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Whipping the Devil Round the Stump

About This Item

  • Title: Whipping the Devil Round the Stump
  • Date: 24 April 1858
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01297
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 24 April 1858: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Kaylen Michaelis Jamie DeRousse Jason Stacy Stephanie Blalock Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Whipping the Devil Round the Stump." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01297.xml (TEI)
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WHIPPING THE DEVIL ROUND THE STUMP.

If our readers want to see the most signal illustration yet of the class of sneaking politicians, about whom we spoke yesterday, let them examine the plan for admitting or not admitting Kansas, proposed by the late English Lecompton Conference Committee of the two houses of Congress. It submits the much disputed candle-box Constitution, and it don't submit it. It saves President Buchanan1 from an ignominious defeat, and it don't save him at all. The plan offers a sure triumph for "the South," and it provides for a certain triumph of "the North." Any way a most accommodating, flexible, composite, sneaking, democratic, whig, everything, nothing, little-joker of a plan!

It is a curious spectacle. If the people of Kansas will pass their necks under the yoke of the Lecompton Slavery Constitution,2 which three-fourths of them had no hand in making, and now mortally hate—If they will only be persuaded to let it encompass and rule them, by indirect permission, they shall be rewarded by a splendid bribe of twenty-five or thirty millions of dollars' worth of public lands! But if they spurn this price of prostitution, then they shall be punished by being remanded back into their old territorial condition, and kept there, in as much poverty and trouble as possible, till they have time to repent their contumacy.

Seriously, if there is any leaven of manliness in Congress, they will reject with scorn, for its whip the-devil-round-the-stump character, this whole plan of the Conference Committee. Give us one thing or the other, gentlemen—black, if you will, or white if you will—but not the mulatto plan of Mr. English.

Notes:

1. James Buchanan (1791–1868) was the fifteenth President of the United States (1857–1861). Late in life Whitman still considered Buchanan "perhaps the weakest of the President tribe—the very unablest" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, November 5, 1888). For more information on Whitman and his disdain for Buchanon, see also Bernard Hirschorn, ""To a President" (1860)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]

2. The Lecompton Constitution of 1857 was written by pro-slavery forces in Kansas. President Buchanan supported it and it was eventually approved by the Senate, but dismissed by the House. Ultimately, Kansas held another local election which resulted in the Constitution’s final rejection. [back]

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