Uploaded March 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here's a virtual movie of the great Walt Whitman reading his 1854 Poem "A Boston Ballad"
"Song of Myself" had its genesis and rapid gestation during the explosive decade of the 1850s, following the Missouri Compromise and the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Law, which increased federal oversight of the process of returning runaway slaves to their owners. Many Americans who resisted this law strenuously objected to the imposition of federal jurisdiction over what had previously been state decisions, and many argued that the enforcement of the law made all Americans complicitous in slavery and, even worse, coerced all Americans into becoming slave catchers. The controversies surrounding this law boiled over in 1854 when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was retained in Boston, Massachusetts, and ordered back to the South by federal marshals and by President Franklin Pierce. Pierce provided hundreds of U.S. troops to escort Burns through the streets of Boston, where twenty thousand angry residents demonstrated against his forced return, and stationed a navy boat in Boston harbor to take him back to Virginia. Whitman wrote an angry, sarcastic poem that he later called "A Boston Ballad" about this incident. In the poem, he chastised the people of the North for allowing this injustice to occur, and he imagined hauling King George III's bones out of his coffin, reassembling them, and putting a crown on the corpse's head, since such cowardice indicated Americans had become subservient to tyrannical power once again. But now the tyrannical power was seen as the U.S. government itself, which was imposing an unjust law on individual states. Whitman included "A Boston Ballad" in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but this was hardly the only mention of the slavery issue in Leaves: of the twelve poems appearing in the first edition, nine dealt with slaves, including the three longest poems, "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Song of Myself."
Whitman's involvement with the slavery issue dated back to the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in territories the United States acquired from Mexico; the proviso had split the Democratic Party, and Whitman became a Barnburner, a Democrat who opposed the extension of slavery to western territories. But it was not until early 1848 that Whitman came into direct contact with the institution of slavery. Acting impulsively on an unexpected offer to edit the New Orleans Daily Crescent, he abruptly left Brooklyn for Louisiana, where for three months he experienced southern culture, witnessed slave auctions, and absorbed the multilingual mix of the Creole city. His sojourn there would have lasting effects, ranging from his use of occasional French terms in "Song of Myself " to his powerful evocation of the slave market in "I Sing the Body Electric" and his detailed descriptions of slaves in "Song of Myself." He carried back with him a slave auction poster, which he kept in his room from then on as a stark reminder of what he had witnessed. Once back in Brooklyn, Whitman founded and edited for a short time a free-soil newspaper he called the Freeman; then, during the years leading up to the appearance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he gave himself time to read, to write incessantly in the small notebooks he always carried with him, and to allow his roiling ideas to evolve. In a burst of creative energy, still discernible in the notebooks he left behind, he discovered his revolutionary new vehicle, a long-lined free verse organized by a vast and absorptive "I" who would speak for all of America in a brash and nondiscriminating voice.
PLEASE NOTE - The image used in this animation is not actualy Walt Whitman it is a lookalike of Walt Whitman and is not to my knowledge a copyrighted image please write to me if you have bonafide information to the contrary. at my email address of hyperbolelad@hotmail.com
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
Here's a virtual movie of the great Walt Whitman reading his 1854 Poem "A Boston Ballad"
"Song of Myself" had its genesis and rapid gestation during the explosive decade of the 1850s, following the Missouri Compromise and the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Law, which increased federal oversight of the process of returning runaway slaves to their owners. Many Americans who resisted this law strenuously objected to the imposition of federal jurisdiction over what had previously been state decisions, and many argued that the enforcement of the law made all Americans complicitous in slavery and, even worse, coerced all Americans into becoming slave catchers. The controversies surrounding this law boiled over in 1854 when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was retained in Boston, Massachusetts, and ordered back to the South by federal marshals and by President Franklin Pierce. Pierce provided hundreds of U.S. troops to escort Burns through the streets of Boston, where twenty thousand angry residents demonstrated against his forced return, and stationed a navy boat in Boston harbor to take him back to Virginia. Whitman wrote an angry, sarcastic poem that he later called "A Boston Ballad" about this incident. In the poem, he chastised the people of the North for allowing this injustice to occur, and he imagined hauling King George III's bones out of his coffin, reassembling them, and putting a crown on the corpse's head, since such cowardice indicated Americans had become subservient to tyrannical power once again. But now the tyrannical power was seen as the U.S. government itself, which was imposing an unjust law on individual states. Whitman included "A Boston Ballad" in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but this was hardly the only mention of the slavery issue in Leaves: of the twelve poems appearing in the first edition, nine dealt with slaves, including the three longest poems, "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Song of Myself."
Whitman's involvement with the slavery issue dated back to the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in territories the United States acquired from Mexico; the proviso had split the Democratic Party, and Whitman became a Barnburner, a Democrat who opposed the extension of slavery to western territories. But it was not until early 1848 that Whitman came into direct contact with the institution of slavery. Acting impulsively on an unexpected offer to edit the New Orleans Daily Crescent, he abruptly left Brooklyn for Louisiana, where for three months he experienced southern culture, witnessed slave auctions, and absorbed the multilingual mix of the Creole city. His sojourn there would have lasting effects, ranging from his use of occasional French terms in "Song of Myself " to his powerful evocation of the slave market in "I Sing the Body Electric" and his detailed descriptions of slaves in "Song of Myself." He carried back with him a slave auction poster, which he kept in his room from then on as a stark reminder of what he had witnessed. Once back in Brooklyn, Whitman founded and edited for a short time a free-soil newspaper he called the Freeman; then, during the years leading up to the appearance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he gave himself time to read, to write incessantly in the small notebooks he always carried with him, and to allow his roiling ideas to evolve. In a burst of creative energy, still discernible in the notebooks he left behind, he discovered his revolutionary new vehicle, a long-lined free verse organized by a vast and absorptive "I" who would speak for all of America in a brash and nondiscriminating voice.
PLEASE NOTE - The image used in this animation is not actualy Walt Whitman it is a lookalike of Walt Whitman and is not to my knowledge a copyrighted image please write to me if you have bonafide information to the contrary. at my email address of hyperbolelad@hotmail.com
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2014
