzhugh's earlier attempts to show the exploitation of workers in Great Britain as a greater and more oppressive form of slavery than chattel slavery. What was not said of such lithographs as the one Whitman describes was that they might very well be representations of Irish workers forced off their own land and caught up in the industrial mills of northern England, where they suffered poverty and sickness and often were evicted again. The deflection of attention toward England apparent in Whitman's editorial shows him siding in 1842 not only with the Southern states but with Irish Americans who resented as much as he what was seen as the "meddling" of Europe—especially England but, after the 1841 Address, also Ireland—in matters pertaining to the United States. Later, in 1847, when as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle he expressed his opinions on slavery in the context of support for the Wilmot Proviso, Whitman echoed this earlier objection to European meddling by scrupulously acknowledging the right of Southern states not to be interfered with.

Bishop Hughes attacked the Address in the Liberator on March 25, 1842, first by casting doubt on its authenticity—in other words, by fostering suspicion of the Protestant abolitionists who had presented it—and second by denouncing, should the petition prove true, all such foreign attempts to sway "naturalized Irishmen or others" on any question "appertaining to the foreign or domestic policy of the United States."⁴¹  Irish newspapers in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia took up the bishop's outrage and urged readers not to succumb to foreign appeals for support of a movement of radicals who would threaten the union of states. The Boston Pilot, the country's leading Catholic newspaper, hammered the final nail in the coffin of the Address by claiming the abolitionist movement was a plot instigated by England to threaten national security here.⁴² 

The shadow of England and its power hovered over many of the proclamations and denunciations coming from both sides. In Ireland O'Connell, who was nearing the end of his career, hoped to have the backing, if only the moral support, of the Boston abolitionists in his drive for repeal of the Act of Union. In the United States, Irish American supporters of O'Connell's repeal attempt opened themselves to suspicion when they accepted as their national leader Robert Tyler, son of the slaveholding president. Further damage to their cause came when they received the financial support of slaveholding Irish in the South. Compounding these issues were the unavoidable feelings of distrust bred by religious differences, which made Irish Catholics unwilling to align themselves with the Protestant establishment in America. The situation proved hopeless; O'Connell eventually disavowed the Address, and the abolitionists lost all hope of rallying the Irish to their cause.

While distrust of England's intentions and of rival religious institutions figured largely in all of this, there was also the matter of an almost palpable tension between the Irish and the New England abolitionists, the result of the vast difference in their comparative social status. Many of the same individuals who lionized Frederick Douglass and were willing, at the dictates of what they termed a higher law, to violently oppose the law of the land for the sake of Anthony Burns had no sympathy for the Irish truckman James Batchelder who was acting according to his own principles. While attempting to establish Whitman's attitudes toward the Irish, it is instructive to also take into account those expressed by others of his time, including some who were prominent in the abolitionist movement. For instance, letters that passed between Wendell Phillips and his wife reveal patronizing attitudes toward the Irish and the couple's actual discomfort when in the presence of those same Irish they were seeking to enlist to their cause.⁴³  Theodore Parker, the fiery supporter of John Brown's radicalism, was known to have frankly declared his aversion to the Irish and, in an 1850 article for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review entitled "The Causes of the Present Condition of Ireland," referred to them as "an ignorant, idle, turbulent, and vicious population" whose slavish condition could not be solely laid to English rule.⁴⁴  Just a year earlier Parker had published the "Moral Condition of Boston" and, after describing the Irish in much the same terms, put them on the level of wild animals: "Of course they will violate our laws, these wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle."⁴⁵  On the Sunday following Batchelder's murder, Parker reminded his audience that the Irishman was a volunteer in the service of the marshal and that "he liked the business of enslaving a man, and has gone to render an account to God for his gratuitous work."⁴⁶ 

Orestes A. Brownson, the peripatetic believer in a succession of philosophies and religions, finally settled in the Roman Catholic Church in 1844, only to find himself uneasily yoked there with the Irish. He joined them in accusing Daniel O'Connell of seeking to undermine American institutions when O'Connell attacked slavery, but when nativism became a forceful reaction to the postfamine waves of Irish immigration, Brownson took it upon himself as a native New Englander (born in Vermont) to serve as mediator between the two groups. However, in the pages of his Quarterly Review, most issues of which he wrote entirely, he spoke almost exclusively to his fellow (Irish) Catholics, admonishing them on how to become better Americans. In July 1854 Brownson wrote an article for the Review entitled "Native Americanism" and laid to Irish Catholics full responsibility for anti-Catholic and nativist feelings because of their "Irish clannishness" and their resistance to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of America.⁴⁷  Though he held the Irish responsible, Brownson also claimed to discern England's treachery and hatred for Catholicism behind the nativist agitation and even professed a belief that the Free Soil movement was of the same instigation. In his opposition to the Free Soilers, Brownson was joined by the Protestant Irish socialist, by then a senator from New York, Mike Walsh, who was also a fervid denouncer of the abolitionists. Privately Brownson was no different from most of the New Englanders; to Charles Montalembert, leader of the Catholic liberals in France, he wrote (in an un-Christian manner on, of all days, Christmas) of the Irish as "the most drunken, fighting, thieving, lying and lascivious class in the population."⁴⁸ 

While there is no direct evidence of it, Whitman may have been aware of all these undercurrents of class consciousness circulating beneath the surface of the abolitionist movement. Perhaps there is a hint of this awareness in a comment he once made about William Douglas O'Connor's having learned the art of skillful argumentation "in the anti-slavery school—whether for good or bad I do not know—learned it all there, in the clash of classes—won his spurs in the struggles of the abolition period."⁴⁹  As both an Irish Catholic (though not a practicing Catholic) and an abolitionist, O'Connor may have found himself at times in an uncomfortable position among New Englanders on both sides of the issue. Elitist attitudes also came between the working-class Whitman and many of the upper-class New Englanders, and he would continue to feel the effects and complain of them throughout his life. As late as 1881, when Whitman was again in Boston, Bronson Alcott (who always seemed to appreciate Whitman's prose more than his poetry) declared him "too brawny and broad to be either high or deep, and [one who] must rank with the sensuous school of thought and style."⁵⁰  Even Emerson, as we have seen, was not immune to this class consciousness and on occasion allowed it to shadow his feelings toward Whitman despite his admiration.

The Irish remained a special case, and after the famine had brought them to the United States in greater numbers than had been believed possible for cities such as Boston and New York to absorb, it was felt necessary to distinguish and articulate the traits and characteristics that many Americans came to believe were innate contributing factors to their impoverished condition. Alcoholism, as might be imagined, was one of the principal factors pointed to by the Protestant New Englanders, many of whom totally abstained from drinking alcohol. Here, too, the Irish in America had failed the Boston abolitionists. In 1849 when the abolitionists brought to the United States the famous Irish temperance lecturer Father Theobald Mathew, in hopes he would have as profound an effect on the Irish here as he did in Ireland, their plans were thwarted by Boston's Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick, who opposed such meetings because of their Protestant sponsorship and strongly discouraged Irish Catholics from attending.⁵¹  Mathew himself proved a further irritant and raised the abolitionists' ire when he refused to observe the polarities of North and South and took his message to the Southern states.

Alcohol and the domination of priests aside, New Englanders still found it hard not to believe that the Irish were the cause of their own destitution. Thoreau, an inveterate expounder on all that came within his view, has left a number of comments on the Irish, some of which are more damning than others. As is widely known, the cabin Thoreau built at Walden for his two-year experiment in economical living was made from the lumber of a shanty belonging to the Irishman James Collins, who had worked on the Fitchburg Railroad. After Collins and his family moved on, Thoreau took the dwelling apart, piece by piece, laying the pieces out to dry in the sun. While he was thus occupied, he tells us in Walden, a neighbor, "Seeley, an Irishman," pocketed the still usable hardware and, "there being a dearth of work, as he said," remained "to represent spectatordom" while Thoreau worked.⁵² 

Two years before Thoreau went to live at Walden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, while walking in the vicinity of Walden Pond, had come upon "a little hamlet of huts or shanties, inhabited by the Irish people who are at work upon the rail-road," perhaps the very place where Collins had lived. Hawthorne was moved by the scene, by "the shouts and laughter of children, who play about like the sunbeams that come down through the branches." While the children played, the women were washing clothes, and he could see the fruit of their labor all about, "long lines of white clothes are extended from tree to tree." So natural did the people seem in this setting that, Hawthorne says, "Their presence did not shock me, any more than if I had merely discovered a squirrel's nest in a tree."⁵³ 

From Thoreau we have quite a different response. Caught in a sudden storm late in the summer of 1845, Thoreau came upon a shanty in the woods near Walden Pond. At first he thought it uninhabited but within were neighbors, "John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children," the youngest of whom he describes as a "cone-headed infant... John Field's poor starveling brat."⁵⁴  With a schoolteacher's manner and using himself as exemplum, Thoreau set about trying to instruct Field in living a life of simplicity and thereby improving his status. Neither Field nor his wife could understand the method, and Thoreau concluded that John Field was "born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria [wings] to their heels."⁵⁵  Though Thoreau was often very harsh in his judgments of the Irish, he once wrote, "The simple honesty of the Irish pleases me."⁵⁶  Simple honesty could not undo his horror at the effects of alcohol, however, and he says of another Irish neighbor, the former soldier Hugh Quoil, that though he had fought at Waterloo he "now awaits his future in an old ruin in Walden woods" convulsed by delirium tremens.⁵⁷  The unfortunate Quoil sold rum to other Irishmen on Sundays, Thoreau says, and eventually drifted away, never to be seen again by his Concord neighbors.

In October 1849 Thoreau walked the beach at Cohasset, Massachusetts, viewing the wreck of an emigrant-laden brig, the St. John, which foundered on its journey from Ireland. The remains of the known passengers were in boxes marked with chalk; others, like the swollen and mangled body of a drowned young woman—whose death brought no further comment from the Concordian than that she "probably had intended to go out to service in some American family"—lay beneath hastily thrown cloths.⁵⁸  While he seems not to have been much moved by this experience, Thoreau initially was quite affected in January 1852 by the sight of a small Irish boy, John Riordan, whose mother had patched his ragged clothes with "countless" pieces taken from an old pair of Thoreau's trousers. The misery of the child, who lacked proper outer garments in the cold and snow, caused Thoreau to feel guilt "that his little fingers and toes should feel cold while I am warm." In February he carried a new cloak to the child, noting in his journal, "These Irish are not succeeding so ill after all. The little boy goes to the primary school and proves a forward boy there."⁵⁹ 

Pronouncements such as those of Parker and Thoreau on the nature and destiny of the Irish were attempts to locate character in ethnicity, an intellectual activity that much preoccupied native-born American intellectuals in the years before the Civil War. This was especially the case in the Northern states, where populations included large numbers of people of varying national origins, and became of even greater importance in those places where, it seemed, the Irish threatened soon to outnumber the natives. Though there were exceptions (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin notably), this character study did not generally extend toward blacks, who were seldom seen as anything more than victims whose characters were fashioned by that status and by their acceptance of Christianity. Though both of these conditions had been imposed upon them, they were viewed nonetheless as a saving grace. Furthermore, blacks were clearly of a different race, not even to be thought of at this point as part of the future "race" that would emerge in the United States. In trying to determine what that future race would consist of, factors such as ethnicity, religion, national origin, even social and economic conditions, all came under consideration to varying degrees. Of the immigrant groups the Irish, by sheer weight of numbers, were the objects of the greatest scrutiny and of attempts to evaluate their worth as future Americans. Most of these attempts were at best condescending, at worst condemnatory or expressive of the same kind of resignation Thoreau felt in contemplating his Irish neighbor's future. Of the more condescending type one might take as an example the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson's comments, made more than thirty years after he led the mob that killed James Batchelder: "The Irish race has its characteristic faults, partly the result of temperament partly of oppression; but I maintain that a due proportion of Irish admixture will help, not hinder American society: through the sunny nature of the race, its humor, its physical courage, its warmth of heart, and its strong domestic affections."⁶⁰ 

As for Thoreau, despite such moments of hope as he may have felt for little John Riordan beginning primary school, his sense of resignation comes through clearly in a pessimistic poem that appears in his journal, the first stanza of which conveyed his belief in the futility of education for such a child:

I am the little Irish boy

[no handwritten text supplied here]That lives in the shanty

I am four years old today

[no handwritten text supplied here]And shall soon be one and twenty

[no handwritten text supplied here]I shall grow up

[no handwritten text supplied here]And be a great man

[no handwritten text supplied here]And shovel all day

[no handwritten text supplied here]As hard as I can

Fuller attributes their personal flaws to the Irish having been for so long an oppressed race, and though she is dismayed by their "extreme ignorance, their blind devotion to their priesthood, their compliancy in the hands of demagogues," she concludes that "we must regard them as most valuable elements in the new race," by which she means the race of future Americans.⁶³ 

Fuller's prediction for the future of the Roman Catholic Church in America is particularly interesting for its speculation, "if there be Catholicism still, it will be under Protestant influences, as begins to be the case in Germany. It will be, not Roman, but American Catholicism where [the power of the church] must vanish in the free and searching air of a new era."⁶⁴  Expectations such as these did not fade easily. Eight months before his death in 1892, Whitman reviled the Catholic Church and Pope Leo XIII, whose teachings on social issues he viewed as "trying to make [the Church] consist with the fact of America," something Whitman believed could not be done because America "says no to Catholicism."⁶⁵  Clearly it was their religion, rather than the Irish themselves, that was objectionable even to their supporters, and viewpoints such as Fuller's, freely and publicly declared without either malice or intended condescension, cast greater light on Whitman's attitudes if only by indicating that they were far from exceptional.

Fuller's article drew hostile comments from her readers, who must have been mostly women with complaints of Irish domestic help. Typically, for Fuller, she responded by writing another column in which she contrasted the blessings of liberty enjoyed by Americans with the feudal conditions still prevailing in Ireland under England's rule. She offers precepts for Americans in their contacts with the Irish, to exercise patience and expect no gratitude in return, and urges consideration for the needs of the Irish servant who, though domiciled under their roof, was ignored by the household members. In applauding Fuller, however, one must not lose sight of the fact that her expressions of genuine concern were written prior to 1847, when the immigrant Irish, though numerous, had not yet reached their full swell. By the time she was again in Boston that city, which had been receiving four thousand or five thousand Irish a year, had seen thirty-seven thousand enter in the year 1847 alone.⁶⁶  Indeed, Henry David Thoreau saw the Irish as "naturalizing themselves" (by which he meant both in the political and philosophical sense) at so rapid a rate that they "threaten at last to displace the Yankees, as the latter have the Indians."⁶⁷ 

Margaret Fuller's views on the Irish can be judged enlightened when compared to those of most of her New England peers, yet even here questions of race intrude, an indication of the "ethnological" thinking of the time, which a decade later would allow the Irish to be viewed as a separate race. That Whitman partook of this ethnological reasoning is indicated by his ready use, as late as 1871, of the word "stock" in referring to the Irish background of New York City policemen. There is also an unpublished Whitman manuscript, probably dating to late 1867, titled "Of the black question," which appears to be a refutation of Carlyle's objections to black suffrage using the ethnological argument that blacks would disappear from human history through the working of nature.⁶⁸  Dale T. Knobel points out that by 1860 the Irish had been given special status by most Anglo-Americans "as an 'alien' race," a status recognized by the 1860 report of the United States Bureau of the Census, which subdivided white inhabitants as "native," "foreign," and "Irish."⁶⁹ 

Among the general population of Anglo-Americans it had come to be accepted that the deficiencies of Irish character were "the cause rather than the consequence of their particular Old World condition."⁷⁰  This conclusion was arrived at largely because of the social problems presented by the postfamine immigrants who were in such wretched condition that it was hard for Americans to believe they had not always been so. But in part it was also because the Irish opposed abolition. Their opposition was viewed, correctly, as an action taken to protect their status, such as it was, in their new country, but it was also seen as a callous indifference to the suffering of slaves and an open hostility toward blacks whose competition they feared. The latter belief lingered for many years. Looking back on the time of slavery in his autobiography, Frederick Douglass spoke of the Irish having been taught "to despise the Negro... [and] to believe that he eats the bread that belongs to them."⁷¹  Irish opposition to abolition was also viewed, incorrectly, as proof of either an inability or an unwillingness to act in a democratic fashion. This was especially the case in Boston, where the abolitionists sought to swell their numbers by gaining Irish adherents and condemned them for their opposition by claiming they feared to break ranks with the Catholic clergy. As has been pointed out by all who have chronicled the history of the Irish in America, only their widescale participation in the Civil War (which they saw as a defense of the union of states, not as a war to free the slaves) brought them out of the disrepute into which they had fallen, a disrepute which in Boston was deepened by the abolitionist controversy.

Where Whitman stood on much of this is hard to tell, since for the most part he maintained the observer's role to the activities of his Boston friends, much as Franklin Sanborn described him as an observer at Sanborn's trial. A Free Soiler rather than an abolitionist, he continued to see the opening West as a place for the white worker to stake a claim in America, and there is no mention of a freed slave in his "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" In 1879 Whitman traveled to Kansas for the commemoration of its having become a territory twenty-five years earlier. While there he made contact with former abolitionists he had known, some of whom, including Richard Hinton, had taken part in the struggle to make Kansas a free state. The trip was made at the suggestion of a newspaper friend, Colonel John W. Forney, and was paid for by Forney's Philadelphia publisher.⁷²  There is little reason to think that Whitman would have made the journey under other circumstances, and he made no public reference to the "Exodus" into Kansas taking place in the same year when thousands of freed blacks fled the South. Publicly Whitman maintained silence on the abolitionist movement until 1891 when, in Goodbye My Fancy, he included his tribute to William Douglas O'Connor, which was originally printed as the preface to a collection of three of O'Connor's tales. There he tells of his Boston meeting with the twenty-nine year-old who was, "a thorough-going anti-slavery believer, speaker and writer, (doctrinaire,) and though I took a fancy to him from the first, I remember I fear'd his ardent abolitionism—was afraid it would probably keep us apart. (I was a decided and out-spoken anti-slavery believer myself, then and always; but shy'd from the extremists, the red-hot fellows of those times)."⁷³ 

In 1888, when Traubel queried him as to "what had been his emotional experience at the time of the execution of John Brown," Whitman replied, "not enough to take away my appetite—to spoil my supper." Asked further, "Did your friends understand this at the time?" he responded, "Some of them—yes: some of them thought I was hard-hearted." His brother George, he claimed, had "thought [the hanging] a martyrdom," as did he, "but not the only one: I am never convinced by the formal martyrdoms alone: I see martyrdoms wherever I go."⁷⁴ 

Whitman seems to have been echoing Emerson in this claim to "see martyrdoms wherever I go," for until the Fugitive Slave Law brought slavery into Boston, Emerson had begged off total commitment to the abolitionist cause by claiming he had other slaves to free. Indeed he had, especially among the white population, and he conscientiously went about the matter of freeing their minds of engrained habits of conventional thinking. As a result many were able to question governmental definitions of "free" and "slave" and when necessary to upset concepts of justice that, in practice, served to promote injustice.⁷⁵  Whitman seems to have been of the same mind as Emerson in this regard, for in his late years when asked if he had ever associated himself with "that radical crowd" (the Boston abolitionists), he responded, "No: but that wasn't because they were too radical: it was because they were not radical enough."⁷⁶  In a similar vein, he once was asked if he had withheld himself from what he termed the "fervid dead-earnestness" of his friend William O'Connor on the antislavery issue out of sympathy with Emerson's challenge to the movement's "one virtue," exclusivity. Whitman demurred: "I don't know that it was for Emerson's reason or for any conscious reason: I felt, I feel, that the cosmos includes Emperors as well as Presidents, good as well as bad."⁷⁷ 

The Irish dissented from the abolitionist cause for reasons that seemed to them good and sufficient. Whitman may not have shared those reasons fully but did so at least to the extent of his intuitive belief that no cause was demonstrably wholly and entirely right. Whether or not he included the plight of Irish immigrants among those martyrdoms he claimed to see at every hand can only be gauged by such unpublished writings as his sensitive comments on the condition of Irish women kept on view at the hiring office in New York (see chapter 1) and such generalized sympathetic identifications as appear in his poetry. There is some evidence, however, that Whitman may have understood the position of the Irish in their antiabolitionist stand. In 1888 he looked back on his early life, probably to the time of writing "Blood-Money" and "A Song for Certain Congressmen," when, he said, he was "very bigoted in my antislavery, anti-capital-punishment and so on, so on, but I have always had a latent toleration for the people who choose the reactionary course," because, he claimed, he was at heart "not a revolutionaire [but] an evolutionist."⁷⁸ 

On this question of a "black Irish race" in America Whitman, if he ever contemplated it, was silent. If conclusions may be drawn from his silence it would appear, especially in view of his own unwillingness to join the abolitionist movement, that Whitman did not see the refusal of the Irish to do so as proof of their inability to embrace democratic principles. While his primary reason for shunning the abolitionists was his fear of national disunion, he also shared the protectionist, working-class attitudes that motivated the Irish and overrode other considerations. Never again after the New York City public school controversy did Whitman publicly, or privately so far as is known, utter any anti-Irish sentiments that could be said to even approach those of many of the New England transcendentalists. Like most Americans of his time, his principal requirement of the Irish, that is, the Irish Catholics, was not that they take up this or that cause, only that they "improve" their character by abandoning their religion or, at the very least, their clergy and its influence on their lives. It was not, however, a requirement the Irish Catholics in America were willing to meet, not even as part of a strategy of acceptance.

5.

Washington, D.C.

Walt Whitman came to the nation's capital driven by the necessity of war, as were many other Americans in the years 1861 to 1865. He came not in a uniform or carrying a government-issued rifle but with empty pockets and a fearful heart. It was December of 1862, his brother George's name had appeared (though misspelled) on a list of those wounded at the battle of Fredricksburg. Whitman left New York immediately, had his pocket picked while changing trains in Philadelphia, and arrived in Washington, D.C., with no means of obtaining food or transportation. He walked from hospital to hospital looking for George and knocked on office doors seeking information about him but got nowhere—until two friends from his Boston days came to his rescue. William Douglas O'Connor was now clerking at the Light-House Board in Washington, and Charles Eldridge, one of Whitman's former publishers, was assistant to the Army Paymaster. Between them they provided money and assistance in getting to Falmouth, Virginia, where George's Fifty-first New York Regiment was bivouacked. As it turned out, George's wound was only superficial, and in a short time he returned to active duty. Whitman, however, had seen in the army hospitals piles of amputated limbs and the mangled bodies of suffering men—and had noted the scarcity of help for the surgeons and medical staff. He wrote to his mother that he would be remaining in Washington for a time. Except for visits, he never returned to his Brooklyn home. His subsequent wartime experiences, relative to the Irish, were such that they occasioned a mixture of emotions, strong positive feelings based on personal relationships and negative responses to the public emphasis on the idea of the "fighting Irish" as a major constituency of the Northern armies.

In the time between his visit to Boston in 1860 and his arrival in Washington two years later, Whitman had seen the publication of the third (the Boston) edition of Leaves of Grass and admitted, "I am very, very much satisfied." Once back in New York he also had tried unsuccessfully to help Henry Clapp save his Saturday Press from foundering. Clapp had been a good friend and had kept Whitman's name and poetry alive in the pages of his journal even when the reviews were bad. "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" made its first appearance (as "A Child's Reminiscence") in the December 1859 issue of the Press, and when William Douglas O'Connor met Whitman a few months later he was filled with awe to be in the presence of the author of a piece that showed such "reach of spiritual sight [and] depth of feeling."¹  Thayer and Eldridge, responding to Whitman's request, had tendered Clapp some money (perhaps an advance on Whitman's expected royalties), but it was to no avail. When the war broke out the Boston publishers lost monies owed them in the South, and not long after they, too, were bankrupt.

Whitman kept busy writing poems that were published in newspapers and enjoyed himself many nights at Pfaff's, a New York restaurant and café on Broadway near Bleecker Street, frequented by a crowd of bohemians. Years later, in the summer of 1881, Whitman went back to visit Pfaff's, then located at Twenty-fourth Street, and breakfasted with the proprietor, Charles Pfaff. The two reminisced about the old days, in 1859 and 1860, and drank a champagne toast to old friends, most of whom were dead.²  Among those Whitman recalled was an Irish author, Fitz-James O'Brien, a writer of short stories well thought of in his time, though no longer read.

O'Brien was a native of Limerick, Ireland, born in 1828; he was educated at Trinity College and, having squandered an inheritance, came to the United States about 1852. A dandy, he was proud of his good looks and good clothes, but in 1858 his nose was badly broken in a fight. He was rather delightfully described by the editor and critic William Winter as having "a bluff and breezy manner of speech, tending at times to a joyous turbulence."³  O'Brien wrote stories and poems, some of which appeared in Harper's, and a number of plays, one of which, the comedy A Gentleman from Ireland, was performed in New York. His stories were of the sort written by Edgar Allan Poe and owe little to his Irish background. At some point O'Brien became enamoured of the actress Matilda Heron and followed her to Boston, where she was appearing in Camille. She seems to have abandoned him to his luck, however, and he fell on hard times. In 1861 he joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard and was shot in February 1862. His wound became badly infected, leading to the condition known as lockjaw, or tetanus; he lingered until October when he died in a Virginia hospital.⁴ 

No doubt because O'Brien's work was well received at the time, Whitman thought him a reliable enough critic to have asked the Irishman for an opinion of his own poems. In February 1857 he queried O'Brien as to what was most lacking in their composition, to which O'Brien responded "euphony—your poems seem to me to be full of the raw material of poems, but crude, and wanting finish and rhythms."⁵  When Whitman noted this exchange to himself, he added that when asking others the same question, "the answer has been—'You have too much procreation.'" Obviously the Irishman had the good sense not to raise that objection.

In the years before the war Whitman not only spent pleasant evenings at Pfaff's but also continued to attend opera performances, a practice he had begun some time in the 1840s. It chanced that he was returning home from a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix at the New York Academy of Music on the night of April 13, 1861, when he heard the newsboys' shouts of the firing on Fort Sumter. That September, after the disastrous Union defeat at Bull Run, he read a draft of a new poem to his friends at Pfaff's, a war cry called "Beat! Beat! Drums," which, probably because of its timely subject matter, appeared simultaneously in the New York Leader and Harper's Weekly.

While welcoming Whitman to its ranks, the Leader had absorbed some of the writers formerly associated with the defunct Saturday Press, among them Ada Clare and Henry Clapp. Its editor, Charles G. Halpine, had emigrated from Ireland in 1851, and so Whitman's "City Photographs" series, recounting hospital visits to injured New York stage drivers, many of whom were Irish, quite naturally found a place in the Leader. Halpine, soon to be in uniform himself, no doubt saw that Whitman's latest poem fell nicely into line with the general efforts being made by newspapers and periodicals to rouse their readers to the Union cause.

On November 2 another poem, "Old Ireland," also appeared in the New York Leader. Since it is one of Whitman's lesser known works and is germane to this study, the poem appears here in its entirety.

For hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,

Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,

Once a queen, now lean and tatter'd seated on the ground,

Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders,

At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,

Long silent, she too long silent,, mourning her shrouded hope

      and heir,

Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full

      of love.

Yet a word ancient mother,

You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with

      forehead between your knees,

O you need not sit there veil'd in your old white hair so

      dishevel'd,

For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,

It was an illusion, the son you love was not really dead,

The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in

      another country,

Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave,

What you wept for was translated, pass'd from the grave,

The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it,

And now with rosy and new blood,

Moves to-day in a new country.

Though Whitman later would write poems similarly addressed to countries other than his own, such as France and Brazil, "Old Ireland" is distinguished from these both by its imagery and content. The poet addresses Ireland in terms of its antiquity and, by reference to a "royal harp," invokes its bardic age. Just a few years earlier, sometime between 1856 and 1858, Whitman had penned a note to himself about the mythical bard Ossian, "The Irish swear that Ossian belongs to them—that he was born, lived, and wrote in Ireland."⁷  The note may indicate his awareness of protests made by defenders of Irish culture, such as Thomas Davis, poet and leader of Ireland's Young Ireland movement, which made wide use of Ossianic national symbols, the shamrock and bardic harp.

The protests were against claims made by the Scottish poet James Macpherson who in 1762 published what he said were translations of third-century Scottish poems supposed to have been written earlier than any known Irish bardic poems. While Macpherson's were actually of his own fashioning, the Oisin (which Macpherson rendered as "Ossian") ballads belonged to a Scots-Irish tradition; since their subjects were Irish, however, objections were raised to the claims of a Scottish translation. To one who had set for himself, as Whitman had, the goal of becoming his country's bard, all such claims were significant, as were the bardic symbols, so that in referencing the harp he is honoring Ireland's ancient Celtic culture and its poets.

The dominant image of the poem, the mother/country, is one used by poets everywhere, including the Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose works were well known and loved in Whitman's time, both in Ireland and in the United States. Whitman read Moore, along with Scott and Burns, throughout his lifetime, claiming in his old age that he went to them "again and again in certain humors: they are very consoling."⁸  In Whitman's poems the mother/country image appears again in "Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood," where the individual states in America are equally protected and nurtured by the "Mother of All," the democratic union. Yeats and the literary revivalists later used such female personifications of Ireland as Deirdre of the Sorrows or Cathleen ni Hulihan, figuring Ireland as a poor old woman who will be returned to queenly status only when she finds gallant warriors, as those in the days of Gaelic Ireland, to exert her claims. These personifications drew on a type of medieval Irish poem, called the Aisling, a dream vision form similar to that found in Chaucer's House of Fame. While Whitman's maternal image seems now a cliché and the observation a generalization, it is also a truism that Whitman could offer no greater respect than to depict Ireland, or any country, in terms of the maternal, so highly did he revere motherhood. In "The Return of the Heroes," written in 1867, the image expands so that "the Mother of All" is Nature herself (as nineteenth-century American writers invariably used the word, capitalized and female) who oversees all—the returning Civil War soldiers, the harvesting of her bounties across a still unified nation, and the silent march of the war's spectral dead. By conjoining the themes of war and plenitude, the poem presents what seems at once a complementary and an opposing image to that drawn in "Old Ireland."

In its content "Old Ireland" goes beyond anything Whitman wrote about any country and its people (other than the United States) and may indicate his recognition of Ireland as the source of the largest immigrant population in America. The poet clearly grasps, at this point, the horror of the situation that has driven the wholesale emigration from Ireland, conveying it by reference to the grave over which crouches the sorrowing mother/country, mourning her loss of future generations. He proclaims a message of hope expressed in terms of resurrection that (presciently, if one thinks of the Easter Rising of 1916) evoke the promise of Easter, "The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country." The "country," however, is not that realm of the resurrected Lord but America, to which the future of Ireland has been "translated, pass'd from the grave," by wind and sea—almost as if Whitman were imaging, in "The winds favor'd and the sea sail'd it," the Irish adage of the famine years that spoke of emigration as "hope from the sea."

The final two lines of "Old Ireland," as they appeared in Drum-Taps in 1865 and in all subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, simply affirm what has gone before by contrasting the improved physical appearance of the immigrant Irish in their "new country" with the poem's earlier images, of death, a grave, and a "shrouded hope." When the poem first appeared in the New York Leader, however, the final line read, "Moves to-day an armed man in a new country." The editors of Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition explain the original final line as follows, "The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American revolutionary society, was founded in the United States in 1858."⁹  To be more specific, the Fenian Brotherhood was founded in New York City on March 17, 1858, and organized the following year.¹⁰  A historian of the brotherhood (named for legendary warriors of Irish myth, the Fianna) describes it as "an organized body of men devoted to a system of political, financial, and military action on the part of the Irishmen of America, aiding and co-operating with an allied body of revolutionists in the British Isles, for the purpose of gaining the independence of Ireland."¹¹  Whitman's original 1861 reference to the immigrant Irishman as "an armed man in a new country" well may have been an appeal to the Fenians, who at the time were being actively solicited for service in the Union army with such slogans as, "You have fought nobly for the Harp and Shamrock, fight now for the Stars and Stripes."¹²  If Whitman indeed sought to enlist the Fenians in the Northern cause, he may have felt differently after witnessing the widespread glorification of Irish soldiers and their bravery that became part of New York's wartime ethos.

If we accept that Whitman was appealing to the Fenians, it may be worth considering another, though more tenuous, suggestion in the poem's title. "Old Ireland" might be construed as a rejection of the Young Ireland movement, begun in Ireland in 1846 because of disappointment with Daniel O'Connell's nonviolent Repeal movement. Members of Young Ireland had viewed with alarm the emigration of thousands from their homeland as a weakening of any possible military attempt at independence. A brief, unsuccessful revolutionary attempt by Young Ireland in 1848 had been quickly put down, and the movement died an ignominous death, its leaders either transported to Australia or escaped to America. Whitman's "Old Ireland," which sees emigration as having been the only hope for Ireland's youth, can be read as a refutation of the Young Ireland argument, a refutation supported by the fact that when the rebels who participated in the 1848 uprising had fled to New York they found many among the immigrant Irish who were eager to join them in establishing the Fenian Brotherhood.¹³  Still, even such a speculation as this, that Whitman may have been discrediting Young Ireland, pales in light of his 1856 poem later called "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire." Surely the support offered there to revolutionaries everywhere by "the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over" was as much directed to the foiled revolutionaries of Young Ireland as to any.

The Fenian Brotherhood of 1858 planned to spread across the United States, drawing into membership Irish Americans who would be willing to train and arm themselves, with the prospect of returning to Ireland to effect a revolution. Irish militia companies were formed in New York State and elsewhere, but before much could be accomplished in the way of training the Civil War broke out, and the Irish were caught up in its fury. Something of the bitterness felt by these volunteers and conscripts at finding themselves in a war not truly their own comes through in the rhyme attributed to the Irish fighting men:

War battered dogs are we

Gnawing a naked bone

Fighters in every war and clime

For every cause but our own.

What became a long, delaying interval for Fenianism proved ultimately to be a time of great advancement for the Irish in America, for they entered the Union army in numbers upwards of 140,000 and won for their people a larger measure of respect from Americans than they had ever enjoyed. It is, then, not unlikely that the final line of "Old Ireland," as Whitman originally wrote it in 1861, was intended as a rallying cry aimed specifically at the Irish; his possible reasons for changing the line will be discussed later in this chapter.

Since the general reaction to the Fenian Brotherhood in New York newspapers had been negative, placement in the Leader of a poem suggesting that the brotherhood of militant Irishmen now be viewed as potential armed forces in the Union cause would have shone a more positive light on that organization. This speculation is supported by the fact that the Irish immigrant editor of the Leader, Charles Halpine, used his paper to propagandize for support of the war and would have welcomed such a suggestion. Halpine, the son of an Episcopal priest, was a longtime Tammany Hall activist and commanded a wide readership among the city's Irish. He joined the Sixty-ninth Regiment, New York's Irish regiment, shortly after the outbreak of the war and, after serving as an officer with the regiment, was stationed in New York.¹⁵  Though in later editions of Leaves of Grass it was moved to the "Autumn Rivulets" section, the fact that "Old Ireland" became part of Drum-Taps when that collection of Civil War poems was first published in 1865 would indicate that Whitman saw it as related to the Civil War.

Once Whitman had decided to remain in Washington his most pressing needs were for work and a place to live. Through the good offices of "Charley" Eldridge he obtained work as a copyist in the office of Major Lyman S. Hapgood, Army Paymaster. There he also wrote letters for the New York Leader and the Brooklyn Standard, written in the style of a war correspondent but focusing on the activities of New York regiments. Afternoons he spent visiting the army hospitals in and around Washington. Turning to another friend, William Douglas O'Connor, now married to Ellen (Nellie) Tarr, he accepted the couple's invitation to rent a hall room in the same boardinghouse, at 394 L Street, where they and their young daughter occupied rooms. In this way he was able to take dinner and breakfast with them and keep his expenses low. Whitman had intended to continue this arrangement for only two weeks or so, but, at the insistence of his friends, he remained for months before moving to another boardinghouse. The landlord at 394 L Street was, like O'Connor, an Irishman, by the name of Quinn. Ellen O'Connor later remembered Quinn as a very mean man whom Whitman once observed cheating someone. Whitman reprimanded him, though without raising his voice: "I can hear his voice now," she recalled, "very gentle, but very firm and ringing."¹⁶  Whitman also remembered Quinn as "a mean Irishman" but added, "I do not intend by that to reflect on Irishmen in general—to say that Irishmen are mean—but rather to indicate that Irishmen are so rarely mean that when you meet one of the real stripe, he seems to make up for all the rest!"¹⁷ 

"So rarely mean" certainly implies that on the whole Whitman's encounters with the Irish were favorable. Clearly, if we were to judge by his praise of William Douglas O'Connor we would have to say they were more than favorable, for in the plethora of compliments with which Whitman surrounded almost every mention of O'Connor's name—with repeated references to his Irish ancestry—there lies the strongest clue to the poet's appreciation of what he took to be peculiarly Irish qualities. The story of the friendship between these two men has filled two books thus far and countless additional pages. To Whitman, O'Connor was a chivalrous knight of old, a friend of his soul, and an Irish bard. He appears to have been the first person with whom Whitman could fully share his poetic intentions, which were nothing less than the revolutionizing in form and content of American poetry.

William Douglas O'Connor was a native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, born there in 1832 to an English mother and Irish father. His father, Peter D. O'Connor, was a laborer who, having left Ireland at an early age, was among the earlier wave of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century. William left home when still a child to live and work on his own. His formal education was scant, but he made excellent use of the Boston Mercantile Library Association so that he later was better read, especially in the literature of the English Renaissance, than most of his contemporaries. As a young man he turned his artistic skills to the daguerreotypist trade, in Providence, Rhode Island, and continued to write and publish poetry and short fiction in that city as he had done in Boston.

O'Connor's first notable story was called "What Cheer?" and appeared in Putnam's Monthly in July 1855. It is a highly moralistic tale in which a young student despairs of the world and decides to kill himself by drinking laudanum. At the moment of drinking he is arrested by a scream from another part of the building where he resides. With the aid of a local restauranteur he investigates and finds a woman in a desperate situation, impoverished, with young children, and having just found her husband dead, a suicide by the very means the student had intended for himself. The moral is quickly obvious, as the student realizes he has been self-absorbed and uncaring of others around him. Of no small interest is the fact that the poor family the student has ignored is Irish, the husband described by the restauranteur as "A cussed Irishman, of course. Gets drink somehow; dunno how, for he aint in work. Licks his wife, just for rum an' ugliness, an' drives the children out o'doors."¹⁸ 

O'Connor presents both a practical and a philosophical explanation for the condition of the "cussed Irishman." The restauranteur admits his anger at the man's behavior, but when he puts himself "in the man's boots" he realizes the cause: "he got seventy-five cents a day for totin' brick an' mortar up a ladder, from mornin' to night. That's four dollars an' a half a week, ye know, an' will you have it now, or wait till ye get it, 's the principle, you understand, with the man that hires him." The omniscient narrator offers a more deterministic, New England puritanical, view, describing the dead man as "a poor, ignorant, besotted, brutalized Irish laborer," the result of previous generations "making him all he was, and never to rise above that level, but to sink lower and lower forever."

The story suggests a division within O'Connor as to the root cause of Paddy's condition, whether the result of circumstances, in America as in Ireland, of which he is the victim, or the result of generations of poverty and ignorance, which can only breed more of the same. Born in New England and possessed of superior intelligence, O'Connor cannot have found it easy to identify with the immigrants all around him, despite having been forced by the circumstance of his own impoverished childhood into something near their level of existence. While he devoted much to the abolitionist cause, there is no evidence that O'Connor ever took up the cause of the Irish immigrants. In 1853 he returned to Boston and went to work on a periodical, the Commonwealth, whose offices served as a gathering place for Boston's abolitionists. O'Connor quickly fell in with the movement, and a year later he met Ellen Tarr, who worked for William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist paper, the Liberator. Two years later they married, and O'Connor took an editorial position at the Philadelphia weekly the Saturday Evening Post.

While working in Philadelphia O'Connor, who had become something of an authority on Elizabethan literature, took up the cause of Delia Bacon, a Massachusetts woman who claimed descendency from Sir Francis Bacon, the real author, she argued, of Shakespeare's plays.¹⁹  O'Connor became convinced of the accuracy of this argument, and late in his life he ardently defended an Irish immigrant, Ignatius Donnelly, whose study, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays, was published in 1888. Almost entirely out of respect for the judgment of his good friend O'Connor (for he claimed not to be convinced of the argument nor to have read all of Donnelly's book), Whitman wrote "Shakspere-Bacon's Cipher," a short poem in which he diverts the question of the disputed authorship to his belief that in every aspect of nature "A mystic cipher waits infolded."²⁰  Throughout his lifetime, however, O'Connor was not to be dissuaded on the subject and frequently tried to convince others, drawing on what Whitman saw as his Irish intensity to ignite his rhetoric. One friend of the Washington days remarked, "O'Connor was a man of unfailing eloquence, whom it was always delightful to listen to, even when the rush of his enthusiasm carried him beyond the bounds of discretion, as it did in the Bacon-Shakespeare business."²¹ 

O'Connor remained with the Post until 1860, when the new publishing firm of Thayer and Eldridge coaxed him into returning to Boston to write a romance that would advance the abolitionist cause. There he met the poet whose work he had admired since the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855.

"Did you take to him from the first?" Whitman once was asked of his meeting with O'Connor. "Yes, without a suspicion of uncertainty," he replied, "he was so bright, magnetic, vital, elemental: I think the thing was mutual—was instant on both sides."²²  O'Connor was twenty-eight, Whitman forty-one, but the attraction clearly was mutual. O'Connor wrote of the older man, "it is health and happiness to be near him; he is so large and strong—so pure, proud and tender"; Whitman said of the younger man, "he was a gallant, handsome, gay-hearted, fine-voiced, glowing-eyed man; lithe-moving on his feet, of healthy and magnetic atmosphere and presence."²³  For Whitman the best was yet to come, since he found in this charismatic young Irishman an intellectual companion who responded to Leaves of Grass with mind and heart and who would prove himself one of the poet's most faithful friends.

In the summer of 1863 the pleasant arrangement at the L Street boardinghouse came to an end with the removal of the O'Connors to a larger apartment. Since their new quarters were nearby, Whitman continued to take many of his meals with the family and spent at least Sunday evenings with them, if not other evenings as well. He was not the only one to do this, for a circle of friends formed around the O'Connors that included at least three more comrades from the Boston days: Charles Eldridge, Richard Hinton, and John Trowbridge. John Burroughs also joined the group in 1865 and thereafter remained one of Whitman's closest friends; it is from Burroughs we learn that one of the favorite haunts in Washington for the circle of friends was Harvey's, where they ate oysters while perched at a counter on high stools.²⁹ 

Intellectual discussions were the order of the gatherings at the O'Connors', and the subject matter ranged widely over literature, politics, philosophy, and, inevitably, the war. Unlike the quiet observing manner Whitman seems to have maintained while in Boston, he freely participated in these discussions. O'Connor's eloquence, however, made him the dominant speaker in the group. As to his manner of argument, Whitman once remarked, "William's onslaught is terrifying—it always means business. He never charges the enemy with an apology on his lance. That is the idea—he is fiercely in earnest: nothing can stand against him: when he comes along God help you if you don't get out of his road." But O'Connor seems also to have been subject to chimerical changes in temperament, which may actually have been the result of a manic-depressive disorder that Whitman confused with his friend's Irish ancestry, seeing his "constitutional melancholy, his Irish bardic nature" as explanation for the extremes to which he was often led.³⁰ 

His friend's fierce earnestness became public when, in 1865, Whitman was dismissed from his government position. In that year Whitman had moved from the Paymaster's Office to the Indian Affairs Bureau of the Department of the Interior, where he was a clerk for Secretary of the Interior James Harlan. The reasons for the dismissal appear to have been many but apparently included Harlan's personal objection to his clerk's poetry.³¹  Whitman was then preparing another edition of Leaves of Grass and kept in his office desk a copy of the 1860 edition as his working blueprint. The book came into Harlan's hands, and he found the poems offensive enough to use them as at least partial excuse for the dismissal. Whitman was given another post the same day, in the Attorney General's office, but O'Connor was incensed at what he perceived as a disgraceful offense to freedom of thought and expression. The result of his indignation was the now famous defense of Whitman, The Good Gray Poet, published nine weeks later. In this pamphlet polemic O'Connor, fully aware that he was risking his own government position, brought to bear all of those argumentative skills Whitman and the other friends were so keenly aware of—the passion, fire, and earnestness that made O'Connor unique among them. Though at times he allows himself to be carried away to such a degree that he weakens his argument, one cannot fail to be impressed by the erudition of his defense and the sincere adulation of the poet that infuses it. Reading it one must agree with Whitman, who said of O'Connor, "he is a withering fire to his enemies and a sustaining fire to his friends."³² 

Overlooked perhaps even by Whitman at the time was the extent to which his friend's Irish background may have made him such a firebrand, especially in defense of the poet, for it was in large part O'Connor's finely honed sense of political oppression that led him to react as he did. Centuries of subjugation by a tyrannous government may have been as much a part of his psychological makeup as of any among the Irish in America and elsewhere. That an attempted suppression of literature by a government officer (for such was O'Connor's interpretation of the dismissal) should occur in a democratic country was intolerable, and O'Connor responded in the only way he knew, by blasting both the individual offender and his compatriots in general for a lack of appreciation of the "Good Gray Poet." Not until a year before his own death did Whitman indicate his grasp of what may have been the true source of O'Connor's rage. To Traubel he confided, "O'Connor is distinguished first of all by an abysmic flavor—an Irish bardic ardor centered in him out of six generations of patriotism, national aspirations. It made a vast heart."³³ 

A large part of O'Connor's defense of Whitman was based on the poet's unselfish visitation of the wounded in military hospitals begun almost immediately after his decision, in 1862, to remain in Washington. Initially a hospital visitor who brought fruit, reading materials, tobacco, and other items to the patients, Whitman progressed to writing letters for them—and often to inform parents of their deaths—and eventually to actual nursing duties such as cleansing wounds and changing dressings.³⁴  The poems included in Drum-Taps faithfully recorded his experiences in the hospitals, as did his letters, especially those written to his mother, and Specimen Days, his prose autobiographical account of some of the events of his life. The letters and the long lists of soldiers' names entered in his notebooks reveal the presence in these hospitals of Irish and Irish American soldiers from all parts of the country. One of the most touching accounts in Specimen Days, however, concerns a young soldier who came from Ireland specifically to volunteer his services. His name was Thomas Haley of Company M, Fourth New York Cavalry, "a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness—shot through the lungs—inevitably dying—came over to this country from Ireland to enlist—has not a single friend or acquaintance here," Whitman wrote.³⁵ 

Whitman saw Tom Haley when he was first brought to the hospital (apparently Campbell Hospital in Washington) on June 15, 1863, and did not believe the young man could live twelve hours. At the time of writing, Whitman says, "He lies there with his frame exposed above the waist, all naked, for coolness, a fine built man, the tan not yet bleach'd from his cheeks and neck." The wounded youth slept most of the time, but when awake he was "like some frighten'd, shy animal." Whitman sat beside Haley in silence, observing his breathing and the beauty of his youth, "so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair." At one point Haley awoke and turned on Whitman "a long steady look," then sighing, returned to sleep. "Little he knew," Whitman says, "poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover'd near."

Unlike Thomas Haley, who came directly from Ireland, approximately a third of the 140,000 Irish who served in the Civil War were from the New York area.³⁶  Among the first to enlist, they had responded to the call for volunteers out of a devotion to their adopted country and to the idea of the union of states. Still conservative on the question of slavery, they did not see themselves as volunteering for the purpose of abolishing slavery; in fact, many were still sympathetic to the Southern states. The majority of the New York Irish volunteers served in all-Irish units, such as the Seventy-fifth Regiment, the "Irish Rifles," and in the famous Sixty-ninth Regiment under its commander, Michael Corcoran, an 1849 immigrant who had been a leader of the Fenians.

The Sixty-ninth Regiment was a militia unit prior to the war, with Corcoran at its head. In October 1860 the Prince of Wales visited New York, and Corcoran refused to have his unit march in the welcoming parade. He was placed in court martial, and the trial was still under way when the war started. At that point he issued a highly effective call for Irishmen to volunteer, and the charges against him were dropped. On the matter of the visit of the prince, Whitman disagreed with the city's Irish, and in "Year of Meteors," a poetic retrospective of the year 1859–1860, he sings of the occasion:

And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome

      to you from me, young prince of England!

(Remember you surging Manhattan's crowds as

      you pass'd with your cortege of nobles?

There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;). . . .

Corcoran was taken prisoner at the first battle of Bull Run, but by then the Sixty-ninth Regiment was part of the Irish Brigade formed by Thomas Francis Meagher. Meagher had been exiled from his homeland and sent by the British to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) for his part in the 1848 uprising; he escaped and made his way to New York where he founded a weekly newspaper, Irish News.³⁸  Throughout the four years of the war Meagher was variously seen as hero or as drunkard, but he managed to generate a tremendous amount of excitement and garnered great public adulation for the Sixty-ninth. A full-scale parade and ceremony attended the departure of the regiment from New York, and a similar, though far more somber, observance greeted the return of their vastly diminished numbers after Bull Run.

It should be recalled that in September 1861 when Whitman published his battle call, "Beat! Beat! Drums!," it was as part of a general rallying effort that followed the defeat at Bull Run. The ranks of the Sixty-ninth Regiment were so ravaged there that their return to the city was for the purpose of recruitment. Not long after this event Whitman would have been made personally aware of the enormity of the contribution made by the men of the Sixty-ninth, for it was at the battle of Fredricksburg where his brother George was wounded that the regiment was next engaged and where it won its fame, not only for the losses that nearly wiped out the regiment but also for bravery of such magnitude that some of the best-remembered Irish heroism in the war was displayed there. The New York newspapers made much of this, especially of Meagher's report that, of his 1,200 men who went into battle at Fredricksburg, only 280 remained alive the following day.³⁹  Robert E. Lee is said to have hailed the Irish brigade at Fredricksburg with the words, "Never were men so brave. They ennobled their race by their splendid gallantry."⁴⁰ 

The Fifty-first New York Regiment had also suffered losses at Fredricksburg, sixty-nine infantry men and six officers killed or wounded. At the end of the first year of the war the regiment had only three hundred of its original thousand men.⁴¹  Whitman may have chafed at the amount of publicity accorded the Irish Brigade, perhaps feeling that other fighting units and their men were being slighted. Because of his brother's assignment to the Fifty-first New York Regiment, Whitman took a special interest in it when sending news articles home. In June 1864, having been ill and told by the doctors to remain away from the hospitals until he felt better, Whitman returned home despite his fears that George might be injured while he was away. By midsummer he felt well enough to visit the New York hospitals where the war wounded were tended, and late in the summer he and his mother attended the funerals of two of George's friends killed in battle. In October he published "Fifty-First New York City Veterans," a brief history of George's regiment, in the New York Times. It recounted the movements of the regiment from the time it left New York in October 1861, and may have been born of a desire to offset the publicity garnered by the Sixty-ninth Regiment, or at least of the hope of providing a balance to it.⁴² 

Whitman lacked the ability, and no doubt the desire, to produce the kind of humorous writing about the war that contributed to the image of the Irish volunteer as a good-natured hero who, despite his troubles, found much about the army that was laughable. It was, in fact, just such a hero as this who captivated many New Yorkers. Charles Halpine, with whom we may assume Whitman had friendly relations when Halpine was editor of the Leader, chronicled the adventures of a fictional New York Irishman, "Private Miles O'Reilly of the Forty-seventh New York Volunteers," in the pages of the Irish-American. Because of its comic appeal, the series commanded a wide readership, and the newspaper proudly boasted that only the president was better known than O'Reilly. Halpine collected the O'Reilly pieces in The Life and Adventures, Songs, Services and Speeches of Private Miles O'Reilly and, amusingly, described his hero as possessing "the usual strong type of Irish forehead—the perceptive bumps, immediately above the eyes being extremely prominent."⁴³  The description, with its snide allusion to phrenology, indicates an awareness of the way in which this pseudoscience of head bumps frequently was turned against the Irish.

Another possible contributing factor to the deletion cannot be ignored, however—the four days of antidraft rioting that took place in New York in July 1863, largely at the instigation of the city's Irish. As already noted, the Irish had been quick to volunteer their services to the Union cause. Though some conservative Irish, especially those who had business interests in the South, were among those Northerners of every background who opposed the war, the greater majority of the Irish population in New York quickly responded to the call for volunteers. Like Whitman's brother George, many of them initially signed up for a three-month enlistment but then reenlisted for the duration of the war. Despite this, the Irish eschewed the politics of Lincoln and remained loyal to the Democratic Party throughout the war and after it. Their feelings were well expressed by Halpine in one stanza of his "Song of National Democracy":

To the tenets of Douglas we tenderly cling,

Warm hearts to the cause of our country we bring;

To the flag we are pledged—all its foes we abhor—

We ain't for the "nigger" but are for the war.

They may have clung to Douglas's Democratic principles, but the city's most influential Irish newspaper, the Irish-American, consistently urged its readers' loyalty to the president. This kind of support was severely tested, however, by Lincoln's proclamation of the emancipation of slaves, which raised for the Irish laborer the specter of a mass influx into the North of competitive black workers. The willingness of blacks to take the place of striking Irish workers and the eagerness with which employers replaced striking workers with blacks were fresh in the minds of the city's Irish, many of whom still labored at the lowest economic end of the workforce.

The breaking point for New York's Irish, in their support of Lincoln and the war, came with the passage of the Conscription Act in March 1863. The act exempted those who could either pay three hundred dollars or provide a substitute, which to the low-paid Irish seemed grossly discriminating. Whitman and his mother worried that his brother Jeff would be drafted, and Walt wrote his mother that there seemed no way to avoid it but to borrow the money needed to buy Jeff's way out.⁴⁷  Jeff's presence and financial support were vital to Louisa Whitman, especially since another of her sons, Andrew, had been discharged, presumably for poor health, and was at the time seriously ill (he died in December 1863); but there were many in the city with equal need who had no place to turn for such a loan.

Like most of those who were away at war, Whitman learned of the New York City draft riots from the newspapers. On July 15 he wrote to his mother from Washington, "So the mob has risen at last in New York—I have been expecting it, but as the day for the draft had arrived and every thing was so quiet, I supposed all might go on smoothly—but it seems the passions of the people were only sleeping, and have burst forth with terrible fury, and they have destroyed life and property." The feeling in Washington, he told Louisa, was "savage and hot as fire against New York, (the mob—'copperhead mob' the papers here call it)," and he heard everywhere, even in the hospitals, "threats of ordering up the gunboats, cannonading the city, shooting down the mob, hanging them in a body, etc."⁴⁸ 

Initially, Whitman's reaction to this fury was, as he said, "partly amused, partly scornful," but on reflection he quickly changed his mind. As he wrote his mother in the same letter, "we are in the midst of strange and terrible times—one is pulled a dozen different ways in his mind." The fact that he had been expecting some sort of riotous reaction to the draft, even welcomed it—as his words "at last" would indicate—and that he was relieved when the conscription was temporarily suspended in the city (for, as he said, "the deeper they go in with the draft, the more trouble it is likely to make") suggests Whitman's sympathies remained with the rioters even after he had overcome his first enthusiasm. His feelings appear to have been partially shared by his brother Jeff, who on July 19 wrote him an account of the events that began, "We have passed through a wonderful week for our New York. A week that I think will eventually be productive of great good to our country, but had at a fearful cost."⁴⁹  Jeff believed the news reports of the riot were exaggerated but that the number of deaths was underreported. He offers a figure of four hundred rioters killed, though of the five hundred or so deaths recorded historically, most were not rioters.

The week that Jeff referred to began when the first names, twelve hundred of them, were drawn for the draft on Saturday, July 11, 1863. It was an unfortunate choice of date for its proximity to the annual Boyne Day reminder, on July 12, of the great defeat of Ireland's Catholic forces by William of Orange. Sunday was a day of rest for the laborers, which allowed them ample time to attend to the publication in the Sunday newspapers of the names selected for conscription. When the majority of names proved to be those of mechanics and laborers, among whom the Irish numbered predominantly, it seemed that history was repeating itself in a new form of oppression, and so the rioting began. Jeff Whitman felt so bitterly toward the Irish for their participation in the riots ("I'm perfectly rabid on an Irishman") that he feared not enough of them had been killed by the army troops sent to quell the insurrection, and his brother George, writing from Kentucky where he was part of the Union troops, wished more of the rioters had been killed.⁵⁰  While Walt quickly corrected his initial reaction to the riots, he gave no indication that he held the Irish responsible for the uprising, nor, on the other hand, does he seem to have believed that they were being unduly singled out for conscription.

The riots began on Monday, July 13, when Boyne Day, having fallen on a Sunday, was observed, though not with the Orange parades that the city would come to know in later years. Rioting did not begin, as might have been expected, in the poorest districts of the city. Rather it was the industrial workers, painters, carpenters, bricklayers, and stonecutters who began the first acts of defiance, and in this fact lies the reason for the support of the action by Jeff and Walt Whitman, who were themselves of the laboring class. Inevitably, because unchecked, the rioting spread and drew in the criminal or near criminal elements who took advantage of the situation to loot and burn the homes and businesses of prosperous Republicans. Later in the week most of the rioters' anger was directed at blacks, and murder was added to crimes against property. Police forces in the city, whom Jeff Whitman claimed "covered themselves with glory" in the riot, were insufficient to quell the uprising, and Union troops stationed nearby had to be brought in. The affair brought no small condemnation of the city's Irish from New York's mayor George Opdyke, who promptly vetoed a bill that would have enabled many of those called up for the army to pay their way out of the draft. As it turned out, news of the bravery of the Irish volunteers and the heavy losses sustained by the Sixty-ninth Regiment at Gettysburg only a week before the riot began quickly pushed the lurid riot stories off the front pages.⁵¹ 

For all their sorrow and despair, the war years also brought great joy to Whitman, for he found in tending the wounded an outlet for those tender nurturing instincts that were so vital a part of his personality. His contacts with the young and not-so-young soldiers brought him friendships that were, for the most part, as intense as they were fleeting. But as is so often the case with those who find themselves thrown together to share brief times of pain, loneliness, and uncertainty, relationships developed that could not be continued beyond the national emergency. "Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips," Whitman later wrote of those days, but the kisses faded either into death or distance, and letters written in peacetime went unanswered or brought responses that told of new lives, with wives and children.⁵⁵  The one great difference was his wartime friendship with Peter Doyle, "Pete the Great," as Whitman dubbed him, the young Irishman who did not drift away until circumstances forced him to and who never forgot the man whose love he understood, if not always his poetry.

Peter George Doyle, born in Limerick, Ireland, on June 3, 1843, to Peter and Catherine Nash Doyle, came to the United States with his mother and three brothers in 1852.⁵⁶  The Doyle family settled in Virginia, where Peter later became a machinist and possibly a cooper, that is, a barrel maker. When the Civil War began he joined the Confederate army to serve in a Richmond light artillery unit, one of ten enlisted men who were natives of Ireland.⁵⁷  His company saw action at Richmond, Manassas, and Antietam, where Doyle was wounded and sent to a hospital in Richmond. There he entered a petition seeking discharge on the grounds that he was "not a Citizen of the Confederate States" having been born in Ireland.⁵⁸  Further, he claimed to have lived in Washington, D.C., from the time of his arrival in America and that he had been conscripted in Virginia when he went there seeking employment. A few days after entering this petition he attached an addendum stating his intention to return to Ireland as soon as possible. Doyle was discharged on November 7, 1862, and years later was a member of the United Confederate Veterans.⁵⁹  A month after his discharge his company was involved in the battle at Fredricksburg, where George Whitman sustained the wound that brought his brother Walt south.

The addendum to Doyle's petition for discharge was probably made at the urging of Confederate army officers, who sought assurances of foreigners seeking a way out of the army that they would leave the country. When Doyle did not leave, he was arrested four months later for desertion and returned to his company. Wounded, hospitalized, and released, Doyle never returned to duty. On his way north he was captured and imprisoned in Washington. A short time later he and some others in like situations were freed after swearing not to aid the Southern cause.

Whitman's remembrance of Pete was as "a rare man: knowing nothing of books, knowing everything of life: a great big hearty full-blooded everyday divinely generous working man: a hail fellow well met . . . Pete fascinates you by the very earthiness of his nobility."⁶⁴  Clearly, Peter Doyle was, in Whitman's mind, the epitome of the working class, with all its values rolled up in this one Irish mechanic. So important did Whitman consider Pete to an understanding of his poetry that at one point he claimed it was necessary to include their friendship in order to "get the ensemble of 'Leaves of Grass.'"⁶⁵ 

During the next few years Whitman and Doyle continued together as much as possible. Though they often talked of living together this was not possible, as Pete was supporting his widowed mother; he stayed on with her, and Whitman lived in boardinghouses. Whitman's affection for the young Irishman was such that he was miserable when the often taciturn Doyle seemed not to return his love. In July 1870 Pete must have seemed especially distant, for Whitman chastised himself in a note, "Depress the adhesive nature / It is in excess—making life a torment," and again, "REMEMBER WHERE I AM MOST WEAK, & most lacking. Yet always preserve a kind spirit & demeanor to 16. BUT PURSUE HER NO MORE."⁶⁶  Whitman used "16" as the code reference for Pete, based on the numerical placement of his initials in the alphabet, and "HER" was his later substitution for the original "HIM."⁶⁷  His feelings changed, however, when, on the night before Whitman left for Brooklyn to visit his mother, he and Pete said a tender farewell on a Washington street corner. From Brooklyn Whitman wrote how comforted he was by that leave-taking: "I never dreamed that you made so much of having me with you, nor that you could feel so downcast at losing me." Then, acknowledging his need, he adds, "I foolishly thought it was all on the other side. . . . I now see clearly, that was all wrong."⁶⁸ 

It was the following year, in July 1871, when Whitman was again in New York, that he wrote to Doyle and O'Connor about the Irish rioting in the city. Then, a year later came a break with O'Connor; the following year, 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke, which initiated a series of strokes that eventually took him away from Washington and from Pete. Whitman went to live with his brother George and George's wife in Camden, New Jersey, later buying his own home in that community where he died. Pete changed jobs to work on the railroads and managed to see Whitman only now and then. In 1875 Whitman visited him in Washington for two weeks. For a time they exchanged letters, then postcards. When Whitman was able to get about again (with the help of a cane Pete gave him), he began giving lectures on Lincoln's assassination. He made vivid the event by using the firsthand account provided by Doyle, who was present in Ford Theater, heard the shot, and saw Booth jump to the stage and fall before crying out "something," which Doyle said, "I could not hear for the hub-bub," before disappearing from view.⁶⁹  Doyle attended some of these lectures, which afforded them brief reunions.

Two years before his own death Whitman was startled one day by a newspaper headline, "The Death of Peter Doyle." Although it referred to a different Peter Doyle, it "knocked the breath out of me," he told Horace Traubel, and he then went on to remember "Pete—a rebel—not old—big—sturdy—a man, every inch of him!"⁷⁰  But toward the end of Whitman's life there was almost no contact between them, something which Pete later explained as his fault. When the old poet was ill and needed care, Pete felt he wanted to nurse him, he told a friend, because "we loved each other deeply," but he knew "there were things preventing that" and so stayed away.⁷¹  He came for the poet's burial, however, and remained in touch with some of Whitman's friends. It is from one of them we know that Peter Doyle "never swerved from him" (Whitman) and, from another, that the two were so closely associated in the minds of Whitman's friends that when Pete died in 1907 it was "almost like losing Walt anew."⁷² 

One thing Whitman shared with the Irish in America was their joint participation in the Civil War, and like them he took from that experience both good and bad. For him it was the goodness of personal relationships that enriched his life, mixed with a somewhat grudging attitude that too much attention had been paid to the wartime exploits of this one immigrant group. But while the Irish gained from their participation in the war greater and greater strength in the American society, Whitman was noticeably weakened, physically, by it. The great, robust physique that was frequently commented on by others seemed to leave him from that time, to be replaced by an even greater sensitivity of mind and heart due, in no small measure, to "the dear love of comrades" he had known in the war years.

6.

Boston, 1881

7.

Camden & Eminent Visitors

8.

Dublin

9.

Coda

On more than one occasion while writing this book colleagues or friends, after learning that my subject was Whitman and the Irish, have immediately asked the question: "Did he like them?" Some asked because they were aware of the Aurora editorials, which led them to think the answer might be a straightforward "no." Others, most often those of Irish descent, asked simply because they were curious. No one asked the question in reverse, thus according Whitman's opinion pride of place, yet I feel sure they would have done so had my topic been Whitman and the English or Whitman and the French, both studies, by the way, that have already been produced. The assumption was that Whitman was in a better position to pass judgment on, or at least to like or dislike, the Irish than they were to do the same toward him. The examination of his contacts with Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Irish Americans, however, fails to indicate he himself felt any such superiority. He accepted the immigrant, and in his New York City days the Irish were the largest immigrant group; he accepted with gratitude the adulation of the Anglo-Irish scholars; and, above all, he treasured the friendships of those individuals, both native-born Irish and Irish American, who were among the closest of his friends, O'Connor, O'Reilly, and Doyle.

One of the things this study aimed to establish is that those of the Irish literary community who were Whitman's contemporaries, as well as some who came after, responded very positively to his poetry. Clearly, he did not serve as a useful model for writers of the Irish literary revival beyond the inspiration he provided for the idea of a national poetry in modern literature and in democratic nations. There is nothing in Leaves of Grass that even approximates the urge felt by the Yeatsian nationalists to return to a golden age of Celtic myth and make it newly relevant. Then, too, by the time of Yeats and others who were interested in the American bard as a possible model of nationalistic poetry, Whitman was seeking to move beyond that classification to achieve the international audience he had envisioned early in his poetic career.

As early as the second edition of Leaves, in 1856, the poem that later became "Salut au Monde!" reveals Whitman's assumption that his democratic message would reach beyond his own country and arouse in peoples of other nations a desire to achieve democracy. The encouragement offered in "To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire" could be for no other purpose but to foster everywhere the overthrow of monarchies and the establishment of democracies; as he said to the newly radicalized Thomas W. H. Rolleston, in absentia, "I do wish you, I did wish you, Godspeed." Whitman's quick response to Rolleston's suggestions for German and Russian translations of Leaves bears out his desire to exert a worldwide democratizing influence, as did his belief that "America, inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity."¹ 

This sense of custodianship of a future republic to be enjoyed by all peoples underlies one of the more interesting of twentieth-century critical comments on Whitman, offered by the Ulster poet and scholar Tom Paulin. Writing in the years just after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, in which the government of Ireland was granted greater authority in the affairs of Ulster in exchange for a more determined effort at preventing republican terrorism, Paulin expresses the feelings of his fellow Ulsterites as those of a people suddenly "marginalized" by a powerful, once protective nation. His critical essays, offered in a collection titled Minotaur, were composed in the years after the agreement and, Paulin claims, "aim to explore the experience of marginality in relation to the nation state."²  In one of these essays Paulin forges a not unlikely link between the republicanism of John Milton and the democratic vision of Whitman. He begins by presenting an argument for the vital and inseparable alliance between Milton's prose and poetry, though acknowledging the lack of "a [theory of] poetics for the prose" by which to correlate the two. Paulin proposes to fill the void by insisting on "topicality—the dramatic intensity of the polemical Now" as the point of connection.³  With examples drawn from Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, he demonstrates Milton's creation of images and rhythms that directly convey poetic interpretations of various polemics set forth in Of Reformation, Aeropagitica, and others among his prose writings. Paulin quotes from Areopagitica and Milton's vision of the free city, "the mansion-house of liberty," where "the pursuit of Truth outstrips the pursuit of war," and where the citizens actively engage in bringing about "the approaching Reformation" by "musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas . . . others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement."⁴ 

Paulin sees in this passage an anticipation of Whitman's "Song of Myself ": "Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, / A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming," and argues that Milton "sounds almost uncannily like Whitman democratically trying to pack every last rapid action in."⁵  Then, in what proves to be his most effective drawing from Milton's prose, Paulin quotes a passage, "In short, it is the renewed cultivation of freedom and civic life that I disseminate throughout cities, kingdoms, and nations," pointing out that the voice of the poetic persona could almost be that of the persona infusing so much of Whitman's poetry. From this position of strength, Paulin concludes by asserting that it is in comparing Milton and Whitman that we can "start to see the republican poetics that structures [Milton's] prose."⁶ 

The argument is forceful and convincing, and the comparison offers a new pairing of visions that departs from the more familiar one, of Blake to Whitman. Since Milton and Whitman wrote in both forms, the comparison between their prose and poetry can be extended, thus offering the promise of an ever greater increase of insight. What cannot fail to impress, however, is the impulse behind the argument, which is eloquently expressed in the introduction to the collected essays, subtitled "Poetry and the Nation State." Describing the emotional and psychological effects on Ulsterites of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Paulin speaks of a people who have no place to worship, "no place to sacrifice." It is, he says, "a version of penal times when Irish Catholics were forbidden to celebrate mass and had to do so, fearfully, at 'mass rocks' out in the hills." Driven by this sense of persecution, Paulin seeks, and finds, his place of refuge in a shared utopian vision of a free state which, conveniently, he is able first to locate in the visionary texts of the great English republican poet before finding it again in the poetic construct of an American poet describing a democratic state. More than Edward Dowden's examination of Whitman as the example of what kind of poetry a democracy will present, Paulin's essay suggests the need of so many Irish writers who felt themselves to be marginalized, adrift between two political bodies and a part of neither. Had Yeats been able to connect, via England's great polemicist and poet, to the prophet of American democracy and his vision of its utopian future, he might not have experienced the sense of cultural fragmentation that eventually led him away even from the cultural nationalism he once embraced. In near despair, Paulin becomes an emigrant to the visionary country of Milton and Whitman, just as countless others from Ireland, north and south, had become emigrants to an alien nation. Not surprisingly for an Ulsterman, he carefully charts his route toward the envisioned state via the English literary and political tradition, which he sees as having been the custodians of the long-held vision.

Paulin's feelings of despair at the political actions of his country would not have been unknown to Whitman. The sad fact that he, too, faltered, in the 1870s, and allowed his belief in America and in himself, as the herald of democracy, to erode was the regrettable result of his declining physical and emotional health. At this point he lost his sense of mission and, rather than emphasizing the appropriateness of his message to other nations, presented himself to his European admirers as a poet neglected by his own people. Yeats, for one, saw this as the mark of failure, on Whitman's part, to achieve the national status he had expected. Yeats turned away to follow his own instincts, hearing, perhaps, in the democratic "yawp" the echo of a mob howling, which to his mind would have served only to further disunite his already politically and emotionally divided country.

The question of whether Whitman's desire for an international audience interfered, even conflicted, with the presentation of a poetic persona that claimed to speak to and for Americans brings us closer to his associations with the Irish in America.⁷  There is no denying that his personal relationships with Irish and Irish Americans were warm and loving, but he seems to have found lovable in them qualities that he identified as characteristically "Irish" and which he expected to find in all who were of Irish birth or background. In short, he accepted as true the stereotype of Irish rebelliousness, fierce loyalty, and a readiness to fight, with much of which—especially the rebelliousness—he personally identified.

It also seems certain that he never overcame his objections to Catholicism and continued to view it as limiting its believers' full participation in democracy. In his defense, however, it should be said that beyond his one venture, in the pages of the 1842 Aurora, into a full-blown depiction of the Irish as dupes of their priests, he never again gave public utterance to such sentiments. One does wish for a fuller representation of the Irish in Whitman's poetry, especially in his poetry of Manhattan. It is a wish born of an expectation, considering the fact that the Irish constituted the largest ethnic group in New York City in the years Whitman lived and worked there. The explanation for the infrequency of their appearance that comes most readily to mind is that which also seems to explain Whitman's notice of the increasing Chinese population in Boston while never commenting on the Boston Irish: they were simply too numerous to notice and their Catholicism, which distinguished so many of them, not so immediately observable. Still, the Irish appear in the poems with sufficient frequency to register their presence among the American workers who are Whitman's principal choice of representative Americans.

It is Whitman's image of the worker, free and independent, even joyous in his or her work, that made an impress on the minds of his Anglo-Irish admirers. The sheer joy with which Whitman went about his own labor of creating a poetry of and for a nation's people struck a resounding chord among these, his earliest Irish readers. That it also took root in the hearts of some of Ireland's greatest labor leaders is obvious from their own utterances. One cannot help thinking that Whitman, whose friend and companion Peter Doyle worked on streetcars and railroads most of his adult life, would have taken special pleasure in knowing that his words had inspired the leaders of Ireland's greatest transport workers' union.

There is no denying that Whitman's democratic message was taken over by the socialists in England and in Ireland. They may have recognized what he himself did not, that his heartfelt desire for "the dear love of comrades" among workers was the ultimate "cause," to which he repeatedly referred but never defined, and that it was the genuine basis for his international appeal. In Ireland this cause was never subverted, as it sometimes was in England, by aristocratic, university-trained intellectuals whose idea of demonstrating love for the laboring class was to take a lover from among its ranks. Though they rejected him as a paradigm for their nationalistic purposes, the Irish celebrated Whitman for many of what might be termed the right reasons, his joyfulness, his humanity, even, despite themselves at times, for what he called a "heroic nudity," which encouraged them to strip away the ambiguities that flowed from cultural divisiveness and seek a unified vision of Ireland.

There is no way of knowing how popular Whitman was among the Irish Americans of his day, nor do we know if John Boyle O'Reilly was successful in promoting Leaves of Grass among readers of the Pilot. The sexual aspect of the book may have been offputting to many of O'Reilly's readers, but the rebelliousness that led Whitman to insist on its inclusion may have proved a strong attraction for them. Whitman was not entirely wrong in accepting the Irish stereotype, for that part of it which emphasized rebelliousness was surely true—with good cause—and sparked in him a flare of recognition that must have been mutual and which seems to have carried over into other areas of mutual understanding. For evidence of this we need look no further than the cemetery worker, Ralph Moore, who, alone among those with whom Whitman discussed his final resting place, completely understood what was needed. So it had been throughout Whitman's life, that at the most elemental level of need he found understanding among the laboring class—where he could not miss finding the Irish.