Week 4, Whitman and the Civil War

This week's text is "Year of Meteors (1859-60)"

Newspapers were filled with reports of intense meteor showers during the fall of 1859 and the summer of 1860: it actually was a “year of meteors,” as Whitman’s portentous poem claims. The American artist Frederic Church’s painting “Meteor of 1860” captures the drama and power of the July meteor event. During that last uneasy year before the Civil War began, 1859-60, unexpected spectacular events that seemed to portend something calamitous seemed to take place with increasing frequency. No event was more ominous than the capture, trial, and hanging of the radical abolitionist John Brown, who had tried to coordinate a slave insurrection that he hoped would initiate a war to end slavery; his attack on Harpers Ferry Armory in western Virginia took place in October 1859. Henry David Thoreau would write that “John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live.” Herman Melville would begin his own book of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces, with a short poem called “The Portent,” picturing Brown “Hanging from the beam, / Slowly swaying,” and calling him “The meteor of the war.” The spectacular fall meteor shower hit in November, halfway between Brown’s sentencing and his execution, and many newspapers reported the momentous confluence of the two events. Melville called him “Weird John Brown”: he was “weird” in the same way Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” in Macbeth were, agents of prophecy and fate (the word derives from the Old English wyrd, meaning “destiny”).

In “Year of Meteors,” Whitman joins Thoreau and Melville in recognizing the ways that John Brown and meteors signaled the inevitability of the war that so many felt was on the near horizon. In Whitman’s poem, he characterizes the precedent year of the war as a “brooding year,” during which Lincoln was elected president (assuming the nineteenth “Presidentiad,” a word Whitman was proud to have invented, meaning a four-year term—a president could serve two Presidentiads if re-elected, or two presidents could share a presidentiad if one resigned or died while in office.) The speaker of Whitman’s poem imagines himself present at Brown’s hanging, silently witnessing with clenched teeth as the prophetic death becomes a “sign” of many deaths to come.

But then the poem veers off in a completely unexpected direction, recalling the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales, to New York City in October of 1860, just a year after Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. The eighteen-year-old Edward, son of Queen Victoria and the notorious playboy prince, was a hit in North America, greeted by tens of thousands of people at his stops at various American cities. His trip marks the beginnings of America’s renewed infatuation with the British royal family. He was the first heir to the British throne to come to the U.S., and his attendance at a service in Trinity Church in New York to hear prayers for the royal family spoken for the first time since the American Revolution was seen as a sign of a new era of friendship between the former antagonists. America’s earlier wars with Britain now seemed to be fading into the past just as a new internecine war was shaping up, one that would lead both North and South to seek the vital support and recognition of Great Britain, a country that struggled over which of America’s broken halves it should side with and ended up remaining neutral, though many influential Brits favored the Confederacy. In a controversial move, Edward made a quick visit to Richmond, the soon-to-be Confederate capital, but he spent most of his time traveling through the North. He visited President Buchanan in the White House and, in a healing act, visited George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon and paid his respects at the tomb of the general who was instrumental in defeating the British and securing American independence.

As Whitman evokes the prince’s visit to New York, he echoes his “Calamus” language of male-male affection that he had included in his cluster of poems by that name in his 1860 Leaves of Grass, the edition in which he offers up a vision of “a new friendship—It shall be called after my name, / It shall circulate through The States, indifferent of place, / It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each other—Compact shall they be, showing new signs, / Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom. . . .” This was the “Calamus” affection that he hoped might prevent a civil war, a call for males not to define their relationships with each other by competition and battle but rather through democratic care and concern that would cross and heal regional differences: “the special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster of ‘Leaves of Grass,’” he wrote, “mainly resides in its political significance.” It would be “the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west” by which “the United States of the future . . . are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union.” So, in “Year of Meteors,” he expresses a “Calamus” love for Edward: “I know not why, but I loved you.” The love he expresses here for a young man who now represented America’s former enemy is a kind of reconciliation that prefigures the reconciliation Whitman would enact toward his Confederate enemies at the end of the Civil War.

Then the speaker recalls another memorable event of the summer of 1860 as the Great Eastern, a British iron sailing steamship, at the time the largest ship ever built (Whitman says “she was 600 feet long,” but in fact she was 692 feet in length), sails into the New York harbor on her first transatlantic voyage. And from this arrival, the speaker suddenly moves to “the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads.” Perhaps Whitman now is thinking of the 1860 meteor burst that Church painted. But instead of attaching the meteor image to John Brown and the portents of war (as Melville and Thoreau had done), Whitman turns it back on all these events of the year—“evil and good”—and perceives an overarching pattern of comings and goings, of “transient and strange” brightness and darkness, of the ultimate insignificance of all events, even seemingly momentous ones, in the vastness of cosmic time. In the most memorable move, Whitman ends his poem by underscoring the transience of his own work and of himself: “what is this book, / What am I myself but one of your meteors?” The meteor flares up and sails across the sky, then disappears into the dark vastness; Lincoln’s presidency comes and suddenly goes; John Brown’s plans materialize and collapse; the Prince of Wales visits and leaves; the Great Eastern arrives and departs and eventually is dismantled and forgotten (in 1890, two years before Whitman’s death, the giant ship would be broken up). Whitman is returning to his faith that only the vastness of time provides the ultimate meaning of all passing events, and he gains some comfort in realizing that the portents of 1859-60 are things that will, in deep time, “flit through . . . hastily.” He will continue to try to understand the horrors of the war that is about to come by trusting in the vast restorative power of nature to heal history, to turn mass death back into fertility, to extract a future out of the darkness of the present.

We will see how, throughout the war, Whitman looks to the heavens, not so much for guidance or for signs of what is to come, but rather for the solace that vast time and deep space bring as an eternal backdrop to the comings and goings of the quickly passing human history that seems to our eyes, moment by moment, so vital and important. The horrors Whitman was about to face in the four years of the Civil War would often send his eyes skywards.

—EF