“Wilmot
Proviso,
1846, amendment to a bill put before the U.S. House of
Representatives during the Mexican War; it provided an appropriation
of $2 million to enable President Polk to negotiate a territorial
settlement with Mexico. David Wilmot
introduced an amendment to the bill stipulating that none of the
territory acquired in the Mexican War should be open to slavery.”
-http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0852373.html
The Wilmot Proviso was a hot button
topic, one that also had a hand in leading to the Civil War. It
should be noted that David Wilmot was trying to protect the interests
of the white worker seeking a wage who obviously couldn't compete
with free labor, rather than trying to stop the proliferation of
slavery based on moral grounds.
I
find it interesting that Whitman was critical of abolitionists and
merely an anti-extentionist (as Fanny brings up in citing the David
Reynold's article "Politics
and Poetry: Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the
1850s") when
that seems
to contradict his view toward slavery in “Song of Myself.” Didn't
he say that we are all the same? Whitman is way ahead of his time in
regarding women as equal to men: “I say it is as great to be a
woman as it is a man” (Song of Myself, section 21, line 7) and his
passage about the “runaway slave” would have been incendiary in
the time especially in the South, but not much less in
the north, I imagine, as well. He is actively taking part in a
criminal activity by harboring a slave and he professes this,
encourages this as it is the moral thing to do. 65 “In all people
I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,” (Song
of Myself, section 20, line 17-18). That is pretty straightforward so
one has to question his poetic proclamations next to his practical,
public views. In this poem he is definitely advocating that everyone
should be equal.
So where's the divide? What happened?
Wilmot proviso was 1846, Leaves of Grass in 1855, I can only assume
that tensions increased at this time since the Civil War began in
1861. Is it simply a timeline thing? Does Whitman shift his opinions
as the years leading to the Civil War pass? Whitman effuses such
across-the-board equality, not only equality but almost buddhist like
connection in “Song of Myself”; that we are all part of one
another and share the same atoms. This idea is so important he begins
the poem with it saying, “For every atom belonging to me as good
belongs to you,” (Song
of Myself, section 1, line 3) Why does he profess this
in the poem when he didn't back up this view in the political
landscape? Especially when he had some amount of influence in his
position as a journalist.
Yes, W's attitude toward abolitionism seems complicated . . .but not his attitude toward slavery. Perhaps abolitionism was more complicated than we think? We need to investigate this . . .
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