New Orleans Daily Crescent

In January 1848, Whitman either resigned or was fired from his position at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle because of political differences with the owners. With his brother Jeff, he traveled to New Orleans in February to take a new job with the Daily Crescent, one of three dailies in New Orleans which, in the 1840s, was the third most populous city in the United States and booming in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. The newspaper was founded by two veteran newsmen, Sam McClure and A.A. Hayes, who hired Whitman to help create connections with northeastern newspapers in order to exchange news and information. Whitman published "The Mississippi at Midnight" in the first issue of the Crescent. He also published impressions of his travels to New Orleans as well as a series, "Sketches of the Sidewalks and Levees" in subsequent issues. But Whitman abruptly resigned from the newspaper on May 25, 1848 and returned to New York where he founded his own newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman.

Poems

"The Mississippi at Midnight." New Orleans Daily Crescent 6 March 1848: [2]. Revised as "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," Specimen Days & Collect (1882–83).

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harold W., and Sculley Bradley, eds. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Hayes, Maverick Marvin. "New Orleans Crescent." Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland, 1998.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism a History: 1690-1960. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan Company, 1995.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.