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“Walt Whitman” by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M “Walt Whitman” by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price Family Origins tile tension in the Whitman children between a more smoldering, brooding Puritanical temperament and a Walt Whitman, arguably America’s most influential and sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition. Whitman’s innovative poet, was born into a working class family father was a stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, in West Hills, New York, a village near Hempstead, maybe an alcoholic, whom Whitman respected but for Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after whom he never felt a great deal of affection. His mother, George Washington was inaugurated as the first presi- on the other hand, served throughout his life as his dent of the newly formed United States. Walt Whitman emotional touchstone. There was a special affectional was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who bond between Whitman and his mother, and the long was 34 years old when Whitman was born. Walter correspondence between them records a kind of part- Whitman, Sr., had been born just after the end of the nership in attempting to deal with the family crises that American Revolution; always a liberal thinker, he knew mounted over the years, as Jesse became mentally un- and admired Thomas Paine. Trained as a carpenter but stable and violent and eventually had to be institution- struggling to find work, he had taken up farming by alized, as Hannah entered a disastrous marriage with the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just about an abusive husband, as Andrew became an alcoholic to turn four, Walter Sr. moved the family to the grow- and married a prostitute before dying of ill health in his ing city of Brooklyn, across from New York City, or 30s, and as Edward required increasingly dedicated “Mannahatta” as Whitman would come to call it in his care. celebratory writings about the city that was just emerg- ing as the nation’s major urban center. One of Walt’s Self-Education and First Career favorite stories about his childhood concerned the time General Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the By the age of eleven, Whitman was done with his for- six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and mal education (by this time he had far more schooling carried him. Whitman later came to view this event as a than either of his parents had received), and he began kind of laying on of hands, the French hero of the Ameri- his life as a laborer, working first as an office boy for can Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy some prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a in the energetic city of immigrants, where the new na- subscription to a circulating library, where his self-edu- tion was being invented day by day. cation began. Always an autodidact, Whitman absorbed Walt Whitman is thus of the first generation of Ameri- an eclectic but wide-ranging education through his vis- cans who were born in the newly formed United States its to museums, his nonstop reading, and his penchant and grew up assuming the stable existence of the new for engaging everyone he met in conversation and de- country. Pride in the emergent nation was rampant, and bate. While most other major writers of his time enjoyed Walter Sr.—after giving his first son Jesse (1818-1870) highly structured, classical educations at private insti- his own father’s name, his second son his own name, tutions, Whitman forged his own rough and informal his daughter Mary (1822-1899) the name of Walt’s ma- curriculum of literature, theater, history, geography, ternal great grandmothers, and his daughter Hannah music, and archeology out of the developing public re- (1823-1908) the name of his own mother—turned to the sources of America’s fastest growing city. heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the In 1831, Whitman became an apprentice on the Long names of his other three sons: Andrew Jackson Whitman Island Patriot, a liberal, working-class newspaper, where (1827-1863), George Washington Whitman (1829-1901), he learned the printing trade and was first exposed to and Thomas Jefferson Whitman (1833-1890). Only the the excitement of putting words into print, observing youngest son, Edward (1835-1902), who was mentally how thought and event could be quickly transformed and physically handicapped, carried a name that tied into language and immediately communicated to thou- him to neither the family’s nor the country’s history. sands of readers. At the age of twelve, young Walt was Walter Whitman Sr. was of English stock, and his already contributing to the newspaper and experienc- marriage in 1816 to Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch and ing the exhilaration of getting his own words published. Welsh stock, led to what Walt always considered a fer- Whitman’s first signed article, in the upscale New York Mirror in 1834, expressed his amazement at how there advocate). By the time he was sixteen, Walt was a jour- were still people alive who could remember “the present neyman printer and compositor in New York City. His great metropolitan city as a little dorp or village; all fresh future career seemed set in the newspaper and printing and green as it was, from its beginning,” and he wrote trades, but then two of New York’s worst fires wiped of a slave, “Negro Harry,” who had died in1758 at age out the major printing and business centers of the city, 120 and who could remember New York “when there and, in the midst of a dismal financial climate, Whitman were but three houses in it.” Even late in his life, he could retreated to rural Long Island, joining his family at still recall the excitement of seeing this first article in Hempstead in 1836. As he turned 17, the five-year vet- print: “How it made my heart double-beat to see my eran of the printing trade was already on the verge of a piece on the pretty white paper, in nice type.” For his career change. entire life, he would maintain this fascination with the materiality of printed objects, with the way his voice Schoolteaching Years and identity could be embodied in type and paper. His unlikely next career was that of a teacher. Although Living away from home—the rest of his family his own formal education was, by today’s standards, moved back to the West Hills area in 1833, leaving four- minimal, he had developed as a newspaper apprentice teen-year-old Walt alone in the city—and learning how the skills of reading and writing, more than enough for to set type under the Patriot’s foreman printer William the kind of teaching he would find himself doing over Hartshorne, Whitman was gaining skills and experienc- the next few years. He knew he did not want to become ing an independence that would mark his whole career: a farmer, and he rebelled at his father’s attempts to get he would always retain a typesetter’s concern for how him to work on the new family farm. Teaching was his words looked on a page, what typeface they were therefore an escape but was also clearly a job he was dressed in, what effects various spatial arrangements forced to take in bad economic times, and some of the had, and he would always retain his stubborn indepen- unhappiest times of his life were these five years when dence, never marrying and living alone for most of his he taught school in at least ten different Long Island life. These early years on his own in Brooklyn and New towns, rooming in the homes of his students, teaching York remained a formative influence on his writing, for three-month terms to large and heterogeneous classes it was during this time that he developed the habit of (some with over eighty students, ranging in age from close observation of the ever-shifting panorama of the five to fifteen, for up to nine hours a day), getting very city, and a great deal of his journalism, poetry, and prose little pay, and having to put up with some very unen- came to focus on catalogs of urban life and the history lightened people. After the excitement of Brooklyn and of New York City, Brooklyn, and Long Island. New York, these often isolated Long Island towns de- Walt’s brother Thomas Jefferson, known to everyone pressed Whitman, and he recorded his disdain for coun- in the family as “Jeff,” was born during the summer of try people in a series of letters (not discovered until the 1833, soon after his family had resettled on a farm and 1980s) that he wrote to a friend named Abraham Leech: only weeks after Walt had joined the crowds in Brook- “Never before have I entertained so low an idea of the lyn that warmly welcomed the newly re- elected presi- beauty and perfection of man’s nature, never have I seen dent, Andrew Jackson. Brother Jeff, fourteen years humanity in so degraded a shape, as here,” he wrote younger than Walt, would become the sibling he felt from Woodbury in 1840: “Ignorance, vulgarity, rude- closest to, their bond formed when they traveled to- ness, conceit, and dulness are the reigning gods of this gether to New Orleans in 1848, when Jeff was about the deuced sink of despair.” same age as Walt was when Jeff was born. But while The little evidence we have of his teaching (mostly Jeff was a young child, Whitman spent little time with from short recollections by a few former students) sug- him.
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