“Glorious Times for Newspaper Editors and Correspondents”: Whitman at the New Orleans Daily Crescent, 1848-1849

Abstract

From the situation of the country, the city of New Orleans had been our channel and entrepot for everything, going and returning. It had the best news and war correspondents . . . -Walt Whitman, "New Orleans in 1848" 1 I was down in New Orleans, in 1848-9-an editor in the Daily Crescent newspaper office -Walt Whitman 2 Less than a decade into the construction of the mammoth, still-authoritative Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, 3 general editor Gay Wilson Allen had to admit that he had officially abandoned the project's editorial goal "to print everything, so that the Collected Writings could be called absolutely complete." "Everything" was even then proving not only too immense, but too elusivewith Whitman's newspaper writing in particular being singled out as the "most baffling" editorial problem of all. 4 Whitman, like Mark Twain or Fanny Fern, spent decades as an editor and journalist, so that by mid-life he already identified as "an old newspaper man." 5 Yet most of his voluminous journalism appeared unsigned, with the result that this extensive prose corpus-likely the majority of all words Whitman published during his lifetime-is still significantly undefined, disputed, unlocated, and/or unknown.Whitman himself has been of little help in clarifying things. Most extant interviews with the poet, for instance, only serve to add to our confusion as Whitman tries to downplay and sideline his early work. Whitman never even mentioned, in writing at least, his authorship of the "Paumanok" and "Travelling Bachelor" letters, nor that in 1858 he had pseudonymously serialized a journalistic series on men's wellness, Manly Health and Training, in the pages of the