The strange sad war revolving

Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis points the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's 1865-1876 publications by considering them in the context of the legislative discourse on black emancipation and its stormy aftermath.

While Whitman's Union ideology is virtually uncontested, the perceived absence of attention to race relations in his postwar texts has recently become a source of curiosity and a target of criticism. By yoking together literary and legislative discourses, this book provides a rhetorical pathway for the recovery of the emancipatory significance of Whitman's works of the Reconstruction decade.