feeling like walt whitman

Part of what makes me such a huge fan of Walt Whitman is the personal revelations he went through when he moved from New York City to New Orleans for a three month editorial position and the way that his time in the southern city effected his politics and poetry.

In the beginning of his career, Whitman was opposed to abolitionism and abolitionsts as he believe the movement did more harm and created more commotion than good. Whitman believed that abolitionists had slowed the progression of the anti-slavery movement by being too politically extreme and disrupting the democratic process. That being said, Whitman also disapproved of the Southern state and their inability to put the interests of the nation above their own. After his short time in New Orleans, living in the culture, amongst the slaves, he returned to New York City with an entirely new perspective. In his unpublished word, The Eighteenth Presidency, Whitman wrote to the men of the South “either you abolish slavery of I abolish you”. After his time in New Orleans, he was entirely disgusted and moved to action by the idea of people being traded as if they were lifeless commodities.

This is how I felt when I read chapters three and four of Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It's safe to say that every American has learned something about slavery throughout their many year's in the national educational system. We learn about the civil war, abolitionists, the cruelty of slavery, and sometimes even slavery as it exists in modern day with human trafficking, forced labor, abduction, and prostitution. That being said, narratives have the ability to pull emotions out of readers that history textbooks simply cannot.

When it comes to slavery, it’s safe to say that I am well educated, but upon reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I was struck like Whitman during his time in New Orleans by the ways in which the story’s white characters so easily dismissed the notion of life and humanism in their slaves. One passage that particularly moved me was the passage in chapter three where Linda discusses the dispensability of elder slaves.

“Slaveholders have a method, peculiar to their institution, of getting rid of old slaves, whose lives have been worn out in their service. I knew an old woman, who for seventy years faithfully served her master. She has become almost helpless, from hard labor and disease. Her owners moved to Alabama, and the old black woman was left to be sold to any body who would give twenty dollars for her” (17).

Though I had most certainly read about elder slaves and their role in the slave economy, I had never read about it in a way that highlighted the blatant disregard of life and emotion in the slave owners. I found myself angry, as if I wanted to write an Eighteenth Presidency of my own and years after American slavery ended. This feeling persisted through the entire reading.