Tuesday
As our reactionary Supreme Court attempts to put the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, states throughout the south (including my own Tennessee) are striving to remove as many Black legislators as possible from government. On April 15, the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, historian Heather Cox Richarson provided a useful overview of the fascist right’s relentless assaults on African Americans ever since. The racism that fueled the civil war has never vanished from the American psyche.
Richardson quotes from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his powerful response to Lincoln’s death, and it’s instructive to revisit the poet’s heartbreak now, when we worry that we may need a similar elegy to mourn the death of America as a multiracial democracy.
Richardson notes that, following Lincoln’s death, his Tennessean successor Andrew Johnson tried to reverse the hard-fought gains of African Americans. While Congress fought back, the lack of accountability for the bloodiest and costliest war of the 19th century meant that “the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious.” Former Confederates, the historian notes, “still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.”
And so it has been ever since. Whenever the federal government intervened to protect minority rights, southern whites complained about an overreaching government threatening individual liberty. This, Richardson writes, “became an article of faith among the radical right.” Southerners also rewrote the Civil War as a noble “lost cause”—this is how I was taught it in seventh grade Tennessee history—and that mythology spread to northern and western states, where white supremacists had their own anxieties about minority groups. On January 6, 2021, a Confederate flag was even carried by Trump rioters assaulting the Capitol.
So with Trump pardoning those rioters; with the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights act, granting Trump total immunity, and leading the attack on women’s reproductive choices; with the administration attacking on environmental regulation, renewable energy, federally-owned nature preserves, and sacred Indian sites; with governmental heads, including Pete Hegseth, firing African Americans indiscriminately; and with billionaires, domestic and foreign, corrupting officials with their money, many of us feel like Whitman solitary hermit in the poem. We’re mourning the death of the American promise as the poet thrush mourns Lincoln’s death:
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
I can think of few more powerful images in American poetry than “song of the bleeding throat.” The pastoral elegy does what the great elegies do, providing the poet a means of expressing and exploring intense grief:
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
The poem opens with a profound irony that I remember noticing when my own son died in April, which is that nature, oblivious to human sorrow, doesn’t stop springing to life. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,/ And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,” Whitman writes, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
Noting the irony, T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land” in a poem that owes much to Whitman.
And yet, this “ever-returning spring” will become a source of hope as “Lilacs” progresses and can also bolster those of us reeling from Trump’s assaults on the American dream. As the train carrying Lincoln’s body to Illinois passes through the landscape, Whitman senses a resilient and vibrant nation. Imagining America as a burial chamber, Whitman says he will hang the following pictures on its walls:
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows…
And because he is the poet of all America, not just rural America, Whitman includes cities in his pastoral elegy, including “my own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships.” He also mentions a generalized city, “with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,/ And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.”
So yes, while Death enters into the drama, it does not get the last word, even though Death claimed not only Lincoln’s but thousands of Civil War soldiers (“I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,/ And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them”). This is not a facile optimism but a profound understanding of how death can be followed by new life. The fact that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday is not lost on Whitman.
Recently I wrote about feminist Rebecca Solnit’s optimism and how she cites Antonio Gramsci’s “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As Solnit observes about her latest book,
People do not remember the past … [they] often seem to live in a perpetual present. And some find that reassuring, that nothing is ever going to change. Some find it despair-inducing, because nothing is ever going to change. I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it.
For Solnit as for Whitman, the life cycle will emerge triumphant, bringing with it healthy change:
Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them. They’re essentially saying, if you listen closely: ‘You all are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly, with the environmental and climate work, feminism, queer rights, the general anti-authoritarian push for accountability and equality. All those things are connected.’ Your enemies appraise you accurately, even when you don’t believe it yourself.”
For those at the time, the death of Lincoln seemed like the end of the world. But it takes more than reactionary temper tantrums, no matter how damaging, to end America’s great democratic experiment.
