Young Walt Whitman
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by Philip Gambone

During the winter of 1836-1837, Walt Whitman took a teaching position near Babylon, on Long Island. At age seventeen, the man who would become one of America's greatest poets, had already tried his hand at a variety of other callings as well: office boy, apprentice newspaperman, journeyman printer, amateur debater, and occasional writer of stories and sketches. But no matter the job, words were his passion.

It was a heady time in which to be a young American. The air was alive with talk about presidential politics, abolition, Irish immigration, and worker's rights. According to Gay Wilson Allen, one of his biographers, the teenage Whitman took part in formal debates over the advantages of military training, vocational versus liberal education, bonuses for soldiers, imperialism, and "the practicality of settling national disputes without war."

War talk was in the air. News of slave rebellions and Indian wars filled the newspapers. Above all, there was the news from Texas. After ten years of increasingly hostile confrontations between the Mexican government and the ever-growing population of Anglo-American settlers in Mexico, the Texians, as they called themselves, declared independence from the mother country and established a republic on March 2, 1836.

How the creation of the Texas Republic affected Whitman is not known. During this period, he was, according to Allen, "absorbed in his teaching and experiments in writing, kept to himself, [and] confided in no one." However, by the early 1840s, Whitman had come out of his shell. He was more and more engaged in newspaper work, and before he was twenty-three, took charge of one of New York's dailies, the Aurora. His editorial stance tended toward self-reliant individualism. Other newspaper jobs followed, the most important of which was his editorship of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

The two years that Whitman edited the Daily Eagle (March 1846 – January 1848) correspond, almost exactly, to the dates of the Mexican-American War. This war, which resulted in the U.S. appropriation of the self-proclaimed Texas Republic and a vast portion of other Mexican territory, was waged on the grounds that it was the "Manifest Destiny" of the United States—a term coined in 1845 by John L. Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review— "to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." The idea took off. The proponents of Manifest Destiny saw the expansionist designs of the United States as sanctioned by the Almighty Himself.

It may surprise some—it certainly did me—that during his editorship, Whitman, world citizen and the champion of democracy, fell into line with the rampant nationalism of the day. A piece he wrote in the Daily Eagle (May 11, 1846) argued "the necessity of an immediate Declaration of War." Ten days later, after Congress had in fact declared war, Whitman continued to press his claim, writing that "this nation should prosecute a vigorous and stern war with the enemy—carrying our arms, if need be, into the very capital of Mexico."

Whitman upheld the right of the United States to incorporate Texas and other Mexican territory into the United States. "We love to indulge in thoughts of the future extent and power of this Republic," he wrote on July 7, 1846, "because with its increase is the increase of human happiness and liberty…. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race? Be it ours to achieve that mission!"

Mexican War Battle
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In another Daily Eagle editorial, Whitman proclaimed that the American victories in the Mexican War "rival[ed] the fights of old in Grecian passes, and the proudest examples of Latin valor!" At the same time, he extoled "the interchange of business and pleasure" that supposedly took place between American soldiers and the natives of Mexico. He had great hopes that the war would, in the long run, "hasten the advent of that holy era when all swords shall be beat into plough shares and spears into pruning-hooks."

The other two Brooklyn papers and some in New York City opposed the war, but Whitman was steadfast in his loyalty to the cause and his opposition to the anti-war Whig Party. Indeed, in an editorial "Annexation" (June 6, 1846), he posited the idea of the annexation of "the main bulk" of Mexico. In the "large, fertile and beautiful" Yucatan, there was, he stated, "a wide popular disposition to come under the wings of [the American] eagle. Moreover, California and Santa Fe—how long a time would elapse, he asked, before they, too, would shine "as two new stars in our mighty firmament?"

To the accusation of expansionist greediness, Whitman declared that "such greediness is not ours. We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching, only inasmuch as it will take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good…. We have no ambition for the mere physical grandeur of this Republic. Such grandeur is idle and deceptive enough. Or at least it is only desirable as an aid to reach the truer good, the good of the whole body of the people." In another editorial (October 13, 1846), Whitman pronounced Gen. Zachary Taylor's capture of Monterey to be "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character."

Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico (1848)
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Eventually, Whitman's zeal for the war started to diminish. By the winter, he felt that the war had gone on long enough. "Let it go no further!" he wrote on January 4, 1847. "Enough has been done to revenge our offended honor. The Mexicans have been punished enough."

Various commentators have sought to understand what one has called Whitman's "spreadeagleism and Democratic-imperialism." They take pains to point out that his idea was merely "to take territory that was sparsely settled and make it bloom through cultivation and throb with virile and free life," as Cleveland Rodgers and John Black wrote in their book on Whitman's essays for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Rodgers and Black make much of the fact that Whitman eventually supported the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prevented slavery from being introduced into the newly acquired territories. When Congress failed to pass the Wilmot Proviso, Whitman withdrew his support for the Democrats and President Polk and joined the short-lived Free-Soil Party.

President James K. Polk
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Quite understandably, the Mexican take on Whitman's support of the War is less forgiving. For example, Mauricio González de la Garza, a Mexican journalist and writer, has argued that Whitman's Brooklyn Daily Eagle essays "reflect his position on a war that had no other justification than territorial expansion at the expense of a weak nation." In his book, Walt Whitman: Racista, Imperialista, Antimexicano (1971), González de la Garza contends that patriotism for Whitman meant "domination of one's country over others and the right of Americans to impose themselves on other nations."

Manifest Destiny, González de la Garza wrote, became a magical phrase. "With it, in addition to becoming God's favorite children, [Americans] received a kind of plenary indulgence, which eliminated the hassle of justifying the United States' purpose regarding territorial expansion…. The phrase 'Manifest Destiny' transformed expansion into the inevitable by divine decree. To deny the Great Republic the right to be greater and greater was to oppose the will of God." In the end, González de la Garza contends, Whitman shared "the same imperialist mentality as Polk."

Manifest Destiny
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What are we to make of Whitman's initial fervent support of the Mexican War? Were his Brooklyn Daily editorials expressions of a callow political thinker? Did he impulsively fall into line with his party's jingoistic expansionism? Did he base his opinion of the Mexicans on sensationalistic accounts and propaganda? Was the idea of Manifest Destiny so intoxicating that he neglected to give it serious critical scrutiny?

To be fair, in his later poems, reminiscences and other writings, Whitman rarely again mentioned the Mexican War and, in fact, abjured his anti-Mexican rhetoric. In 1864, he wrote that Mexico was "the only one to whom we have ever really done wrong." And toward the end of his life, on the occasion of the 333rd anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe, he looked forward to "that composite American identity of the future, [in which] Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts." The American identity would, he wrote, have to include Spanish as well as "our aboriginal or Indian population—the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West."

That is the Whitman that we—gringos and Mexicans—can still enduringly celebrate, the poet who proclaimed himself "the mate and companion of all people." All people. As he wrote in Song of Myself, "I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, / By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms."

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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