Walt Whitman by Unknown, ca. February–May, 1848

This half plate daguerreotype is housed in a mahogany-colored passe-partout mount and gilt wall frame. For more than a century after Whitman’s death, almost nothing was known about this early and beguiling daguerreotype portrait. Many scholars had conjectured that this image—with Whitman posed in a formal frock coat and black cravat, his hair gray only at his chin and in a single shock atop his head—must derive from the early 1840s, during Whitman’s days as editor of the New York Aurora. In 1991, however, Denise B. Bethel examined the case in which the portrait is held and discovered that the paper seal holding the image in place is made from “what appears to be newsprint, in French, with the running head Le Messager fortuitously preserved.” Le Messager was a weekly bilingual newspaper published in Bringier, Louisiana, just upriver from New Orleans, between 1846 and 1860. That tiny scrap proved that this was a portrait of Whitman taken during his brief stint as editor of the New Orleans Daily Crescent between February 25 and May 25, 1848.

Thus, we see in this portrait the face of the twenty-eight-year-old editor far from home for the first time. Whitman found New Orleans exhilarating and was fascinated especially by its free intermingling of cultures and languages. But this was also where he first witnessed the horrors of a slave auction—an experience that he would later incorporate into the poem best known as “I Sing the Body Electric”: "I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. / Gentlemen look on this wonder, / Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it."

For more information on this daguerreotype, see Denise B. Bethel, "Notes on an Early Daguerreotype of Whitman," pp. 148–153.

See "Notes on Whitman's Photographers."