Agitation

What a sad, sad difference 150 years makes. This would get all these guys wire tapped for sure today, if not worse.

Whitman was adopting the spirit of agitation popularized by reformers who were trying to arouse the moral conscience of the nation. The Brooklyn preacher he most admired, Henry Ward Beecher, declared in an antislavery speech of 1851: "Agitation? what have we got to work with but agitation? Agitation is the thing in these days for any good." The next year the abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared: "Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity . . . Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated." The antislavery leader Joshua Giddings used similar language: "Agitation is the great and mighty instrument for carrying forward . . . reforms. Agitation is necessary to purify the political atmosphere of this nation." And Whitman's correspondent and favorite speaker, John P. Hale, told the Senate: "I glory in the name of agitator. I wish the country could be agitated vastly more than it is."

Whitman was coming to think that that he, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He wrote in his 1856 notebook: "Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and laws and institutions -- If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them and shall die {sic}. He once declared, "I think agitation is the most important factor of all -- the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!"

~ What Whitman's America, by David S. Reynolds, Vintage paperback edition, pp. 138-139.