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1. The Poet of Slaves
- The University of North Carolina Press
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Chapter One The Poet of Slaves I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves. —Walt Whitman, unpublished poem fragment, 1854 In early August 1848, the first national convention of the newly formed Free-Soil Party took place in Buffalo, New York. Those in attendance were a mix of former Democrats, Whigs, and Liberty Party members who, for various reasons, opposed the extension of slavery into territories acquired by the United States during the Mexican War. Walt Whitman attended the convention as one of the official delegates from Brooklyn. Like manyother Democrats who split with their party when it failed to support theWilmot Proviso’s ban on slavery in the new territories , Whitman joined the Free-Soil Party not because he opposed slavery per se but because he was worried that white laborers would be economically disadvantaged—“degraded,” as he put it—by the presence of slave labor in the West.1 Despite this disregard for African American civil rights held by many Free-Soilers, the platform of the party was broad enough to attract African American abolitionists who saw in the Free-Soil movement an opportunity to extend the national debate on slavery. Frederick Douglass, one of the featured speakers at the convention, said in retrospect, “Anti-slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought to make it a thunderbolt .”2 James M.Whitfield was living in Buffalo at the time of the Free-Soil convention. The son of free northern blacks, Whitfield had moved to Buffalo from his hometown in rural New Hampshire and was working as a barber, contributing to the local African American political community, and beginning to contemplate a career as a poet.3 While James M. Whitfi eld 22 James M. Whitfield the scant historical documents regarding Whitfield’s life do not definitively place him at the Free-Soil convention, it is all but certain that he was aware of it and more than likely that he felt an investment in its outcome. (The abolitionist newspaper the North Star, which heavily promoted the convention, lists Whitfield as one of its subscribers for the year and mentions Whitfield’s involvement in other abolitionist activities in upstate New York.)4 As an active participant in local antislavery efforts in Buffalo, Whit- field would have seized the opportunity to interact with the black abolitionists who came to the convention, including Douglass and his North Star coeditor Martin R. Delany.5 Following the convention, Whitfield’s poetry began to appear regularly in the North Star, and Whitfield himself soon became increasingly involved in various political movements led by Douglass and Delany.6 Whitfield’s involvement with these men—particularly with Delany—would later shape his career as both an activist and a poet. While it is probable that Whitfield interacted with various African American political leaders at the Buffalo convention, there is little chance that he met Whitman there. Despite the democratic and antiracist sentiments that characterize much of Leaves of Grass,Whitman had little contact with African Americans before the Civil War. Whitfield’s Buffalo barbershop, however, was a gathering place for men of letters and, as such, could have been a draw to Whitman.William Wells Brown wrote in the early 1860s, “There has long resided in Buffalo, New York, a barber, noted for his scholarly attainments and gentlemanlydeportment. Men of the most polished refinement visit his saloon [sic], and, while being shaved, take pleasure in conversing with him; and all who know him feel that he was intended by nature for a higher position in life.This is James M.Whitfield.”7 Whitman had already developed a sense of himself as a literatus at the time of the Free-Soil convention (by 1848 he had published a handful of poemsandafewworksofshortfiction),butitremainsanopenquestionasto whetheror not his burgeoning identityas a writer would have been a powerful enough motivation for him to seek out the literate company offered in Whitfield’s barbershop.8 By the 1850s, however, both poets would develop an interest in writing about life in the United States and, more specifically, in creating poetry that could somehow embody the nation itself. Even if the two men had met in Whitfield’s barbershop to discuss their mutual interest in writing poems that rendered the nation as verse, by 1848 neither had suf- [3.238.62.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09...