David S. Reynolds writes the fifth essay in this book, titled “Politics and Poetry: Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the 1850s” (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.66-91). We must emphasize that the social crisis included in the title is closely linked to the political crisis that is discussed in the article and which is the main topic under discussion. A passage from this essay will give a better view of it, that is, a view of the political situation of the United States in the decade preceding the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass:
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The early 1850s witnessed one of the most momentous phenomena in American political history: the collapse of the party system. The Whig Party, weak for years, broke up in 1854 as a result of the sectional quarrels over slavery, and Whitman’s Democratic Party became strife-ridden as well. The party crisis aroused Whitman’s wrath against the governmental authority figures he had once revered. The presidencies of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan eroded his confidence in the executive office. This period was a time of egregious presidential incompetence, mainly because of these leaders’ soft-spined compromises on the slavery issue. [...] The 1850s was also a decade of unprecedented political corruption, a time of vote buying, wire pulling, graft, and patronage on all levels of state and national government. Class divisions were growing at an alarming rate.
The social forces that drove Whitman to despair simultaneously opened up new vistas of self-empowerment. As authority figures collapsed, the individual self – sovereign, rich, complex – stood forth amid the ruin of the parties. Whitman’s growing disillusionment with authority figures sparked his deep faith in common people and in the power of populist poetry. [...] The healing of a divided nation, he had come to believe, could be best achieved through all-absorptive poetry. (1997, p.66-7)
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We have in these two paragraphs a summary of what was happening in the United States and to Whitman in that period. Whitman’s view on this topic is given in “Origins of Attempted Secession”, which is referred to in section 3.5, along with a broader description of the American situation at that time.
