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joh n frederic k bell Poetry’s Place in the Crisis and Compromise of 1850 On June 14, 1850, at the height of the nation’s political crisis, the New York Daily Tribune printed a poem by Walt Whitman. “House of Friends” con- demned northern Democrats in Congress for conceding to the South by supporting the Compromise of 1850 and its accompanying Fugitive Slave Act. Freedom was at risk of being “balk’d,” Whitman warned, not by its enemies but by its supposed defenders. Alluding to the prophet Zechariah, he seethed: “From the house of friends comes the death stab.” To Whitman, the Compromise threatened to undo America’s supposedly inseparable ideals of liberty and Union by foisting proslavery policies on free soil in the North and West. As the principle of preservation encroached on the preservation of principle, he looked to poetry for redress. Whitman was not alone among northerners in his dismay at the Compromise, nor was he the only poet to articulate his concerns in verse. At once refl ecting and shaping political realities, poetry captured the drama of public life at the turn of the 1850s and featured prominently in the civic discourse of those years. This essay examines
The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Aug 8, 2015
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