Defenders of Disunion: Walt Whitman, John Brown, and the Political Landscape of 1850s America

If Brooklyn has anything equivalent to the small town main street, the one street that defines the essence of such a town, anyone from that borough would likely say that its road equivalent would be Flatbush Avenue. Traversing the borough, with a major bridge at either end and shopping along almost all of its length, that street meanders its way through Brooklyn in the pathway it so chooses, violently cutting through the regular, uniform street grids in favor of its ancient routing that was once a Native American trail.

  Continuing up Flatbush from where it begins among the startlingly new high rise apartments of Downtown Brooklyn, past the site of the Barclays Center arena that in my childhood days was an open rail yard, and up the hill to the mouth of the great greenery of Prospect Park, one arrives at Grand Army Plaza. That plaza, the only streetscape that is strong enough to itself break the pathway of Flatbush Avenue, is so much more than a traffic circle. Its symbolic boundary of the edges of neighborhoods and Brooklyn’s great cultural institutions meeting together calls back to a much earlier time, before it was just one plaza among many in the wider city, when Brooklyn was instead left on its own and this spot was the one major crossroads of an independent city, forging its own identity amidst the rampant urbanizing growth of rowhouses and apartment buildings that seem almost ancient now, but were most certainly just as dramatic of a change to Brooklynites then as the Downtown skyscrapers are to myself now.

In the center of Grand Army Plaza lies what could be considered its true namesake, the great granite Soldiers’ and Sailor’s Arch that memorializes that grand army of the war between the states, now revered as the namesake of the plaza. The arch is 80 feet tall, not so tall as to be overwhelming but certainly tall enough to feel truly remarkable in scale, tall enough for the weight of the actions it memorializes to come across as the great duty they were. On the ledges of each side of the arch sit metal sculptures of the titular soldiers and sailors, seemingly bursting out of the stone, and on the top is the metal figure of Columbia, a personification of the country standing triumphant on her chariot. Carved into the stone across the top is the inscription “To The Defenders Of The Union: 1861-1865,” the pragmatic sacrifice of those brave souls permanently inscribed into a memorial that cannot be ignored.

But before the plaza and before the grand apartment buildings that surround it, before the park that they all overlook, and most certainly before the Civil War and the arch needed to memorialize it, none of what I have so far described was there at all. In the years before the Civil War, Brooklyn was largely still countryside with smaller rural towns scattered around, an ancient agrarian way of life still present next door to what was then one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Among this world of hillsides and farmland that was quickly transforming into the first real suburb of Manhattan roamed Walt Whitman, the poet working first as a newspaper editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and later simply as a writer who chronicled elements of his city that only he seemed to be able to see.

In his poetry, we can clearly see that Whitman was enormously impacted by the political climate of this time directly before the Civil War, when it seemed clear to almost everyone that unfathomable violence was just around the corner; though that knowledge, it seems, made it no less unfathomable. In poems like “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” among others, Whitman laid out to readers what he thought of this climate and the larger ideas of union and equality that were fueling the violence that was already happening because of the tensions around the question of the continuance of the system of slavery. In simply expressing his thoughts this way, Whitman adopted a voice that was seemingly prophetic in nature, writing of ideas that can only be seen as being far ahead of their time. Whitman seemed to hope and long for peace in a violent time, while simultaneously almost being able to see into the future of violence being unavoidable and blood being spilled because of everyone else’s differing ideas of how equal people of different races should be, and what the union of the states could possibly look like going forward amidst such disagreements.

For how influential of a figure Whitman was in this antebellum time, his true, although still moderate, fame largely came later in his life. The indisputable most influential man of this era, at least for a significantly shorter time than any of his contemporaries, was the radical abolitionist John Brown. Brown’s unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, did not slow down the impacts that Brown hoped to have in his violent crusade against slavery, albeit very much changing what those impacts were. This raid greatly changed how northerners and southerners thought of abolitionism and gave a startlingly clear sign of what kind of violence might happen because of people’s views on slavery. Brown, of course, had his own strong views of union and equality that sometimes differed from Whitman’s, although there are sometimes similarities in each man’s views as well.

Brown certainly did not wish for peace, as he had already been very willing to use violence against supporters of slavery even before the Harper’s Ferry raid. In his quotes, however, it is clear that Brown too knew that violence because of slavery was something inevitable. In looking at these two influential figures of the antebellum North, and antebellum United States more generally, we can see how their thoughts on these complex ideas differed and were similar. Both of them saw this period in American history for what it truly was, in a way that was far ahead of their time, each seeing the ideas of union and equality in their own trademark ways that give a larger picture of the United States at such a crucial moment in its history.

“Song of Myself” is one of Whitman’s best known poems, and one that shows very clearly what some of his views on the idea of union and equality were. Unlike other transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman largely shirked the idea of a greater spiritual force in favor of a more scientific based idea of a person’s place in the world, which shows how he believed in and thought about these ideas.  “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself.” “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,” he continues in the poem’s opening. “Born here,” in this sense, seemingly means that Whitman was born on the earth, just like his parents and their parents and every other human was, too. Whitman is made of atoms, just as every other person and everything else is made of, and the atoms that make up the soil and air are what allows him and every other being on earth to continue living.

To open the poem this way is especially notable, as Whitman has no qualms with letting readers know right away how he feels about the inherent equality of all living beings, about the atomic structures that make us all the same on the most fundamental level, saying without explicitly saying that there is no fundamental difference between people of different races, ethnicities or cultures. This was a truly radical statement for his time, one that would not be mainstream for many decades after this poem and one that only the most fervent abolitionists like John Brown openly expressed at the time. Whitman was able to convey it in a way that was far more subtle but that still conveyed how he felt about the idea of human equality.

This idea can be seen elsewhere in the poem as well in looking at Whitman’s seeming fascination with the idea of death. Death was not something Whitman wrote of as negative or scary, but instead he seemed to believe that death was another unifying element that showed the equality of all people. In his famous lines about grass, Whitman considers how grass is “Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In the link here between grass and people being buried under it, Whitman seems to personify the idea of death, portraying it as a unifying figure. The “I” in these lines could mean Whitman himself, but it is also seemingly from the perspective of death itself. Regardless of your race, Black or white, and regardless of your status in society, working class laborer or congressman, death is the end for us all. No one can escape death and we will all eventually end up buried under the grass, perhaps the truest form of equality that there is. The idea of death here shows how Whitman was thinking about equality, and his specific mentioning of race shows that he applied this thinking to that area as much as anything else, and specifically as much as other areas of inequality, such as class.

“Song of Myself” shows quite a bit about how Whitman viewed the idea of equality, and can certainly be read as showing how he thought about he idea of union as well. However, his other notable poem “I Sing the Body Electric” is perhaps a better example to see his views on this subject. “I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul,” Whitman opens this poem by saying. Immediately into the poem, we can see that Whitman is speaking of his idea of union being the people he loves surrounding him and essentially showing him that they care about him, asking him in return only for the dedication of his own soul, a clear and supremely intimate type of union. As with most

Whitman poems that use “I” phrases, it is possible as well to read that language as not being Whitman himself but instead being society at large, showing how he felt that society was a kind of unifying force over everything and everyone in it.

Whitman continues the poem by listing out different varied elements of the world, ranging from “The sprawl and fullness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards” to “The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle” to “The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,” and down to things as simple as “The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance” and “The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and the blinding of the eyes.” Perhaps seemingly random things to list, on first glance, but their purpose for the poem is indispensable. Whitman intentionally paints this picture of society and the many differing elements and types of people it contains, contrasting them with moments as universal, for his time at least, as rowing a boat and riding a horse, and as universal even to our present day as hair blowing into your eyes and walking past strangers on the street.

The message here is clear; that all of us, regardless of our social standing, the old and the young and the rich and the poor, are all unified by the most simple elements of merely being alive. We are all in a union together, something that in this time directly before the Civil War was increasingly hard to see for many Americans. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman attempted to remind a divided nation that they were still, and always would be, unified by the mere virtue of being alive and experiencing the same mundane everyday experiences as everyone else. This idea of the union of humanity was hard to remember for people living in the United States at the time, but Whitman was seemingly able to see past his own time and the current political moment of his era and understand the bigger picture of what it truly means to be in a union, and that all of humanity was unified whether some liked it or not.

Whitman’s idea of equality and union is a fascinating and introspective look into how a poet interpreted a tumultuous political moment. However, these insights in Whitman’s poetry can sometimes feel a bit big-picture and removed from the real world issues that were happening around him. To see another way people were experiencing such a historic political time, we can look at someone who was very much not a poet, but instead was the most boots-on-the-ground type of activist. John Brown did not leave much writing of his own, but in the weeks after his failed raid on Harper’s Ferry he quickly rose to the status of a martyr and a very public figure. Naturally, many people wanted to hear what he had to say, and so many interviews were conducted with him and people who knew him recounted the things he had said before the raid. In looking at his quotes from this time, we can see how he thought of the ideas of union and equality fairly differently, but that he had a similar knack as Whitman for being able to predict quite closely things that happened after his time, although in his case many of these events arrived much more quickly after his death in late 1859.

As one of the most prominent abolitionists of his time, many of Brown’s quotes that are related to equality naturally had to do with his views on slavery specifically, as opposed to Whitman’s views that can be thought of as more broad. “In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free slaves,” Brown stated to the Virginia court that tried him when he was captured after the raid, showing his deep commitment to bringing about equality for those enslaved. His commitment is especially clear here, as he feels no real remorse or shame for the violent actions he took against slavery, while simultaneously denying that he had any other goal, or that that stated goal was bad in any way.

Whereas Whitman seemed to largely shirk traditional religion, Brown was heavily influenced and driven by his deep Christian values. “This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the Law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that, ‘All things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them.’ It teaches me, further, to ‘Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction,” he said at his trial, acknowledging the deep-rooted hypocrisy of a society that claimed to believe in Christian values but ignored the parts of Christianity that conflicted with their system of slavery. In this quote, we can see how Brown viewed equality as a deeply religious notion, that slavery was an affront to God because everyone is equal in God’s eyes.

As a very radical abolitionist, Brown of course believed deeply in equality, but his ideas on the concept of union can be seen as well in his quotes. “I don’t think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion,” Brown said soon after his capture, in October of 1859. In an almost prophetic way, Brown clearly saw that it would necessarily take acts of violence to finally settle the subject of slavery, an idea that would greatly come to pass during the Civil War, soon after his death. Even in this quote, however, where Brown acknowledges the deep flaws of his nation, he clearly did think that even the most avowed slaveholding southerners could eventually see the wrongs of slavery, even if it would take violence to get them there.

Although greatly understanding the flaws of his country, Brown still believed in the idea that everyone in it was in a union together and that they would one day be able to acknowledge their flawed ways and change that union for the better. “This is a beautiful country,” Brown said on his way to the gallows for his execution, the last recorded thought he ever expressed. Even among his failures and among the horrors of the country that he saw for what they really were, Brown saw the beauty in the land and seemed to see into a future for that land that would be more violent than it had ever been before, but that ultimately would lead to it being more fair than it ever was before too.

To avoid being too directly political, I will say that it is undeniable that the current political moment in the United States is one that is tumultuous, to say the least, perhaps offering one of the biggest political changes and upheavals since the time of Walt Whitman and John Brown. At a time that can seem scarier every day in how enormous the changes happening around us can feel, I have often thought back to the Grand Army Plaza arch, its poignant inscription reminding me that there is sometimes a need for unions to be defended. The words of Whitman and Brown show that they each thought very much about the idea of union, and the idea of how to make an unfair union more equal. In each of their ways, Whitman being more loftily poetic and Brown being more about direct actions, they both conveyed a sense of being ahead of their times, of seeing ahead to their union going through hard times but emerging with more equality, equality ranging from freeing those enslaved to the physical structure of each person providing a basis for treating everyone as an equal.

The union may sometimes need to be defended, but it is worth defending. Some of the most influential Americans to ever live, Walt Whitman and John Brown are not always thought of as contemporaries, but both of them had a similar longing for the continuance of a union that did not live up to its ideals of equality, but that both of them believed could do so one day. In reading what each man thought about this topic, I am encouraged even more now to look towards the past in order to gain insight on our present, to see the views of this old poet and activist as something to learn from, as each of them being ahead of their time not only in light of the events that came directly after their lives, but that are seeming to come to pass in our time too, or may come to pass at some unknown time in the future. Brown and Whitman were both there, they both saw and contributed to the history of another tumultuous moment in America and they both interpreted it in ways that only they could. Reading their insights and taking them as valuable for the present allows us to do exactly what they each perfected; seeing beyond the present moment, no matter how difficult that present may be, to a future where the union stands and no longer needs to be defended and where everyone in it is truly, finally, unified together as equals.