But Seldom Told - "Twasinta's Seminoles" by Albery Allson Whitman

I recently decided to read some epic poems from around the world, with a special interest in ones that are not part of the standard canon of Western Literature.  One of the ones I found was from my own country about events that happened in my own back yard.  It's called Twasinta's Seminoles.   

It was published in 1890 and written by Albery Allson Whitman, a formerly enslaved black man. The poem is set in the 19th Century during the Seminole Wars that were fought between the United States and the Seminole tribe from 1816 to 1858.  I had never heard of Albery Whitman and, despite going to high school in Florida, knew basically nothing about the poem's subject matter.

In her dissertation "My Song in Bolder Notes Arise: The African American Long Poem Tradition," Keisha Watson sums the work up this way:

Twasinta’s Seminoles is an important poem, as a historical artifact for those interested in the nineteenth century, American slavery, and the Post-Reconstruction era or the literary history of the black long poem. ... His poem enters the American long poem tradition and refigures it by placing the history and heroism of people of color, specifically the Seminoles, Indian and black, in political and martial coalition against the American government, at the center of his long narrative poem.

One thing that struck me and was part of the impetus for this piece is that there's very little to be found online about Twasinta's Seminoles, or indeed Whitman himself.  My edition of the poem seems to be the only one available and it is pretty barebones; it's not footnoted and there's no scholarly essays or commentary in it.  It's just a scan of an old printing.  The only analyses I found that even mentioned it were Watson's dissertation and another called "Triangulating Race: The Native Presence in Early African American Literature" by Kate Stutz.

(I am deeply indebted and grateful to both Watson and Stutz for their work.  I knew essentially nothing about any of this literature or history and both dissertations, linked above, were enlightening and are worth reading.)

Background

Albery Allson Whitman, who lived from 1851-1901, was born into slavery in Kentucky.  In his own words he was "bred to the plow."

In 1871, after the Civil War and Emancipation, he attended Wilberforce University in Ohio which was one of three historically black universities that were established before the war.  (The university was named after the English abolitionist William Wilberforce who led the campaign in English Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807.)

In his preface to Twasinta's Seminoles, Whitman has a lovely passage about poetry:

I began to try sayings of poetry before I knew what writing was. Before I could write a letter, I was trying to scribble down what the birds and bees and cows were saying and what even the dumb rocks were thinking. Nature has ever had a speech for me, and in listening to her voice, lies my satisfaction.

In his introduction to the book At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman, Ivy Wilson says of Whitman:

[He] was one of the most important African American poets between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar and probably the most prolific. ... [I]f for no other reason than sheer dedication to the myriad forms of poetry as a genre, Whitman remains singular for the amount he published and for the range of his apparent reading.

Wilson goes on to describe Whitman's willingness to write in different styles:

Experimenting with blank verse, dialect poetry, ottava rima, Spenserian stanzas, and iambic, trochaic, and anapestic lines in three to five feet, Whitman had an appreciation for various metrical and stanzaic forms.

Despite being well regarded in his lifetime, Whitman kind of vanished after his death in 1901.  As Kate Stutz says in "Triangulating Race:"

To give a sense of his absence, none of his work is included in any of the major anthologies of African American literature. Before James Hays’ 2000 dissertation on Whitman and Ivy Wilson’s collection of Whitman’s work in 2009, the last original criticism published on Whitman was in Joan Sherman’s Invisible Poets in 1974.

So why did Whitman fall out of favor? Stutz puts forward this possibility:

One explanation for Whitman’s fall from favor is his chosen form. Whitman’s major works are long narrative epics that adhere to strict form and meter. By contrast, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the other Whitman (Walt) ushered in new poetic standards—Dunbar’s dialect poetry and Whitman’s free verse— that made A.A Whitman’s poetry irrelevant if not obsolete.  In the first wave of recovery of African American writing, Whitman was discounted for “aping” Euro-American form and voice without much originality, inspiration, or clear invocation of African American culture. Thus, scholars measured African American literature by the same metric that Hamlin Garland did at the end of the nineteenth century; they expected culturally specific work rather than mere “imitation.”

The African-American Long Poem Tradition

In "My Song in Bolder Notes Arise," Keisha Watson discusses how Twasinta's Seminoles is part of a tradition of long poems by black authors in the United States.  In addition to Whitman's work, she also talks about the 18th Century writings of Phillis Wheatley (the first African American and second woman to publish a book of poetry in the US), the 19th Century poems of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and George Boyer Vashon, and the 20th Century works of Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden.

Regarding the 19th Century poets, Watson says:

My reading of African American long poems of the nineteenth century— all hybrid texts written from within or against the epic grain—reveals that black poets engaged this broad genre to lay claim to the Western literary tradition from the apex of that tradition as they defined it. In other words, early black poets wrote long poems to signal artistic seriousness, intellectual equality, and ownership of the most exalted of Western poetic forms, all of which challenged the socio-political status quo during slavery, Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction eras.

Watson goes on to say that, additionally, black authors writing in the aftermath of Emancipation preferentially chose verse in part because:

The mnemonic function of verse was especially useful to an audience that included those unable to read, an illiteracy enforced during slavery and maintained through various forms of racial discrimination after the Civil War.

Twasinta's Seminoles was self-consciously written to evoke a European poetic aesthetic, with Whitman saying in his preface that he is writing in:

the "stately verse," mastered by only Spenser, Byron, and a very few other great poets...

One other thing to note is that Whitman's choice of a Native American subject is not unique in early African-American literature.  In Triangulating Race, Stutz examines works concerning Native Americans by no less than 13 different black authors from the 18th Century to the dawn of the 20th.  To quote her:

It is not my goal to provide an exhaustive list of African American works that include Native Americans; at the same time, the comparatively large number of texts I consider supports my argument that the native is both a recurrent and constitutive presence in the African American literary tradition.

A (Very) Brief and Simplified Historical Context

The Seminoles are a Native American tribe that coalesced in Spanish Florida in the 1700s.  That's putting it really simplistically, as tribal identity and ethnogenesis is really complicated, but it'll have to do for now.

Spain at this time didn't actually control much of Florida, with their power being limited to St. Augustine and Pensacola. The Seminoles traditionally accepted escaped slaves from Southern American plantations which put them in the crosshairs of the United States.  Escaped slaves settled in Florida in what became known as the Maroon communities and they sometimes intermixed with the Seminoles, becoming what's known as the Black Seminoles.

American slavers frequently crossed into Florida to re-capture slaves which caused an escalating series of raids and reprisals between the Seminoles and the plantation owners.  The Seminole Wars began in 1816 when then-general Andrew Jackson led troops into Spanish Florida to punish the Seminoles and disrupt the Black Seminole and Maroon communities.

Spain ceded its claim to Florida to the United States in 1819.  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 triggered the Second Seminole War which ended with thousands of Seminoles and Black Seminoles being forced onto reservations in Oklahoma.  A small minority of Seminoles stayed in Florida, retreating South.  The Third Seminole War broke out in 1855 and resulted in another round of expulsions to Oklahoma.

The Poem's Plot

Twasinta's Seminoles is a story of conflict between the Seminoles, including the Black Seminoles, and the United States in North Florida.  The main characters are Atlassa, the chief of the Seminoles at Mickasukie, Palmecho, the chief of the Seminoles at Twasinta, and Ewald, the daughter of Palmecho and lover of Atlassa.

The plot kicks off when Twasinta is attacked by the United States and is rescued by Atlassa and his men.  Palmecho is then dishonorably taken prisoner under a flag of truce by the Americans at St Augustine and is again rescued by Atlassa, who kills three soldiers during the rescue.

Palmecho is captured by the United States once more and threatened with execution to flush out Atlassa.  Atlassa and his Seminoles win a battle against another US incursion but he is then captured after the US soldiers again violate a flag of truce and snatch him.  The poem ends with the Seminoles being shipped to Texas, where they evade a slave catcher than cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and freedom.  (Mexico had abolished slavery.)

As Stutz says:

In telling this history, Whitman inverts the traditional epic by depicting the story of the losers, rather than that of the victors who conquer an empire.

The poem, though, contains much more than just the straight line events of the fight between the United States and the Seminoles.  The narrative is broken up by digressions that either enrich the setting by focusing on specific people's lives apart from the greater conflict or let the narrator ruminate on concepts like slavery, freedom, and historical memory.

For example, after the opening invocation, the poem starts with a slave escaping to Florida and being accepted by the Seminoles.  Former slaves pop up explicitly a few times in the story, being referred to as "exiles" but generally the narrative is not concerned with who is a Black Seminole and who is not.  In the world of the poem, the exiles were welcomed and assimilated so completely that it's not really relevant what anyone's ethnic background is.

Also Ewald and Atlassa's love story isn't all that important to the plot but it both contributes to the idea that these people were just trying to live their lives prior to the US incursions and reinforces the kind of post racial utopia of the Seminole community, as Ewald is explicitly mixed race and it's never an issue for anyone in the story.

The Mechanics

Poetic Form and Structure

The "stately verse" that Whitman uses for Twasinta's Seminoles is the Spenserian stanza, a form created by the 16th Century English poet Edmund Spenser for his epic The Faerie Queen.  The Spenserian stanza is a nine line fixed verse form with a rigid ababbcbcc rhyme scheme with the first eight lines being in iambic pentameter (i.e 10 syllables in 5 iambs) and the final line being in iambic hexameter (i.e. 12 syllables in 6 iambs.)

Side bar: an English iamb is a rhythmical unit consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.  An iamb can cross word boundaries, like in this really iambic fragment of Romeo and Juliet's prologue:

Where ci-vil blood makes ci-vil hands un-clean. From forth the fat-al loins of these two foesA pair of star-cross'd lov-ers take their life;

(Syllables broken out and stressed syllables in bold for illustrative purposes.)

It's worth noting that only really bad iambic verse is strictly iambic the entire time; there's always a natural ebb and flow where the patterns of stress shift to accommodate the actual words.  Iambic meter suits English really well as spoken English is pretty rhythmically iambic already.

But English is really rhyme poor which is what pushes a fixed form like the Spenserian stanza out of the naturalism that unrhymed blank verse has and into a more artificial mode.  Writing English with a rigid rhyme scheme imposes restrictions on the writer who has to choose words and verse construction very carefully and it inevitably bends the phrasing to fit the rhyme.

This bending can get pretty extreme, which can be ok, depending on the poem.  In his preface, Whitman mentions the English Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788-1824), who often wrote in tightly rhymed verse with some truly bonkers end of line word choices, like in his epic Don Juan. But Don Juan is a satirical comedy so when Byron rhymes "synonymous" with "antique house"... whatever, it's kind of a joke.

Twasinta's Seminoles, however, is a serious poem dealing with intense and powerful ideas and events but, fortunately, Whitman largely manages to avoid semantic awkwardness.  (Though I'll talk a little more about this in the next section.)

In the hands of a clumsy author, rigidly rhymed stanzas also can slip into a weird singsong pattern that feels like a nursery rhyme and can be kind of grating over the course of a long poem, but Whitman for the most part doesn't fall into this trap either.

Twasinta's Seminoles is structurally similar to Byron's long poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, also written in Spenserian stanzas and having an Invocation followed by 4 Cantos (i.e. chapters.)  Given Whitman's obvious respect for and familiarity with Byron, I would guess this is not a coincidence.

Whitman's introduction reveals that, at least with regards to Twasinta's Seminoles, he wasn't concerned with structural or linguistic innovation so much as parity with prestigious English verse:

...I may seem to have "rushed in where angels fear to tread." To this view of the matter, I will say by way of defense: someone of my race is sure to do everything that any one else has ever done, and as none of my race have ever executed a poem in the"stately verse," I simply venture in.

The Writing

Twasinta's Seminoles uses elevated language with a lot of poetic allusion and metonymy which puts it squarely in continuity with European Romantic poetry from earlier in the century.

For example:

Not Albion's power nor Scotia's pride alone,

Could drum and slogan till the air should shriek

With martial praise, —nor with their lips of stone,

Could Tyber's Mistress and Illyrium speak

- Canto 1, stanza 51

"Albion" is a conventional European poetic synonym for England.  "Tyber's mistress" as shorthand for Rome and "Illyrium" for the Balkans wouldn't sound out of place amidst the stock imagery of the European tradition.

The poem also repeatedly highlights the sublimity and almost prelapsarian ideal of Nature, in a similar vein as the English Romantics John Keats or William Wordsworth:

Oh! does not Nature teach us primal bliss?

Who has not felt her lessons in his youth?

And having felt, who can forget forsooth!

The voice of birds, the toll and hum of bees,

And air all filled with sounds, sweet or uncouth,

Dark hights, majestic woods and rolling seas

Have been my teachers, and my teachers still be these!

- Canto 1, stanza 14

One interesting departure from the English poetic tradition is that Whitman uses basically no references to Greek and Roman mythology.  In fact Twasinta's Seminoles is an extremely Christian poem, with the narrator often invoking God and even the Seminole chief Palmecho saying things like:

Is God not reconciled, am I not saved

By my Redeemer's all-atoning wounds?

- Canto 2, stanza 88

Twasinta's Seminoles operates in multiple registers, being by turns idyllic, angry, exhortative, and elegiac.  There are some really striking and powerful imagery, like this description of the Atlassa's Seminoles fighting the US Army:

Furies imprisoned by infernal hate,

Where the hot irons circumvex their pains, 

Surge not more fierce on Torture's brazen gate, 

Nor writhe defiant more in blist'ring chains,

When, death inducing not doth stream their veins;

Than surge and writhe these Seminoles beneath 

The hall of angry lead that on them rains!

From tree and hommock rushing to the death

They blanch grim slaughter's cheeks and drink his very breath!

- Canto 3, stanza 42

On the other end of the spectrum there are things like this beautiful passage about an old boatman's poignant song:

...

And pond'ring by the waters lone and still,

The old man conned his lifetime's Afternoon,

And turned the pleasing view, "I shall be going soon"

"Come now, my love, the moon is on the lake:

Upon the waters is my light canoe;

Come with me, love, and gladsome oars shall make

A music on the parting wave for you, —

Come o'er the waters deep and dark and blue;

Come where the lilies in the marge have sprung,

Come with me, love, for oh, my love is true!"

This ls the song that on the lake was sung,

The boat man sang it over when his heart was young.

- Canto 1, stanza 32-33

Occasionally Whitman's language combined with the rigid form of the Spenserian stanza result in some inelegant or clunky verses.  Perhaps it's inevitable for an epic written in a high register but Twasinta's Seminoles is always close to the line of being a little too florid and there were definitely stanzas that I had to read a few times to tease the details out of.  By my estimation it's mostly on the correct side of that line but it is a dense read.

At the beginning during the Invocation I had a hard time locking into the rhythm of the unfamiliar Spenserian stanza and kept losing the thread but that was a temporary problem; It went away when I got used to the form.

Another thing that made the poem challenging was the frequent references to unfamiliar places and people.  Without any footnotes or scholarly glosses a modern reader is kind of on their own.

I'm talking about things like "Her beauty shines on us from Candahar" (Canto 2, stanza 55) or "What is there now of gods and Mikadoos" (Canto 2, stanza 2).   The former is talking about Ewald who is from the Tampa area, so presumably "Candahar" is not an alternate spelling of Kandahar, Afghanistan but I absolutely could not figure out what it was referring to.  Same for "Mikadoos."  Go fish.

The text references "Taylor's vet'rans," "Clinch's mercenary host," a well regarded commander "Gaines," as well as defenders of Freedom "Some Bruce," "Brown" and "Lovejoy,"  After some internet detecting I think I figured most of them out but I'd be curious if Whitman's original audience would have known these references immediately.

FYI, I'm pretty sure "Taylor" is 12th US President Zachary Taylor who fought in both the Black Hawk War and the Second Seminole War, "Clinch" is Duncan Lamont Clinch, another American officer in the Seminole Wars, "Gaines" is US General Edmund P. Gaines, the namesake of Gainesville, FL, "Bruce" is Robert the Bruce who led Scotland to regain independence from England in the 1300s, "Brown" is abolitionist John Brown, and "Lovejoy" is the American abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy who was killed by a pro-slavery mob in 1837.

None of these references are load bearing and the senses, if not the specifics, were all pretty obvious in context.

Admittedly, I was giving it a really close read and wasn't willing to let a pitch go over the plate so I was constantly stopping to research what some of these unfamiliar references were, which slowed me down a lot.  If I had been reading it more like a normal human it still would have required concentration but would have gone a lot faster.  All in all it isn't that long being about 260 stanzas for 2300 or so lines.

The frequent narrator digressions that break up the action also can make the plot a little hard to keep track of, but the poem also isn't really about the pure historicity of the details of who fought who where and on what date so I think a fixation on that sort of misses what the work is going for.

Themes and Ideas

Slavery

Not surprisingly, slavery looms large over Twasinta's Seminoles.  As I mentioned above the narration opens on a slave in Georgia escaping to Florida which, while not having much to do with the surface plot of the poem, establishes the stakes and the pervasiveness of slavery's threat.  Indeed the story is bookended by flights to freedom, with the exile at the beginning and the Seminoles at the end dodging slave catchers before escaping to Florida and Mexico, respectively.

And while it's not explicit in this text, slavery is ultimately the cause of the poem's conflict as the United States saw the free black populations in Florida as a threat to the slaveholding order in the South, being both a beacon for runaways and a potential locus for armed resistance.  One of Andrew Jackson's objectives in the First Seminole War was the destruction of these communities.

The narrator describes slavery with language that positions it against nature and the natural order:

Shall thunders ask of man what time to beat

The march of clouds? Or oceans beg his leave

To rock their under-world's? In his dread seat,

Doth Blanc consider him? When did he weave

A mantle for the hurricane, of give

The Rockies leave to hold the dying Sun! -

Sooner all these - sooner an earthquake heave,

And sink earth back where broods oblivion,

Than God-giv'n mind submit for gyves to be put on.

- Canto 2, stanze 6

("Gyves" are shackles.)

Nature and freedom are consistently paired throughout.  The poem revels in the natural beauty and harmony of the free Seminoles' world and Nature is a balm to the still enslaved man at the beginning:

The negro slave by Swanee river sang;

Well-pleased he listened to his echoes ringing;

For in his heart a secret comfort sprang,

When Nature seemed to join his mournful singing.

To mem'ry's cherished objects fondly clinging;

His bosom felt the sunset's patent glow,

And spirit whispers into weird life springing,

Allured to worlds he trusted yet to know,

And lightened for awhile life's burdens here below.

- Canto 1, stanza 1

Whitman also evokes Eden and the desire to return to it from this world of evil and greed:

Oh! Isn't the goal of life

Where man has plenty and to man is fair?

When free from avarice's pinch and strife,

Is earth not like the Eden-home of man and wife?

- Canto 1, stanza 9

Greed in the poem is explicitly linked to the institution of slavery, like when the narrator says how the "lucre-loving Saxon ... fattened on the blood of slaves," (Canto 1, stanza 41) which means slavery is in a sense preventing the world from returning to an Edenic state.  ("Lucre-loving Saxon" means "money loving Englishman" which in this context represents the United States given the country's beginning as a British Colony.)

Slavery's evil corrupts the beauty of Nature:

So fared the land where slaves were groaning yet -

Where beauty's eyes must feed the lusts of men

*Tis as when horrid dreams we half forget,

Would then relate, and still relate again -

Ah! cold abhorrence hesitates my pen!

- Canto 1, stanza 4

Also note that all of the stanzas I just quoted are from before the Seminole narrative proper even begins.  These ideas are the bedrock of this poem.

Another thing I thought was interesting was how slavery was portrayed as an entrenched system, not just the personal evil of a few individuals.  The "wreck of laws" (Canto 1, stanza 9) allowed and supported the institution.  Slavery was not accidental but architected.

As the narrator says:

I never was a slave - a robber took

My substance - what of that? The law my rights -

-Canto 2, stanza 11

I found the following passage also pretty striking:

The heavens were sad, and hearts of men were faint;

Philanthropy implored and wept, but then

The wrong, unblushing trampled on Restraint

While feeble Law sat by and uttered no complaint.

- Canto 1, stanza 4

The Law is complicit and sits idle, regardless of how much heaven and humanity pleads.

Criticism of the United States

This is also not much of a surprise given the subject matter but the United States does not come off well in this narrative, though it is interesting that the poem only rarely names the United States explicitly.  In fact I think it only happens once, late in the poem in Canto 3:

This is the conquest of the flow'ry land!

He who has earned the fame of many wars -

America's chief captain in command,

Marshals his battle-hardened regularsI

Proud thro' the pine woods float the stripes and stars,

- Canto 3, stanza 37

Other than that the United States soldiers are "the foe" or "the troopers" or "the fierce bands" and their weapons are "the oppressor's wasting fire."  Even the most condemnatory passage in the work just says "this nation"

If e'er the muse of hist'ry sits to write,

And Florida appear upon her page,

This nation's crimes will blush the noonday light,

And • • * • 's name will lead her criminal age!

Of all the cruel wars she e'er did wage,

The cruelest will be to him assigned!

-Canto 2, stanza 73

I don't know if the blank spot where a person's name should be is due to a damaged manuscript or is an intentional redaction by Whitman, similar to how Victorian novels often anonymize character and place names.  "This nation's crimes" is a pretty oblique and passive construction and I can only assume it was deliberate as something similar happens earlier in the Canto.

However oblique the language, the United States troops are portrayed as marauders, riding "to march against some unsuspecting town" (Canto 2, stanza 80) and led by people who give the "oily speeches of designing men"(Canto 2, stanza 44) before kidnapping people under the flag of truce.

But for all his condemnation of the United States of the poem's time, Whitman ultimately does have faith in the United States of his own time.  Very near the end of the poem he describes the death of slavery and oppression with an impassioned finality.   

In all our shores the day of slavery's done.

'Midst the wild freedom of our mighty shades,

Now, every man whose soul the hope pervades

Of life, and liberty, and happiness,

May join with Sovran Labor's plows and spades,

And jocund axes ln the wilderness,

To dig and hew away primeval want's fortress.

- Canto 4, stanza 45

This is a land of free limb and free thought,

Freedom for all, home-keeping or abroad,

Here man is all unhindered, as he ought,

Dreading no priest's rebuke, no despot's nod,

In high respect of Right, the friend of God!

Sole sovereign of himself, by nature throned,

Planting his titles in the royal sod,

He spreads his reign where labor's might is owned,

And harvests revenues for which no subject groaned.

- Canto 4, stanza 49

The optimism of these passages is bittersweet.  Twasinta's Seminoles was originally published in 1884 as The Rape of Florida and was subsequently re-edited and released by Whitman in 1890 with the new title, so Whitman was composing this work just before the full fury of Jim Crow, before Southern States implemented the Mississippi Plan of 1890 and amended their constitutions to disenfranchise black voters, before the Wilmington Massacre / Coup where white supremacists overthrew the city's elected biracial government and killed many black residents, and before God knows how many other abominations to the ideals of freedom.

Race and Racialization

It's interesting to me that Whitman doesn't really racialize the conflicts in the poem.  As I've said, the poem opens an escaped slave but overall isn't concerned with interrogating anyone's racial identity.  The only color descriptors for black people, the words "negro" and "sable" are used only at the very beginning and are always used for a person currently enslaved.  These words are used about four times and never after the story's focus shifts to Florida.  The Seminole community is an Edenic post-racial one and Whitman describes it's mixed society this way:

The native warrior leads his ebon maid,

The dark young brave his bloom-hued lover wins;

And where soft spruce and willows mingle shade,

Young life mid sunniest hours its course begins:

All Nature pours its never-ending dins

In groves of rare-hued leaf without'n end, -

"Tis as if Time, forgetting Eden's sins,

Relents, and spirit visitors descend

In love's remembered tokens, earth once more to blend.

- Canto 1, stanza 30

The language is very specific here; different types of trees "mingle shade," there are "rare-hued" leaves, and a blending of earth.  Racial mixing is just a part of this idealized society.  Is Atlassa a Black Seminole?  Are any of his warriors?

Who cares?

Twasinta's Seminoles also does not associate villainy with whiteness.  "The white man" as a concept only comes up in the two cantos about the real historical Seminole warrior Osceola, who the narrative holds up as a cracked mirror parallel to Atlassa, someone motivated by hatred and revenge.  When the United States Army actually appears, they aren't described by their skin color any more than the Seminoles or the exiles are.

One last thing I thought was interesting was this aside from Whitman's narrator:

I envy not the man whose want of brains

Supplies a roost for race-hate's filthy brood!

The little eminence his soul attains

Is more the pity when 'tis understood,

That he perhaps has done the best he could!

Tread not upon him just to see him squirm!

Pity forsooth! to crawl is his best good,

And 'tis his nat'ral way, I do affirm;

So, let him crawl his fill, he is a harmless worm!

- Canto 2, stanze 16

Like with Whitman's cheer for the death of oppression it's difficult for me to get on board with his optimism.  I would love to dismiss men's race-hate as the pitiable side effect of stupidity but I just don't think it always is.  And I think history has proven these men are not harmless and ignoring them is dangerous.

Religion - Skepticism towards Institution

Twasinta's Seminoles is deeply ambivalent about the church.  Not Christianity as belief system but rather religion as an institution, and one that has been used as a tool of oppression.  The poem often pairs church imagery with imagery of tyranny.  It literally says "church and prison joined" more than once.

One such passage is this one about St. Augustine where Palmecho is being held prisoner:

Dark rose the walls, a church and prison joined,

Their kindred glooms to blend and intermix.

Dungeon'd in one, the unknown victim pined,

And in the other mid quaint candlesticks,

Somber and weird arose a crucifix:

How fitly these portrayed the men who built

A house of God o'er shadowed by old Nick's -

Vain man, to thus offend thy makers! wilt

Thou look on images to take away thy guilt!

- Canto 2, stanza 67

("Old Nick" is a British nickname for Satan.)

Human power structures, whatever their theoretical ethics, have always been weaponized to serve the interests of the powerful, and Twasinta's Seminoles is keenly aware of this.  For Whitman's narrator, men like Atlassa who fight for freedom are all that stands in the way of the world being made a hell by "vampire priests and kingly vultures." (Canto 3, stanza 48)

In probably the most explicit condemnation of religion as a vector for evil, the narrator says:

Thus envy's blist’rous tongue her victim smites,

Malice her bludgeon whirls, Theft stalks abroad,

Lust thrives, and like a deadly serpent bites,

And highway vandalism takes the road

To spoil the earth and preach the word of God!

Oh! infamous insult to heaven and earth!

Well was the ground on Sin's account called Nod!

The sum of crimes that have religious birth

Would blight the hills of God and smite them with a dearth

- Canto 2, stanza 70

This applies no less in the United States of the 21st Century than it did in the 19th.

Time, Effacement, and Poignance

One last thing that I found really resonant about the poem was it's elegiac substrate.  It is very explicitly the story of a time passed on and a:

 too soon forgotten race

That flourished once, but long has been obscure

- Canto 1, stanza 4

Elegy and lamentation recur all throughout the poem and the poet mourns all the things time has wiped away.

The trump of fame is but the thunder's tone

Borne off forever, dying on the wind.

The glorious summits of the ages gone,

In dim remoteness scarcely lift the mind:

The mighty deeds that thrilled of yore, mankind,

Are now forgotten or but seldom told;

Th' unresting spirit e'er the new must find-

Old lands, old tongues, old heav'ns and earths - all old

Things pass away, as time displays the new unrolled.

- Canto 2, stanza 1

There's a feeling of inevitability to this and it's reinforced by some of Whitman's narrative choices.  The outcomes of the battles, particularly the second one, are a little fuzzy and Atlassa and his people are captured off page in the space between Cantos 3 and 4.  I think this amplifies the sense of futility, that the characters are fighting against the tide of history.  The blow by blow doesn't matter - the Seminoles lost, though they were never broken.

Several times the narrator exhorts posterity to remember them, like in this passage:

Down to the end of time be it proclaimed!

Up to the skies of fame let it be rung!

Wherever valor's sacrifice is named, 

Whenever plaudits fire the human tongue;

Or by sweet strings expressed, or mortals sung, 

Let it go forth, and let mankind attest, 

That, Seminoles and exiles, old and young, 

Upon the bosom of their country prest;

By valiant deeds are shrined in ev'ry patriot breast!

- Canto 3, stanza 45

Twasinta's Seminoles is a song to remember these valiant people and their fight for freedom.  It's sad that it didn't really work.  The history of its events is understudied and the poem and its author have fallen into obscurity.

Gallimaufry

• I can't give enough thanks to Keisha Watson and Kate Stutz for shining a light on part of history and literature that I knew almost nothing about.  Of the authors they mentioned, I have read Brooks and have heard of Hayden, but everyone else was new to me.

• Check out these poems that I learned about while researching this piece:

"A Double Standard" by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1896)

"Middle Passage" by Robert Hayden (1945, revised 1962)

"Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1899)

• I found this stanza, where Palmetto is "pausing on the brink of time" to be very powerful:

Lo! where Palmecho stoops within the gate,

How touching is his tender last farewell!

His child from him they cannot separate,

Tho' ruthless hands provoke the purpose fell!

A daughter's sweet affection who can tell?

A father's benediction how sublime,

When on his lips the words of parting dwell,

And he is pausing on the brink of time,

To lift his eyes towards a brighter, holier clime!

- Canto 3, stanza 16

• The real of history of the Seminoles and Black Seminoles is undoubtedly a little more complicated than their purely idealized relationship in the poem. For example, the Seminole Tribe has sometimes moved to exclude Afro-Natives from Tribal membership.

• If I had to speculate as to who the redacted name is in Canto 2, stanza 73, I'd guess it's Andrew Jackson.  The next stanza says of this person:

Extermination was his highest creed,

Bondage the one provision of his will,

The blood of innocence marred not the deed.

He knew no art of warfare but to kill :

That seems on brand for Jackson and, as I mentioned, the poem gives some admiration to General Gaines, who opposed Jackson's Indian Removal policy.

• The final 12 syllable iambic line of a Spenserian stanza is called an "alexandrine."

• I found two different etymologies for the word "Seminole."  One is that it is from the Spanish word "cimarron" which means "wild" or "untamed" and the other is that it's from the Creek word "simanóli" which means "free people."

• This is a great line:

The pride of empire humbles in the dust,

And all that man would do bows down to what he must.

- Canto 2, stanza 41

• The poem's geography is a little fuzzy.  The timeline is also fuzzy, though, so characters crossing the 160-ish miles between St. Augustine and Tampa Bay more quickly than they probably should isn't a big deal.  It probably wouldn't be noticeable to someone who doesn't live in Florida.

• Twasinta's Seminoles uses the word "whilom" several times.  It comes from the Old English "hwilum" and now means "formerly.'  I had never encountered that word before but then when I was looking at Spenser's The Faerie Queen for background research it was there too.  I guess Whitman really did like Spenser.

• The Seminoles weren't sent on ships to Mexico in real life, though after their removal to Indian Territory, Black Seminole leader John Horse led an escape there in 1849.  I suspect the ending of Twasinta's Seminoles is a conflation of the United States Indian relocation policy with John Horse's escape.

• I really like this stanza:

Thus, when afar the wide Bahamas shone, —

In lucent stillness gleamed the sunset sea —

When day's last rim sank like a molten zone,

Emblaz'ning in Omnific heraldry

The far-off crag and latest mountain tree;

Thus, on a strand dividing worlds I've stood,

Till, touched by the dark wand of mystery,

I felt the brow of night, and earth imbued

With dread emotions of a great eternal Good.

- Canto 1, stanza 17

Conclusion

I think Twasinta's Seminoles is very worth reading.  It's about a time period that deserves to be studied and contemplated and there were a lot of moments that strongly resonated, even 130 years later.

Neither it nor Whitman deserve the obscurity they've fallen into.

Down to the end of time be it proclaimed!  Up to the skies of fame let it be rung! Let it go forth, and let mankind attest.

-m