"Chants Democratic and Native American": A Neglected Sequence in the Growth of Leaves of Grass

Abstract

TN THE BROODING AND FATEFUL DAYS of the spring of i86o Walt A-Whitman issued the third edition of Leaves of Grass. While the political crisis swirled through the nation's cities, Walt Whitman read galley proofs of this new edition in the office of Thayer and Eldridge, his new publishers, in Boston. Though it might seem that the erstwhile Democratic party ward worker was committing an act of gross indifference by sitting back and watching his party crumble and his nation divide into two hostile ideological camps, the truth is that Whitman was now finally working to achieve the goal of a Poet of Democracy, to write his evangel poem of comrades. If tempers flared around him, he would, in his new volume, answer tempers with his own combination of gentle persuasion, anger and superideological reconstruction of the American experience. He referred to this revised and greatly augmented edition of Leaves of Grass as the New Bible.1 The revelation of its scriptures was the ordained Union of States, in themselves a new type of answer to the eternal cry of mankind for the messiah and for the millennium.2 Far from being the work of an aimless and disillusioned village-democrat-turned-sour, Leaves of Grass i86o was