A few days after Sumner’s caning, in Syracuse, New York, radical abolitionists held a convention during which they harked back to old John Quincy Adams. In 1842, Adams had declared that during war, slaves could be freed by martial law: “that the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institutions, slavery among the rest. Under that state of things, so far from its being true that the states where slavery exists have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States, but the commander of the army, has power to order the universal emancipation of slaves.” To those radical abolitionists, the country was in a state of war. Frederick Douglass recalled what the bold Adams had said and what the bold Adams had meant: that “liberty and slavery are eternally forbidden to be at peace. There is no middle ground; the choice it leaves to liberty, is kill or be killed.”
IF THE OSTEND MANIFESTO and its implications for Cuba—and slavery—had to most Americans seemed far away or forgettable; if the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed too cerebral or not worth fighting for; if the Anthony Burns case in Boston represented the furor of dozing fanatics, now awakened; if Abraham Lincoln moralizing about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise among prize cattle seemed quaint and far-fetched; if the sacking of Lawrence seemed an instance of frontier justice; if the radical abolitionists symbolized the frenzied “ultraism,” not to be taken seriously, of a handful of white people and of (“insolent”) blacks, then the brutal caning of Charles Sumner “silently epitomized,” as one historian put it, “the white men’s right to speak, whether in the U.S. Senate or in Kansas.”
With its classical allusions tightly coiled around insults to Southern manhood and gentility, Sumner’s mean-spirited speech had been sophomoric, admitted George Templeton Strong, who regarded antislavery agitation as mistaken in principle and mischievous in policy. “But the reckless, insolent brutality of our Southern aristocrats,” he concluded, “may drive me into abolitionism yet.”
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DEMOCRACY
After his death it was said that Phineas Taylor Barnum was more alive than anyone still living. Gray-eyed, affable, and six foot two, his jowls a little flabby, he had been funny, extroverted, and aphoristic. And as a producer and prolific writer (though he himself was his best and truest subject), Barnum had represented America to Americans, or so he had hoped. In that way, he was oddly like his contemporary, the controversial poet Walt Whitman; in fact he was the Whitman of the stage: cocky, optimistic, self-centered, a purveyor of the American scene and in a way its singer. He celebrated the variety, the innocence, the agitations that Whitman declared quintessentially American.
Born in rural Connecticut in 1810, as a boy Barnum peddled molasses candy but by 1855, the year of his first autobiography, the budding impresario had edited a newspaper, been sued for libel, worked for a dry goods store, opened a museum, and as a loyal Democrat paid a call on Andrew Jackson when his circus troupe performed in Tennessee. He had also successfully promoted Joice Heth, a former slave said to be the 161-year-old blind, toothless, wrinkled ex-nurse of the infant George Washington. Slavery had dressed the founding father, Barnum symbolically suggested, his eye on the box office. (Barnum had bought Heth, which of course made him a slave owner.)
Barnum declared that people got their money’s worth in the untruths they happily paid for. And besides, the greater the fiction, Barnum said, the greater the truth.
In 1841 he bought Scudder’s Museum at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in lower Manhattan and opened his famed American Museum, a medley of crowded rooms that over time displayed bearded ladies, four-legged chickens, whale carcasses, educated dogs, wax figures, American Indian artifacts, and the ugly, popular “Feejee Mermaid” (a fishtail grafted onto a monkey’s torso). He included scientific exhibits, paintings, and a few marvels of the mechanical world, such as the “knitting machine.” All were jumbled together: the dubious, the peculiar, the inventive, the technological, the grotesque, and the made-up. Millions of people—from Bowery boys to Henry David Thoreau, from farmers to the Prince of Wales and the young Henry James—paid the twenty-five-cent price of admission.
Entrepreneur, national historian, and peerless promoter, Barnum was a manipulator of images who understood advertising, publicity, and the American propensity for self-making. He did not aspire to literary greatness or to poetry. Instead, he worked with the country’s scramble of opportunity, squalor, idealism, and mistrust to create a weird hall of mirrors in which people unwittingly saw themselves. But Barnum loved his audience. In fact, he didn’t say there was a sucker born every minute, though the phrase has been attributed to him. Rather, his hodgepodge of curiosities was a kind of democracy in action, embracing everybody and everything.
Walt Whitman learned a great deal from Barnum. Interviewing him in 1846 after Barnum returned from Europe (where he had exhibited the midget General Tom Thumb to the young Queen Victoria), Whitman asked the showman if there was anything he’d seen abroad that made him “love Yankeedom less.” Barnum answered immediately, “No! Not a bit of it! Why, sir, you can’t imagine the difference.—There everything is frozen—kings and things—formal, but absolutely frozen: here it is life.” Whitman presciently commented, “a whole book might be written on that little speech of Barnum’s.”
In 1850 Barnum shrewdly orchestrated the American tour of the coloratura soprano Jenny Lind, the so-called Swedish Nightingale, and turned it into a series of hugely lucrative publicity events aimed at all classes. The programs included ballads, arias, folk tunes, and bel canto—and attracted raving, screaming crowds that tossed bouquets at her white-shod feet. In New York City, twenty thousand people gathered on Broadway in front of the entrance to the Irving House just for a peek, and a sellout crowd of five thousand elbowed into Castle Garden in Battery Park on opening night. Among the ranks of those who heard her sing during her fabulous American tour through Pittsburgh and Baltimore and Richmond and Charleston and Natchez was Emily Dickinson’s father, Edward, who went to a performance in Northampton, Massachusetts. Daniel Webster saw her in Washington, and a disappointed Walt Whitman in New York thought the Nightingale’s performance glitzy. She was scheduled to give 150 concerts in the United States and Cuba. She sat for Mathew Brady, the newly minted photographer of celebrity. Soon there were Jenny Lind shawls, riding hats, bonnets, gloves, sofas, pianos, and poems. George Templeton Strong summed up the commotion, and the reasons behind it, when he noted that the Nightingale reminded him “of the good little girl in the fairy story who spat pearls and diamonds out of her mouth whenever she opened it to speak.” Jenny Lind, however, produced five-dollar bills, “a variation that suits the more prosaic imagery of the nineteenth century.” The Gilded Age was arriving early.
Barnum’s bubbling energy, his beguiling falsehoods, his seeming ease, and his canny affectation of civic duty (his exhibits were supposed to educate) delighted or, more to the point, distracted Americans frustrated by bloody Kansas and bloodied senators and weary of talk of wage slavery, never mind chattel slavery, railroads, and tariffs. In 1853 Barnum staged an expurgated version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Familiarly known as the “Compromise” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Barnum let Little Eva and Uncle Tom survive. Slavery wasn’t so bad, William Lloyd Garrison scoffed, as long as most of it was omitted. But Barnum couldn’t have cared less what a nut such as Garrison might say. True, the story had been toned down, but the play was the only “sensible Dramatic version of Stowe’s book,” he insisted, because it didn’t give fanaticism a platform. Besides, there was no use in being glum, as one of the advertisements declared; this is America.
And remember that for the same ticket of admission, you could see the Bearded Lady.
In 1855, Barnum published his first autobiography, a book he’d write and rewrite over the course of his lifetime, as if he was saying that behind every story lay another version of the same story and that behind every person another side of that person. By the time he published his autobiography’s final rewrite, it w
as the second most widely read book in the country, after the Bible. Barnum’s revisions were not exactly falsehoods; in fact they reflected Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that the self (even the idea of the self) was always growing, always evolving: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”
Emerson’s so-called theory of expansion was the spiritual counterpart of O’Sullivan’s manifest destiny, except that O’Sullivan and the Young America movement defined expansion in territorial, not spiritual, terms. Democracy, for them, was an America of growth and change and progressive, outward movement. And that’s what Whitman celebrated in his first, 1855, edition of Leaves of Grass, which he, like Barnum, would revise over the course of his life:
My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage.
“WE HAD CEASED, we imagined, to be surprised at anything America could produce,” remarked a British journalist. “We had become stoically indifferent to her Wooly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums.” Then came Walt Whitman.
The first edition of Leaves of Grass was a Barnumesque celebration of democracy, of an America “growing among black folks as among white, / Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff.” And if Barnum eschewed higher laws by bridging the gap between the real and the fake and acknowledging that people liked their deceptions—self-deceptions best of all—Whitman in his way also reconciled the divisions between high and low, male and female, young and old, urban and rural. Right inside all of them were higher laws. These laws, then, were not higher at all; they were inherent, immanent, innate. And the poet embodied these laws; the poet contained all things, “the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines—the tribes of red aborigines—the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts—the first settlements north or south—the rapid stature and muscle—the haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution . . . the union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable.”
A Union calm and impregnable: this was what Lincoln offered in his speeches in Illinois in 1854 on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This was the fluid world that entrepreneur Barnum managed, exhibited, relished, and exploited. This was the diverse audience Whitman addressed (or imagined) when he declared America the greatest poem and he, its poet:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . no more modest than immodest.
Whoever degrades another degrades me . . . and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging . . . through me the current and index.
I speak the password primeval . . . I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
Like Barnum, Whitman had gray eyes, said Bronson Alcott, the Orphic oracle from Concord whom very few people read; he was also a friend of Emerson’s and the father of Louisa May, and he’d arranged to meet Whitman, “the very God Pan,” in New York. Alcott, who was not at all buttoned up, noticed right away that Whitman wore a concoction of clothes—including trousers tucked into his cowhide boots and an open shirt—and seemed out of place in parlors. There was certainly nothing “New Englandy” about him, to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase. Dickinson claimed never to have read Whitman, who she’d heard was scandalous.
Visiting Whitman at his home on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, Alcott was accompanied by Henry David Thoreau and the abolitionist Sarah Tyndale. Though Whitman liked Mrs. Tyndale, he was ambivalent about the prickly Thoreau, who, before Whitman arrived, had helped himself to the biscuits Mrs. Whitman was baking. Still, Whitman pressed on Thoreau a copy of the new (1856) second edition of Leaves of Grass.
Thoreau later told a friend that with the poet’s “heartiness & broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders—as it were sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain.” That was high praise coming from Thoreau, particularly since Whitman later remembered strolling with the woodsy writer over Brooklyn streets when Thoreau suddenly turned and asked, “What is there in the people? Pshaw! What do you (a man who sees as well as anybody) see in all this cheating political corruption?”
“Thoreau’s great fault was disdain—disdain for men (for Tom, Dick and Harry),” Whitman would say.
In Walden, Thoreau’s recently published spiritual autobiography, Thoreau had included a chapter aptly called, with sly reference to William Seward, “Higher Laws.” In it, Thoreau had insisted he loved the wild in nature not less than the good—though, in fact, he staked his life on the higher, more evolved side of being. Whitman placed his bets on the lower, which to him was also the higher.
The cool recluse of Concord thus met the democratic humanitarian of the kosmos who loved high and low, the good and the wild, which were just two sides of a seemingly different coin: union, without compromise or confrontation.
THE FIRST (1855) EDITION of Leaves of Grass, twelve poems and a preface, all untitled, had been published on the Fourth of July. Whitman had not included his name on the title page though on the frontispiece was a portrait of a bearded man, without cravat, his shirt open, one hand on his hip, the other in his pocket, his hat rakishly tipped back. Here he was, a poet of the people for the people, without pretension or pomp. “The best writing,” he would say, “has no lace on its sleeves.”
Whitman mailed a copy of his book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who responded kindly and with true admiration. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he promptly wrote.
Then, for publicity, Whitman published Emerson’s letter in the Tribune without Emerson’s consent. He also quoted a section of it on the cover of the next edition of Leaves of Grass, which included the new and sensual poems that would predictably annoy Emerson, who later called Whitman “priapic.”
That was not all: in Barnumesque style, Whitman continued to breach etiquette by publishing three anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass in which he hailed his own arrival as the American bard whom Emerson had been awaiting: “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe,” Emerson had written in 1844. Look no more, Whitman effectively said. The New York Times caustically replied, “Mr. Walt Whitman . . . was not content with writing a book, but was also determined to review it.” Yet in this second edition of Leaves of Grass, no matter how jauntily he had pushed himself or America, Whitman more somberly surveyed the territory before him—the rascal and thief (his words) who was president (Franklin Pierce), the Anthony Burns case, the beating of Charles Sumner, the federal government’s backing of the proslavery Kansas government, and the nomination for president of the weak, toadying James Buchanan on the Democratic ticket.
Whitman’s optimism frayed at the edges, and in the open letter to Emerson that he placed at the end of the second edition he warned, “In every department of These States, he who travels with a coterie, or with selected persons, or with imitators, or with infidels, or with the owners of slaves, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a man, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a woman, or with any thing less than the bravest and the openest, travels straight for the slopes of dissolution.”
The slopes of dissolution: even for the ebullient Walt Whitman, talk of disunion was in the wind.
“YES, THE WORLD’S a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete,” Melville had written in Moby-Dick. Barnum had included a mobile panorama of the Mississippi River in his production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the Mi
ssissippi River spelled adventure, which is how Samuel Clemens would come to use it; and panoramas of the great wilderness were very popular forms of entertainment. And there was the sea, as Melville knew, and foreign ports. Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s four “black ships” (as the Japanese called them) stubbornly anchored themselves in the Bay of Yedo, prying open Japanese ports to U.S. trade. Elisha Kent Kane, infatuated with the spirit rapper Maggie Fox, would soon publish his best-selling Arctic Explorations, about his quest to find the lost explorer Sir John Franklin—and about the harrowing, seductive pursuit of the Northwest Passage and an open polar sea: manifest destiny in different dress.
Americans loved a journey. They loved the ocean, the forests, the fauna, the vastness, the Barnumesque variety, even the sublimity of it all and, Thoreau notwithstanding, they loved to consider its rich land ripe for the taking. Unable to distinguish between spectatorship and ownership, they loved to plant their flags, which the surveyor John Frémont had done in the Rocky Mountains. And they loved the explorer and adventurer, especially if he was a daring and handsome man, part patriot, part expansionist, part rogue filibusterer. That too was John Frémont.
By 1856 Frémont was a national celebrity who had undertaken five exploring expeditions and rather enjoyed the notoriety he earned from them. Known as the Pathfinder, he’d mapped out a route from Missouri to Oregon (the Oregon Trail) as well as routes through Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and of course California, where in 1849, as the fledgling state’s very first senator, he voted for abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. “The West,” one historian wrote, “was also the chessboard in the Great Game between North and South.”
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