The New York Evening Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and was edited by abolitionist, poet, and Democratic partisan William Cullen Bryant between 1829 and 1878. Whitman and Bryant met when Whitman was editing the Democratic Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846–1848) and, during the summer of 1851, Whitman published at least five articles in the New York Evening Post. The three articles included here were published as a series entitled “Letters from Paumanok," over the course of which Whitman recounts a trip to rural Long Island and back. In these letters, Whitman takes on a first-person persona that in its observational stance and use of vignettes anticipates elements of Leaves of Grass (1855). The New York Evening Post also published Whitman's poem "Song for Certain Congressmen" on March 2, 1850, which was signed "Paumanok." Whitman published two more poems in the Evening Post as well: "After All, Not to Create Only" (September 7, 1871) and "The Song of the Universal" (June 17, 1874). The New York Evening Post was retitled New York Post in 1934 and has been published in a tabloid format since the 1940s.
In the series "Letters from Paumanok," Whitman experiments with an eyewitness-style persona who invites the reader to engage the universal through experiences of the everyday.