Project Expanded

So I am attempting to understand Whitman's views on slavery and how that relates to his peers as well as the common American of the time. I am slowly realizing that there really wasn't a common thread belief throughout the people, hence the separation of the North and the South. I am discovering though that there was a common desire to believe in something. When reading an article about Whitman's relation to pro-slavery and how he was marketed to the south as "the rage" as a strategy to get his work out there, Van Evrie, the editor of the Day Book, a pro-slavery newspaper, was compared to Whitman in their reader and who they appealed to

"socially insecure whites in search of a sense of identity that could help make the existing social and economic systems more tolerable.”

 I think what I want to do now is find that voice within Whitman and his peers and capture it in the Cento poem I am creating. In order to do so, I will research further about the Free Soil movement, something Whitman was said to be apart of, and artists on both ends of the slavery spectrum such as William Douglas O'Connor, John Townsend Trowbridge, Franklin Benjamin Sandborn, Van Evrie etc. I will also search through newspaper articles that these people were featured in such as Commonwealth, an anti-slavery paper, and Day Book, a pro-slavery paper. I am hoping to find a common thread as mentioned earlier having to do with a search for an identity.