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I. Specimen Days
1. A Happy Hour�s Command
"DOWN in the Woods, July 2d, 1882.�If I do it at all I must delay no
longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of
diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862��65, Nature-notes of 1877��81, with
Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a
big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this
hour,�(and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant
grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect
temperature, never before so filling me body and soul)�to go home, untie
the bundle, reel out diary-scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large
or small, one after another, into print-pages, 1 and let the melange�s
lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves. It will
illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life�s days and hours
(and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever
noted. Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some
object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual
hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble
the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than
fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour�s command, which seems
curiously imperative. May-be, if I don�t do anything else, I shall send
out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed. 1
Note 1. The pages from 8 to 20 are nearly verbatim an off-hand letter of
mine in January, 1882, to an insisting friend. Following, I give some
gloomy experiences. The war of attempted secession has, of course, been
the distinguishing event of my time. I commenced at the close of 1862, and
continued steadily through �63, �64, and �65, to visit the sick and
wounded of the army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and around
Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu
jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and
what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief�d cases, persons, sights,
occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the
dead. Some were scratch�d down from narratives I heard and itemized while
watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have dozens
of such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years,
for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung.
I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these
soil�d and creas�d livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper,
folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten�d with a pin. I have them
just as I threw them by after the war, blotch�d here and there with more
than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not
seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or
getting ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 26 to 81 are
verbatim copies of those lurid and blood-smutch�d little note-books.
Very different are most of the memoranda that follow. Some time after the
war ended I had a paralytic stroke, which prostrated me for several years.
In 1876 I began to get over the worst of it. From this date, portions of
several seasons, especially summers, I spent at a secluded haunt down in
Camden county, New Jersey�Timber creek, quite a little river (it enters
from the great Delaware, twelve miles away)�with primitive solitudes,
winding stream, recluse and woody banks, sweet-feeding springs, and all
the charms that birds, grass, wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old
oaks, walnut trees, &c., can bring. Through these times, and on these
spots, the diary from �Entering a Long Farm-Lane� onward was mostly
written.
The COLLECT afterward gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces I
can now lay hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all
together like fish in a net.
I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that
eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all Nature,
authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen interiors,
personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of the
Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen�d, wondrous time.
But the book is probably without any definite purpose that can be told in
statement."
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II. Collect
3. Origins of Attempted Secession
"Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and any
day.
I CONSIDER the war of attempted secession, 1860�65, not as a struggle of
two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening, and
very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same
identity�perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become
fused, homogeneous and lasting. The origin and conditions out of which it
arose, are full of lessons, full of warnings yet to the Republic�and
always will be. The underlying and principal of those origins are yet
singularly ignored. The Northern States were really just as responsible
for that war, (in its precedents, foundations, instigations,) as the
South. Let me try to give my view. From the age of 21 to 40, (1840��60,) I
was interested in the political movements of the land, not so much as a
participant, but as an observer, and a regular voter at the elections. I
think I was conversant with the springs of action, and their workings, not
only in New York city and Brooklyn, but understood them in the whole
country, as I had made leisurely tours through all the middle States, and
partially through the western and southern, and down to New Orleans, in
which city I resided for some time. (I was there at the close of the
Mexican war�saw and talk�d with General Taylor, and the other generals and
officers, who were f�ted and detain�d several days on their return
victorious from that expedition.) 1
Of course many and very contradictory things, specialties, developments,
constitutional views, &c., went to make up the origin of the war�but the
most significant general fact can be best indicated and stated as follows:
For twenty-five years previous to the outbreak, the controling
�Democratic� nominating conventions of our Republic�starting from their
primaries in wards or districts, and so expanding to counties, powerful
cities, States, and to the great Presidential nominating conventions�were
getting to represent and be composed of more and more putrid and dangerous
materials. Let me give a schedule, or list, of one of these representative
conventions for a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated
Buchanan. (Remember they had come to be the fountains and tissues of the
American body politic, forming, as it were, the whole blood, legislation,
office-holding, &-c.) One of these conventions, from 1840 to �60,
exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in our own age
and in these States. The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of
them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders,
office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,
custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train�d to
carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers,
slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures
of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges,
ruin�d sports, expell�d gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists,
carriers of conceal�d weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr�d inside with
vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people�s money
and harlots� money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy
combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From
back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the customhouses, marshals� offices,
post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President�s house, the jail,
the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was
hatch�d at midnight; from political hearses, and from the shrouds inside,
and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses
of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal
almshouses; and from the running sores of the great cities. Such, I say,
form�d, or absolutely control�d the forming of, the entire personnel, the
atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National
politics�substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding
everything�legislation, nominations, elections, �public sentiment,�
&c.�while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders,
were helpless in their gripe. These conditions were mostly prevalent in
the north and west, and especially in New York and Philadelphia cities;
and the southern leaders, (bad enough, but of a far higher order,) struck
hands and affiliated with, and used them. Is it strange that a
thunder-storm follow�d such morbid and stifling cloud-strata? 2
I say then, that what, as just outlined, heralded, and made the ground
ready for secession revolt, ought to be held up, through all the future,
as the most instructive lesson in American political history�the most
significant warning and beacon-light to coming generations. I say that the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth terms of the American Presidency
have shown that the villainy and shallowness of rulers (back�d by the
machinery of great parties) are just as eligible to these States as to any
foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire�there is not a bit of difference.
History is to record those three Presidentiads, and especially the
administrations of Fillmore and Buchanan, as so far our topmost warning
and shame. Never were publicly display�d more deform�d, mediocre,
snivelling, unreliable, false-hearted men. Never were these States so
insulted, and attempted to be betray�d. All the main purposes for which
the government was establish�d were openly denied. The perfect equality of
slavery with freedom was flauntingly preach�d in the north�nay, the
superiority of slavery. The slave trade was proposed to be renew�d.
Everywhere frowns and misunderstandings�everywhere exasperations and
humiliations. (The slavery contest is settled�and the war is long over�yet
do not those putrid conditions, too many of them, still exist? still
result in diseases, fevers, wounds�not of war and army hospitals�but the
wounds and diseases of peace?) 3
Out of those generic influences, mainly in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
&c., arose the attempt at disunion. To philosophical examination, the
malignant fever of that war shows its embryonic sources, and the original
nourishment of its life and growth, in the north. I say secession, below
the surface, originated and was brought to maturity in the free States. I
allude to the score of years preceding 1860. My deliberated opinion is
now, that if at the opening of the contest the abstract duality-question
of slavery and quiet could have been submitted to a direct popular vote,
as against their opposite, they would have triumphantly carried the day in
a majority of the northern States�in the large cities, leading off with
New York and Philadelphia, by tremendous majorities. The events of �61
amazed everybody north and south, and burst all prophecies and
calculations like bubbles. But even then, and during the whole war, the
stern fact remains that (not only did the north put it down, but) the
secession cause had numerically just as many sympathizers in the free as
in the rebel States. 4
As to slavery, abstractly and practically, (its idea, and the
determination to establish and expand it, especially in the new
territories, the future America,) it is too common, I repeat, to identify
it exclusively with the south. In fact down to the opening of the war, the
whole country had about an equal hand in it. The north had at least been
just as guilty, if not more guilty; and the east and west had. The former
Presidents and Congresses had been guilty�the governors and legislatures
of every northern State had been guilty, and the mayors of New York and
other northern cities had all been guilty�their hands were all stain�d.
And as the conflict took decided shape, it is hard to tell which class,
the leading southern or northern disunionists, was more stunn�d and
disappointed at the non-action of the free-state secession element, so
largely existing and counted on by those leaders, both sections. 5
So much for that point, and for the north. As to the inception and direct
instigation of the war, in the south itself, I shall not attempt interiors
or complications. Behind all, the idea that it was from a resolute and
arrogant determination on the part of the extreme slave-holders, the
Calhounites, to carry the states rights� portion of the constitutional
compact to its farthest verge, and nationalize slavery, or else disrupt
the Union, and found a new empire, with slavery for its corner-stone, was
and is undoubtedly the true theory. (If successful, this attempt might�I
am not sure, but it might�have destroy�d not only our American republic,
in anything like first-class proportions, in itself and its prestige, but
for ages at least, the cause of Liberty and Equality everywhere�and would
have been the greatest triumph of reaction, and the severest blow to
political and every other freedom, possible to conceive. Its worst result
would have inured to the southern States themselves.) That our national
democratic experiment, principle, and machinery, could triumphantly
sustain such a shock, and that the Constitution could weather it, like a
ship a storm, and come out of it as sound and whole as before, is by far
the most signal proof yet of the stability of that experiment, Democracy,
and of those principles, and that Constitution. 6
Of the war itself, we know in the ostent what has been done. The numbers
of the dead and wounded can be told or approximated, the debt posted and
put on record, the material events narrated, &c. Meantime, elections go
on, laws are pass�d, political parties struggle, issue their platforms,
&c., just the same as before. But immensest results, not only in politics,
but in literature, poems, and sociology, are doubtless waiting yet
unform�d in the future. How long they will wait I cannot tell. The pageant
of history�s retrospect shows us, ages since, all Europe marching on the
crusades, those arm�d uprisings of the people, stirr�d by a mere idea, to
grandest attempt�and, when once baffled in it, returning, at intervals,
twice, thrice, and again. An unsurpass�d series of revolutionary events,
influences. Yet it took over two hundred years for the seeds of the
crusades to germinate, before beginning even to sprout. Two hundred years
they lay, sleeping, not dead, but dormant in the ground. Then, out of
them, unerringly, arts, travel, navigation, politics, literature, freedom,
the spirit of adventure, inquiry, all arose, grew, and steadily sped on to
what we see at present. Far back there, that huge agitation-struggle of
the crusades stands, as undoubtedly the embryo, the start, of the high
preeminence of experiment, civilization and enterprise which the European
nations have since sustain�d, and of which these States are the heirs. 7
Another illustration�(history is full of them, although the war itself,
the victory of the Union, and the relations of our equal States, present
features of which there are no precedents in the past.) The conquest of
England eight centuries ago, by the Franco Normans�the obliteration of the
old, (in many respects so needing obliteration)�the Domesday Book, and the
repartition of the land�the old impedimenta removed, even by blood and
ruthless violence, and a new, progressive genesis establish�d, new seeds
sown�time has proved plain enough that, bitter as they were, all these
were the most salutary series of revolutions that could possibly have
happen�d. Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out of Albic, Roman
and Saxon England�and without them could not have come�not only the
England of the 500 years down to the present, and of the present�but these
States. Nor, except for that terrible dislocation and overturn, would
these States, as they are, exist to-day. 8
It is certain to me that the United States, by virtue of that war and its
results, and through that and them only, are now ready to enter, and must
certainly enter, upon their genuine career in history, as no more torn and
divided in their spinal requisites, but a great homogeneous Nation�free
states all�a moral and political unity in variety, such as Nature shows in
her grandest physical works, and as much greater than any mere work of
Nature, as the moral and political, the work of man, his mind, his soul,
are, in their loftiest sense, greater than the merely physical. Out of
that war not only has the nationalty of the States escaped from being
strangled, but more than any of the rest, and, in my opinion, more than
the north itself, the vital heart and breath of the south have escaped as
from the pressure of a general nightmare, and are henceforth to enter on a
life, development, and active freedom, whose realities are certain in the
future, notwithstanding all the southern vexations of the hour�a
development which could not possibly have been achiev�d on any less terms,
or by any other means than that grim lesson, or something equivalent to
it. And I predict that the south is yet to outstrip the north. "
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III. Notes Left Over
5. Darwinism�(then Furthermore)
"RUNNING through prehistoric ages�coming down from them into the daybreak
of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and so brought
onward�(a sort of verteber and marrow to all the antique races and lands,
Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews, &c., and giving cast
and complexion to their art, poems, and their politics as well as
ecclesiasticism, all of which we more or less inherit,) appear those
venerable claims to origin from God himself, or from gods and
goddesses�ancestry from divine beings of vaster beauty, size, and power
than ours. But in current and latest times, the theory of human origin
that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously reversing the antique,)
is that we have come on, originated, developt, from monkeys, baboons�a
theory more significant perhaps in its indirections, or what it
necessitates, than it is even in itself. (Of the twain, far apart as they
seem, and angrily as their conflicting advocates to-day oppose each other,
are not both theories to be possibly reconciled, and even blended? Can we,
indeed, spare either of them? Better still, out of them is not a third
theory, the real one, or suggesting the real one, to arise?) 1
Of this old theory, evolution, as broach�d anew, trebled, with indeed
all-devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so needed as
a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing and unspeakably tenacious,
enfeebling superstitions�is fused, by the new man, into such grand,
modest, truly scientific accompaniments�that the world of erudition, both
moral and physical, cannot but be eventually better�d and broaden�d in its
speculations, from the advent of Darwinism. Nevertheless, the problem of
origins, human and other, is not the least whit nearer its solution. In
due time the Evolution theory will have to abate its vehemence, cannot be
allow�d to dominate every thing else, and will have to take its place as a
segment of the circle, the cluster�as but one of many theories, many
thoughts, of profoundest value�and re-adjusting and differentiating much,
yet leaving the divine secrets just as inexplicable and unreachable as
before�may-be more so. 2
Then furthermore�What is finally to be done by priest or poet�and by
priest or poet only�amid all the stupendous and dazzling novelties of our
century, with the advent of America, and of science and democracy�remains
just as indispensable, after all the work of the grand astronomers,
chemists, linguists, historians, and explorers of the last hundred
years�and the wondrous German and other metaphysicians of that time�and
will continue to remain, needed, America and here, just the same as in the
world of Europe, or Asia, of a hundred, or a thousand, or several thousand
years ago. I think indeed more needed, to furnish statements from the
present points, the added arriere, and the unspeakably immenser vistas of
to-day. Only the priests and poets of the modern, at least as exalted as
any in the past, fully absorbing and appreciating the results of the past,
in the commonalty of all humanity, all time, (the main results already,
for there is perhaps nothing more, or at any rate not much, strictly new,
only more important modern combinations, and new relative adjustments,)
must indeed recast the old metal, the already achiev�d material, into and
through new moulds, current forms. 3
Meantime, the highest and subtlest and broadest truths of modern science
wait for their true assignment and last vivid flashes of light�as
Democracy waits for it�s�through first-class metaphysicians and
speculative philosophs�laying the basements and foundations for those new,
more expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer American poems. "
An expanded collection of Whitman's works can be
found at:
http://bartleby.school.aol.com/229/
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