Walt Whitman Looks at Boston

Abstract

AFTER a sufficient number of years have passed, any contemporary portraiture or appraisal of a given community gathers considerable local antiquarian interest. Such recording gains even wider historical significance when the setting involves so characteristic and individualized a milieu as that which Boston and its environs formerly possessed. This becomes true to an even greater degree when the period of observation extends over a span reaching from 1860, when a citizen of Concord was seized at night by the United States marshal, under an unlawful warrant from Washington, and carried before the Massachusetts supreme court' on the charge of being implicated in John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, to the year 1882, when one of America's permanently significant volumes of poetry was withdrawn from publication in Boston upon a threat of by the district attorney. An unsympathetic observer of this season of rapid and unparalleled change in the history of New England might almost be led to remark that the decline of true New England spirit could be traced definitively within that time, the score of years, between the trial of Frank B. Sanborn, when Boston was the centre of anti-slavery agitation in this country, and the famous publication and suppression of Leaves of Grass, which marked the rise of Boston as the capital of literary censorship in