Political editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Times

Whitman's journalistic writings are vast and almost exclusively without an authorial byline. In order to help the reader orient themselves within this material we have identified a series of themes that appear frequently in the journalistic writings, a selection of which can be accessed via the "Subject" filter. This curated exhibit of editorials is not meant to be representative of all of Whitman's writing or thinking on a given topic but rather to provide readers with one possible avenue of entering into this vast and complex set of materials.

Whitman's tenure at the Brooklyn Daily Times paralleled the seemingly inexorable breakdown of the American political system in the 1850s. In 1854, the Whig Party began to fracture along regional lines over the issue of the expansion of slavery. In 1856, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina. Soon thereafter, John Brown murdered five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, inaugurating a low-grade civil war in the territory. During the 1856 election that November, the new Republican Party ran a national candidate that appealed primarily to Northern regional interests. The next year, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney effectively declared that enslaved people could be transported to any state in the Union.

After their defeat in the presidential election of 1856, Republicans muted any abolitionist rhetoric to appeal to a political constituency that eluded them in the recent election: free-soilers. While an organized free-soil movement had been moribund since the late 1840s, this Democratic faction's support for the exclusion of slavery from the western territories continued to appeal to farmers and artisans who understood southern slavery as a plot against working-class economic interests. A platform that was more pro-labor than pro-abolition appeared to Republicans to be the key to this constituency.

In this light, Abraham Lincoln's famous 1858 senatorial campaign in Illinois against Stephen A. Douglas tracked changes in Republican rhetoric across the nation. Focusing on limiting the expansion of slavery, and playing upon his western roots, Lincoln's arguments in the famous debates with Douglas remade the party's reputation from a hotbed of abolitionist rhetoric to a working-man's party that promoted broad-based prosperity, a position he used to successfully secure the presidency in the election of 1860. And while a cursory look at Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry and his portrayals of wartime Washington make it appear that the figure of President Lincoln and the crucible of war transformed the poet's loyalties from Jacksonian Democrat to Lincoln Republican, political editorials from 1858 reveal a shift that predates Lincoln's election to the presidency.

Whitman's work for the free-soil movement as a delegate to the party's unsuccessful presidential convention in 1848, and as an editor of the short-lived free-soil Brooklyn Freeman in 1849, positioned him as the voice of Democrats disaffected from the party at large. By the late 1850s, when most free-soilers had been exiled from, or silenced within, the Democratic Party, Whitman proved to be a politically useful editorialist at the Republican Brooklyn Daily Times, especially in light of Democratic President Buchanan's support for Kansas's pro-slavery constitution in 1858. As Whitman recalled to Horace Traubel in 1889, "we were originally Democrats, but when the time came we went over with a vengeance: it was no role, no play, for us: we were at once what the church would call—what orthodox Democrats would call—deep-dyed heretics." While it is not entirely clear when Whitman and his brothers "went over with a vengeance," Whitman's editorials in the Times echo free-soil arguments he made almost ten years before, and during the late 1850s Whitman found a sympathetic audience among the bohemian artists and authors who congregated at Pfaff's beer cellar. The ongoing conflict in Kansas and the debate over the expansion of slavery into the territories provided the impetus to revisit these arguments in the Brooklyn Daily Times. In this regard, Whitman's free-soil ideology remained largely intact for over a decade, and in 1858 the Republican Times boisterously offered free-soil Democrats an ideological home, with Whitman serving as the paper's ambassador to this disaffected Democratic constituency. In this regard, Whitman's free-soil arguments in the Daily Times track Lincoln's own during his senatorial campaign in 1858, and place both within a broader Republican strategy to widen its base for the midterm elections.

But the expansion of slavery was not the only issue that inclined Whitman's journalism toward the Republican cause. Whitman's support for the Brooklyn Waterworks paralleled arguments common to Republican policymakers during this period, and before them, Whigs of the previous generation. Whitman's personal interest in the waterworks through his brother Jeff, an assistant engineer on the project, has now been established by scholars, but his arguments for an unelected board of experts to oversee construction merit some explanation here. As historians like Alex Zakaras have shown, Democrats' laissez-faire ideology grew from a naturalistic understanding of the economy, which interpreted government intervention as, at best, a violation of the natural order and, at worst, a plot by elites to fleece the common people. However, since the 1830s, Whigs like Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had supported public funding for infrastructure projects and a high tariff to incubate American industry. Abraham Lincoln, formerly a Whig, brought these economic policies to fruition with legislation like the Pacific Railway Act during the Civil War. Whitman, in his advocacy for expert, rather than democratic, authority over the construction of the public waterworks in Brooklyn, fits comfortably within the ideology of the Republican Daily Times long before Lincoln's "goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness" appealed to him.

Whitman's political mutability during this period was not unusual. As Erik Alexander and Rachel Shelden have shown recently, party fluidity was the norm before the Civil War. The notion of a rigid two-party system between the 1830s and 1850s was largely an anachronistic construct of 20th century historiography. In this light, Whitman was not so much the heretic he claimed to be. When he began to write editorials for a Republican newspaper after a decade as a Jacksonian Democrat, the journalist-poet was flowing with the fluid political culture of antebellum America, absorbing it, as he said in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, as he hoped it would absorb him.