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Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1.	Historical Background
Chapter 2.	Time Line
Chapter 3.	New York City
Chapter 4.	Boston, 1860
Chapter 5.	Washington, D.C.
Chapter 6.	Boston, 1881
Chapter 7.	Camden & Eminent Visitors
Chapter 8.	Dublin
Chapter 9.	Coda
Notes

INTRODUCTION

On May 27, 1846, just four days short of his twenty-seventh birthday, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Walter Whitman as he was known then, informed his readers that "'Valentine M'Clutchy, the Irish Agent' . . . a well-printed book . . . from the pen of one of the most popular Irish writers, the author of 'Fardorougha, the Miser,'" was available at a local bookstore. The editor had "no doubt" that it would "be found good reading." ¹   The unnamed author, whom Whitman seems to assume his readers will know, was William Carleton (1794–1869, one of Ireland's finest nineteenth-century novelists. Whitman's recommendation was made on the basis of his own and his readers' familiarity with Carleton's Fardorougha, which had an American edition in 1840 and was widely read. In fact, Carleton's novels were so popular in America that a collected works had five American editions between 1856 and 1885. ²  

On another occasion many years later, in 1888, Whitman was deep in memories of his dearest companion Peter Doyle after having read over again an old letter from "Pete." Speaking of Doyle to Horace Traubel, the young man who was to become the chronicler of his final days, Whitman (sounding like Matthew Arnold at his accommodationist best) attributed Pete's finest qualities to his being Irish: The real Irish character, the higher samples of it, the real Keltic [sic] influences; how noble, tenacious, loyal, they are!" ³   Then, suddenly, adding:

You should read—you probably have not read—a book called The Collegians, printed some fifty years ago. I can't think of the author's name—my memory plays me such shabby tricks these days—(though I should know it—it is a familiar name). . . . It is a beautiful study of Irish life, Irish character—a little uncanny, but very important for some of the things it discloses. I am not a voracious novel reader—never was—but some few of the novels I have read stick to me like gum arabic—won't let go. The Collegians was one of them. ⁴  

Like Carleton, Gerald Griffin was also a writer popular with the general public in America as well as with Irish readers. The works of both men were serialized in New York newspapers and magazines, Carleton's running in Brother Jonathan early in the 1840s when Whitman published two of his early poems there. While he makes no mention of it, Whitman may also have read John M. Moore's The Adventures of Tom Stapleton, which began serialization in Brother Jonathan in January 1842, the same month Whitman's poem "Ambition" appeared there.

Whitman's references to these Irish novelists somewhat undermine his claim not to have read many novels. They better support a counterclaim he made at another time and which Traubel also reports, that Whitman had read "cartloads" of novels when he was young and that they were "a most important formative element" in his education. ⁵   While we are aware of his love for the novels of Eliot, Dickens, and Sand, it is clear from the references to these two Irish novelists, who are admired yet for their skill at characterization, that whether he read many or a few, Whitman had an innate critical sense of what made a novel good—its faithful depiction of human nature. Certainly his high praise of The Collegians, Griffin's 1829 novel of Irish country life (which years later would have its parallel in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy), has been seconded by literary critics of the caliber of William Butler Yeats, who included it in his list of the best Irish books, and Padraic Colum, who called it "the best of the Irish romantic novels." ⁶   As for Carleton, Yeats so admired his writing that he edited the anthology Stories from Carleton (1889). In an article where he extolled Carleton as "the peasant Chaucer of a new tradition," Yeats, quite coincidentally, created an undeniably Whitmanian catalog of Carleton's novelistic offerings: "[Carleton] was able to give us a vast multitude of grotesque, pathetic, humorous persons, misers, pig-drivers, drunkards, schoolmaster, labourers, priests, madmen, and to fill them all with an abounding vitality." ⁷   Small wonder Whitman found Carleton "good reading."

If not from the New York publications, Whitman may have become aware of Griffin's The Collegians through his friend Edward H. House, an habitue of Pfaff's, the Broadway restaurant (actually more of a pub) where Whitman spent many nights in the late 1850s and early 1860s. House is believed to have collaborated with Dion Boucicault in the creation of The Colleen Bawn, a very popular stage version of Griffin's novel, which Whitman, a frequenter of the theater and familiar with Boucicault's work, probably saw. ⁸   Whitman also loved Scott's novels and may have noticed the similarity of The Collegians to The Heart of Midlothian, his particular favorite among Scott's works, and may have even found something reminiscent of the farmers on his native Long Island in Griffin's depiction of eighteenth-century Ireland's country people. We do not know if Whitman was aware that the author was born in Limerick, birthplace of his friend Peter Doyle, but he makes it clear that he saw in Pete the same characteristics that are presented in Griffin's tale and that he found these characteristics highly impressive whether encountered in fiction or in life. ⁹  

Griffin made much of "national" characteristics, a topic of great interest to nineteenth-century Americans, which is discussed in chapter 1 in some detail. Despite this interest, we do not find the Irish well represented in American literature prior to the twentieth century, their depiction, like that of blacks, having been left largely to the popular stage. In his poetry Whitman presents both blacks and the Irish, though the latter appear mainly in his lengthy catalogs and are thus not easily discovered. If he cast about for literary precedents, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Teague O'Regan in Modern Chivalry (1792–1805) must surely have come to mind, for he is one of the most delightful characters to be encountered in early American fiction. Teague's opportunistic but beguiling attempts to rise in the loosely ordered frontier society of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania are the occasion for great humor but also allow Brackenridge to lecture him, and the reader, on the need for a rational approach to democracy and the elevation to public office of those who are best prepared for the responsibility. While Teague's political ambitions are treated with indulgent amusement, they signal what will later become a genuine fear in American society, the highly politicized Irish immigrant male eager to avail himself of democratic prerogatives.

The late eighteenth century offers another portrait of an Irish immigrant, less well known than O’Regan but more interesting for the psychological complexity with which he is drawn. Clithero Edny (whose surname is an anagram of “deny”) in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) is both a victim of his lowly birth among the peasantry of Ireland’s County Armagh and the victimizer of the family of an English landlord whose wife seeks to improve Edny’s condition. Though Edny harbors murderous intent, Brown’s protagonist, the humanitarian Edgar Huntly, seeks only to reach the Irishman on a humane level, a rationalist approach which he learns too late is foolhardy. ¹⁰  

Not so easily discerned is the culpability of another character in the book known only as Dr. Sarsefield, who becomes a father figure to both Huntly and Edny. While he is never identified as Irish, his name suggests it, for it echoes that of Patrick Sarsfield (?–1693), who achieved heroic status when he and his Irish cavalry defended Limerick against the forces of William of Orange following the defeat at the Battle of the Boyne. In a romance infused with the shadowy influences of denied or unacknowledged evil and dominated by the fear of various kinds of “others” (immigrants, American Indians, those who manifest such disorders as sleep walking), Sarsefield, a physician, is the supposed example of the truly rational man, yet he bears a good deal of responsibility for the tragedy that concludes the tale. ¹¹   He and Edny are thus twinned villains and are perhaps of the same national origin.

Whitman created no Irish characters in his early works of fiction but did include the Irish as part of the democratic portrait of America he draws in Leaves of Grass. He could hardly have done otherwise. In 1855 when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, 72 percent of New York’s workers were foreign born, and of these the Irish formed about 45 percent; of the city’s total population, 30 percent were Irish. ¹²   The Irish moved into the workforce wherever they were welcomed, as day laborers, bricklayers, servants, carters, ferrymen, and longshoremen. In the years before the Civil War New York was a workers’ city, with a working-class culture that inspired Whitman and to which he responded joyfully. Within this environment the Irish, as the city’s largest ethnic group, maintained a cultural identity of their own. Crowded into the lower Manhattan districts of the First, Fourth, and Sixth political wards, they re-created there the familiar, the world of church and public house, and added the new-found joys of inexpensive entertainment and engagement in politics. All of this “Irishness” swirled about Whitman as he trod the streets of his “Mannahatta,” and it became part of him and his poetry. In his private life his contacts with the Irish and Irish Americans were among the most important, and the most satisfying, of his life experiences. In general, Whitman’s remarks about the Irish are so generous that they offset the effect of the one incident most often referred to as evidence of his antipathy for them, an 1842 attack in the New York Aurora on Bishop John Hughes. The contradiction, if real, needs explanation and is addressed in chapter 1.

The overall need for a work such as this became clear to me in 1996 when I was asked by my friend and colleague Maureen Murphy, who is a specialist in Irish studies, to make some welcoming comments to members of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature at their annual conference. The association was meeting that year at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, where Murphy and I are on the faculty. Since Long Island is Whitman’s birthplace, it seemed appropriate to comment on Whitman and the Irish. To my surprise, I found no definitive published scholarship on which to draw except for studies that included reference to such events as Edward Dowden’s 1871 appreciation and Oscar Wilde’s visit in 1882. Terence Diggory’s critical study, Yeats and American Poetry, included Whitman but was narrowed by its subject matter. Drawing together some remarks for the occasion, I began then to outline a study of Whitman’s connections not only to the literary people at Trinity College and to the Irish literary revival but also to the Irish and Irish Americans with whom he came in actual contact. Not surprisingly, these latter connections became the major portion of the study and now constitute the first five chapters of this book. Despite attempts to trace all of the individuals with obviously Irish surnames with whom Whitman was in contact, some remain elusive. One of these is the Frank Sweezey (or possibly Sweeney) in New York to whom Whitman claimed to have told the full story of the unknown “Ellen Eyre,” who wrote Whitman a highly suggestive letter in 1862. If the same occupational stereotypes held then as now, Sweezey may have been a bartender, for Whitman appears to have confided in him because he “talks very little.” ¹³   Other Irish connections, such as with the Irish-born David Goodman Croly, editor of the New York Daily Graphic, where Whitman published a number of poems in the 1870s, proved insignificant.

While the book is by no means a biography of Whitman, of necessity it has required a presentation of background on his life and work so that the reader is properly situated in each chapter. I have been keenly aware in writing it that a book of this kind draws two distinct audiences, as represented by the title. My task has been to interest both groups while filling in, to the best of my ability, gaps that may exist within the respective compasses of each. I must admit, however, to a greater knowledge of American studies than Irish studies; further, much of what is presented here is by way of narrative, establishing the kinds of links between Whitman and the Irish upon which subsequent critical and theoretical studies can be built.

The format governing the chapters is geographical rather than biographical, which allows an examination of Whitman’s connections with the Irish and Irish Americans in those United States cities where they were located in large numbers. While Washington, D.C., does not fit the schema in that it did not have a large number of Irish, it is important because of two Irish friends there who were especially close to Whitman, William Douglas O’Connor and Peter Doyle. New York and Boston are natural sites for him to have made Irish contacts, but one regrets the lack of a chapter on Philadelphia, another city with a large Irish population and located just across the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman spent his final years. Whitman’s personal contacts in Philadelphia were few, however, and with the exception of the visiting Irish American sculptor William O’Donovan and perhaps of some working men, did not include, so far as I have been able to determine, any Irish.

I hope that the reader will not be disconcerted by the interweaving of fact and supposition in chapter 1. While we know of certain connections Whitman had to New York’s Irish, his early years in Brooklyn and New York still have large gaps in factual information, though it is always hoped that scholarship will fill these blanks. Many links are suggested here on the basis of Whitman’s enormous interest in everything that took place in New York City and the involvement of the Irish in so much of what went on there. The first of the two Boston chapters brings Whitman into the abolitionist activities of that city and their impact on the Irish. It examines attitudes toward the Irish revealed by leading New Englanders and draws some parallels between Whitman’s abolitionist sentiments and those of Boston’s Irish immigrants. The second Boston chapter revisits William O’Connor’s role in defending Whitman against the suppression of the 1881 Leaves of Grass. This is a familiar matter to Whitman scholars, but the chapter also lays out for the first time Whitman’s friendship with another Irishman, one of Boston’s outstanding figures in his time, John Boyle O’Reilly.

Chapter 5 moves in the direction of the leap across “the pond” that occurs in the final chapter by bringing together accounts of visits to Whitman by three Irishmen, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and William Summers. In the case of Wilde, it also examines the Irish writer’s role in the Swinburne “defection,” as it has been called, the change of heart toward Whitman by the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. The final chapter takes us to Dublin, where a coterie of Whitman admirers formed around Edward Dowden at Trinity College, and establishes the roles of Standish James O’Grady, Thomas W. H. Rolleston, William Butler Yeats, and others in furthering an appreciation of Whitman among Europeans. It also examines Yeats’s changing reactions to Whitman, in whose work he seems to have seen a harbinger of the fate of culture in a modern society. Fearful, perhaps, of an approaching democratic state, Yeats chose to turn to his country’s past rather than risk further loss of Irish culture to a poetic voice that may not have resonated with the Irish people.

In what might be termed the final chapter of Whitman’s life, the years 1889 to 1892, there were other, though not highly significant, Irish connections that deserve to be mentioned here. Late in 1889 Whitman decided on the site at Harleigh Cemetery, outside Camden, where he wished to be buried. Some of the cemetery personnel had tried to convince him that the site should be prominent and highly visible, with no trees about to obscure the view. Only one man on the staff understood his feeling, that nature should be kept “in her own character—not to have her spoiled, deflected.” ¹⁴   That man was Ralph Moore, the cemetery superintendent whom Whitman spoke of as “an Irishman of the better kind: I like him.” He urged Horace Traubel to introduce himself to “Mr. Moore,” adding, “you will like him—he has a genuine way—and as engineer, gardener, has a good deal to tell.” ¹⁵   Moore was able to understand Whitman’s desire to go deep in the woods and agreed with the poet that it was necessary to keep the trees.

The sympathy between the two men seems to have been so well established that Whitman was able to sum Moore up for Traubel: “Moore is not bitten with the art-side of life: not sacrificed to that band of all literary, artistic ambition: elegance, system, convention, rule, canons. In that respect he is our man.” ¹⁶   Whitman so trusted Moore that in signing a contract for the tomb he appended a note leaving the details of the design and layout to him. This proved to be a mistake, for Moore allowed the cost of construction to outrun the agreed-upon sum. Yet when the tomb was completed and the bill was more than Whitman could pay, Whitman refused to believe that Moore was involved in any deceit. The matter was finally settled to Whitman’s satisfaction, and Ralph Moore’s name cleared. Though younger than Whitman and, according to Traubel, “a giant, rosy with health,” Moore died unexpectedly in December 1891, three months before Whitman’s death. ¹⁷  

The tomb plans brought another Irishman into Whitman’s life. At the suggestion of Whitman’s friend Thomas Donaldson, a Philadelphia sculptor came to discuss the design of the burial vault. He was John J. Boyle (1851–1917), an Irish American born in New York City, who grew up in Philadelphia. Originally a stonecutter, he studied sculpting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in Paris. In 1880 he had completed a bronze group, Indian Family, or The Alamo, for Chicago’s Lincoln Park and later a bronze, Stone Age in America, for Philadelphia. Whitman was hesitant about having a recognized sculptor’s opinion on the matter of the vault, since he feared “the temptation [of sculptors] to make their work genteel,” but Boyle pleased Whitman with his suggestion “simply to have a rough boulder with a bronze leaf somewhere carelessly disposed.” ¹⁸   Though it is not certain that Boyle did design the tomb, Whitman was well disposed toward him and his ideas, and Traubel records the advice he (Traubel) gave the sculptor: “Make the vault elemental—keep it strictly to elements: it more fits Whitman’s character and tastes than anything else.” ¹⁹   The tomb as it stands fulfills these instructions. It’s comforting to know that Whitman had a few good Irishmen to help him in this important decision of where and how he would spend eternity.

Finally, some explanation must be offered of terms used throughout this book. “Irish” and, at times, “the Irish,” are most often used in the same all-encompassing sense that Whitman and those of his time used it, to refer to those born in Ireland, either north or south, Protestant or Catholic, and to Irish Americans, whether naturalized or born in the United States of Irish parents. Where necessary, the term is modified textually for greater specificity and at times is set off by quotation marks to indicate Whitman’s rather stereotypical references to the Irish people. In the historical discussions the term “Anglo-Irish” is used with reference to the Protestant community that came to the foreground in Ireland in the eighteenth century when they became the principal landowners. Though few in number, they are said to have “ascended” economically, educationally, and politically above the Catholic Irish, a position they continued to hold until late in the nineteenth century. In the literary sense, “Anglo-Irish” also refers to the literature of Ireland written in the English language.

There are many people who helped me in researching and preparing this book. I wish first of all to thank Maureen Murphy for reading the manuscript, offering advice and encouragement, and for being my friend. Julie Jones was an enthusiastic listener and saw to it that I was introduced to professors of literature at Trinity College who shared her enthusiasm for this project. Thomas Heffernan and the members of the Columbia University Seminar in Irish Studies were most helpful, as were the members of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature and the Irish American Heritage and Culture Week Committee of the Board of Education of the City of New York. Various libraries and their curators and librarians provided vital information, among them Trinity College Library and the National Library, Dublin; the New York Public Library; the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland; Boston College Library; the New-York Historical Society Library; the Donald and Joan Axinn Library at Hofstra University; and the American Irish Historical Society. Thanks are due, too, to John Ridge, Craig Rustici, Thomas D’Agostino, Richard Ryan, and Albert von Frank. In Dublin I was warmly and graciously entertained by Annette, Bridget, and Una O’Connor, the “Three Graces,” as James Joyce would have dubbed them. The suggestions of readers and editors at the University of Iowa Press were invaluable, as was the work of Robert Burchfield. The loving support of my husband, John, during the writing of this book, in what proved to be the final summer of his life, will always be remembered.

1.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Ask most Americans at what point their nation’s history first touched Ireland’s and the answer will likely be, “At the time of the Irish famine when all the immigrants came here.” Few realize the Irish were in America before the American Revolution and that many were involved in the revolution. In fact, countless episodes of Irish history, and the history of the Irish in America, remain obscure to the average American. While nineteenth-century Ireland is somewhat scantily known for its Fenianism and for Charles Stewart Parnell, twentieth-century Irish history has been so romanticized in film and song as to cast it, as well, into a shadowy light. With this in mind, and conscious that the narrative of Walt Whitman’s connections to and influence on the Irish must be placed against a backdrop of historical events, a brief overview is offered of events pertinent to that narrative.

The earliest point at which America can be said to have played a role in Irish history was when the Irish saw in England’s distraction, at the time of the war between France and England from 1793 to 1802, an opportunity to press their own claims. Because of the similarities between their colonial status and that of the North Americans, Irish sympathy lay heavily with the colonies at the time of their rebellion. When American independence signaled to England the instability of its position relative to its colonies, there was a movement on the part of the Westminster Parliament to allow the Irish Parliament legislative autonomy. Ireland’s parliamentary government was a product of the Middle Ages and represented the acknowledgment of a common need among the disparate peoples of that time. Under England’s rule, however, the Dublin Parliament had lost the freedom to legislate for its own people.

Concessions made by England revived the spirit of a people who, in ancient times, had belonged to independent kingdoms until raiding Danes and Norsemen disturbed their civilization. The great Irish hero Brian Boru routed the Danes in the eleventh century, but by 1171 Henry II, with the blessing of a papal bull, began the conquest of Ireland for his Norman lords. For another hundred years the English and the Normans fought to retain hold of Ireland, with the English barely managing to hang on and, by 1400, reduced to inhabiting a circumscribed area around Dublin known as “the Pale.”

Under succeeding kings, England managed to gain greater advantage and exert increasing control over the Irish, but things took a radical turn in the sixteenth century when Henry VIII separated his country from Roman Catholicism and established himself as head of the Church of England. The Irish, however, remained loyal to Rome. When Henry VIII made the Protestant Church of Ireland their official church they suffered for their resistance by having their lands taken from them and by being denied the right to hold public office. Never ceasing to agitate and never deserting their faith, the Irish rebelled repeatedly and each time were punished by the loss of more freedoms. The worst such punishment came when Oliver Cromwell landed at Dublin in 1649 and conducted a campaign of conquest that included the massacre and dispossession of thousands of Irish.

In the decade between Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland in 1649 and the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Joseph Whitman moved, in 1657, from Connecticut to Huntington, Long Island, New York. Joseph was nephew to John Whitman, who had arrived from England in 1635 on the True Love and settled in Massachusetts. Before long Joseph Whitman would own a very sizeable portion of the West Hills area surrounding Huntington, where Walt Whitman was born.

Later in the century Ireland thought it saw an opportunity to gain ground by welcoming England’s Catholic king, James II, when he was forced to abdicate; however, both the Irish forces and James’s were beaten at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. This defeat, bitterly remembered by the Catholic Irish, was triumphantly celebrated by the Protestant Irish on each anniversary of the date. In the nineteenth century these celebrations, brought by immigrants from both sides of the religious conflict to the streets of American cities, became the cause of violent riots. The defeat at the Boyne would echo through the streets of New York City every July for a good part of the nineteenth century, with at least one such reminder terminating in a riot severe enough for Walt Whitman to comment on. On these occasions Ulster Orangemen (named for William of Orange, James II’s Protestant son-in-law who helped drive the king from his throne) paraded through the most densely populated Catholic Irish areas of the city, a practice continued in Northern Ireland to this day.

The penal laws that followed the defeat of the Jacobites aimed at eradicating Catholicism in Ireland. Meanwhile, Scottish Presbyterians, who were planted in northern Ireland after what is known as the “Flight of the Earls” (the exodus of the most powerful northern families after their defeat in a futile effort against a southern enemy), took control of the land so that the 59 percent of Irish soil that had been owned by Catholics in 1641 fell to 14 percent by 1703. ¹  

In 1780, just a year after the birth of Walter Whitman Sr. and two years before Cornwallis’s surrender to the revolutionary forces in America, Henry Grattan, a member of Parliament from Dublin, moved for an independent Irish legislature. Although the motion failed, it was successful in 1782, and for a time relations between the two parliaments improved. The revolution in France, however, reawakened a thirst for independence, which led an Irish barrister, Theobald Wolfe Tone, to argue for sweeping reforms of a kind the English Parliament was not ready to grant. Tone saw an advantage in uniting the interests of two groups, Irish Catholics and Protestant radicals who refused the claims on their allegiance of the established Anglican church. He also sought the help of France and in 1798 undertook a rebellion, which failed when the small number of French who arrived in August of that year were defeated along with the Irish revolutionaries in September. The rebellion was brutally put down, and Tone committed suicide rather than allow the English to hang him. In New York Rufus King, then serving as United States minister to England, learned that the British planned to banish the captured Irish rebels to America and protested against the United States becoming a new penal colony for England. In 1803 Robert Emmet attempted to revive the revolutionary fervor of 1798 but was hanged and beheaded for his fruitless efforts. While no direct evidence of this exists, it seems likely that Walter Whitman Sr. would have been as supportive and admiring of this revolutionary attempt as he was of all others directed against European tyrannies. It was in this democratic and dissenting atmosphere that Walter Jr. spent his formative years and which led to his veneration of such freethinkers as Thomas Paine and Frances Wright. Later he would add to these the Irish who fought to secure for themselves their own native land.

The immediate result of the 1798 rebellion was an enforced Act of Union in 1800 that created a United Kingdom in which Ireland’s Catholic population was a minority among the combined Protestant populations in England, Scotland, and Wales. This United Kingdom of Great Britain lasted until Ireland gained independence in 1922. Ireland’s north became the industrialized region, and Belfast soon took precedence over Dublin. Under the Union, Protestants were privileged over Catholics in all social and political institutions; most egregious was the stipulation that Catholics were not allowed to serve in Parliament, a provision that was remedied in 1829 with the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill for which Daniel O’Connell, a Catholic lawyer and head of the Catholic Association, had fought for more than a decade.

Once emancipation was won O’Connell soon took his fight in a new direction, leading a movement to repeal the Act of Union by constitutional means. Though the movement was slow to gather momentum, by 1840 he had enough support to launch a Repeal Association. The association attracted a group of young literary men, Catholic and Protestant, who acquired the name “Young Ireland.” This group was not interested in constitutional reform, and saw repeal as only a half-way measure toward full separation of Ireland from England. In the event of such a separation, however, they wished to see neither religious faction gain an ascendency in Ireland, so they sought to focus attention instead on a common national culture of history and literature.

One of their leaders was a Protestant attorney, Thomas Davis, who, with Charles Gavan Duffy, founded the Nation, a periodical devoted to fostering their ideals. Through the pages of the widely read Nation Davis became the spokesperson for a cultural nationalism, the aim of which was to free the Irish people of their cultural dependency on Britain and provide them with a set of values that were distinctively Irish. After Davis’s death in 1845 Duffy assumed leadership of the group and split with O’Connell over the issue of O’Connell’s determined belief in constitutional nationalism as the only viable position.

In these same years Walt Whitman was making his first impress on the city of New York, soon to become the refuge of thousands of Irish. In May 1841 he went to work in the printing office of the New York New World, a weekly newspaper, and in July he gave a speech at a Democratic Party rally in City Hall Park. These newspaper and political activities were leading Whitman in new directions so that he came to know such Irish champions of democracy as Mike Walsh, of the New York Spartan Band and one of the “Bowery b’hoys,” and John L. O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan, best remembered for originating the words “Manifest Destiny,” owned and edited the highly influential United States Magazine and Democratic Review, where Whitman published fiction pieces. After becoming editor of the New York Aurora in 1842, however, Whitman came out against the Irish in New York, a position he took because of strong democratic reasons of his own.

Soon after, in Ireland, both the Repeal movement and Young Ireland were overshadowed by a natural disaster of such proportions that it swept away all other concerns. In 1845 the potato crop was destroyed by a fungal disease that caused black spots to appear on the leaves of potato plants and the potatoes to wither and rot. These were the first signs of the famine that would blight large portions of Ireland in that year and again in 1846, 1848, and 1849. By the end of the decade the population of Ireland had declined by 1.6 million people who died of famine-related disease and starvation or who left the country. During these famine years mass emigration brought thousands of Irish to America, most of them from the country’s southern counties where Catholics predominated. In New York Whitman became increasingly aware of the plight of these immigrants, finding himself particularly sympathetic to the public exposure of Irish women seeking employment.

The famine destroyed O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and with his death in 1847 the movement came to an end. Young Ireland attempted an uprising in 1848, and a number of its leaders, notably John Mitchel, were arrested while others fled the country, some finding refuge in America. Mitchel was sent to prison in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) but escaped and made his way to New York in 1853. There, among the large population of Irish immigrants and with the help of other revolutionaries who had fled Ireland, he began raising funds for an organization that would undertake to free Ireland. Many years later, in 1881, Walt Whitman formed a close friendship with a veteran of that same prison in Van Diemen’s Land, John Boyle O’Reilly, who, like Mitchel, had been sent there for revolutionary activities and had likewise escaped to America.

When Mitchel had sufficient funding he returned to Ireland, in 1858, to found the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood; a year later an American branch of the brotherhood, the Fenian Brotherhood, was established in New York. The dreamed-of revolution never took place and, except for the production of such remarkable leaders as John O’Leary and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the brotherhood languished in Ireland. It rapidly gained momentum in America, however, where small militia groups formed and a rhetoric of Irish liberty developed. After the American Civil War began these militia quickly swelled the ranks of enlisted men (in armies of both North and South) in the belief that America’s gratitude for such service would lead to full support of a military action against Britain. While serving as a hospital visitor in Washington, D.C., throughout the war years, Whitman met and tended to many an Irish and Irish American soldier. When he published Drum-Taps, a collection of poems related to the Civil War, he included his poetic tribute to Ireland, “Old Ireland.” During these same years Whitman developed intense friendships with two men of Irish ancestry, Peter Doyle and William Douglas O’Connor.

At the war’s end many former soldiers returned to Ireland ready to fight for its freedom. They were dependent on their American counterparts for arms, however, and with insufficient support from the American Fenians the idea collapsed. Before that, in 1866, the Irish Fenians undertook an attempted assault on Great Britain by invading Canada. The invasion was thwarted, but another attempt was made in 1870; equally unsuccessful, it heralded the decline and eventual end of the Fenian Brotherhood.

In Ireland, the decade of the 1880s was dominated by the land wars. The Protestant ascendancy of the late eighteenth century had been largely the result of their landownership. A century later these landlords controlled the Irish Parliament, while most of Ireland’s large population in the south was forced by lack of industry to subsist mainly by land tillage. Industrial growth in the north gradually led to that region’s becoming the provider of goods for both north and south, and the earlier reliance on land there was diminished. In the famine years, thousands in the south who were unable to pay rent were evicted; many never really had an opportunity to catch up even after that disaster had passed. In the postfamine years a change in family practices of land transfer, which posited ownership with one son rather than parcelling the land among many, proved to be a move toward stabilization and toward focusing greater power within the ranks of tenant farmers. Such stabilization was needed, for an unofficial policy developed of agrarian disturbance, which sometimes became violent, directed against landowners, many of whom were English. This unofficial policy was replaced in 1879 by the founding of the Irish National Land League, which sought specific objectives and had as its ultimate goal Irish ownership of Irish land. Though not Irish himself, James Redpath, friend and active supporter of Whitman, became a partisan of and fundraiser for the Land League, bringing to it the full force of his skills as writer and speaker.

It was two former Fenians, Michael Davitt and John Devoy, both of whom had been imprisoned for their activities in the brotherhood, who saw in the question of land distribution an issue that could influence the outcome of the larger political objective, Home Rule for Ireland, which in the minds of most Irish meant complete independence. The president of the Land League, Charles Stewart Parnell, took up what had been mainly an issue in the western counties and made it the Irish land issue by advocating fixed rents and an eventual right of landownership by the peasant population. In short, the object of the Land League was the abolition of landlordism and the return of the land to those who worked it. Parnell went to America in 1880 to raise funds for the Land League. While there he addressed Congress on the Irish issue and organized an American Land League that was strongly supported by the Irish population in America. A more revolutionary movement in both Ireland and America was the Clan na Gael, founded in 1867 and later led by Rossa, who instituted a terrorist campaign of dynamite sabotage against Londoners in the 1880s.

By this time Walt Whitman had gained a following among students and professors at Trinity College, Dublin. Included was Thomas W. H. Rolleston, who wrote letters to Whitman in which he told of the purposes and activities of the Land League, winning for this cause Whitman’s heartfelt support. Land League activities included boycotting, or shunning those who took up tenancy on a farm from which a poor farmer, unable to pay rent, had been evicted. In this way the league exerted a moral force, but mass rallies at which Parnell pushed the objective of Irish land for the Irish people brought the league and its president into direct conflict with England’s prime minister, William Gladstone. Gladstone became prime minister in 1868 and, with the help of the Liberal Party, which took up the cause of Irish Catholics as part of its opposition to the Whig Party and its support of the Protestant ascendancy, in 1869 succeeded in disestablishing the Church of Ireland, the first of many steps Gladstone would take to ameliorate conditions in Ireland. Ultimately, Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 went a long way toward correcting the rent problem, but before that was accomplished, continued disturbances led to severe action by the government.

In 1881, just a year before Whitman welcomed Oscar Wilde in Camden, New Jersey, Parnell was arrested for publicly denouncing these repressive measures. His imprisonment called forth the Land League’s “No Rent Manifesto,” exhorting no payment of rents until the government acceded to the league’s land policies. Gladstone was forced into releasing Parnell early and had to agree to work with him in formulating legislation that would further address the land problem. A brief setback to this spirit of cooperation came just after Parnell’s release from prison in 1882, when two government officials were murdered in Phoenix Park by extremists acting in the cause of independence. But Parnell was now ready to take another, nonviolent, step toward independence, the Home Rule movement.

In 1884 the Irish National Land League was superseded by the National League, with Parnell at its head, and Home Rule, or self-government, became the avowed objective. Two years later Gladstone introduced a Home Rule bill that included provision for an Irish Parliament that would attend to all Irish matters, leaving other matters to the English Parliament. It was defeated by Gladstone’s own Liberal Party, whose members feared an independent Ireland. Again, in 1893, Gladstone offered the third Home Rule bill, which was also defeated. Home Rule was defeated by more than the Liberals, however; it fell along with Parnell, who suffered disgrace and the loss of his position when, in 1890, he was named in a divorce action by the husband of Katharine O’Shea, Parnell’s mistress for many years. ²   In America Whitman was among the many who supported Parnell, but he came to believe that for the good of the cause of Home Rule Parnell must step aside. The point became moot when Parnell died in 1891 of natural causes, contributed to, no doubt, by the disgrace he suffered.

There was no political leader to take Parnell’s place, and Irish politics splintered into dissenting groups. Strangely, it was a literary force that gave direction in the early years of the twentieth century by attempting to replace political nationalism with cultural nationalism. The Irish literary revival had its beginnings as early as Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland published in 1878. Although nationalist, like the earlier Young Ireland movement, its aim was to revive the submerged culture of the Irish and thus foster a new sense of nationalism. O’Grady was among many of the writers and thinkers in Ireland who in these years were admirers of Whitman. Their leaders, mostly Protestants, held to a firm belief that Ireland needed its educated Protestant class in order to command respect from other nations.

The clear leader of this literary movement was William Butler Yeats, early on a Whitman follower who later turned away because of what he perceived as Whitman’s failure to gain an audience among his countrymen and women. Yeats’s nationalism had been awakened by contact with the great Fenian revolutionary John O’Leary. While Yeats revered O’Leary’s devotion to Ireland, he believed that the Young Ireland and Fenian movements had been far too romantic in their vision of Ireland and too uncritical of its reality. Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 where he and others attempted to wrestle with questions of what constituted Irish culture and Irish literature and what each of those entities would be in the future. Their objective was an Irish literature that would take its place among those of other nations and command their respect. Though a nonspeaker of Irish, as were most of those who followed him in the revival, Yeats supported the Gaelic League, which sought to revive that language and to produce a literature in Ireland’s own tongue.

In 1905 Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Fein (Ourselves alone). A nationalist movement, it had as its vision an independent Ireland unified politically as well as culturally. This vision was opposed by the Ulster unionists, who prized their connection to the United Kingdom. While the question of Irish independence continued to dominate the national discourse, a labor movement was forming strength under the leadership of James Larkin and James Connolly. Connolly, a socialist, had attempted to establish an Irish Labour Party, a move that challenged the Labour Party of Great Britain. He and Larkin were successful, however, in organizing the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. In 1913 and 1914 Larkin and Connolly led strikes during which they attempted to inspire the workers with Whitman’s words. The strikes caused widespread disruption in Ireland but brought little change for the workers.

The year 1916 is indelibly stamped in Irish history by the events in Dublin during the Easter Rising, a rebellion against the British government. The nationalist Sinn Fein believed that the Irish volunteers fighting in the World War should not have been so engaged anywhere until the battle for their own national independence had been won. The Sinn Fein were joined in rebellion by an Irish Citizens Army, formed to protect strikers during the 1913 lockout. The strikers, members of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, were aided by other republican organizations and may have received aid and support from Fenian Irish Americans. The rebellion centered on the capture of the General Post Office, from the steps of which one of the rebel leaders, Patrick Pearse, read a proclamation declaring an Irish republic. The rebellion lasted only six days before being put down by the British.

The British moved swiftly against the rebels, and court martial trials of key figures in the rising were followed by executions that roused the passions of the Irish populace. James Connolly was one of those executed; another who was sentenced to die, Eamon De Valera, was spared because of his American citizenship, a consequence of his New York birth. As a result of the Easter Rising, Sinn Fein became the political force of revolutionary nationalists, eventually replacing the Irish Party and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1917 de Valera was elected president of Sinn Fein.

In 1918, with the British army taxed heavily by the war, the United Kingdom decided to extend conscription to Ireland, which had been exempted until some form of Home Rule could be enacted. The Irish refused to accept Prime Minister Lloyd George’s conditional offer of partial Home Rule, and conscription was not instituted. However, in 1919 an underground military force made up of the Irish Republican Army and, under Michael Collins, the Irish Republican Brotherhood began a guerrilla war against the British government. The objective was to prove to the British that they were not capable of governing Ireland, and in this the guerrillas enjoyed the wide support of the populace. The British retaliated by sending additional forces, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans, the latter so named for the colors of their uniforms, who were responsible for atrocities against the general populace as well as against the rebels.

Late in 1920 the Government of Ireland Act ended the hope of a united independent Ireland by acceding to the Ulster resistance to Home Rule, partitioning the country into north and south, and establishing parliaments in Dublin and in Belfast. These two bodies were empowered to exert control in local matters, but the United Kingdom Parliament could still interfere and held supreme authority. The following year, in the face of continued agitation in the southern counties, the United Kingdom offered a treaty stipulating dominion status similar to that of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It amounted to near independence for the southern counties, though with sworn allegiance to the king and continued separation for Northern Ireland.

A team of negotiators, including Michael Collins, agreed to the offer, but de Valera and the Republicans rejected it because a Free State was not a republic. They further rejected the oath of allegiance to the king required by the terms of the treaty. The Irish Parliament accepted the treaty, as did a majority of the Irish people. Conflict over the two positions led to a civil war of largely guerrilla actions. Despite the Republican rejection, the Anglo-Irish treaty held, and in 1922 Ireland became the Irish Free State. The loss of the dream of an Irish republic was a terrible blow to the revolutionaries, for whom the division of the country was of lesser importance.

In 1937 the Irish Free State’s (Eire’s) constitution became effective, and in 1949 Eire was formally declared a republic, the Republic of Ireland. The division of north and south remained in place, with Northern Ireland still a part of the United Kingdom until such time as its Parliament should demand a change. In November 1985 the British and Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement by which the British allowed the Irish government some sway over the affairs of Northern Ireland in exchange for Irish cooperation in rooting out terrorists. The terrorism, mostly directed against the British army in Northern Ireland, continued, and long years of violence ensued. Whitman’s prayer of “God-speed,” uttered in support of the Land League, appeared to have been thwarted by the enduring enmity of the two sides.

2.

Time Line

1819

Whitman born (May 31) on Long Island, N.Y.; family moves to Brooklyn, N.Y., four years later

1823–1830

Whitman and family live in various places in Brooklyn, including the vicinity of the Brooklyn Navy Yard located very near the heaviest concentration of Irish in Brooklyn

1840s

In Ireland, the Young Ireland revolutionary movement flourishes; one of its writers is "Speranza," Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde

1841

Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America is issued by Irish and American abolitionists calling on Irish to support abolitionism; Whitman begins working for the New York New World and becomes active in the Democratic Party, political home to most of the city's Irish; he publishes for the first time in John O'Sullivan's United States Magazine and Democratic Review

1842

Whitman becomes editor of the Aurora, a New York daily, and writes editorials attacking New York's Irish and Bishop John Hughes

1842–45

The great Irish famine migration begins, bringing Irish in record numbers to the United States

1847

Whitman, now editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, adopts the Free Soil position supported by Irish workers; Whitman recommends books by William Carlton to Eagle readers and editorializes on the problems of Irish laborers and their attempts to unionize

1848

Whitman writes sketch of Irish drayman for the New Orleans Daily Crescent; back in New York later this year Whitman has his head "read" by a phrenologist and becomes an advocate of this pseudoscience, which contributed to notions of national characteristics

c.1850

Whitman writes an unpublished account of the plight of Irish women seeking new positions as servants through an emigrant agency

1854

Whitman may have written "Poem of Apparitions in Boston," later known as "A Boston Ballad," in this year at the time of the trial in Boston of fugitive slave Anthony Burns; an attempt by abolitionists to rescue Burns leads to the death of Irishman James Batchelder

1855

Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass; this and succeeding editions of Leaves contain references to the Irish and to New York employment, activities, and events that included many Irish

1858

the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American revolutionary society, is founded in the United States

1859–1860

At Pfaff's, a New York restaurant, Whitman is friendly with Fitz-James O'Brien, writer of short stories

1860

In Boston for the publication of a new edition of Leaves, Whitman meets William Douglas O'Connor

1861

Whitman publishes "Old Ireland" in the New York Leader; firing on Fort Sumter begins the Civil War; New York's all-Irish Sixty-ninth Regiment enters the war

1862

Whitman goes to Washington, D.C., and takes a government position while volunteering as a hospital visitor to Civil War wounded; renews friendship with William Douglas O'Connor

1863

Conscription Act brings four days of rioting in New York City in which Irish play a major role

1865

Whitman meets Irish-born Peter Doyle in Washington, D.C., beginning a long and intimate relationship

1866

William Douglas O'Connor publishes The Good Gray Poet defending Whitman, who has been dismissed from a government position

1869

The Fenians invade Canada for a second time (the first was in 1866); John Boyle O'Reilly, just escaped from an English prison, accompanies invasion as a reporter for the Boston Pilot

1871

In July Whitman writes letters to Peter Doyle and William Douglas O'Connor describing the riot that occurred in New York City on Boyne Day; Edward Dowden publishes "The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman"; Yeats, at first an admirer of Whitman, later challenges Dowden's views and rejects Whitman as a model for a national poet

1879

National Land League formed in Ireland

1880

American Land League founded; Charles Stewart Parnell arrives in New York

1881

In Boston to deliver his Lincoln lecture, Whitman meets John Boyle O'Reilly, now editor of the Boston Pilot; Whitman grants permission for Russian translation of Leaves to John Fitzgerald Lee, a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and to Thomas W. H. Rolleston for a German translation

1882

Oscar Wilde visits Whitman in Camden, New Jersey; murder of government officials in Dublin's Phoenix Park; Leaves of Grass is suppressed in Boston and in the library of Trinity College, Dublin

1884

Whitman meets Abraham (Bram) Stoker; Stoker has admired Whitman's poetry since 1872 and had written to him in 1876

1889

William Douglas O'Connor dies in Washington, D.C.

1890

John Boyle O'Reilly dies in Boston

1892

Whitman dies (March 26) in Camden, New Jersey, and is buried in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, in a spot recommended to him by an Irish cemetery worker, Ralph Moore

3.

New York City

Although the events of 1871 are not especially memorable in American history, the year offers a good starting place for a consideration of relationships between Walt Whitman and the Irish. Essential to this consideration are two letters written by Whitman in the summer of that year, each of which suggests he had found in New York’s Irish community verification of his long-held faith in the gradual absorption by his country’s immigrants of the principles and practices of democracy. It could not have come at a better time for the poet of democracy, who in the same year published Democratic Vistas, a somber prose meditation revealing a generally bleak outlook on the nation’s future. That we should see in Whitman’s private letters a glimmer of hope occasioned by the sight of New York City’s Irish policemen, even while he publicly castigated American society as “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten,” is not something to be ignored. ¹   The glimmer is especially significant because Whitman had not always been so sanguine about the city’s Irish immigrants, especially the Irish Catholics. Indeed, his earliest published utterances on them were filled with the kind of venom most often associated with nativism. Unfortunately, the alteration was not so public as had been his earlier attack, appearing as it did in private correspondence rather than, as before, in a public newspaper. In truth, it must be allowed that his warming toward the Irish may have been somewhat influenced (since Whitman was susceptible to such influences) by a show of appreciation for his work coming at about this time from a group of writers and scholars in Dublin. Certainly he was influenced by his deep love for particular Irish friends, some of whom were born in Ireland and others born in America. But there is no reason to doubt that Whitman was also genuinely impressed in 1871 by the changes that time had wrought in the condition and the character of New York’s largest ethnic group. There is, in fact, reason enough to believe he welcomed the thought that his early belief in the democratic impulses of the Irish immigrants was vindicated by those changes.

Whitman’s exposure to the Irish in the cities of Brooklyn and New York spanned the years before and after the great migration spurred by the famines in Ireland that began in 1845. In New York the pre-famine Irish population has been estimated as high as twenty-five thousand, or one-fourth of the city’s total. ²   Mostly Protestant, either Anglican or Presbyterian, the earliest immigrants joined the middle class in Brooklyn and New York. Some of those who came after the 1798 uprising, men like Thomas Addis Emmett and William James Mac Nevin, were by their culture and refinement considerably more aristocratic than their revolutionary activities would indicate. De Witt Clinton, United States senator, mayor of New York City, and governor of New York, was of Irish descent. When he initiated New York’s great engineering project, construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825), he coincidentally opened up employment opportunities for hundreds of Irishmen.

In subsequent decades Catholic Irish immigrants were increasingly among the poor who gathered in neighborhoods on the fringes of middle-class enclaves. Whitman’s recollection, in 1889, of a family by the name of Murphy whom he had known “in New York 30 or 40 years ago—famous men in their line—stationers,” is an indication of the prosperity attained by the earlier arrivals. ³   An 1866 New York Times description, however, of the Irish living in the area just south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the largest allotment of poor Irish were found and not far from where Whitman’s family was living, offers a different picture, one that Whitman could not have ignored:

Here homeless and vagabond children, ragged and dirty, wander about; here the utterly poor congregate; and here accumulate all the causes of pestilence or disease; decaying garbage, dead animals, filthy and unclean privies, with crowds of unwashed human beings packed together, and houses badly arranged for ventilation. Here the drainage or sewerage is usually imperfect and the whole soil is thus ripe for diarrhea or cholera. ⁴  

In New York City conditions were no better. Edgar Allan Poe described an Irish squatter camp in the southern portion of the site where Central Park was later built. By Poe’s account, a typical Irish shanty there was about “nine feet by six, with a pigsty applied externally, by way both of portico and support.” Built entirely of mud, the shanty, as Poe recalls it, would seem to have been “erected in somewhat too obvious an imitation of the Tower of Pisa.” ⁵   In other parts of the city the Irish were crowded into buildings and neighborhoods never designed to hold such large numbers of people. One result of this, as the Times noted, was contamination of the city water supply drawn from shallow wells. When cholera struck the worst neighborhoods of the city in 1832 and 1835 as the result of the contaminated water, the Irish who lived there were believed to be the cause of the contagion. ⁶   Cholera, a concomitant of poverty and, more specifically, of a lack of sanitation and pure water, spread rapidly among the Irish. As a result, their poverty became so linked with the disease in the minds of the city’s more fortunate that cholera came to be looked upon by many as a necessary scourge of nature eliminating the poorest, and least “desirable,” members of society.

Whitman seems not to have been completely immune to this line of reasoning. Though he was in the safer regions of Brooklyn and Long Island while the epidemic raged in 1832, he later worked it into one of his fiction pieces, presenting the disease in such a way as to somewhat uphold the belief that epidemics can function as a means of moral cleansing. In the summer of 1845 he published “Revenge and Requital; A Tale of a Murderer Escaped,” in John L. O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review. It is the story of Philip Marsh, a man who commits murder and escapes the law before punishment can be meted out. Marsh finds redemption for his guilty soul by nursing cholera victims in the “dirtiest and wretchedest section of the city, between Chatham and Centre streets.” The location was on the fringe of Five Points, in the Sixth Ward—known as the “Bloody Ould Sixth”—where the poorest of the city’s Irish were congregated, the same area to which Jacob Riis would turn for material for his 1890 exposé of conditions among the city’s poor. Though it is unlikely it was his first visit, given his journalistic career, Whitman mentioned going to the Five Points area in September 1868, claiming the visit was “instructive but disgusting.” ⁷   While Marsh’s redemption, gained through selfless contact with contagion, is not the interpretation of cholera’s purgative effects adopted by the morally righteous of the city, it partakes of the generalized belief that such widespread disasters can offer opportunities for moral redemption and cleansing; indeed, Whitman describes the murderer as an “unterrified angel of mercy and charity” and as a “messenger of health.” ⁸  

In 1849 when cholera struck New York again, Whitman became concerned for the inhabitants of Brooklyn and two years later wrote an article in that city’s daily Advertiser ( June 28, 1851) on the need for pure water to be supplied by the city, as New York had done for its citizens by building the Croton reservoir. Later, in “Song of Myself,” Whitman identified not with the healer, as in his story of Philip Marsh, but with the victims of the disease:

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp,

      but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl . . .

      away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them,

I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg.

Since the subject of cholera is encompassed in the poem by a wider identification with other unfortunates, such as the imprisoned and street beggars, it is possible to see in these lines an oblique reference to the city’s Irish, who in their poverty are embraced by the poem’s persona as selflessly as are the cholera victims by Philip Marsh. Whitman’s identification with the Irish poor may have stemmed from an early association with them in Brooklyn, where he and his family barely managed to remain above the level of poverty that obtained in the immigrant neighborhoods. Brooklyn’s “Irish Town” was located near the navy yard, not far from where the Whitmans lived in the 1820s and where Walt’s brother Jesse worked for a time. The family was still in Brooklyn in 1855 when the Irish made up Brooklyn’s largest foreign-born element, numbering 56,753 out of a population of 205,250. ¹⁰  

In the 1850s when he was fashioning the all-encompassing poetic voice he believed America needed, Whitman experimented by assuming a fluid, flexible persona. Among the many tentative lines written in this manner in his notebook is one in which he directly associates that persona with the newly arrived Irish: “The poor despised Irish girls and boys immigrants just over.” ¹¹   New York was by then at a saturation point, having absorbed thousands of famine exiles in the preceding four years, and the newly arrived Irish were indeed poor and despised. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, however, contained a direct reference to these immigrants that subtly reminded them that for all their troubles in America, they were still better off here than at home. The reference appears in the poem later titled “The Sleepers,” a marvelous evocation of sleep and its dreams, where the narrator is capable of entering the night visions of the sleepers whose dreams he describes. Among such visions are those in which “ships make tacks in the dreams . . . the sailor sails . . . the exile returns home, / The fugitive returns unharmed,” and “the immigrant” (suggesting the many songs of exile fashioned by the Irish in America) “is back beyond months and years; / The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood, with the well-known neighbors and faces, / They warmly welcome him . . . he is barefoot again. . . . he forgets he is well off . . .” ¹²  

As the immigrants were forced into ever tighter precincts the Irish neighborhoods of the midcentury became the worst slums of the city. In 1871, however, by which time the United States had absorbed, subsequent to the 1845 famine, some 2.5 million Irish emigrants, conditions had improved considerably for most of New York’s Irish. They formed 21 percent of the city’s population, and as a consequence of their numbers and their political aspirations, they had moved into the mainstream of its life. In fact, the Irish had become a potent force in what was still a workers’ city. They had moved ahead in the workforce to become tailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, and masons, while still filling those roles they had earlier claimed as carters, coachmen, housemaids, longshoremen, and ferrymen. The city’s largest union, the Laborers’ Union Benevolent Society, was made up mostly of Irish members, and by the end of the 1860s nearly all the officers of New York’s unions were Irish, either native or descendent. ¹³   By 1872 the “Tammany Tiger” was headed by its first Irish Catholic leader, John Kelly, paving the way for the election in 1880 of New York’s first Irish mayor, shipping magnate William Grace.

The years just prior to 1871 also had wrought some changes in Whitman’s life, not all of them welcome. Most had been within his family structure. Thomas Jefferson Whitman, or Jeff, the brother to whom he had felt closest since their six-month sojourn in New Orleans in 1849, had moved to St. Louis with his wife and two daughters. There Mattie, Jeff’s wife, had developed a persistent throat ailment from which she would die in 1873. Louisa Whitman, the poet’s mother, widowed since 1855, was also beginning to show signs of poor health and of wearing down under the pressures of caring for her son, Edward, who had mental and physical disabilities, and worrying about the deteriorating mental health of another son, Jesse, her eldest. ¹⁴   The child of yet another son, Andrew, who died in 1863, had been run over and killed by a cart while playing in the street, the result of his mother’s drunken neglect.

As counter to these there were the upswings in Whitman’s authorial life. Leaves of Grass had seen its fourth edition in 1867, and he continued to work on poems to be added to the next edition. Through the good offices of the publisher of the magazine Galaxy he had published two essays in 1867, “Democracy” and “Personalism,” which had been fused into the soon to be published Democratic Vistas (1871). In the same year he would produce Passage to India, the title poem of which is arguably the last of his great poems. Since the publication of some of his poems in England in 1868, he had become a focus of attention for a number of prominent figures there, among them a female admirer, Anne Gilchrist, who sent an impassioned marriage proposal he did not accept. In the summer of 1871 Edward Dowden, professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, issued a significant essay, “The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman,” which reflected a growing admiration for the American bard among Irish literati. In 1871 he would also be hailed by the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and receive warm letters from that country’s poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Although he had lived in Washington, D.C., since 1863, Whitman was still a son of “Mannahatta” and returned often to visit friends there and his mother in Brooklyn, as he did in 1871. New York, then as now, had a tendency to believe itself the center of the world, but Whitman would have been quite conscious of the fact that the District of Columbia had been provided for the first time with a form of territorial government. Other events that would not have escaped his attention in 1871 included the establishment of the first Civil Service Commission, though Congress, not able—until the assassination ten years later of President Garfield—to see the need to replace the spoils system, failed to continue its support; the organization of the country’s first professional baseball association, displacing amateurs; and the fire in Chicago that destroyed an area of more than three square miles, consuming human lives and property including the original draft of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Of more immediate interest to the vacationing Whitman would have been some New York events of that summer: work on the bridge between the cities of Brooklyn and New York entered the second of its fourteen years; more than a hundred people were killed when a boiler exploded aboard the Westfield, a Staten Island ferry; and at least fifty people were killed in a riot involving Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. All of these events would have impressed Walt Whitman, but we have his comments on only one, the Irish riot.

On June 20, 1871, Whitman returned to Brooklyn on his annual vacation from his position as clerk, third class, annual salary of sixteen hundred dollars, in the Attorney General’s office in Washington, D.C. Just three months earlier he had been declared dead by the New York World, which ran a lengthy obituary in the mistaken belief that he had been killed by a railroad train in Croton, New York. Though to one correspondent he claimed the false report kept him from “hardly stir[ring] out in New York,” it was really his mother’s illness that kept him close to home. ¹⁵   While in Brooklyn Whitman wrote regularly to his beloved friend in Washington, Peter Doyle, being careful to set Pete’s mind at ease about his health by assuring the younger man that he was doing very little work and spending most of his time at home caring for his mother. When not with her, Walt told Pete, he was riding the ferry and visiting Coney Island. On Sunday, July 16, he even wrote a letter to Pete while on the sands of Coney Island, expressing the time-honored sentiment, “Pete, I wish you were with me.” ¹⁶   Two days earlier he had written Doyle and another friend, the Irish American William Douglas O’Connor, news of quite a different sort, the murderous riot that took place July 12 in New York City at the annual parade of the city’s Orangemen commemorating the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Both of the friends to whom he wrote were “Irish” (as Whitman used the term), and Whitman seems to have felt the particular need to share with them his feelings on the subject. To Pete he wrote:

There was quite a brush in N.Y. on Wednesday—the Irish lower orders (Catholic) had determined that the Orange parade (protestant) should be put down—mob fired & threw stones—military fired on mob—bet. 30 and 40 killed, over a hundred wounded—but you have seen all about it in papers—it was all up in a distant part of the city, 3 miles from Wall street—five-sixths of the city went on with its business just the same as any other day—I saw a big squad of prisoners carried along under guard—they reminded me of the squads of rebel prisoners brought in Washington, six years ago—. ¹⁷  

Whitman wrote much the same thing to O’Connor, only emphasizing to him the peculiar manner in which so much of the life of a big city can go on unconcernedly while mobs riot and the police and militia kill. ¹⁸  

The riot in New York on that July day in 1871 was actually a repeat of what occurred at the previous year’s Boyne Day. Orangemen, originally members of an Ulster Protestant Society in Ireland dating to 1795, were, in the United States, members of an ethnic organization whose principal activity was its annual celebration of the Battle of the Boyne. The 1870 observance had been given an extra boost by the fact that in May President Grant had declared the government would no longer tolerate the Irish Catholic Fenian Brotherhood functioning as a kind of separate government within the United States. ¹⁹   Actually, it was an empty gesture, for the Fenians had ceased some years before to wield the force of numbers they had once commanded, but the Orangemen took it as a token of further Catholic defeat. On July 12 they had a procession up Eighth Avenue to a park located at Ninetieth Street, where a picnic and dance were to be held. One report credits twenty-five hundred men, women, and children with parading to tunes of “Boyne Water,” “Derry,” and others “obnoxious to the Catholics.” ²⁰   As it passed a road construction site where a large number of Irish were employed, the procession attracted unfavorable attention and was soon followed by the workers and other Irish Catholics. The Metropolitan Police were notified, but by the time they reached the park a shower of stones was falling on the Orange-men. A general melee followed, with clubs, sticks, and anything that could serve as a weapon being brought to bear. The militia were called, but by the time they arrived the injured were scattered about the streets. Groups from both sides of the combat tried to crowd into horsecars to escape, and as the fighting continued it brought wreckage to the cars and animals as well as to innocent passengers. Eight people died as a result, fifteen were wounded, and only six arrested; a subsequent investigation cast doubt on the willingness of the city’s police to put down the rioters. ²¹   New York’s Irish waited to see what the following year would bring.

At the time, the New York Irish were as closely linked to the powerful Tweed Ring as any politically motivated ethnic group could hope to be. William M. Tweed was Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, deputy street commissioner of New York City, and New York state senator. Peter Barr Sweeny, one of the original Ring organizers, was a Tammany sachem and city chamberlain, and Richard B. Connolly was the city comptroller. The Irish had been in America long enough to be able to see some of their number move up into the ranks of the well-to-do, and some even became Republicans. For example, in 1871 Edward Gleason, superintendent of the Union League Club, a highly respectable Republican political group, was able to build a house on 128th Street near Fifth Avenue. Though the location was considered “in the country,” the house was designed by the prestigious architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Withers. Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, and he and Withers had just completed the plan of the spacious estate Olana in Hudson, New York, for landscape artist Frederick Church. ²²  

Despite the evidence of economic gain, most of the city’s Irish still toiled as laborers at low wages, competing always with the latest immigrants and with free blacks. Labor activism among Irish immigrants throughout the midcentury had focused mainly on improved wages, and this limited objective hampered any strides toward overall improvement of working conditions. In addition, Irish workers originally impeded their own progress by forming rival groups and secret societies whose memberships were determined by place of origin in Ireland. ²³   Only gradually did the idea of benevolent societies replace these secret organizations. Benevolent societies, forerunners of organized labor unions, had political and religious as well as occupational roots. In March 1846 Whitman wrote in the Eagle of a meeting of laborers held at Carroll Hall (a conservative Catholic political society often opposed to Tammany Hall) for the purpose of forming a benevolent society that would care for sick members and bury its dead, “as well as to regulate the prices of work.” One speaker who, Whitman says, addressed the gathering “in very animated language” was Michael F. O’Connor. A partial victory was claimed by reading aloud letters from contractors who had agreed to the demanded wage, among them Messrs. Collins, Brady, S. and P. O’Donnell, Quinn, and Burns. While Whitman makes no mention of this, note the Irish names of the contractors, who may have been Americans born to immigrant parents and who are indicative of entrepreneurial advancement possible in a labor-dominated economy that was beginning to break down, creating the need for unions.

Craft workers, among whom the prefamine Irish immigrants numbered highly, were essential to the working class that developed in New York from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Whitman was part of this working class; because of his particular craft, printing, he was aware of the encroaching mechanization that would revolutionize the very character of work and create a new social and economic order based on what Sean Wilentz has labeled “capitalist conceptions of wage labor as a market commodity,” where the worker’s labor was no longer his or her own. ²⁴   In the mid-1830s the city’s unions had maintained that those workers who attained the status of journeymen had the right to determine the worth of their labor, which was said to be their own “property.” ²⁵   By the time Whitman was writing about unions in the Eagle, in 1846, unions represented not just the city’s craftworkers but also laborers such as the stevedores and dock builders, where the influx of Irish was just beginning to be felt.

In his Eagle article Whitman warmly supported the organization of a benevolent society but denounced the attempt to regulate wages, which he saw as similar to tariffs, fair trade laws, and other such restrictions on business, to all of which he was opposed. He examined the case of the workers, however, and found it worthy of attention, pointing out that they labored from sunrise to dark for sixty-four and a half cents and were docked exorbitantly for being only minutes late. “And,” he exclaimed, “many of these men have families of children to feed, and clothe, and educate—and potatoes are a dollar a bushel, and flour and beef unusually high! . . . Let our philanthropists not go to oppressed England and starving Ireland for samples of scanty comfort.” ²⁶   A month later Whitman was not so sympathetic. He editorialized that the new Laborers’ Association had not only set its own prices and hours but the men now refused to work unless all were employed, which, he says, the city’s requirements did not at the time justify. He regretted that the laborers were “going to the very excess of injustice which they complained of in their own former employers.” ²⁷  

The following day the editor reported that several of those in the association had called upon him and made him realize he had not done its members justice, for they were in fact ready to receive any work when available. One supposes that the contingent of workers with whom he met included more than a few Irish, for Whitman went on to a lengthy discussion of the condition of Irish laborers. Whigs and nativists, he claimed, say the Irish are a “low ignorant set” who do not belong in the country. He argued that though they were ignorant in “book-lore” and “perhaps uncouth in manners,” they had come here “pining and panting for a new and better home” and were opposed to “all kinds of tyranny.” Largely because of this last-named quality, Whitman professed to have felt great pride when in a political meeting he had seen “a mortar-stained laborer coolly taking his prominent part in the proceedings.” He thought he was witnessing “the budding in a fellow creature’s long darkened breast, of the seeds of freedom, and of a knowledge of his own rights.” There is, Whitman claimed, a glory to such a dawning “even in the despised hod-carrier.” ²⁸  

The same spring of 1846 brought a strike at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Dock by Irish dock construction workers seeking higher pay. There was violence, especially when the construction firm brought in German workers to replace the striking Irish. In the Eagle Whitman claimed the disturbances were not caused by Brooklyn workers but by “blustering rowdies” from New York “who seize every occasion to fan the flames of riot.” ²⁹   Late in his life Whitman claimed to have been familiar with the dockworkers, “the Be-Jesus boys,” he called them, “in New York — stevedores on the wharves: I am soft for them, too — the real genuine fellows: but there’s a rough gang, set, in New York . . . a dangerous gang.” ³⁰   Dangerous they no doubt were, and the violence of their strikes was far from Whitman’s vision of comradely workers. In the Atlantic Dock strike German workers were attacked and badly beaten, for which a number of Irish were indicted. The indictments broke the strike, and though many of the Irish returned to their jobs, the workforce was carefully set at half Irish, half German, which meant that many Irish workers lost jobs. Most devastating, however, there was no increase in salary for the laborers on land, who were mostly Irish, while the dredgemen, all Germans, received an increase of five cents an hour, bringing their hourly rate to eighty-five cents, five cents more than the Irish were paid. ³¹  

In editorializing on the worst aspects of the dock strike Whitman pointed out that, “with all their faults, the Irish are a warm-hearted people.” He then told of a striking Irishman who found some forty or so non-English-speaking Germans (scabs called in to replace the strikers) who had finished work but were fearful of crossing the picket line to get to the ferry and return home to New York. The Irishman took the Germans to the boat and saw them safely across the river, where, with no common language in which to do so, they made every effort to convey to him their gratitude. ³²  

Consideration of this type did not extend to black workers, however; the Longshoremen’s United Benevolent Society, formed in 1852, operated exclusively for the Irish dockworkers but proclaimed its willingness to accept any white workers it deemed worthy of working the docks. The key word here is “white,” for in 1850 the Irish dockworkers had gone on strike to force the firing of a black worker. Subsequent strikes, in 1852, 1855, 1862, and 1863, though undertaken for higher wages, also involved violence aimed at black workers brought in to replace the strikers. ³³  

On principle, in the 1840s and 1850s Whitman did not support the idea of organized labor, which he saw as an attempt to interfere with business and manufacturing. There was always the hope, however, that the narrowness of focus that shaped the views of most immigrants would expand under the influence of democracy. About 1856 Whitman noted to himself what he believed to be the “Gist” of his work: “To give others, readers, people, the materials to decide for themselves, and know, or grow toward knowing, with cleanliness and strength.” ³⁴   Below this he lists a number of New York newspapers and their street addresses, perhaps with a view of finding in at least some of them outlets for his proposed educational program. The only ethnic paper on the list is the Irish-American, at 116 Nassau Street, and while there is no direct evidence that Whitman actually published in it, the paper was the one Irish newspaper in New York that would have welcomed such a liberal approach. ³⁵  

The Irish-American began publication in New York in the summer of 1849; its owner and editor was Patrick Lynch, former editor of the Boston Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot. In Boston Lynch had used his paper to support revolutionary movements in Europe and repeal of the enforced union of England and Ireland. These positions made him unpopular with the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Boston, who feared seeing their people in the States thrust into dangerous situations if they adopted Lynch’s views. Lynch learned from his experience, and in moving to New York to begin publication of the Irish-American, he made an effort to reconcile Irish American republicanism and Roman Catholic interests. In the first issue of the paper he indicated he would support democratic-republican principles but would not forsake Catholicism, and in later editorials he scrupulously defended the honor of the Church. ³⁶   Nevertheless, Lynch’s republican tendencies were strong, and though his newspaper bore on its masthead the motto “neutral in religion and politics,” it was not long before it clearly demonstrated its editor’s leanings. These sympathies may have led Whitman to see the paper as a possible outlet for his own democratic proselytizing, a way of placing in the hands of its readers “the materials to decide for themselves” and thus hasten the democratization of the Irish in America.

The process of democratization, Whitman knew, had begun long before among the Irish Protestants who had arrived in the States earlier. It could continue among the more recent Catholic arrivals, he believed, if the influence of their priests could be overcome. The Irish had started coming to North America before that continent boasted a free and independent nation. The first to arrive were mostly Protestants — Ulster-Scots who were Presbyterian (Andrew Jackson’s parents were among these) and others who were Church of Ireland or Anglican. Many proved themselves valiant in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. A slow but steady immigration rate continued, with an upsurge early in the 1840s that seemed to signal the spiraling rate of increase that would follow the famines in Ireland. Among those who came in the years of a declining economy in the southern counties of Ireland, immediately preceding the famine, were Catholics who then found themselves at odds with the already established Protestant Irish when such issues arose as the controversial move to fund parochial schools with public tax monies. The famine, of course, brought the great waves of Catholic immigration. In the years between 1847 and 1851, 848,000 Irish entered New York City’s port. So many of them remained in the city that in 1860 New York was the most Irish city in the United States, with the Irish population totaling some 200,000 out of a total population of 800,000. ³⁷  

Census figures for 1870 show a New York City Irish-born population of 201,999. ³⁸   At that time roughly 75 percent of New York’s Irish voted Democratic (the remainder, Protestants for the most part, made up the Irish wing of the city’s Republican Party), though there was some discontent that the Democrats did not see fit to run an Irish candidate for mayor. ³⁹   Nonetheless, the Irish vote in New York (11 percent of the state’s total population and 21 percent of the city’s) was strong enough to secure the elections in 1870 of Democrats A. Oakey Hall as mayor and John T. Hoffman as governor. ⁴⁰  

The Irish had played a vital role in shifting the political power base away from Albany and toward New York City. The earliest Irish immigrants found their way into whichever of the parties suited their political philosophy, but as the immigrant population increased and especially as it became clear that the immigrants intended to remain in the city, they were viewed by the Democratic Party as a means of gaining power through sheer force of numbers. This brought the Irish into the rivalry between upstate and downstate politicians in which Albany Whigs, later Republicans, sought to keep the city submissive to the state government. Already highly politicized when they arrived in America because of their own country’s forced subservience to England, the New York Irish allied with the Democrats, who were fighting to gain control of city politics. When the doors to the Tammany Society and the Democratic Party were opened to them they entered in great numbers, eventually finding their way, by 1870, to Albany. For some years William Tweed wielded great power in the state legislature. Of its fewer than thirty members, nine were native Irishmen, the parents of another eight had been born in Ireland, and three had other Irish family connections. ⁴¹  

Tweed’s power extended into the streets of the city, where his Irish backers formed the largest group of municipal workers. In 1871 Tweed introduced in the state legislature a new charter for New York City which was opposed by a group of anti-Irish dissidents calling themselves the “Young Democrats.” Hoping to curb Tweed’s control of the party, the group planned a coup. With the help of the Metropolitan Police, however, Tweed was able to prevent the meeting at which the takeover was to occur, an indication not only of his influence on the police force but of the large number of Irish who marched in its ranks. Other powerful forces were at work as well, led by wealthy reformers who, stimulated to action by disclosures in the Republican New York Times of massive fraud and financial misdealings within the city government, now sought to oust Tweed and restore fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, any threat to Tweed was seen by the Irish political bloc as a threat to them.

By the time the July 1871 observance of the Battle of the Boyne arrived, the city’s Irish were already roiling. In January their rival political factions, Catholic and Protestant, had vied for the honor of welcoming five Fenian prisoners recently released from English jails. Among the five were Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who within a few years would command the distinction of being Ireland’s most public, and most radical, exile, and John Devoy, the lifelong Irish freedom fighter. Devoy was a longtime associate of another exiled Fenian, John Boyle O’Reilly. The city’s contending Irish sectarians were each eager to convey the rebels to the parade and festivities that awaited them. So fierce was the competition between the Tammany Catholics and the Orangemen that the exiles, who were interested only in gaining support for Ireland’s cause, eschewed all convoys, turned away offers of swank hotels to stay at the less prestigious Sweeney’s Hotel, and publicly chastised the New York Irish for their disunion. ⁴²  

Spring brought its own troubles. In May there had been labor unrest, with Irish workers striking for pay increases. By July the city’s Irish on both sides of the religious fence were smarting with the memory of the previous year’s riot. The Catholics sought to have the mayor issue an order restraining the Orangemen from parading, but Hall chose to hide behind his superintendent of police and had him issue the ban. This cowardliness, as well as the ban itself, stirred the non-Irish of the city to public outcry. In an effort to quiet things, Governor Hoffman issued a proclamation sanctioning the observance. Resentment at this edict coming from the governor they had elected spilled over into the streets as gangs of Irish laborers set upon the marchers with results much as Whitman described them. At the height of the riot, with the procession of Orangemen determinedly advancing on their tormenters, a shot was fired from a nearby window, and the militia of the Eighty-fourth Regiment, called out by the governor, fired into the crowd killing and injuring scores of people. The count of dead and injured on this one July day was in the neighborhood of 165. ⁴³   It was, the Times said, “a day never to be forgotten in the history of the City of New-York.” Certainly it was a day to arouse memories of the previous decade’s draft riot, another stain on the city’s history in which the Irish had figured prominently. One account of the Orange Riots, published in 1873, evoked the draft riot by way of praising “the almost universal faithfulness of the Roman Catholic Irish police to their duty. In this [the Boyne Day riot], as well as in the draft riots, they have left a record of which any city might be proud.” ⁴⁴  

Such praise was a tribute to the members of a largely Irish police force that all but owed its existence to the need, real or perceived, to hold in check the city’s Irish. In nineteenth-century New York, street riots were a form of public exhibition, an “acting out” of frustration and grievance and so much a part of the cityscape that Whitman includes “the fury of roused mobs” in his descant on the city in “Song of Myself.” Riots, along with increased crime, created a need for a fully staffed municipal police force to replace the system of part-time wardens and watchers considered sufficient early in the century. For a time, after the police force was established, members of the city’s governing body, the Common Council, were allowed to appoint men to serve two-year terms as police officers, thus initiating a political connection to law enforcement not easily corrected. In 1845 the Democrats then in power brought into existence a force of eight hundred paid police; by 1856 the city’s “Civic Army,” as it was called, numbered twelve hundred, but, fearful of such an army in their midst, citizens insisted they be unarmed and without uniforms. ⁴⁵   Uniforms were introduced soon after, however, in the hope they would command respect from the roughs of the city. With the Democratic Party’s continued hold on city politics, jobs on the police force became a part of the party’s patronage offered most often to the Irish on whose support the party relied. Though there were times when they were accused of favoring their own, over the years the Irish police came to win the respect of most of the city’s citizens.

Whitman, too, was impressed by New York’s police and their actions in the Orange Riots. He wrote to Peter Doyle:

The N. Y. police looked & behaved splendidly—no fuss, few words, but action—great, brown, bearded, able, American looking fellows, (Irish stock, though, many of them)—I had great pleasure in looking on them—something new, to me, it quite set me up to see such chaps, all dusty & worn, looked like veterans— ⁴⁶  

Similarly, to William O’Connor he commented:

the Policemen looked & behaved splendidly—I have been looking on them & been with them much, & am refreshed by their presence—it is something new—in some respects they afford the most encouraging sign I have got—brown, bearded, worn, resolute, American-looking men, dusty & sweaty—looked like veterans—the stock here even in these cities is in the main magnificent—the heads either shysters, villains or impotents—. ⁴⁷  

Whitman appears to have been looking at the police from a dual perspective, both of which aided his newly acquired respect. For one thing, he associates them with veterans of the Civil War, a group he held in the highest regard and personal affection. In so doing, he sees, perhaps for the first time, beyond their ethnic “stock,” viewing them not as Irishmen but as Americans—or at least as “American-looking.” ⁴⁸   From the vantage point of this new regard, he can clearly delineate them from the scurrilous politicians at whose behest they function. Indeed, most New Yorkers were beginning to see those at the head of the city’s political organization, the Tweed Ring, in the same light as Whitman does here, as villains. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871 was the way in which they hastened a public recognition of rampant political infamy so that, amid mounting evidence of fraud and corruption, 1871 saw the end of the Tweed Ring and its hold on the city’s politics.

What we cannot fail to notice in Whitman’s account is the personal reaction he registers, the pleasure he derives from observing the police, an emotion which is “something new to me,” he says. If we connect this to his comment on their “stock,” an obvious reference to their Irish roots, we recognize an admission of a change of mind, perhaps even of heart, about the presumed character of these Irishmen.

The question of character was a subject on which most nineteenth-century New Yorkers held opinions, since character and its national determination had come very much to the foreground of public discourse, largely as the result of the great influx of Irish. At the time of Whitman’s letters, the individual who most fully epitomized the adverse image of the Irish politician as possessed of incorrigibly low character was one of the villains to whom Whitman obliquely refers, Irish-born Richard Barrett Connolly, known as “Slippery Dick,” who came to America in 1826 and rose to become comptroller of New York City in the years 1867 to 1871. Connolly was the principal factor in the downfall of the Tweed Ring because of financial malfeasance from which he personally profited, to the tune of some six million dollars he is believed to have taken with him when he fled the country to avoid a jail sentence. Amid the general blatancy of the Ring members’ wrongdoing, Connolly stood out for what was described as his low cunning, his greed, and the way in which he had distinguished himself in the course of his political rise by a shrewd use of his ethnicity to further his career. ⁴⁹  

Connolly moved through the ranks, keeping pace with the political advancements being made by New York’s Irish. In 1839 he was elected to the Tammany Society and worked his way up. He latched on to the campaign of the former Democratic United States Senator Fernando Wood when Wood sought Irish support for his bid for mayor of New York in 1854. So fully was Connolly later identified with the city’s Irish that when Whitman wrote his 1871 letter to O’Connor, contrasting the upright behavior of the New York police with the chicanery of their leaders, he may well have had in mind the Irish-born Connolly. Whitman wrote his letter on July 14, just six days after the New York Times (its owner having refused a bribe from Boss Tweed not to publish) had begun printing the full record of Connolly’s impropriety.

Whitman’s improved perception of Irish police may also have been helped by his deep attachment to Peter Doyle and his family. Pete’s brother, Francis, was a police officer in Washington, D.C. In May 1871, before leaving Washington for New York, Whitman had prepared an editorial defending Francis Doyle against newspaper claims of brutality in the arrest of a young boy on theft charges. Evidently the newspaper had taken up the case as something of a cause, for Whitman refers to a persistence in reportage that “amounts to persecution.” The reprimand by Doyle’s superiors is enough, he claimed, to bring the matter to an end, but Whitman could not resist adding his own admonition, that the attempt to make “martyrs and heroes of the steadily increasing swarms of juvenile thieves and vagabonds who infest the streets of Washington” is a disservice to the citizenry. As to Francis Doyle, he is described as “a little stern perhaps” but the bearer of “an excellent reputation” who “served the Union cause, as soldier or sailor, all through the war.” ⁵⁰   The article remained in Whitman’s notebook, unpublished, perhaps at the request of the officer himself or of his family, who may have wished to avoid exacerbating the situation. Before the year was out Francis Doyle was dead of a gunshot wound inflicted by Maria Shea (known as the “Queen of Louse Alley”) when he attempted to recover articles she had stolen. Whitman attended Doyle’s funeral on New Year’s Eve 1871 and must have found it a sad ending to a year that had seen the Irish caught up in too many instances of violence in American streets. ⁵¹  

The larger issue in the Whitman letters is his changed attitude toward the Irish in general. No longer the “coarse, blustering rowdies,” as he described the union organizers he had once condemned, the Irish had come to mean to him such beloved friends as Peter Doyle and William Douglas O’Connor. If the events of that year moved Whitman to recall earlier ones involving New York’s Irish, he could not have failed to note the distance he had covered in his personal reactions to this immigrant group. It was a leap shared by many Americans, for whom the Civil War and the heroic participation of thousands of Irish-born immigrants proved a turning point in attitudes. But despite his changed attitude, there is little reason to believe Whitman would not have continued to justify his intent, if not his rhetoric, in the New York Aurora in 1842 when he publicly reviled the Irish and took on no less a figure than the Reverend John Hughes, bishop (later the first archbishop) of New York. His intention would have been the same in 1871, for the one constant in Whitman’s attitude toward the Irish is revealed in his description to Peter Doyle of a segment of the Boyne Day rioting, “the Irish lower orders (catholic).” It was their allegiance to Roman Catholicism, rather than the Irish themselves, that Whitman could not accept, for he viewed their church not only as undemocratic but as antidemocratic. When he could dissociate the Irish from their religion he found much about them to his liking, even identifying his poetic persona with them in Leaves of Grass. Privately, as in the cases of Doyle and O’Connor, he could love them above all others. But an Irish friend’s Catholicism could remain a stumbling block, so much so that, as shall be seen in the case of John Boyle O’Reilly, Whitman felt forced to deny its existence.

Whitman’s furious and unguarded attack on New York’s Catholic Irish in 1842 might be offered as evidence of strong anti-Irish feelings had it not occurred when he was still quite young and opinionated, if it did not also suggest the matter was part of the ongoing viciousness common to the city’s newspaper business, and, most significantly, if it did not reveal cultural influences he could hardly be expected to have withstood. Recent verifications of Whitman’s journalism and the availability of the full texts of his Aurora editorials are helpful in understanding the matter. ⁵²   Coupled with a historical background on the public school issue and placed within a biographical framework, they allow a more complete narrative to emerge.

When the twenty-three-year-old Whitman joined the staff of the Aurora in 1842, first as the writer of a series of articles and then as editor, the two-penny daily was one of many newspapers produced in New York City. Among the others were such popular papers as James Gordon Bennett’s Herald and a relative newcomer, Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Most of the newspapers of the time aligned themselves with a political party, and the Aurora was mildly Democratic, though it concentrated more on the city’s social scene than on its politics. As editor, Whitman would alter this. He was no novice to the field, having already racked up at least ten years’ experience on Long Island papers—the Patriot, a Democratic organ; the Whig Star; and the self-proclaimed Democrat. For one year, 1838–1839, he was owner, editor, and printer of his own paper, the Long Islander, produced near his birthplace in Huntington. In Manhattan he had worked on weeklies, Park Benjamin’s New World and the somewhat idiosyncratically named Brother Jonathan. The jingoistic but literarily discriminating Democratic Review, owned by John Louis O’Sullivan, published some of Whitman’s early short stories and poetry. In his late years Whitman recalled O’Sullivan as “a handsome, generous fellow. He treated me well.” ⁵³   To be treated well in the rough and tumble world of New York journalism of the time was not a small matter, but neither was Whitman’s move into the heady atmosphere of the democratic crusade spearheaded by O’Sullivan and the Democratic Review.

John L. O’Sullivan was not typical of any of the Irish who came to America either in the prefamine or the famine years. While most Irishmen who arrived in the decade he did, the 1820s, were Ulster Protestants who fell into the broad category of artisans and craftworkers, the O’Sullivan family could boast an assortment of men who made their living and their mark as soldiers and rebels, fighting in various European countries (most often on the losing side) generally, though not always, in opposition to England. John Louis was born on a British warship off the coast of Gibraltar in 1813 and was brought to New York in 1827. Though baptized a Catholic, he was an Episcopalian for most of his life, before returning to the Catholicism of his family. ⁵⁴  

O’Sullivan’s true religion was democracy, which he believed was the future of all countries and the world’s most needed form of political advance. Despite his own scholarly achievements, he eschewed the fields of teaching and the law to enter the world of newspaper and magazine writing. Early work in New York City led to the launching of a paper in Washington, D.C., in 1835. O’Sullivan decided to use its location in the nation’s capital and its favored position with the newly elected Martin Van Buren to turn it into a national journal of literature and politics intended to further the advance of democracy and of the Democratic Party. O’Sullivan quickly gathered into his fold some of the country’s outstanding writers and thinkers by promising them a truly democratic forum in which they might express any political idea, while he as editor would uphold the party line. In practice, the latter consideration pretty much limited the published materials to those written from a Democratic perspective, but the magazine also had a strong literary goal, which was to present the very best that a democratic society could offer. While the New England writers, with the exception of Nathaniel Hawthorne, generally sniffed at his invitation to write for the Review, O’Sullivan was really interested in the kinds of materials that were more likely to emanate from such democratic—and Democratic—centers as New York City. In 1841 he moved the Democratic Review to Manhattan. By then he was a member of the New York state legislature, and the magazine’s ties to the Democratic Party were stronger than ever.

In addition to the party’s aims, O’Sullivan hoped to advance those of the Young America movement, which in these, its early years, were principally literary and cultural. Young America had no real connection to the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, but it shared a common nationalistic fervor, which in Ireland, of course, took the form of promoting Irish culture over the claims of the dominant English culture. O’Sullivan and the Young America group promoted the development of an American culture that would reflect the working-class interests and attitudes most evident in cities such as New York. Small wonder that Whitman felt himself to have been well treated by O’Sullivan, for Whitman’s social, cultural, and political views accorded with his. In fact, Whitman’s first entry in the Democratic Review, “Death in the School-Room (A Fact)” in 1841, not only denounced corporal punishment of children but probably also was intended to support O’Sullivan’s stand in the state legislature against capital punishment.

Whitman had already been initiated into the turbulent world of politics, both through his experiences with newspapers that served as party organs and via his own involvement as an appointed Democratic electioneer on behalf of Van Buren. In the 1840 presidential campaign he took part in political debates and gave speeches for the party and its candidate, achieving some local recognition though his oratorical skills were somewhat lacking. ⁵⁵   He was also quite familiar with Tammany Hall and its political objectives. The Tammany Society, originally a fraternal group named for a Native American chieftain, had its origins in late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals, which quickly became Jeffersonian principles. Its benevolence toward the indigent and the working poor of the city led to support from that quarter for Tammany’s later political aspirations. In the 1820s the society offered membership to the Irish, and a decade later they and it were dedicated Democrats. By 1840, when the society supported Van Buren for president, its political influence reached deep and wide in the city, where it had become synonymous with the Democratic Party. Whitman’s electioneering for Van Buren in that campaign brought him into close contact with Tammany. In 1877 he remembered learning much about Thomas Paine from a personal acquaintance of the great infidel, Tammany member Colonel John Fellows. It was, he recalled, “some thirty-five years ago, in New York city, at Tammany hall, of which place I was then a frequenter.” ⁵⁶   That would have been around 1842, about the same time he went to the Aurora. By then Whitman’s philosophical and political ideas had been shaped by an early exposure, via his father’s liberalism, to such socialistic and anticlerical reformers as Robert Owen and Frances Wright. His later absorption of firsthand accounts of one of his father’s heroes, Thomas Paine, well may have served to fuel the anger evident in his Aurora editorials when Irish Catholics became a dominating influence on Tammany and the Democratic Party. At the time, Catholicism was antithetical to those who believed, as did Whitman and his father, in individual liberty and freedom of thought.

Given his political background, it is not surprising that the new editor of the Au