Quotes from David S. Reynolds

The cross-fertilization of different images, he hoped, might help to disperse the various ills he and the nation faced.

Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre—Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.

As he himself expressed it, his was the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths—the greatest in his belief in God and everyday miracles, the least in his acceptance of any church's creeds.

he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages about same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.

the inundation of the average American's consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of "show business," a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.

His chosen medium—writing—had, he believed, a high potential for holding America together. America was a nation of readers, known worldwide for its high literacy rates. At midcentury, a full 90 percent of white American adults could read, as opposed to about 60 percent in England. Whitman crowed hyperbolically: "In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of [English] people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S., are at least two hundred years behind us.

Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it "a national character, an identity" creating "a new moral American continent" without which the physical one was "a carcass, a bloat.

In the free, easy social atmosphere of pre–Civil War America, overt displays of affection between people of the same sex were common. Women hugged, kissed, slept with, and proclaimed love for other women. Men did the same with other men.

In one of the rare moments that he discussed his private beliefs, Lincoln declared he would join a church if he found one whose only requirement was to follow the Golden Rule.

When I have a particular case in hand," he explained, "I . . . love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.

In this partisan diatribe, Lincoln spent most of his time attacking Stephen Douglas's arguments on behalf of the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce while offering little positive support of Winfield Scott or the Whigs. He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce's "ludicrous and laughable" record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War

Whitman would be appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles manipulated by professionals. One of his most famous poetic lines—" I celebrate myself"—can be taken, on one level, as an attempt to restore the idea of celebration, which was fast becoming coldly manipulative, to the personal and genuinely celebratory.

One of Brown's slaveholding hostages at Harpers Ferry, Lewis Washington, a descendant of the nation's first president

His expressions of psychological depression in his notebooks (such as "Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious") doubtless lay behind brooding lines like these: The doubts of the daytime and the doubts of the nighttime.… the curious whether and how, Whether that which appears so is so.… Or is it all flashes and specks?

Whitman wrote articles on almost every topic, storing up images and impressions that would later be useful to him as a poet.

As a poet, he is both the firm teacher trying to guide us and the mild one inviting us to develop on our own, a paradox captured in lines like "I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?" or "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, . . . it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany, . . . formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation.