Chapter 19 - Confederate Literature

Summary

Writing in 1883 to organizers in Sante Fe who had invited him to contribute a poem honoring the 333rd anniversary of the city’s Spanish settlement, Walt Whitman prophesied a future American civilization to embrace what he called – initially – “the Spanish element in our nationality”: To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect – grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity, and honor. … Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come, I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian population – the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and West – I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own – are we to see it cheerfully accepting and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe – and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own – the autochthonic ones?¹