Agitators of the Peace

A Civil War Book Review

Frances Seward, Harriet Tubman and Martha Wright

KENT BARTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War, it could be said that the moral center of the nation rested in the Finger Lakes region of central New York state. The district was a hot spot of abolitionism and the fledgling women-rights movement.

Rochester, on the region’s western edge, was home to Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and celebrated orator, who published his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in a church basement. The village of Seneca Falls, on Cayuga Lake, was the site of the first women’s rights convention, in 1848, with its seminal Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. A medical school on Seneca Lake was the first to award a degree to a woman, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.

Our celebration of seasonal books on topics like nature, gardening, food and baseball—plus David Hockney in France, Richard Thompson’s musical memoir, ‘The Agitators’ and more.

Then there is Auburn, which sits at the northern tip of Owasco Lake. The town is at the heart of Dorothy Wickenden’s “The Agitators,” an absorbing and richly rewarding chronicle of three principled women who fought on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights. The title comes from Lucretia Mott, a prominent feminist, abolitionist and Quaker who proudly modeled herself on the early Friends—social activists whom she once described as “agitators, disturbers of the peace.” Ms. Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker, traces the Auburn women’s lives with intelligence, compassion and verve. In an earlier book, “Nothing Daunted,” she told the story of two Auburn girls who left home to become teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916.

The most famous member of the Auburn trio is Harriet Tubman, whose life story is well-known. Born into slavery in Maryland, she escaped to Philadelphia in 1849, when she was in her 20s, only to return to her home state as a conductor on the Underground Railroad that carried escaped slaves to freedom. During the Civil War, she worked as a scout, spy and nurse for the Union Army. 

Auburn was one of Tubman’s stops on the Underground Railroad. Close to Lake Ontario, it was a jumping-off point for Canada, where fugitive slaves could be assured of safety. In Auburn, Tubman was introduced to Martha Coffin Wright and Frances Miller Seward, who opened their homes to the freedom seekers she sent their way. Giving a meal and a bed to a runaway slave was an act of courage in an era when the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 imposed harsh penalties on those who helped escapees. On the night that the first fugitive arrived in the Wrights’ kitchen, Martha felt “a sense of satisfaction unlike any she’d ever experienced,” Ms. Wickenden writes. “She was violating a law she could not tolerate, transforming her kitchen—the symbolic heart of woman’s sphere . . . —into a place of political asylum.”

Martha Wright, a mother of seven, was the younger sister of Lucretia Mott and a compatriot of feminist leaders Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She went on to become a founder of the Seneca Falls Convention, a supporter of property rights for married women, and an advocate of women’s suffrage.

The third member of this circle of friends, Frances Seward, was, in Ms. Wickenden’s words, a “quieter rebel.” The most conventional of the three, she belonged to a well-off family and had been educated at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, the country’s best school for girls, at a time when no college accepted women. On a visit to Virginia in 1835, when she was 30, she was radicalized by the sight of 10 weeping black boys, ages 6 to 12, naked, roped together and overseen by a white man with a whip. The children were on their way to auction, where they would be sold to work in the fields of the Deep South.

As the wife of William Henry Seward, governor of New York, then senator and Lincoln’s secretary of state, Frances often found herself in the painful position of trying to follow her conscience without damaging the career of her husband, who was not as outspoken on the contentious issue of abolition. In keeping with his wishes, she kept a low public profile about her antislavery work, declining to sign an antislavery petition or publicize her work educating freed slaves. In private, however, she was a powerful and insistent adviser to her husband, pushing him to press Lincoln to emancipate the slaves.

In telling the stories of Martha Wright and Frances Seward, Ms. Wickenden relies heavily on their letters and diaries and those of close family members. The result is an intimate, detailed portrait of the women, including the effect that their activism had on their families. When we meet Martha in the 1820s, she is dissatisfied with her life as a homemaker and its endless drudgery. She writes: “The only way is to grub & work & sweep & dust, & wash & dress children, & make gingerbread, and patch & darn.” Frances, for her part, loathed being a political wife, choosing to spend long periods in Auburn rather than joining her husband in Albany or Washington. After 35 years of marriage, she informed Henry, by then a senator, that she would no longer act as his hostess. For both women, their work on the Underground Railroad sparked political awakenings and a resolve to take leadership roles in the causes they championed.

Harriet Tubman, who was illiterate and left no written record, is nevertheless the one who comes most alive in the book’s pages. Drawing on published interviews with Tubman and letters and diaries of people who knew her, Ms. Wickenden paints her as highly intelligent, determined and dignified—“a small, unstoppable woman . . . unafraid of the slave power of the South and the lawmakers in Washington.” When Tubman needed a home for the family members she had rescued and a base for her work, Frances Seward sold her a house in Auburn.

One of the pleasures of “The Agitators” is the cast of supporting characters who pass through its pages. John Brown “had a hypnotic effect on abolitionists who lacked his fire-breathing pugnacity.” Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, one of Lincoln’s opponents in the 1860 election, was “a small, pot-bellied man with hooded eyes and big ambitions who had an ability to crash through legislative logjams.” Susan B. Anthony was “neither graceful nor beautiful nor rich nor winning to strangers” in the assessment of Martha’s daughter Ellen. Frances Seward describes Lincoln as “amusing and friendly, with a manner like an unassuming farmer’s—not awkward & ungainly but equally removed from polish of manner.”

As the story moves into the war years, the book’s focus shifts and Martha and Frances fade somewhat into the background. Tubman’s wartime service in South Carolina is chronicled in an electrifying chapter about a military raid on plantations along the Combahee River in which she leads 750 slaves to safety. A chapter on Martha’s son Willy, wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, is deeply moving. Ms. Wickenden’s fast-paced description of the attack on Henry Seward by an associate of John Wilkes Booth on the night of Lincoln’s assassination is—in a word—thrilling. A Seward daughter who witnessed the attack writes in her journal: “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor.”

Violence is an ever-present feature of “The Agitators”—from slavery’s brutalities to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War. Auburn, where not everyone approved of the women’s work, was not immune. “These are lawless times,” Frances tells one of her sons after someone throws a rock through a window of the Seward home. That incident came on the heels of an assault on a black boy she was tutoring and after the family dog had been poisoned.

So, too, religion is a continuous presence. Martha, Frances, Harriet—Quaker, Episcopalian, Methodist—all believed that God was on the side of the abolitionists. Tubman went so far as to say that God wouldn’t let Lincoln win the war until he had freed the slaves. The women’s religious faith bolstered their moral determination and shaped their work.

In the book’s closing pages there is an astonishing photograph of Tubman, probably taken outside her home in Auburn in 1911, two years before her death at around the age of 90. It shows a diminutive figure dressed in suffragette white. After the war, the woman who had led slaves to freedom and shown wartime valor turned her attention to advancing the roles of women, black and white.

“The Agitators” carries no political message, but Ms. Wickenden’s assessment of the era leading up to the Civil War will resonate with readers in our own fractious age: “The nation never had been so politically engaged—or so divided.”

—Ms. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of the forthcoming “Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.”

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the April 10, 2021, print edition as 'Disturbers of the Peace.'

 

 

 Speaking again of John Brown:

Abolitionist’s gravestone returning

By Annakai Geshlider

ageshlider@scng.com

 

After years of preservation efforts by the Altadena community, a gravestone honoring abolitionist and former Altadena resident Owen Brown will soon be reinstalled at his gravesite in the foothills north of town.

“We’re really glad it’s finally happening,” said Michele Zack, a local historian and chair of the Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee, which was created by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Owen Brown was the son of John Brown, the abolitionist who led the pre-Civil War raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. According to local historian Paul Ayers, Owen Brown stayed across the Potomac River during the raid, taking care of horses in preparation for a planned getaway and slave rebellion.

Instead, the raid failed and John Brown was hanged for his anti-slavery attempts, prompting his son to flee to Ohio. He lived as a fugitive for 20 years following the raid and eventually followed two siblings to California. In 1881, he settled into a cabin with his brother, Jason Brown, in

                                    

A plaque of Owen Brown is on display at Altadena Triangle Park in Altadena on Nov. 11, 2017. Brown’s gravestone is being returned to his gravesite in the foothills north of the city. ED CRISOSTOMO STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

 

Altadena Meadows, in the foothills north of town.

According to Ayers, the Brown brothers’ participation in the fight against slavery made them well-received when they arrived in Pasadena, where they paraded up and down Colorado Boulevard singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the top of their lungs. Those who founded Pasadena in 1874 had fought for the Union to abolish slavery, making the new city a safe place for the Browns to take refuge.

In the years following Owen Brown’s death in 1889, hundreds of White and Black locals came to pay homage at his gravesite, Ayers said. Interest faded as the 20th century wore on, especially as the Ku Klux Klan dominated Pasadena in the 1920s, and it “became a very racist town,” Ayers said.

The road to preserving Brown’s gravesite has been rocky.

Brown is buried on a 6-acre piece of land at the top of Rising Hill Road, near the base of the foothills. The area, known as “Little Roundtop,” sits not far from the cabin where Brown once lived. In the 1980s, preservation group Altadena Heritage unsuccessfully attempted to get historical status for the site. Because the land is private, preservation efforts have required negotiations with various owners over the years. One owner attempted to bar public access to the gravesite with a “No Trespassing” sign, resulting in a a 2006 ruling affirming the public has legal access to the site.

To top things off, the grave marker kept going missing. In 2002, the landowner at the time rolled the marker down the hill, and it disappeared from public view for 10 years, Ayers said. In 2012, locals rejoiced when Altadena resident Ian White — son of artist Charles White — discovered the grave marker while on a walk near his home.

For years, the area near the gravesite was caught in bitter debate. Developer Tim Cantwell planned to build 18 single-family units at the nearby gated community of La Vina, causing locals to protest the proposed development. Meanwhile, people were still fighting to preserve Brown’s grave for public access.

In 2019, an agreement was reached: The La Vina project will be completed with Cantwell agreeing to buy the land containing the gravesite to preserve it for the public. Cantwell also agreed to fund programs educating locals about Brown and Pasadena’s antislavery history.

Zack anticipates the gravestone will be installed soon, perhaps in the next couple months. With Cantwell having promised to fund the installation and a contractor hired, everything is ready to go. The only thing the committee is waiting is funding from the developer, Zack said.

The Owen Brown Gravesite Restoration Committee has been hosting public meetings since March. Zack said the committee is looking forward to the installation of the stone, marking the culmination of a long process.

“It’s a big deal,” Ayers said, especially because California doesn’t have many historical representations of abolitionism. A major goal of the gravesite restoration project will be educating the public about California’s importance in the Civil War, Zack said.

The state was “the key jewel that the Confederacy wanted” in its attempt to expand slavery, and Pasadena was a stronghold of anti-slavery sentiment, she added.

The gravesite restoration committee has four main tasks, Zack said: restore the gravesite, get the site designated as a historical monument, put the site and the surrounding property in a conservancy (giving it an added level of protection) and educate the public on the site’s significance.

In addition to educational programs for local youth and the public, Zack said the committee is hoping to work with filmmaker Pablo Miralles to create a documentary about the Brown family’s presence in California. In 2019, preservationists worked with Miralles to create a short film about the gravesite.

John Brown “believed firmly that slavery was an abomination, an evil of this country,” Ayers said. “And I think that’s a thing people have to embrace now, that racism is the original sin of the United States and that we have to confront it.”

                                    

Owen Brown, who was born Nov. 4, 1824, in Hudson, Ohio, was John Brown’s third son, and his stalwart lieutenant in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry during the Civil War.

Article source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune 071121

 

                   My Great Great Grandfather and Grandmother were part of the Underground Railroad                        movement in Iowa up to the US Civil War. Here is a newspaper article from 1872 describing a                                            couple UGRR instances during those trying times:

Nathan and Elizabeth (Winder) Newlon

And the Underground Railroad[*]

 

Transcribed and Reformatted From the Original News Article

by

©2015 Chris Newlon Green

 

Iowa State Register[†]                                        December 15, 1872

 

Winterset Branch

      Something like a year ago the Winterset people celebrated the opening of the Rock Island Branch Road, but years before there was a road running through their town. Night expresses only were used, but they never ran off the track. At Winterset Mr. Nathan Newlon was the presiding genius. His crib has held frequent loads that were never gathered in a field of Yellow Dent nor Flint corn. But he was not alone in the business. The number of stockholders in the Underground Railroad at Winterset were legion. In the country there were Uncle Billy Ruby and David Martin, while Mr. J.J. Hutchings, Judge Pitzer, and a score of others in the village always responded when called on to pay for a darkey’s ticket on this famous line.

 

      Four miles east of St. Charles Mr. Wm. Beard kept a station. There was only one other Abolition family near him; the other neighbors all being pro-slavery Democrats of the strictest sect, and the sharpest lookout was necessary when a train was approaching or departing to prevent running into a Locofoco.[‡] Further on, near Indianola, Uncle Grimshaw, a staunch old Quaker with a heart as capacious as the big loft where he used to hide his sable guests, was station agent. The time table was arranged for trains to reach his house about daylight. Here the passengers laid over for the night express, which would roll out about ten o’clock, halting at the Quaker settlement between Knoxville and Indianola. The next stage was a long one – to Newton or to Taylor Peirce’s, and from there the time table has not been furnished us.

 

      One time a party of five slaves came through the northern part of Madison County on foot, and without a guide. They fell in the hands of some pro-slavery residents of the county, and were captured. That night they were placed in a covered wagon, to which four strong horses were attached, and started under guard to Missouri. But meantime some of the Madison County Abolitionists had heard of the circumstance and started in pursuit. About daylight they overhauled the wagon, rode in front of it, and seizing the horses, ordered a halt. The driver got out his shotgun and threatened to shoot. For fear that he might do so foolish a thing, one of the hard-hearted Abolitionists punch him behind the ear, and he retired from the discussion. By the time he again began to take an interest in this world’s affairs, the blacks and their liberators had disappeared, nor was there any further track of them visibly.

 

      The last train that passed through on the route came from Ray County, Missouri, starting just after the war commenced. They came through Page County, stopped over a day at Quincy and the next day halted at Mr. Samuel Ainsworth’s at Nevin. That night they started for the Winterset station. The mud was knee deep, but in the gray of morning Hon. B.F. Roberts came riding up to Mr. Newlon’s door with the announcement that Ainsworth with six fugitives, was close behind. There was a lively rattle of pots and pans in the farmer’s house, a clearing away of rubbish in the loft, and by the time the train arrived Mother Newlon had a smoking hot breakfast on the table and the quarters for the passengers were all prepared. That night they rested, and at nightfall Mr. Newlon started with them for Indianola.

 

      After daylight the next morning, by a circuitous route, they reached Uncle Grimshaw”s and from there they were sent to Newton. That was the last train, and a few weeks later the blacks began to pass through Iowa without a guide, and none molested them. The rails on the track were taken up, and the conductors handed in the records of their doings. They have been scrutinized by the nation, and pronounced correct; nor is it likely that, when the final accounts of men are entered on the ledger of immortality, there will be any balance on this score against those whose humane sympathy, Christian sentiments and brave hearts, made them active workers on the Underground Railroad.

 

---

[*] Nathan, 1812-1878; Elizabeth, 1806-1891

[†] In 1855 the Iowa Citizen began publishing and was renamed the Iowa State Register in 1860. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Des_Moines_Register

[‡] The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s. The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization (“Tammany Hall”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locofocos

 

While on the subject of John Brown, it's interesting to note that his widow, Mary, is buried in the Madronia Cemetery on Oak St. in Saratoga, CA. A couple years ago while visiting friends up there, I took this photo.

I'm going to continue the subject of Abolitionists for the next couple Posts.

 

From the Wall Street Journal On-line  1 May 2021:

Five Best: Novels on Slavery and the Civil War

Selected by Dorothy Wickenden, the author, most recently, of ‘The Agitators.’

 

                        Thomas Hovenden’s ‘The Last Moments of John Brown’ (ca. 1884).

                                           PHOTO: VCG WILSON/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

 

By Dorothy Wickenden, April 30, 2021

The Good Lord Bird

By James McBride (2013)

1. James McBride’s John Brown is a Bible-thumping, “low-down son of a bitch,” a murderous zealot who looks “mad as a wood hammer” and whose infamous militia consists of a dozen of the “bummiest, saddest-looking individuals you ever saw.” These are the early observations of the narrator, Henry Shackleford, an enslaved boy whom Brown mistakes for a girl and sweeps up in the wars of Bleeding Kansas. Henry “weren’t for no fighting,” but he accompanies Brown across the U.S. and into Canada as Brown flees the authorities and attempts to raise money and men. In this antic tale of the misadventures of the man who made the Civil War inevitable, Henry creates a portrait of Brown that grows fonder as the end approaches: “Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy.” Henry witnesses Brown’s atrocities but also his tenderness and his puzzling commitment to fight “on behalf of the colored.” Noting Brown’s beatific smile before he is hanged, Henry says: “It was like looking at the face of God.”

Henry and Clara

By Thomas Mallon (1994)

2. “Henry and Clara” established Thomas Mallon as a master of historical fiction. Clara Rathbone—vain, clever and socially ambitious—reflects, near the climax of this blood-drenched novel, that she always sensed “there was a secret sewn into the violence of that night.” She is referring to April 14, 1865, when she and her fiancé, Maj. Henry Rathbone, last-minute guests of the Lincolns in their box at Ford’s Theatre, witness the assassination of the president. That much is true. But Mr. Mallon seamlessly blends fact and fiction in this sharply angled historic tableau. Clara’s “blind love” for her Byronic stepbrother can only end tragically, and through Clara Mr. Mallon also conveys just how unprepared the North is for the cataclysm of the war. In the spring of 1861, when Clara learns that her father, U.S. Senator Ira Harris, will allow her semi-incestuous marriage as soon as the Union declares victory, she exclaims, “I’m so happy! Maybe this war is a blessing—God forgive me for saying it.” Mr. Mallon, a stylish, witty writer, almost imperceptibly transforms his love story into a heart-stopping psychological thriller.

The Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead (2016)

 3. “The lesson was unclear,” Cora tells herself. No longer enslaved on the Georgia cotton plantation where she was raised, she finds that “misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape.” Relentlessly pursued by the Javert-like slave-catcher Ridgeway, she becomes accustomed to the sound of the lock on his wagon: “It hitched for a moment before falling into place.” Ridgeway opines about “the American imperative”: “To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. If not subjugate, exterminate.” In Colson Whitehead’s dazzlingly inventive narrative, the Underground Railroad is an actual rail line that takes Cora through four hellish states—from an ostensible “new era” in South Carolina, where sterilization and scientific experiments are performed on free blacks, to temporary respite on a black farm in free-state Indiana. Like Cora, the reader cannot escape the hideous legacies of slavery, but Mr. Whitehead holds out some hope for a redemptive future through his heroine: discerning, fierce, indomitable.

The Killer Angels

By Michael Shaara (1974)

4. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a 34-year-old professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, thinks of Aristotle after he leads his bayonet charge on Little Round Top: In the presence of real tragedy, he concludes, “you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended.” Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Killer Angels” doesn’t so much re-create the three-day Battle of Gettysburg as inhabit it. Drawing on primary documents, Shaara climbs inside the minds of the warring officers and invites the reader to experience the sights, sounds and smells of the killing fields. White-haired Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bad heart leaves him with “a sense of enormous unnatural fragility, like hollow glass.” The Yankees hold the superior position in the hills outside town, but Lee disastrously refuses to consider the defensive maneuver urged on him by his second-in-command, James Longstreet. After the defeat, he concedes, “It is all my fault, it is all my fault.” As dusk falls, Chamberlain sits alone on the rocky hill, his mind “blasted and clean,” watching men moving below him with yellow lights, “from black lump to black lump while papers fluttered and blew and fragments of cloth and cartridge and canteen tumbled and floated against the gray and steaming ground. . . . It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.”

Washington Black

By Esi Edugyan (2018)

5. This wondrous adventure story, punctuated by scenes of gruesome violence, begins in 1830. Young George Washington Black, a field hand on a Barbados sugar plantation who is about to lose his life for a murder he did not commit, is whisked away in a hot-air balloon. Its inventor, Christopher, the abolitionist brother of the malign owner of the plantation, is an eccentric naturalist and explorer who has been tutoring “Wash.” In Virginia, Wash refuses to join two fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, preferring to accompany Christopher to the Arctic, on an apparently crazed search for Christopher’s father. Wash later makes his way to Halifax Harbor, where he becomes an expert in marine life. In Esi Edugyan’s crystalline prose, Wash observes the bloom of jellyfish in a nighttime sea: “fragile as a woman’s stocking, their bodies all afire.” But he is not all sensitivity and introspection. Attacked one night by a mercenary, Wash stabs him in the eye with an ivory-handled kitchen knife, then takes flight on his own quest, to find Christopher, the man with whom “freedom seemed a thing I might live in, like a coat”—only to discover that what he actually seeks is to shed the fear of “accepting my own power.”

 

 By Mark Edmundson

April 15, 2021 11:30 am ET

As printed in the Wall Street Journal

Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy 

When Walt Whitman began conceiving his great volume of poetry, “Leaves of Grass,” in the 1850s, American democracy was in serious danger over the issue of slavery. As we celebrate National Poetry Month this month, the problems facing our democracy are different, but Whitman still has a great deal to teach us about democratic life, because he saw that we are perpetually in danger of succumbing to two antidemocratic forces. The first is hatred between Americans, which Whitman saw erupt into civil war in 1861.

The second danger lies in the hunger for kings. The European literature and culture that preceded Whitman and surrounded him when he wrote “Leaves of Grass” was largely what he called “feudal”: It revolved around the elect, the special, the few. Whitman understood human fascination with kings and aristocrats, and he sometimes tried to debunk it. But mostly he asked his readers to shift their interest away from feudalism to the beauties of democracy and the challenge of sustaining and expanding it.

This challenge is what inspired him to find his central poetic image for democracy, the grass: “A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands.” Whitman says that he can’t and won’t offer a literal answer to the question. Instead he spins into an astonishing array of “guesses.” The grass “is the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”; it’s “the handkerchief of the Lord…Bearing the owner’s name somewhere in the corners, that we may see and remark and say Whose?”

To Whitman, “the grass is itself a child…the produced babe of the vegetation.” “Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he writes. “It may be that you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps / And here you are the mothers’ laps.” He offers one metaphor for the grass after another, and one feels that he could go on forever.

But mainly Whitman’s grass signifies American equality: “I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,/And it means,/Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,/Growing among black folks as among white,/Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,/I give them the same, I receive them the same.” Whatever our race and origin, whatever our station in life, we’re all blades of grass. But by joining together we become part of a resplendent field of green, stretching gloriously on every side.

Whitman found a magnificent metaphor for democratic America and its people. Like snowflakes, no two grass blades are alike. Each one has its own being, a certain kind of chlorophyll-based individuality. Yet step back and you’ll see that the blades are all more like each other than not. Americans, too, are at least as much alike as we are different, and probably more so. America is where we can be ourselves and yet share deep kinship with our neighbors.

And who are our neighbors? Kanuck, Congressman, Tuckahoe, Cuff—Canadian, legislator, Virginia planter, Black man, all of the teeming blades of grass that we see around us. When you stand back far enough, you can’t see any of the individual blades, but look closer and there they are—vibrant and unique, no two alike. We say “e pluribus unum,” from many one. But who could have envisioned what that would look like and how it would feel before Whitman came along?

The grass is Whitman’s answer to the problem that bedeviled his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson: how to resolve the tension between the individual and the group. Emerson is sometimes hopeful that the two can cohere. When you speak your deep and true thoughts, no matter how controversial, he believed that in time the mass of men and women will come around to you. Each will say, ‘this is my music, this is myself,” Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” But mostly he is skeptical, believing that society is almost inevitably the enemy of genius and individuality.

Whitman’s image of the grass suggests that the one and the many can merge, and that discovery allows him to imagine a world without significant hierarchy. Can any one blade of grass be all that much more important than any other? When you make the grass the national flag, as it were, you get to love and appreciate all the people who surround you. You become part of a community of equals. You can feel at home.

In “Leaves of Grass,” soon after he offers his master metaphor Whitman rises up to view American democracy from overhead. The poem’s famous catalogues of people doing what they do every day are quite simple: “On the piazza walk five friendly matrons with twined arms;/ The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,/The Missourian crosses the plains, toting his wares and his cattle,/The fare-collector goes through the train—he gives notice by the jingling of loose change.”

This is your family, these are your sisters and brothers, Whitman effectively says. In general, we walk the streets with a sense of isolation. But if we can move away from our addictions to hierarchy and exclusive individuality, and embrace Whitman’s trope of the grass, our experience of day-to-day life can be different. We can look at those we pass and say not “That is another” but “That too is me. That too I am.” Or so Whitman hopes.

Of course, the benefits that Whitman promises do not come for free, or simply by reading his poem. We’ve got to meet his vision halfway, by being amiable, friendly, humane and nonhierarchical. This repudiation of hierarchy is not so easy; it’s not clear that even Whitman himself pulls it off. Isn’t he trying to be a great poet, the first truly American bard? But his effort matters. He knew that democracy is always vulnerable, that the best hope for human happiness could disappear from the earth. But Whitman would not let that happen without a fight.

—Mr. Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. This essay is adapted from his new book “Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy,” published this week by Harvard University Press.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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 Chris' Literary Works

  

From Blue to a Gold Star

Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore

With a young family and bright career future ahead of him, First Lieutenant Clarence R. Green meets his destiny in a trench somewhere in France during the First World War.

From 100 years ago, local newspaper articles, his letters home and family photos tell Clarence's story.

A story of heroism and self-sacrifice.

A story of a small Iowa town's courage amid the anguish wrought by war.

Read the First-Person accounts that changed a family and a community.

Letters Home: Viet Nam 1964

Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore

Letters Home: Vietnam 1964 is framed around an Army Corpsman’s letters home from the nascent Vietnam War. Little has been written about the U.S. Army Medics doing MEDCAP work in Vietnam. This story of medical teams in the Delta region is told through photos, vignettes, and recollections. 

LETTERS HOME’s story unfolds some months before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. A Medical Specialist, part of an Army Medical Civic Action Program team (MEDCAP), delivered medical services to scores of villages and hamlets south of Saigon, in the Delta. The author, Medical Corpsman and French Interpreter, narrates what the war, at the beginning of America’s involvement, was like for him.

“With stethoscopes hanging around our necks and with jars of pills and ointments in our portable drug store, we diagnosed, treated and dispensed medicines to rural folks, families, children, even VC.

"To villagers, we were the Bac Si Mỹ, the American Doctors.”

"A Civil War Narrative:

Journals, Letters and Verse of William Clark Newlon"

 Presented in PDF with photos, maps and footnoted annotation 

Go to:

greensblueandgray.com

William Clark Newlon chronicles his Civil War experience in two journals written between April 1861 and August 1863. Infantry soldier Will Newlon describes his move west from Iowa through Missouri, and then down to Tennessee. Between these events, Will pens the tedium and daily suffering of being a Civil War soldier, the drilling and parades, the cooking and camp making, the cold and the rain, the battles and the loneliness.