Hidden Literacies

Johnson was a cotton farmer

Johnson was a cotton farmer from Mid, Alabama, in Marshall County, about fifteen miles from the county seat of Guntersville. Before the Civil War he was a slaveholder; he fought in the war and was captured; he had fourteen children with two wives and, as far as we know, no college education. He first encountered Whitman’s work through descriptions of it in newspapers. “Again this summer learned in my backwoods hermit home that Walt’s Poems were in books,” he wrote Whitman in 1874, “and that ‘English critics consider him the greatest Poet of America’. Accordingly, I sent some money to a New York Bookseller and got ‘Leaves of Grass’ and ‘As a strong bird on pinions free.’” He became enamored of Whitman’s work, memorizing it and writing frequently to the poet. Eventually he made the journey north to Camden, New Jersey, visiting Whitman for a month in 1887. The unusual convergence of these two figures made the papers, both Northern and Southern. Thirty pieces of correspondence are known to survive today, and while none of Whitman’s letters remain, the relationship was meaningful enough to Whitman that he sent Johnson a copy of the last edition of Leaves of Grass practically from his death bed. Scholars have tended to belittle Johnson’s pretensions as “Philosopher and Poet,” as he put it.  In this to an extent they follow Johnson’s own lead, as his letters are often self-deprecating. But just as often they are feisty defenses of his opinions and sharp interrogations of Whitman’s work. So there are good reasons to take seriously Johnson’s intellectual engagement with the poet over the last decades of his life.

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