So what, then, to do about John Newton Johnson’s letter to Whitman written in the dialect of a Southern infant? You could spend years poring through the archives of nineteenth-century correspondence without finding many letters like this. Physically, there are similar ones: heavily worn, frequently folded, torn, spilled upon, and as a result, difficult to decipher paleographically. In terms of the letter’s racism, once again, you can find plenty of letters that share the same basic tenets. And Whitman received a lot of fan mail; though Johnson and Whitman would end up being correspondents for years, this letter arrived at Whitman’s door while their acquaintance was still in its early stages.[i] But in other respects, the letter is unusual indeed.

            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.[ii] 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.[iii] 

            Perhaps Johnson’s most extraordinary attempt to engage Whitman’s politics of democracy and race came in 1875, when he sent this four-page letter in dialect—baby dialect. In late 1874, not long after they had begun communicating, Johnson named his new son after the poet. The fiction of this letter is that it is from Walt Whitman Johnson to Walt Whitman: a strange, distant mirror. “Me is fine ittle ‘secesh,’ [Secessionist, or Rebel]” the infant “Modern Man” declares, with “plenty…F.F.V. [First Families of Virginia ancestry]” and enough talk of “back-heart bobalition [abolitionism]” to back up the assertion. Johnson’s test of Whitman’s embrace of all races extends to his description of how Walt Whitman Johnson got his name. Complaining that he went without a name for some months, the letter’s speaker says his father “not like name him babys for live mans—him said live ans do bad fings and make babies shamed—but me fink oo neber do no bad fings, man whan talk dood like oo wont neber do no bad fings.” This flattery, however, sets up the challenge to Whitman: “papa not like bobolitions neider, but may-be oo not bobolitions, may-be oo ony make-believe.” Perhaps, the child asserts, it was only to “make in der money” that Whitman took his stance against slavery. Extending the make-believe, Walt Whitman Johnson then imagines himself and Whitman sharing a house together, obtaining fiddles to “play Dixie,” and creating an ideal, unified America together: “if noder war tomes, we will be taptains of Ku Klux banditti, an’ me go east, an’ oo go west, an’ we will clean out all bobolitions.” Fantasies of living with Whitman were not uncommon among his admirers, but this one is without compare, with its disturbing mix of playfulness and violence. Whitman’s poetry helps vocalize Johnson’s appeal, the child referring to its “‘gymnastic’ mudder”; his Union pride and family’s experience of the war tweaked by lines like, “Me bully ittle boy—any ittle Jersey-boo-coat boy say ‘Union’ to me me tan whip him quicker ’n him Banner an’ Pennant tan say ‘fap’, ‘fap’, ‘fap’—oo bet!” It was Whitman’s own insistence on representing America good and bad that underwrote the letter’s concluding demand: “oo mus’ gib…love to ittle secesh mans.”

            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.[iv] His reading of the Northern man’s works was a source simultaneously of intellectual engagement and emotional support.

            This was in part because Whitman’s formula for individual freedom helped Johnson resist the religious and philosophical norms of his locale, and in part because it allowed him to create a rationale for a racist hierarchy that may have seemed to be one of his few remaining possessions. Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, which ringingly criticizes America’s political failures while implicitly expressing skepticism about Black suffrage, was key to Johnson’s thinking. “I wish you would sometime take up Democratic Vistas (for me) and read (Conscience) Page 62 and then bottom of Page 69,” Johnson asked. In those passages, Whitman argues that the “climax of this loftiest range of modern civilization…is to be its development…of absolute Conscience, moral soundness, Justice.”[v] In the passage at the bottom of page 69 is an articulation of the methods for achieving this that sounds distinctly conservative to our ears today: “That which really balances and conserves the social and political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and the dread of punishment, as the latent intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, etc.” (69). Johnson certainly articulated doubts about the morals of his white neighbors, but may have shared with many of them the common prejudicial notion that the Black population lacked the “latent intuitional sense” that Whitman made the foundation of social stability. In any case, in another letter, he concluded something similar. “While you show us that Universal Suffrage is certain to not give us the very worst of characters for rulers,” he wrote the poet, “may not it be inferred that White ascendancy here again will hardly produce any intolerable event?”[vi] Johnson’s is certainly not the version of Whitman’s exuberant democratic equality that has often been claimed or wished for by his critics and disciples. But here it is, operating simultaneously with a range of other readings of Whitman’s work that are familiar to us as progressive, liberating, non-violent, or inclusivist; echoes of the gay Brooklyn laborer, not the would-be white supremacist bandit.

[i] For germane characterizations of Whitman’s correspondence see Edwin Haviland Miller, “Introduction,” in Miller, ed., The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, vol. 5, 1890-1892, (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 1-8; and Alexander Ashland, et. al, “‘All thy wide geographies’: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database,” in Matt Cohen, ed., The New Whitman Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

[ii] Both quotations are from John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 13 August 1874, Whitman Archive ID loc.01837. https://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/tei/loc.01837.html

[iii] A longer discussion of Johnson and Whitman’s relationship can be found in the fourth chapter of Matt Cohen, Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017).

[iv] John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 8 February 1875, Whitman Archive ID loc.01848; John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 17 July 1876, Whitman Archive ID loc.01851.

[v] John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 7 May 1876, Whitman Archive ID loc.1853; Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (Washington, DC, 1871), 62.

[vi] John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, n.d. (after 1874), Whitman Archive ID loc.02420.