to secure other workers. In February 1836 he married and in March again crossed the continent, accompanied by his wife, Rev. and Mrs H. H. Spalding and W. H. Gray, and settled at Waiilatpu, near the present Walla Walla, Washington. Dissensions which arose among the missionaries and their apparent lack of success led to a resolution (February 1842) of the Prudential Committee of the Board to abandon the southern station. With the consent of his associates, Dr Whitman started from the station (3rd October 1842) on the perilous winter journey over the Rocky Mountains and across the plains for the missionary headquarters at Boston, to urge the revocation of the order. He visited New York and Washington also to enlist help and sympathy. On his return journey he joined a considerable body of emigrants on their way to Oregon and piloted them across the mountains. The mission, however, gained the ill-will of the Indians, and, on the 29th of October 1847 Dr and Mrs Whitman and twelve others were killed, and the station was broken up.
On the 16th of November 1864 the statement was published, on the authority of Mr Spalding, that the purpose of Dr Whitman's ride, twenty-two years before, was to prevent the cession of the territory to Great Britain. The story was amplified by Spalding and Gray in 1865, 1866 and 1870, and in its final form declared that Whitman learned at the British fort Walla Walla in September 1842 that a large number of British settlers were expected, and that it was hoped that the treaty then supposed to be in process of negotiation between Lord Ashburton and Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, would give the territory to the British. Thereupon Whitman made his way to Washington, and with much difficulty convinced Webster and President Tyler of the value of the country and prevented its exchange for fishing privileges off Newfoundland. This story has been widely disseminated, but Professor E. G. Bourne and Mr W. I. Marshall independently investigated the whole question, and showed that there is no evidence that Dr Whitman influenced or attempted to influence the State Department. For the pro-Whitman side, see W. H. Gray, Oregon (Portland, 1870); William Barrows, Oregon (Boston, 1883); O. W. Nixon, How Marcus Whitman saved Oregon (Chicago, 1895); W. A. Mowry, Marcus Whitman (New York, 1901); Myron Eells, Marcus Whitman (Seattle, 1909). On the other side see H. H. Bancroft, Oregon (San Francisco, 1886-1888); E. G. Bourne, Essays in Historical Criticism (New York, 1901); W. I. Marshall, History v. The Whitman-saved-Oregon Story (Chicago, 1904).
WHITMAN, WALT (1819–1892), American poet, was born at
West Hills, on Long Island, New York, on the 31st of May 1819.
His ancestry was mingled English and Holland Dutch, and had
flourished upon Long Island more than 150 years — long enough
to have taken deep root in the soil and to have developed, in its
farmers and seafaring men, many strong family traits. His
father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer and carpenter; his
mother, Louisa Van Velsor, was the granddaughter of a sea
captain. There do not appear to be any men in his line of
descent given to scholarly or intellectual pursuits till we get
back to the 17th century, when we come to Abijah Whitman,
a clergyman, settled in Connecticut. Later this Abijah moved
to Long Island, and from him all the Whitmans on the island
descended. Walt was the second of a family of nine children.
The parents early moved to Brooklyn, where Whitman spent his
youth. His career was a chequered one, like that of so many
other self-made American men. First he was an errand boy in
a lawyer's office; then he was employed in a printing office;
next he became a country school teacher; he founded (1836)
and till 1839 edited the Long Islander at Huntingdon, and
later edited a daily paper in Brooklyn (the Eagle, 1846–1847);
then he was found in New Orleans, on the editorial staff of the
Crescent (1848-1849); afterwards he passed his time carpentering,
building and selling small houses in Brooklyn (1851-1854),
in the meanwhile writing for the magazines and reviews and
turning out several novels, and finally revolving in his mind the
scheme of his Leaves of Grass. This scheme was probably
gestating in his mind during the years 1853, 1854 and 1855.
He frequently stopped his carpentering to work at his poems.
He left voluminous manuscript notes, showing the preparatory
studies and reflections that preceded the Leaves; many of them,
under the title of Notes and Fragments, were privately printed
by his literary executor, Dr Richard Maurice Bucke, in 1899.
Finally, in the summer of 1855 the first edition of Leaves of
Grass appeared — a small quarto of ninety-four pages. The book
did not attract the attention of the critics and the reading
public till a letter from Emerson to the poet, in which the volume
was characterized as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and
wisdom that America has yet contributed,” was published in
the New York Tribune. This created a demand for the book,
and started it upon a career that has probably had more vicissitudes
and called forth more adverse as well as more eulogistic
criticism than any other contemporary literary work. In 1856
a second and much enlarged edition of Leaves of Grass appeared.
In 1860 a third edition, with much new matter, was published
in Boston. In 1862 Whitman went to Washington to look after
his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, who was
wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg. Henceforth, for more
than ten years he remained in and about Washington, acting as
a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals as long as the war lasted,
and longer, and then finding employment as a clerk in the
government departments, in the meantime adding to and revising
his Leaves and publishing two or three editions of them, himself
his own publisher and bookseller. Out of his war experiences
came in 1866 his Drum Taps, subsequently incorporated into the
main volume. Early in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which
partially disabled him. He then went to Camden, New Jersey,
to live and continued to reside in that city till his death on the
27th of March 1892. In 1871 appeared his prose volume called
Democratic Vistas. In 1876 he published a thin volume, called
Two Rivulets, made up of prose and verse. Specimen Days and
Collect, also prose, appeared in 1882. New editions of his Leaves
continued to appear at intervals as long as he lived. A final and
complete edition of his works, including both prose and verse,
was published in Philadelphia in 1889.
Whitman never married, never left America, never laid up, or aimed to lay up, riches: he gave his time and his substance freely to others, belonged to no club nor coterie, associated habitually with the common people — mechanics, coach-drivers, working men of all kinds — was always cheerful and optimistic. He was large and picturesque of figure, slow of movement, tolerant, receptive, democratic and full of charity and goodwill towards all. His life was a poet's life from first to last — free, unworldly, unhurried, unconventional, unselfish, and was contentedly and joyously lived. He left many notes that throw light upon his aims and methods in composing Leaves of Grass. “Make no quotations,” he charged himself, “and no reference to any other writers. Lumber the writing with nothing — let it go as lightly as the bird flies in the air or a fish swims in the sea. Avoid all poetical similes; be faithful to the perfect likelihoods of nature healthy, exact, simple, disdaining ornaments. Do not go into criticisms or arguments at all; make full-blooded, rich, flush, natural works. Insert natural things, indestructibles, idioms, characteristics, rivers, states, persons, &c. Be full of strong sensual germs. . . . Poet! beware lest your poems are made in the spirit that comes from the study of pictures of things — and not from the spirit that comes from the contact with real things themselves.” The mother-idea of his poems, he says, is democracy, and democracy “carried far beyond politics into the region of taste, the standards of manners and beauty, and even into philosophy and theology.” His Leaves certainly radiates democracy as no other modern literary work does, and brings the reader into intimate and enlarged relations with fundamental human qualities — with sex, manly love, charity, faith, self-esteem, candour, purity of body, sanity of mind. He was democratic because he was not in any way separated nor detached from the common people by his quality, his culture, or his aspirations. He was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Tried by current standards his poems lack form and structure, but they undoubtedly have in full measure the qualities and merits that the poet sought to give them.
(J. Bu.)
See his Complete Writings (10 vols., New York, 1902), with bibliographical and critical matter by O. L. Triggs. His Poems (1902) has a biographical introduction by John Burroughs, whose Whitman: A Study (Boston, 1896) forms the tenth volume of the “New Riverside” edition of the poet's works. See also Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada, with Extracts from other of his Diaries and Literary Notebooks
