I Hear America Singing (Historical Context)

Historical Context

It is a measure of Walt Whitman’s love for his country and his faith in the nation’s citizenry that he produced this poem in 1860, just as America was starting, after decades of tension, to rip apart into the two sides that would fight each other in the Civil War. The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln set off a series of states resigning their membership in the United States, or “seceding.” Lincoln had run on a platform of moderation regarding slavery: he accepted its existence in states where it was already established, but he opposed it personally and did not want to see the practice extended in the future. Feeling threatened by the new President-elect’s views, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860; during the following January, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana also seceded. On February 4, 1861, the six states banded together as the Confederate States of America. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy would accept the other as a legitimate power, and, as was inevitable, the mounting hostility broke out into armed conflict on April 12, at Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln responded by drafting 75,000 citizens to fight in the Union Army. By the time of the first major battle of the war, the Battle of Bull Run on July 1, 1861, all of the southern slave states were members of the Confederacy.

No single preventable action caused the country to tear in half like this. In a way, it was programmed to happen from the very birth of the nation, when the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” was signed by men who participated in and supported the institution of slavery. At first, the United States government simply proceeded as if this were simply another issue that had two sides, but the supporters of each side felt so strongly about their beliefs that they could not give anything up nor accept any gains by their opponents. As early as 1803, Congress was forced to deal with the fate of the growing country, when the Louisiana Purchase greatly expanded America’s land territory in the west. Debate raged over whether or not slavery should be allowed to expand into the new territory.

In 1818, when the Missouri Territory wanted to become a state, the issue reached a point of crisis. At that time, there were eleven states that permitted slavery and eleven free states, and neither side wanted the other to achieve a majority in the Senate. The agreement that was reached in March of 1820, called the Missouri Compromise, was supposed to settle the issue: Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state, and the deal stipulated that with future additions to the country, slavery would only be permitted in states that fell south of Missouri’s southern border. This compromise may have kept politicians on both sides happy, but throughout the country, the issue became increasingly volatile. In 1850, the same man who had authored the Missouri Compromise, Congressman Henry Clay, devised a series of five acts that were meant to retain the balance of power and calm the more dangerous elements of both sides. Two of the Compromise Measures of 1850 were seen as losses for the supporters of slavery: California was admitted as a free state and slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia. The third act established the territories of New Mexico and Utah, where the slavery issue would be settled by popular vote, and the fourth allotted millions of dollars to pro-slavery Texas for border disputes. The fifth, the Fugitive Slave Act, angered opponents of slavery to an unexpected degree: it made it a federal crime to aid escaping slaves and paid government money to bounty hunters to capture black persons, determine if they were escaped slaves, and return them to their owners. Since these hunters were paid twice as much for each returned slave as they were paid for each person they declared a free citizen, they often enslaved innocent, unsuspecting parties. The outrage felt across the free states in response to this act helped the Abolitionist Movement gather supporters for the cause of eradicating slavery. By 1853, Clay’s Compromise had proven itself to be no solution to the dispute. Senator Steven Douglas of Illinois — the man who is best remembered today for being Lincoln’s debate opponent — proposed yet another compromise scheme, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ended the federal government’s attempts to balance slave states with free states by letting new states vote on whether to allow slavery. The Act raised the fighting over the slavery issue to an unheard-of degree of destructiveness. Abolitionists and slave holders poured money and guns into the Kansas territory, leading to violent attacks and retribution as both sides tried to influence the vote through bribery and intimidation.

Given that the country had been divided from the start over the issue of slavery and that the fighting over this issue had become increasingly bitter for almost a century — to the point that it was about to cause the country to disband into separate halves — , it is difficult to imagine how Whitman could have written a poem in 1860 praising the American spirit: in fact, it is difficult to see how he could even see something that could be considered “American” at that time of division. In the years since the poem was written, though, it has touched something basic in all Americans and helped the country unite with a common identity.

Compare & Contrast

• 1860: The first Pony Express rider carried mail from St. Louis, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in a journey of ten days. Despite its place in American folklore, the Pony Express only lasted until the following year, when transcontinental telegraph lines made it impractical.

  1876: Alexander Graham Bell developed the first working telephone, replacing the telegraph.

  Today: The popularity of the Internet has revived the importance of reading in up-to-the-minute communications.

• 1860: The United States population was 31.1 million, double what it had been twenty years earlier.

  Today: The U.S. population is expected to be over 268 million by the year 2000.

• 1860: The first major labor strike occurred at a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts. The workers’ demands were met, although their union was not given official recognition.

  1885: The American Federation of Labor was founded. One of the nation’s most powerful and durable unions, the AFL is still prominent today.

  1894: Labor Day was established as a United States holiday to honor the contributions of the American worker.

  1935: The Congress of Industrial Organizations was founded during the pro-labor period of the New Deal, as Americans struggled to work their way out of the depression. In 1955, it merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO, which is an important political force today.

  1981: President Ronald Reagan fired air-traffic controllers who were on strike, setting a precedent for anti-union sentiment that has contributed to the decline of union power in this country.

  Today: Union membership has dwindled to about 18 percent of the work force.