As Christopher Hager has observed, northerners, and especially abolitionists, often spoke of the South as a region destitute of literacy. Works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred were “fixated on the arrested literacy of slaveholders,” Hager writes, and quotes Theodore Dwight Weld’s judgment that most slaveholders “are ignorant men, thousands of them notoriously so, mere boors unable to write their names or to read the alphabet.”[i] Johnson is often at pains in his correspondence with Whitman to demonstrate his wide reading, and to differentiate himself from what he regarded as the undereducated and uncurious folks among whom he lived, with their “lack of culture and the love of the ideal in any sense other than the old and barbarous.”[ii] Still, this letter’s fanciful premise and use of dialect may well have been formal choices designed to flout that Northern prejudice about Southern smarts. For starters, Johnson’s son’s persona in this letter may not be able to spell, but then, he’s eight months old. And more significantly, with its trope of the child speaker and its consistent use of eye-dialect, the letter partakes of the same kind of authority-effect that dialect writing more broadly did in the hands of nationally famous American authors.[iii] The letter dares its famous northern, abolitionist, and literary reader to dismiss the opinions of its speaker based on inexperience, ignorance, or illiteracy.

            That said, the choice of this rhetorical strategy raises questions. After all, if dialect was often used to establish authority, it was usually by belittling, implicitly or explicitly, those it depicted as lacking the literacy and comparative sensibility of the writer. Here the subject is the writer’s child; the dialect, presumably, that which the child was learning in his own house. The humor of the notion that an eight-month-old could already spout the writings of Walt Whitman back to their notorious author (and have an opinion about national tariff policy) is offset by the very real racist challenge to Whitman’s stance as the poet of both slaves and masters. If Johnson hoped to tweak the Good Gray Poet, to establish a kind of fraternal equality between them, he did so by the unusual means of first paying homage (by naming his son after Whitman), and then throwing the poet’s own diction back in his face to justify racial hierarchy and a violent vision of manly friendship.

I can imagine many positions on the possible publication of this letter, from “please don’t” to a version of Toni Morrison’s stance in Playing in the Dark, in which she insists that these are pasts we have to confront, because the surest way to make it happen again is to leave the interpretive power over these documents in the hands of those whose vision of freedom does not include a vision of equality. My motivation is something like that, and a bit more.

This is a letter that comes more or less from the place that I grew up. The Tennessee River, where John Newton Johnson was raised on a plantation in Alabama, winds through the upper South to the Jackson Purchase of west Tennessee and Kentucky, where I was a child. Many of my childhood friends and their relatives echoed the same kinds of beliefs, a century later, that are expressed in Johnson’s letter to Whitman, projected those beliefs onto their eight-month-old children and onto their companions like me. But if Johnson’s letter plays on ideas about literacy common in Whitman’s era, in a way it continues to do so today. The daily life of rural Southerners—the web of values, prejudices, loves, hatreds, jealousies that they experienced—is not a recovery priority for much of American literary studies. We need not sanction rural Southern racism, but we must also acknowledge that the pathways to transforming those attitudes aren’t really laid at this point. Many are the literacies of the rural South, obscure not just to scholars but everyday Americans across the United States. Marvelous parallel acts of cultural preservation, in the Great Hole of History: rural southern attitudes about race; the rest of the country’s attitudes about rural southerners. Like one of Parks’s echoes, Johnson’s “oo mus’ gib…love to ittle secesh mans” confronts not just Whitman across political bounds in his time, but us as readers today across the threshold of time.

On one hand we don’t often get the chance to explore the literacy world of people like John Newton Johnson. We know it’s racist. But that racism is woven into a larger tapestry of experience and assumptions, of both hard lessons and strange forms of privilege, that do not tend to get explored in their particularities. One of the reasons we are stuck in the urban-rural dyad we are now in the U.S. is that the stories of people like Johnson haven’t been so much silenced as deprecated—assumed instead of explored, contained instead of confronted. On the other hand, from the standpoint of Johnson’s attraction to Whitman, when we indict Whitman for his racism, we usually look mostly at Whitman’s words. That will only get us so far, because Whitman contradicts himself and because it leaves us stuck in an old way of understanding the effect of a set of texts by way of their author: relate the texts to each other, find the patterns of racism or universalism or nurturing democratic wholeness, and, it is assumed, you’ve found the man, his effect, and why he has that effect. But, we might ask, how did Johnson read Whitman—what was Whitman’s writing doing, irrespective of his intents? If we do that in the case of a letter like this, we find a careful reader of Whitman’s writing. Johnson was a selective reader in some ways, but one who is known to have memorized Whitman’s works, and who is confronting what he regards as Whitman’s one-sided version of national unity and offering an alternative model, grown out of his own mind but also sprouted from Whitman’s writing, from other writers (from Thomas Macaulay to John Burroughs), and the experience of the Alabama backcountry’s socio-political milieu.

My other motivation for publishing this letter here, to return to my earlier observation about editing as an act of political interpretation, is that it will also appear at the Walt Whitman Archive among Whitman’s other correspondence, incoming and outgoing. That edition is a major undertaking, since we have an unusually large surviving corpus of documents from Whitman’s career—thousands of letters, postcards, and the like. And as a consequence of the scale of that project, difficult letters like this one are seldom treated with the editorial depth called for by their politically and personally sensitive nature. They have the same metadata the other letters have; the same interface; the same omniscient-voiced, not-always-helpful annotations. I am grateful to have the opportunity to publish this letter in a context in which modes of reading themselves are the critical subject, and in which the old conception of literacy as reading-plus-writing-equals-intelligence is challenged. That conjunction offers a context in which the complexity of Johnson’s acts of reading Whitman and of authoring this letter can be appreciated even as the racism which informs both acts is highlighted. And perhaps, too, the very outlandishness of the letter’s trope might make it possible to talk about its blend of racism, trauma, and love without evoking the binaries of either nostalgic piety or condemnatory erasure.

I have chosen to annotate the text lightly and have included a separate document detailing sources for Johnson’s more obvious allusions to Whitman’s poetry and prose. But I chose not to provide a regularized text of the letter. As a long line of textual scholars has observed, regularization may open a work’s audience a bit, but it has the potential to oversimplify the text and certainly to create a more subtle but not necessarily helpful interpretation of it at the same time. The drawbacks are exacerbated here by the many illegible parts of the letter, which make determining tense and sometimes vocabulary choice difficult. These gaps and illegibilities in the letter themselves prompt a concluding thought. We tend to prefer “whole” or  “complete” documents when we are teaching, which is partly a function of a persistent emphasis on close reading that, at least in the New Critical model, requires an integral text, and partly a function of what kinds of things we imagine our students are learning—reading, not decipherment; interpretation of text, not of the material properties thereof; a window onto literary history, not a broken mirror or half-heard echo.

Further Reading

There is no biography of John Newton Johnson, but a chapter on his life can be found in Matt Cohen, Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (University of Iowa Press, 2017). A letter from Johnson to Charles N. Elliot discussing his relationship with Whitman is reprinted in Elliot’s Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend (R. G. Badger, 1915). Editions of Whitman’s correspondence can be found at the open access Walt Whitman Archive (https://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/index.html) and in the multi-volume Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, vols. 1-6 (New York University Press, 1961-1977). Recently discovered letters appear in Ted Genoways, The Correspondence, vol. 7 (University of Iowa Press, 2004). Much has been written on Whitman and race; a good starting point is Ivy Wilson, ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (University of Iowa Press, 2014). On Whitman and the politics of nationalism, the classic study is Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (Oxford University Press, 1989); but in connection with the questions of race and citizenship in this period that may have affected Johnson’s reading of Whitman, see also trenchant analyses in Martin Buinicki, Walt Whitman’s Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between History and Memory (University of Iowa Press, 2011), and Luke Mancuso, The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1865–1876 (Camden House, 1997).

[i] Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 37; 35.

[ii] John Newton Johnson to Walt Whitman, 7 October 1874, Whitman Archive ID loc.01840.

[iii] See later, for example, Mark Twain’s use of baby dialect in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). For an example of baby dialect more later contemporary with Johnson’s letter, using similar vocabulary elements (“oo,” and “ittle”), see “Caring for a Baby,” in Fred Hart, The Sazerac Lying Club: A Nevada Book (San Francisco: Henry Keller, 1878), 205-206. It seems that “baby talk” was a matter of some concern during the century among those who thought it might slow development; see for example Marion Harland, “Familiar Talks with Mothers: Baby Talk,” in Babyhood 2.1 (1885), 338-340; and “A Word to Mothers on Baby-Talk,” The Mother’s Magazine and Family Monitor 21 (1853): 37; as well as an anecdote about Samuel Johnson disapproving the practice that seems to have gone mildly viral, for example in John Timbs, A Century of Anecdote from 1760-1860, Volume 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1864): 36.