Walt Whitman and the Police

Abstract This essay traces Walt Whitman’s responses to shifts in policing practices in the antebellum United States, especially in New York City. Whitman’s awareness of a shifting policing landscape is evident in his 1840s writings on police abuses and his fictionalized police encounters in his novels, at least up through his writings his late 1850s writings in Brooklyn Daily Times. Finally, just as Whitman became ensconced in the federal state in Washington, DC, he corresponded in letters about the mishandled 1863 Draft Riots. The essay thus argues that policing provided a way for the writer to explore larger questions about the legitimacy and distribution of governmental power. Though critics, historians, and biographers have most often positioned Whitman as indifferent or even hostile to the state, “Walt Whitman and the Police” reads him as among other things a political thinker, a theorist of governmentality and of state power.