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Teaching School Among the 'Bumpkins'

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

Teaching school on Long Island was not always a happy time for Walt Whitman. But to make ends meet as a young man, he taught for short periods in schools all over the place. In at least one of them, he may have gotten himself into deep trouble.

Although as an old man he fondly reminisced about his teaching days, Whitman earlier complained bitterly about life in the sticks with backwoods yahoos.

"I believe when the Lord created the world, he used up all the good stuff, and was forced to form Woodbury and its denisens, out of the fag ends, the scraps and refuse," the 21-year-old Whitman wrote to a friend, Abraham Leech, in the summer of 1840, when he was teaching at a one-room schoolhouse in Woodbury. In a series of letters that summer, he referred to Woodbury as "Devil's Den" and "Purgatory Place," and characterized the residents as "coarse gumpheads," "brutes," and "contemptible ninnies."

"I am sick of wearing away by inches, and spending the fairest portion of my little span of life, here in this nest of bears, this forsaken of all Go[d]'s creation; among clowns and country bumpkins, flat-heads, and coarse, brown-faced girls, dirty, ill-favoured young brats, with squalling throats and crude manners, and bog-trotters, with all the disgusting conceit, of ignorance and vulgarity."

Though fascinated with these Woodbury letters, scholars have taken them with a grain of salt. Here was a young man, away from the bustle and camaraderie of the city he loved, forced into the countryside to earn a living; a budding writer, trying out the language, being outrageous for effect, trying to make the words swagger, bluster and dance a literary jig. An editor of a selection of Whitman letters, Edwin Haviland Miller, writes: "Beneath the caustic commentary and the posturing and self-pitying emerges a picture of a very lonely young man."

Having left school himself when he was 11, Whitman first stood in front of a classroom of children when he was only a teenager himself. Off and on for five years, between the ages of 17 and 21, the future poet was a schoolmaster in at least 10 Long Island schools. When he was later established as a writer, Whitman took a special interest in the subjects of teaching and children's education, and from him we learn a lot about 19th-Century local schools.

"There are still left some old-fashioned county schoolhouses down through Long Island, especially in Suffolk County," Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Times on April 27, 1858. "The `studies' pursued in this temple, are spelling, reading, writing, and the commoner rules of arithmetic, with now and then geography and `speaking,' and perhaps in more ambitious cases, in addition to these branches, a little grammar, surveying, algebra, and even Latin and French."

These country schools were sometimes open year-round, with the year divided into three-month quarters, and teachers were often hired a quarter at a time. They were paid, Whitman said, about $40 or $50 a quarter, plus board. "Sometimes the teachers 'board round," he wrote. "That is they distribute and average themselves among the parents of the children that attend school -- they stop two or three days in one place, a week in another, and so on."

Teaching in those days was often a quick stop on the way to somewhere else. "The teachers of these Long Island country schools are often poor young students from some of the colleges or universities, who desire to become future ministers, doctors or lawyers -- but, getting hard up, or fagged out with study, they `take a school' to recuperate, and earn a little cash, for future efforts," he wrote. "They are apt to be eccentric specimens of the masculine race -- marked by some of the `isms' or `ologies' -- offering quite a puzzle to the plain old farmers and their families."

Records are skimpy on Whitman as a schoolteacher. In only a couple of instances do we have any evaluation of his performance, one negative, and one extremely positive. An old man named Sandford Brown in West Hills told an interviewer in 1890 that Whitman had been his first teacher, although Brown didn't identify the school. "He warn't in his element," Brown was quoted as saying. "He was always musin' and writin', 'stead of tending to his proper dooties."

Whitman seems to have been much more successful in Little Bay Side, near Flushing, in the winter of 1839-1840. In 1894, Whitman's friend Horace Traubel interviewed a man named Charles A. Roe, who had been Whitman's student when he was a boy of 10. Whitman seemed to have been, at age 20, an instinctive progressive educator, abandoning rote instruction and never using corporal punishment. He engaged children in long conversations, played word games with them and engaged them in "mental arithmetic."

Roe said that the students "were all deeply attached to him, and were sorry when he went away." At one period later in life Whitman would affect the dress of a foppish dandy, but as a schoolteacher he was conventional, Roe said. Whitman "always dressed in black -- dressed neatly -- very plain in everything -- no attempt at what would be called fashion ... He was never sick; did not smoke; never, that I saw or heard of, drank any liquors. As to his eating, I never knew him to have any peculiar habits."

Whitman was thrust into teaching as a result of two disastrous fires that devastated New York City in 1835, virtually destroying, among other things, the printing and publishing industries. Out of work along with thousands of others, Whitman took his first teaching job in June, 1836, in Norwich (now East Norwich). Over the next five years -- with a year out to found The Long-Islander and then abandon it -- he took a number of quarterly teaching jobs on the Island. They included schools in Babylon, Long Swamp (Huntington), Smithtown -- where he stayed for two quarters and became an active member of the local debating society -- Jamaica, Little Bay Side, Trimming Square (Garden City and West Hempstead), Woodbury and Whitestone.

Notably absent from this list is Southold. Whether or not Whitman taught there for a term in the winter of 1840 is a puzzlement. Whether or not Whitman was accused of sodomy with one of his schoolboys, tarred and feathered and run out of town is equally perplexing.

Whitman never mentioned teaching in Southold. But Southold Town historian Wayland Jefferson, citing conversations with old-time residents, wrote a booklet published in 1939 that contained the Whitman-in-Southold story, including the tarring and feathering. In early January, 1841, Whitman, according to Jefferson, was denounced as a Sodomite from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church by the Rev. Ralph Smith, who referred to the Locust Grove school where Whitman taught as the Sodom School, and the name stuck. In 1966, Katherine Molinoff of Smithtown, an English and journalism professor at both Hunter College and C.W. Post, wrote a booklet expanding on the Jefferson story with interviews from a number of Southold residents who had heard the stories for years.

The current Southold historian, Antonia Booth, was asked recently how the community felt about the story. "People here seem to believe it," she said. "Not in a ga-ga, Looney Tunes sense, either. The community believes that he taught here. I'm not sure that the community believes that he was ... what would you call it? I've never seen any proof that he sodomized little boys or anything."

So, Walt Whitman taught all over Long Island. Maybe even in Southold.