Whitman: Quaker Paradox
This is the first comprehensive review of Walt Whitman’s Quakerism, encompassing: (1) an overview of 19th-century Quakerism; (2) the forgotten aspects of antebellum life which enabled Quakers to be such leading players; (3) new Light on the Hicksite Schism; (4) the forgotten Hicks sermons referenced in Whitman’s marginalia; (5) Whitman’s “Good Gray Poet” brand; (6) Whitman in the context of recurring historic intersections between Gay and Quaker history; (7) the uneasy creation of Whitman’s botched Elias Hicks essay; (8) the theme of tolerance as “the Spirit of New York;” and (9) 20th-century Quakers’s forgetting their close association with Walt Whitman.
This essay was published in Quaker History, Spring 2007. The life and works of Walt Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass, pose many challenges for the serious student of American history. One of the most intractable problems has proven to be his lifelong, conspicuous affiliation with Quakers — with their theology, values, heritage, and their many social reforms, as well as with their distinctive dress and speech.
At various times in his life, Whitman also maintained close friendships with many individual Quakers. On the other hand, as a young man, he decided not to become a member of a Quaker meeting (almost certainly Flushing Meeting, when he taught school at nearby Whitestone, New York, during his early twenties). Over the years, while studying this longstanding problem in Whitman scholarship, I have called this puzzle “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox.”
In 1888, Whitman, at the end of his life, began to talk to biographer Horace Traubel about those days, in the context of his Elias Hicks essay, “Notes (Such as They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks.” He was still hesitating on including it in his book November Boughs.
After the telling eulogy by Moncure Daniel Conway, which revealed for the first time how the late Whitman’s sexual honesty was indebted to the great Quaker theologian Elias Hicks, Friends repeatedly stepped forward over the years to endorse Whitman’s reinterpretation of Brotherly Love.
These include University of Pennsylvania ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton; Haverford professor of Biblical Studies Alfred Cope Garrett; the author of the first genuine Whitman biography, an English Quaker named Henry Bryan Binns; Swarthmore’s College Librarian John Russell Hayes, and the influential Orthodox minister and reformer Rufus Jones.
In 1938, the eminent Swarthmore historian, Frederick B. Tolles, published his ground-breaking discovery concerning the reception of Leaves of Grass among Friends, focusing on Lucretia Mott’s delight in the Leaves — which, he concluded, “speaks well for the liberal attitude of some at least, of the Philadelphia Quakers.”
Brinton was born in 1837, Jones in 1863, Hayes in 1866, Garrett in 1867, and Binns in 1873. When this generation of Whitman’s contemporaries passed away, Friends largely forgot how they once had proudly identified his doctrine of Comradeship with the Quaker tradition of Brotherly Love.
In the context of the evidence previously offered in “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox,” the new findings bolster my claim that — although cast in the radical format of Tupperian poetry — Leaves of Grass was understood, at the time, by supporters, detractors, and Friends themselves as an eloquent expression of Hicksite morality.
This hardly contradicts Whitman’s famous claim that he was outside “the fence.” On the contrary, it justifies the theme developed previously: Whitman was, ultimately, too good of a Quaker to be a Quaker.
By analyzing the rise and fall of cautious, encoded, or ambiguous references to Whitman’s Quakerism, we can begin to see how the coy, winking understanding of the Good Quakergray Poet decayed with the end of The Age of Sail, resulting in the critics’ dilemma now known as Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox.
It should be clear why “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox” matters. Although the details are endlessly nuanced, the fundamental reality was simple: there was a near-consensus among “respectable” antebellum Americans that men’s sexual relationships must be thwarted, because such affairs were believed to lead away from God.
In April, 2020, the online Walt Whitman Archive began to publish transcriptions of Whitman’s marginalia, in books he is known to have personally owned. Now, for the first time, we can actually trace his debt to the Perfectionist, Inner-Light ethos of his principal hero, the influential Quaker theologian and dear friend of the Whitman family on Long Island: Elias Hicks.
This paper, first of all, seeks to fix 1883 as the date of Whitman’s earliest explicit denial of sex in Calamus (albeit through the mouthpiece of Standish O’Grady), in case this hasn’t already been clearly recognized. Far beyond that, it seeks to provide insight into both O’Grady’s and Whitman’s positions concerning manly love. Whitman’s sexual identity was a matter of controversy in his own lifetime and throughout the 20th century, culminating in today’s scholarly consensus that he was indeed sexually active as a gay man. So we shall skip the familiar arguments and facts behind the matter and proceed with the task at hand: exploring the Victorian crisis of masculinity, and the Hicksite theology of “God-implanted voices.”
Hicks: Orthodox Sex Panic
Youtube, 2019. This video dramatizes the liberation theology of Walt Whitman’s principal hero: his former neighbor and family friend, Elias Hicks [1748–1830]. It reveals Friend Hicks as Whitman saw him. Quaker history has so far only recognized two causes of the epochal Hicksite Schism: a shift towards fundamentalism and a struggle over Meeting governance. I discovered that the sexual implications of Hicks’ insistence on the Inner Light were a third cause. That controversy was so incendiary, however, that it disappeared from Quaker journals two years after Hicks’ death in 1830.
In 1831, Elisha Bates scorns the late Elias Hicks in his Miscellaneous Repository.
This pamphlet seeks to deepen our conception of Elias Hicks (1748–1830) beyond the mere “farmer” imagined by historians — toward the superconnector he in fact was, linking the maritime-Quaker commerce of the Eastern Seaboard. It seeks to illuminate how Hicksite theology expressed the commercial values of the New York seaport during the Age of Sail, a world now gone with the wind — a forgotten way of life, so different from our own. In doing so, we shall touch the essence of our beliefs about human sexuality, and deepen our appreciation of Quakerism’s unique contribution to modern society: an historic advocacy of the sanctity of individual conscience.
The leading historians of the Hicksite Schism, Thomas Hamm and Larry Ingle, have consistently trivialized the question of morality that so troubled Elias Hicks’s Orthodox critics.
I have shown that the potential effect of Hicks’s view of the Inner Light as a moral guide more crucial than either scripture or religion inspired a hysterical backlash in the Orthodox press until one year after Hicks’s death in 1830, when it was evidently banished from further discussion in print. Elias Hicks’s alleged “doctrine” is here defined by his Orthodox enemies as the proposition that “the murderer, the robber, the drunkard… is emboldened to suppose that he can be judge of the fitness of the [moral influence] of the Deity” and to reject “whatever does not suit his depraved imagination.”
Hicks’s Inner Light theology, therefore, “strikes at [Friends’ historic Inner Light] doctrine at the very root” and “takes off… all restraint from the mind of man, and opens the very flood-gates of immorality.” While it’s true that the Orthodox were eager to pervert anything that Hicks ever said, on the other hand, this piece suggests just how Hicks could give the Orthodox additional ammunition through the reckless extravagance of his remarks.
This screed appeared in 1829, during the separation crisis of the Hicksite Schism. Both its prose and its content betray evidences of having been penned for an American readership by an Englishman.
The author, naively, employs the term “pious” as if it were a complement rather than a slur. The rant begins with hypocritical praise of free speech (a political, not a religious concept), while immediately violently condemning any speech that contradicts the author’s beliefs.
The principal theme is the proposition that Elias Hicks’s alleged Deism poses an existential threat to both “the stability of our government, and the [personal] happiness we enjoy.” The editorial goes on to repeat the journal’s previous warnings that Hicks’s teachings remove “those salutary checks upon evil men, which arise from the fear of certain judgment at the hand of an offended God,” and this “may be very congenial with the corrupt inclination of the sensuality and the libertine.”
In an apocalyptic nightmare, “the worst passions would let loose, and wickedness, like a torrent, would flow through the land.” Moving from the universal destruction of civilization to the private punishment of Hell, the piece concludes with childish scare-stories of Deists who repented too late.
The following 1829 extracts from the Orthodox journal The Friend further prove my contention that the sexual implications of Elias Hicks’s teaching on the Inner Light were one of the most significant motivations for the Hicksite Schism — that is, until one year after Hicks’s death (1830).
In other words, after 1831, dangerously inflammatory references to sexual morality entirely disappear from Quaker journals. These excerpts also suggest how Frances Wright’s adoption of Hicks’s Inner Light arguments in the context of sexual freedoms horrified the Orthodox.
Finally, these essays reiterate the determination of Orthodox capitalists to enforce religious and moral orthodoxy as a form of general social control over their labor force. Owen, Wright, and Hicks were, ultimately, all seen as a threat to aristocratic wealth. Walt Whitman’s publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 served to re-ignite this debate over sex, fidelity, and labor.
From his introduction by Quaker theologian Robert Barclay in the 1670s, until Rufus Jones’ last sermon in 1948, Socrates remained a key exemplar for Friends’ insistence on universal salvation. Following the earliest Christian theologians, Friends argued that all Greeks who preached the One True God to a pagan society were prophets.
As early Friends began to focus on legends of the philosopher’s daimonion, however, Socrates gradually stepped out of their general lineup of en-Light-ened Greeks to emerge as the preferred pre-Christian ambassador for the doctrine of divine illumination. But curiously, the Quaker tradition never developed an accurate portrayal of the daemonic phenomenon, and in the case of Rufus Jones, this was especially curious because his personal philosophy was recognized as Socratic.
On the other hand, antebellum New Bedford’s ex-Quaker, Mary Rotch, exhibited not only a more faithful, but more pragmatic, understanding of Socrates’ daimonion. As originally shown by Frederick B. Tolles, her embrace of a similar spirit, or sign, played a pivotal role in the development of Emerson’s Self-Reliance — the key doctrine of Transcendentalism.
This paper reviews the historic usage of Socrates as an implicit exemplar of Friendly action: as gadfly, as martyr, and above all, as mystic — specifically, as channel for the central mystery in Quaker theology: “the Ray of that true Light which lighteth every Man who cometh into the world.”
Elias Hicks was so deeply impressed by Volume 1 of The Celestial Magnet that he distributed it to several of his followers. The parallels between this book and many aspects of Hicks’s sophisticated Inner Light theology are quite extensive, but it was little noticed at the time by the public and soon forgotten. In aggressively rewriting this essay, I’ve inserted headings relating to the theme of each section.
The towering Quaker theologian (although widely dismissed today as a mere “farmer”) Elias Hicks died in 1830. An attempt to exploit his ardent popularity was orchestrated by Samuel E. Clement, Brooklyn’s postmaster and the publisher of the Long Island Patriot, and by the ambitious, prosperous, and litigious merchant Aaron Leggett [1792–1860].
Leggett, a member of a sprawling clan of prominent New York Friends, has never been previously identified with this incident. The two arranged to disinter his frozen body in the Jericho Friends Graveyard in order to make a death mask. Once they succeeded, legal dispute arose between Leggett and the sculptor, John Henri Isaac Browere. The profound contradictions between contemporary news accounts of the resulting trial make it difficult to determine who originated the infamous scheme.
Legend has it that the cast and all copies of the bust were destroyed, however, Swarthmore Special Collections claims to have the original mask, provenance unknown. This essay covers various attempts to honor or “resurrect” the legacy of Elias Hicks: in Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom; the Leggett-Clement death mask; and the elevation of Elias Hicks’s grandson, Elias Hicks II, to the post of President of the New York Chamber of Commerce.
Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Throughout the decades that I’ve devoted to a study of the life and times of Walt Whitman, I’ve been impressed by how misunderstood he has always been — not only by casual readers, but even biographers. It’s time to dispel the confusion. Here are the top 10 misconceptions about Walt Whitman and his book, Leaves of Grass — in order from smallest to greatest.
In 1840, at age 21, Whitman vowed to write a powerful book about the “peculiarities” of men; the “diversity of their characters;” and the means of “improving their state.” Light, he said, had flowed in upon him. Through all the changes since then, he had periodically been haunted by the challenge. It provoked him: Walt, you understand enough — why don’t you let it out then? Unfortunately, the still, small voice neglected to explain just how.
After 1840, he continued to simmer, but by 1853, his psychic temperature spiked. His spiritual manhood was being absolutely crushed between his joys and terrors regarding Fred Vaughan’s love and the anguish of standing by helplessly, for years, while his pain-wracked father gradually deteriorated. From outside his soul, too, a number of historical forces were converging in his awareness like so many rays of light focused by a telescope. These were his big, strong days, he later recalled, his days of preparation: the gathering of the forces.
The following is a look at the most important of them. It draws upon novel historical discoveries into the “origin of all poems.”
Walt Whitman’s original essay, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” was printed at the end of the 1891–92 edition of Leaves of Grass. The following adaptation is an attempt to quite radically “translate” its disorganized, digressive, awkward “Whitmanese” into the standards of prose clarity expected by 21st century readers.
When I say prose clarity, I am not only referring to a very aggressive copy edit. I have also subjected it to a critical, discerning lens of historical perspective. The result is Whitman’s clearest directions on how to read Leaves of Grass.
Gay Quakers: History
A response to Brian Blackmore’s presentation on Quaker attitudes towards same-sex love in the middle of the 20th century.
At the turn of the century, Brooklyn’s most prominent Catholic philanthropist Cornelius Heeney was remembered as “an odd character” possessing “many queer ways.” Until his death in 1848, he dressed like an 18th century Quaker. As shown here, Heeney’s housemates included John George Gottsberger, Francis Cooper, and Patrick Halegan: “a sort of familiar who lived in the Brooklyn house with Mr. Heeney during the close of his life and exercised considerable influence over him.”
Today’s expansive digital archives have empowered not only academic historians: to an even greater extent, they have empowered independent scholars. The extraordinary depth, breadth, and searchability of historic documents on the web has served as a literary superconductor, removing the substantial friction entailed with traditional access to the archives, and even the contemporary works of other scholars. The search field is therefore an equalizing field.
This unfinished paper explores ardent Brotherly Love as a conduit for God’s love, first, in Thomas Lurting’s memoir of Quaker convincement aboard an English man o’ war, “Fighting Sailor Turn’d Peaceable Christian,” and then, in novelist Daniel Defoe’s derivative portrayal of a Quaker “pyrate” in Captain Singleton. These are early treatments of one species of Quaker casuistry — the essential conflict between Friendly pacifism and a sailor’s complicity in a world of war, piracy, cruel discipline, or whaling. Subsequent tales by Joseph C. Hart (Miriam Coffin) and Thomas Chandler Haliburton (The Season Ticket), however, ignored Quaker friendships and focused solely on the paradoxical violence of “Quakers Afloat.” The last novel to handle the problem of Friends at war was Hugh Wynne, by S. Weir Mitchell. But there was a second species of Quaker casuistry: flirtations with male eros in a society (ostensibly) dominated by Biblical prohibitions against it. This continued to inspire novelists, because it continued to inform the actual lives of Quaker men. The letters of Henry Clapp and Elihu Hubbard Smith suggested that the cultural latitude for fervid affection among Friends could raise hackles in mainstream America. James Fenimore Cooper fictionalized his father’s passionate friendship with a private secretary in The Pioneers, while coyly hinting at the community’s misgivings about their relationship. Whereas Hart and Haliburton, in their novels, chose to wrestle only with the casuistry of bloodshed, Herman Melville, given his greater investment in love between men…
