Walt Whitman's views on slavery

Walt Whitman's complex view's on slavery: A Free Soil Perspective

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman remains one of America's most known and respected poets, but his political views on slavery often give modern readers a shock. White he found slavery as a ideology morally disgusting, he wasn't the hero that some assume him as. Instead, he had a middle ground approach, that being the Free Soil movement. 

The Free Soil Party, which Whitman supported and spoke about, had a clear and precise motto: "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." This wasn't about immediate abolishing of slavery; it was a stance that wanted to prevent slavery's growth into western territories as America pushes its boundaries farther outward.    

Whitman's reasoning for this centered fully on the economical dignity and competition of white labor. He fought that free white workers just couldn't compete fairly against slave labor. When plantation owners brought enslaved people west, they undercut and took away opportunities that should have been occupied by independent framers and laborers trying to build new lives on the frontier. 

This position gave a huge difference from radical abolitionists and Free-Soilers. Whitman viewed abolitionists are extremists whose demands threated to tear the union apart, which he wasn't wrong about. He believed that their all-or-nothing approach would cause a huge conflict rather than gradual progress. He much preferred the choice of containment of slavery. 

The Wilmot Proviso of 1846 illustrated Whitman's vision. This proposed legislation would have banned slavery in all territories acquired form the Mexican-American War. Whitman supported this legislation enthusiastically, viewing it as a perfect compromise for protecting free labor and maintaining the bonds holding the nation.

Yet his views weren't purely pragmatic. While he repeatedly said that slavery was morally wrong and abhorrent. He contradicted however himself a lot because he didn't support abolition. He cared more about the Union's preservation than actually ending slavery.

This caused him to earn criticism from both sides, Abolitionists saw him as a person who couldn't really want to end slavery, instead wanting to just let slavery play out and hopefully end. Pro-slavery advocates viewed the restriction as an attack on their way of life; however even with both sides giving him criticism Whitman stood his ground in his belief of the Free Soil Approach.

Understanding his actual stance and why he thought the way he did really just shows us how messed up pre-Civil war politics was. It revealed the complexity that people had to deal with when even talking about something this life changing for the Union.

Whitman's Free Soil politics reminds us that historical figures rarely if ever fit the modern categories that we have today; and that while he did definitely want the end of slavery calling him an Abolitionist would be a far cry of what he actually was. 

Ai discloser; I used Claude AI to help me create this blog post; However every word was typed by me. I used the text that Claude gave me as a rough outline for the format of how I worded my post. Claude did give me the links for the post.