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• 1 2019-07-12T12:18:24+00:00 an attitude of Southern nationalism 3 Cohen page 8 plain 2019-07-15T10:28:53+00:00 The letter expresses an attitude of Southern nationalism that would not read so weirdly if it were not being performed for Walt Whitman—indeed, occasioned by him and then put partly into his own words. Like this one, Johnson’s other letters to Whitman often form a dialogue, woven out of the strands of Johnson’s visions and Whitman’s poetry and prose. Johnson’s point, across his correspondence with the author, is that Whitman’s idea about freedom, his linking of personal liberation and national identity, is what Johnson is drawing on to parse his own relationships to the South and to the United States in the wake of the war and its economic devastation. Johnson frequently expressed his feelings of depression to Whitman, and recounted mental illness in his children and neighbors, as well, including the suicide of one of his sons. “I have always had a leaning towards suicide as a relief in case of great trouble,” he wrote in 1875; and elsewhere described his “discordant household” as a source of unhappiness.  His reading of the Northern man’s works was a source simultaneously of intellectual engagement and emotional support.