sign in sign up
<<
Home , Walt Whitman

201 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE JEFFERSONIAN WHITMAN:

THE IMPACT OF JEFFERSON ON WHITMAN

KIYOTAKA SUEYOSHI

University of Szeged

Abstract: As regards the relation between Whitman and U.S. presidency, the critical studies center on the relation between Whitman and Lincoln. The process of Whitman’s commitment to the Democratic Party and his alienation from it, and of becoming the self-anointed inheritor of Jeffersonian republicanism plays a key role in the formation of political and poetical Whitman. Faced with the disunion of the U.S., Whitman had recourse to the ideal of the Founding Fathers. Whitman’s is the mediation between Jeffersonian republicanism and Whitman’s America, and between politics and poetics. Keywords: Democratic Party, republicanism, the Declaration of Independence,

1. Introduction

In a conversation with , who was with Whitman in Camden, Whitman agreed that Jefferson is “among the greatest of the great,” adding, “Yes, greatest of the great: that names him: it belongs to him: he is entitled to it” (Traubel 1961: 229). Yet, Whitman, as a poet, demurred: the worship of a great hero is the typical characteristic of the poetry of the Old World. In the deathbed edition of , Whitman (1891-2: 391) refers to Jefferson only once: in Election Day, November, 1884, he said, “These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, / Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.” In this way, Jefferson’s influence on poems of Whitman, however large it may be, is not in the forefront, but in the background. Whitman’s references to Jefferson were made in his prose, especially before 1855, when Whitman had not fully established his own voice. As regards the relation between Whitman and the U.S. presidents, research has been done almost exclusively on the relation between Whitman and Lincoln, who were coeval and to whom Whitman, in Leaves of Glass, dedicated a chapter entitled Memories of President Lincoln. For instance, Shira Wolosky (2007: 373), in : the office of the poet, remarked “The President Whitman has been most closely associated with is Lincoln.” Thus the link between Jefferson’s ideas about government and Whitman’s ideas about poetry remains unexplored. Jefferson is a politician and Whitman a poet, but both share the same theoretical background – faith in ordinary people – from which they developed their ideas. In this essay, I would like to show how influential Jefferson was on Whitman and put Jefferson’s influence into perspective.

2. The interactive system of Whitman’s poetry and of Jefferson’s politics

In the beginning, both Jefferson and Whitman spoke outside of an institutional framework; the spirit of Whitman, an obscure New Yorker, in his

B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 202 assumption of the role of national bard, is like that of Jefferson, an unknown Virginian at the time, in seeking to persuade George III to change his attitude towards the American colonies in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. (Jefferson 1977: 1-21). Also we can draw a parallel between the situation of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Alien and Sedition Acts in that, by both laws, individual freedom was trampled on. Referring to the situation before what is known as the Revolution of 1800, when Jefferson defeated in the elections, Whitman (1920a: 8), calling Jefferson “the Columbus of our political faith”, said that, although “Leading Republicans were at that time taunted and hooted at in the streets” (ibid.), they gained the final victory:

We stand here the inheritors of their principles and opposed to the same foe the foe of equal rights. Democracy must conquer again as it did then and more certainly than it did then. We think so from two simple facts. One is that the great body of workingmen are more powerful and more enlightened now than they were in those days. The other is, that there is a mighty and restless energy throughout the length and breadth of this nation, for going onward to the very verge with our experiment of popular freedom. (Whitman 1920a: 8-9)

Though this was written in 1847, before the (new) Fugitive Slave Law, Whitman’s passion for popular freedom, inherited from Jefferson, unmistakably prodded him into a similar resistance action of self-publishing Leaves of Grass. It can be added that he thought that his resistance action was supported by his belief in the ‘more enlightened’ people. About the principles of his poems, Whitman, in his own criticism of Leaves of Grass (1855), said:

The style of these poems, therefore, is simply their own style, new-born and red. Nature may have given the hint to the author of the Leaves of Grass, but there exists no book or fragment of a book, which can have given the hint to them. (1855b)

This mindset is the mirror of that of Founding Fathers; when they formulated their ideas, Jefferson stated that

We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts. (1977: 578)

Needless to say, it is better to take both remarks with a grain of salt, but the same essence runs through them: the emphasis on the independence from the past. Yet, most importantly, Jefferson’s idea about the relationship between the form of government and people corresponds to Whitman’s about the form and the content of his poems. For Jefferson, “Government had to be tailored to fit the character of a people rather than any universal theory of man” (Steele 2012: 107). Whitman, also influenced by Emerson, wrote poems reflecting the idea that thought should be placed above form. In other words, just as the relationship between Jefferson’s people and government is interactive, the relationship between Whitman’s content and form is also reciprocal; the primacy of people over government in Jefferson’s political philosophy corresponds to the primacy of content over form in Whitman’s poetry.

203 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE About their view of the ordinary people, there also are intimate resemblances. Most famously, Whitman, in his preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), remarked:

Other states indicate themselves in their deputies… but the genius of the is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors… but always most in the common people. (1855a: 4)

Jefferson, who was proud of the American character and spirit and compared them with those of the Europeans, said:

In science, the mass of the people is two centuries behind ours; their literati, half a dozen years before us. (1977: 391, emphasis mine)

Here, two comparisons are made. As regards the “literati,” those of Europe are “half a dozen years” ahead of those in America, but “the mass of the people” existing in Europe is “two centuries behind” that existing in America.” Furthermore, interestingly, in his manuscript entitled The English Masses, Whitman points out that

In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of the people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S. are at least two hundred years behind us. (1984b: 391, emphasis mine)

Coincidence? Probably not. Some commentators quote this saying of Whitman’s, but none refer to Jefferson’s influence. This instance shows both that Whitman had a firm grasp of Jefferson’s writing and that its impact on Whitman was insufficiently recognized. I shall move on to the topic of putting the ordinary people at the center in literature. Before Whitman, however laudable people may have been, there was a conventional cultural barrier against the idea. It is one thing to say that common people are praiseworthy; it is quite another to make them the subject matter of literature. For example, Tocqueville, prominent in his understanding of American society at the time, viewed them as an unpoetical subject, saying “In democratic communities, where men are all insignificant and very much alike, […] The poets of democratic ages can never, therefore, take any man in particular as the subject of a piece” (1835, 1840: 551); instead of such men, “the nation itself invites the exercise of his (poet’s) powers.” (idem: 552) However, both America as a whole and individual people can become the subject matter of poetry. Here likeness, seen by Tocqueville as a fixed state, can also be seen as a process or experience, namely interchangeability between one state and another. Somkin (1967: 106) points out that “’s interchangeability of parts extended equally to the plantation and the legislature. Fatal as it might be to the genius of art, it was the genuine reflection of a republic that was becoming a democracy.” Unlike that of the Old World, the social structure in America at the time was not rigid, based on class, birth, and so on. It had a social fluidity, and this is what democracy is all about. By the old criterion, ordinary people might not appear to be a subject challenging enough to hone poets’ creativity, but by the criterion of the New World this was possible. Whitman said, in his defense of Leaves of Grass, that

B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 204 We have had man indoors and under artificial relations – man in war, in love (both the natural, universal elements of human lives) – man in courts, bowers, castles, parlors […] but never before have we had man in the open air, his attitude adjusted to the seasons and as one might describe it, adjusted to the sun by day and the stars by night. (1984a: 264)

He asserts that ordinary people should be the subject matter of the poetry of the New World. In so doing, his goal is to create literature devoid of any trace of the Old World, because it is when such literature becomes the foundation of people’s virtue and morals that the shift from the Old World to the New World would be completed.

Democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of arts, […] displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. (Whitman 1871: 5)

Whitman, as a poet, was sensitive to the nature of literature and could see what Jefferson had not seen. In his eyes, the context of the Old World literature was feudalistic, and to get rid of its possible negative influence on democracy, he thought that there was a need to create a new literature, outside such a context. Such literary works are superior to those made in other ways, Whitman asserts:

As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre [sic] in the real body and soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of genuineness over all fiction and romance […] (1855a: 12)

The attainment of a literature unique to America is the progress in the American experiment. Such literature could solve the predicament of Jefferson’s admitted backwardness of literature in America, which is seen in his comparison between the ‘literati’ of the Old World and the New World, and enables the U.S. to gain cultural independence from Europe. In the absence of such literature, while emphasizing the importance of the practice of virtue when he recommended a book list, Jefferson was forced to pick up the literature of the Old World

I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. When any signal [sic] act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with it’s [sic] beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. […] Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions; and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit; and in the instance of which we speak, the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. […] I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great horror of villainy, as the real one of Henry IV by Ravaillac as related by Davila? (Jefferson 1977: 349, 350)

This was written in 1771, before the American Revolution, thus it stands to reason that Jefferson quoted the works of Shakespeare for the practice of virtue, because at the time there was no concept of “.” Yet, considering Jefferson’s (and Whitman’s) emphasis on the uniqueness of American experience (Steele 2012: 124, 132- 133, Erkkila 1989: 11), the exercise of virtue by

205 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE reading the literature of the Old World appears unsatisfactory to Whitman, who saw its possible anti-democratic bearing. Whitman sought to replace the literature of the Old World with a distinctive American literature and hoped that American virtues could be expressed and experienced in the American literature:

Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must do on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. (1871: 76)

Like Jefferson, Whitman emphasizes the idea of voluntary exercise in reading. Now with Whitman’s poetry, Americans can exercise American virtues in American literature. In section 2 of Leaves of Grass, Whitman details this exercise:

Have you practiced so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun … there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand … nor look through the eyes of the dead … nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. (1855a: 18)

In his reconstructing the experience of reading on a new basis, Whitman challenges the authority of the Old World and urges readers to unlearn what they had been taught. Compared with Jefferson’s exercise of virtue, Whitman’s exercise is a great leap forward, where self-enlightenment and self-empowerment result from the above-mentioned relationship between literature and democracy, which affect and reflect each other.

3. Jefferson’s party, Jefferson’s proviso

The Wilmot Proviso aimed to ban slavery on the land acquired as a result of the Mexican War, an amendment attached to a bill appropriating money to be used in negotiating a Treaty with Mexico (Whitman 1920a: 182). With the passage of time, the Wilmot Proviso led to the escalation of the antagonism between North and South, and, although it was eventually rejected, its rejection, and the political developments accompanying it, broke the two party system and the equilibrium under the Missouri compromise, leading to the Nebraska Kansas Act, the Fugitive Slave Law, and eventually the Civil War. Whitman viewed the Wilmot Proviso as being of vital interest, and said that:

We believe the Eagle was the very first Democratic paper which alluded to this subject in a decisive manner, expressing the conviction that it is the duty of its party to take an unalterable stand against the allowance of slavery in any new territory, under any circumstances, or in any way. (1920a: 197)

B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 206 This view of the anti-extension of slavery derives from two major reasons: one owing to the workingmen’s perspective and the other owing to the conflict between the extension of slavery and the ideal of the Founding Fathers. As for the first reason, Whitman (1920a: 208) asserts that if slavery were extended to a new territory, “the interests of the few thousand rich, ‘polished’, and aristocratic owners of slaves at the South” would be promoted at the cost of “the grand body of white workingmen, the millions of mechanics, farmers, and operatives of our country” (original emphasis). In his opinion, slavery degrades the labour of those white workingmen, and thus shuts them out from the territory (idem: 205-206) This incompatibility between the slave-labour and the free-labour led Whitman to assert that the new territory should be free. As regards the second reason, Whitman sought to prevent the further degradation of the American soil by the extension of slavery, which, for him, was against the spirit of the Founding Fathers. According to Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the introduction of slavery in America by the King and the Parliament of Great Britain was one of the proofs of their tyranny against America (Becker 1958: 147) and extending the slavery now into the new territory meant that the Americans themselves were doing what they had rejected on their Independence (Whitman 1920a: 224-225). Within Democratic Party, the Wilmot Proviso drove a wedge between those for it and those against it, and, despite Whitman’s campaign, through his articles in the Eagle, it was rejected. In view of Whitman’s calling the Wilmot Proviso the “Jeffersonian Proviso,” (idem: 222), ‘anti-Wilmot’ meant to him ‘anti-Jefferson’. It can be easily inferred that his feeling of despondency, amounting to a feeling of betrayal, was huge, considering the faith he had had in the Democratic Party; by now Jefferson’s party was gone. Eventually, in the turmoil of the political confusion leading to the Civil War, Whitman (1928: 104) went so far as to say, “Are not political parties about played out? I say they are, all round. America has outgrown parties; henceforth it is too large, and they too small. […] I place no reliance upon any old party, nor upon any new party.” After the rejection of the Wilmot proviso, Whitman started to distance himself from the Democratic Party and self-anointed himself the authentic inheritor of Jeffersonian republicanism. At the time, Whitman (1920a: xvi) was the editor of The , a political organ, the local mouth-piece of the Democratic- Republican Party. He was also secretary of the local Democratic-Republican General Committee (idem: xix). Whitman was forced to leave his position, over his support for the Wilmot proviso, as the publisher of the Eagle, also a treasurer of the Committee, was against it (idem: 179). In light of Whitman’s above-mentioned commitment to the Democratic Party, it can be inferred that his perspectives underwent a significant shift, a shift from within the institutional framework to outside of it. His journey on the “open road” began; “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, /Healthy, free, the world before me, /The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose” (1980: 136). The same thing came to look completely different. Gradually, a noxious weed turned into Leaves of Grass. Walter Whitman’s reaction to the “Jeffersonian proviso” was the first step to his becoming Walt Whitman. Whitman (1920a: 218) had viewed the Democratic Party as a party of Jefferson’s doctrine, and in this sense, he identified himself with the Democratic Party. His sense of belonging to it occupied the center of his identity. In his mind, democracy and the Democratic Party were separate, but united entities; he said,

207 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE “true liberty could not long exist in this country without our party.” (1920b: 40, original emphasis). From the bottom of his heart, Whitman believed in democracy and the Democratic Party:

The Democracy of this country never can be overthrown. The true Democratic spirit is endued with immortal life and strength. […] Nor can the Democratic Party become essentially corrupt, either. For true Democracy has within itself a perpetual spring of health and purity. In its very nature it is at war with all selfishness and wickedness. (1920a: 6-7)

Without Jefferson’s party, he may have felt like being left holding the bag in furthering the Republican experiment. In so doing, Whitman faced the need to reconstruct his identity and his relation with democracy. As Erkkila (1989: 19) points out, Whitman viewed the Declaration of Independence as the origin of Republican virtues. Together with the Constitution, it served as a guiding principle of the U.S., and thus relates closely to the people’s distinctive American experience.

4. Jefferson’s substitution of pursuit of happiness for property in the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most influential documents in the world. Its exegesis abounds, and the main focus is on Jefferson’s substitution, as an Inalienable Right, of the “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” which Parrington (1927-30: 344) calls “a revolutionary shift”. At Jefferson’s time, the canonical list of rights, the ‘Lockean triad’ (Wills 1979: 299), was “life, liberty, and property”; yet, Jefferson refused to follow suit. I argue that there are two main objectives of the Declaration of Independence: an international objective – to persuade the world about the rightness of the American Revolution (Becker 1958: 7) – and a domestic one – to chart a course for the future. In other words, there are two elements in it: one with the emphasis on gaining independence and another with the emphasis on embarking on the American Experiment. I also argue that Jefferson’s substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property” relates to the American Experiment. Before the American Experiment, the republican experiments such as the seventeenth-century English experiment ended in failure (Wood 1993: 121) because of the lack of “civic virtue” (Yazawa 2000: 427). A “new” moral was necessary for the American Experiment to succeed. By substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property”, Jefferson sought to go beyond the Lockean idea of a society centered on “property”. According to Garry Wills (1979: 229-283), both the exclusion of ‘property’ and the inclusion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ derive from Jefferson’s exposure to the Scottish Enlightenment, especially the moral sense thinkers represented by Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson’s theory of moral sense is at the heart of the Scottish moral philosophy. The theory asserts that all human beings are innately equipped with a “moral sense” – like the five senses – which tells right from wrong, leading to decoupling this capability from reason (Yarbrough 1988: 27-29). The theory goes a long way to generating a new possibility of harmonizing the selfish and social nature of human in “the enlightened form of self-interest” (Yarbrough 2000: 71), which is crystallized into the social bond by benevolence.

B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 208 Scottish moral philosophy occupies the center of Jefferson’s framework of political philosophy (Wills 1979: 255). In light of the past failure of the republican experiments, Jefferson’s application of the Moral philosophy to the Political philosophy could become the turning point of the republican experiment of self- government. The moral sense theory lends a solid foundation to Jefferson’s faith in the capacity of the ordinary people to self-govern, so far considered impossible because of their supposed inability to tell right from wrong – a line of thought which was the main rationale of the rule of a few experts, like Plato in his Republic (Cappon 1988: 432-433). Nevertheless, at Whitman’s time, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence – the harmony between the private and the public realms made possible by virtues and affectionate ties – was in tatters, because of the degeneration of people and government. Whitman, in his poetry, sought to restore the spirit by forefronting this harmony and save the nation from disunion.

5. Conclusion

Whitman and Jefferson shared their faith in ordinary people, and the parallel between them is best revealed in their interactive systems: Jefferson in politics, between government and people, and Whitman in poetics, between form and content. The process of Whitman’s commitment to the Democratic Party and his alienation from it, his becoming the self-anointed inheritor of Jeffersonian republicanism played a key role in the formation of political and poetical Whitman. Leaves of Grass (1855) is Whitman’s mediation between the original Founding spirit and the America of his time, and also between politics and poetics. In light of this, the study of Whitman’s works, with an eye on Jefferson’s influence, deepens our appreciation of them.

References

Becker, Carl. 1958 (1922). The Declaration of Independence. A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: Vintage Books. Cappon, Lester J. (ed.). 1988 (1959). The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between and Abigail and John Adams. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. De Tocqueville, Alexis. 1835, 1840. [Online]. Available: http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-Tocqueville- Democracy-in-America.pdf. [Accessed 2019, November 5]. Erkkila, Betsy. 1989 (1988). Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press. Jefferson, Thomas. 1977. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. Merrill D. Peterson (ed.). New York: Penguin Classics. Parrington, Vernon Louis. 1927-30. Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, vol. I. New York: Harcourt, Brace And Company. Somkin, Fred. 1967. Unquiet Eagle; Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Steele, Brian. 2012. Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traubel, Horace. 1961 (1914). With Walt Whitman in Camden (November 1, 1888 - January 20, 1889). New York: Rowman and Littlefield, Inc.

209 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE Whitman, Walt. 1855a. Leaves of Grass. New York: Walt Whitman. Whitman, Walt. 1855b. “Walt Whitman and His Poems” in The United States Review 5 [Online]. Available: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/lg1855/anc.00 176.html. [Accessed: 2019, 5 November]. Whitman, Walt. 1871. . Published by Washington, D.C. (Printed for J. S. Redfield, New York). Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David Mckay, Publisher. Whitman, Walt. 1920a. The Gathering of the Forces vol. I. Cleveland Rogers and John Black (eds.). New York: Putnam. Whitman, Walt. 1920b. The Gathering of the Forces vol. II. Cleveland Rogers and John Black (eds.). New York: Putnam. Whitman, Walt. 1928. Walt Whitman’s Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts. Clifton Joseph Furness (ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Whitman, Walt. 1980 (1960). Leaves of Grass With an Introduction by Gay Wilson Allen. Gay Wilson Allen (ed.). New York: Penguin Books USA. Whitman, Walt. 1984a. Unpublished Prose Manuscripts volume IV: NOTES. Edward F. Grier (ed.). New York: New York University Press. Whitman, Walt. 1984b. Unpublished Prose Manuscripts volume V: NOTES. Edward F. Grier (ed.). New York: New York University Press. Wills, Garry. 1979 (1978). Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Vintage Books. Wolosky, Shira. 2007. “Poetry and Public Discourse, 1820–1910” in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.). The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 147-480. Wood, Gordon S. 1993 (1992). The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books. Yarbrough, Jean M. 2000. “Thomas Jefferson and Republicanism” in Thomas S. Engeman (ed.). Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature. Notre Dame: Press, pp. 59-80. Yarbrough, Jean M. 1988. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Yazawa, Melvin. 2000. “The Impact of the Revolution on Education” in Jack P. Greene, Jack R. Pole (eds). A Companion to American Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. pp. 427-434.