As I was reading a biography about Walt Whitman, I came across something that mentioned the fact that Whitman was a known abolitionist. That sentence got me interested in what Whitman’s actual views on slavery were. An abolitionist is a person who wants to end something, in Whitman’s case, he wanted to end slavery. When I read about him being an abolitionist, I automatically assumed that he was one of the few people in his time that disagreed with slavery, but I discovered that I was wrong. He had different reasons for choosing to abolish slavery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
Whitman’s views on slavery were not much different from the average Americans’ views in his time. His great grandfather had owned slaves and Whitman did not have a high opinion of the people with African decent. Though, Whitman saw absolute slavery as disgusting and pitied the people in servitude. Some people say that he often referred to slaves in his poetry. The references were in “The Sleepers”, “Song of Myself”, and “Leaves of Grass”. Whitman decided to side with the abolitionists after he saw that the issue of slavery was threatening to tear the nation apart. He had not changed his views on race. Whitman saw what the issue was doing and decided that it was not worth the fight, though the Civil War still broke out and Whitman changed his interest to the suffering of soldiers on both sides. Despite his views on slavery and race, Whitman has influenced many notable African Americans writers, such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and June Jordan. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/more/e_race.hthttps://michaelasmommyblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1386&action=editml
This is a video of Whitman reading the words of his poem “The Sleepers”:
One source that I found said that it is questionable about how Whitman really felt about slavery and African Americans. In “Leaves of Grass”, he appears that he opposes slavery by including African Americans into the “ideal, multiracial republic”. He also portrayed them as beautiful, dignified, and intelligent. In many other of Whitman’s poems, he appeared to believe that blacks were inferior to whites and show little tolerance for the abolition of slavery. Whitman once wrote a novel about a man traveling down to the south and meeting a slave owner and a beautiful Creole slave woman who was sexually alluring, yet also vengeful and violent, showing that he fed into racist stereotypes. http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_51.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125789927
Although it is not very clear as to if Walt Whitman was a racist man or not, it is clear that he does not believe in interracial relationships. It seems to me that Whitman did not really agree with slavery, but he was also influenced by the people around him. Whitman only chose to abolish slavery thinking that a war was just not worth it. Whitman never owned any slaves, though his great-grandfather owned them until it was prohibited in New York. In my opinion, Whitman seemed a little back and forth on what he thought about slavery and the abolishing of it.
michaelasmommy's Blog 