Albery Allson Whitman
Albery Allson Whitman was born into slavery on May 30, 1851, on a farm near Munfordville, Kentucky, in Hart County, what Whitman called “the Green River country.” He had at least one sibling, a sister. His mother died in 1862, and his father died soon after emancipation, leaving Whitman an orphan at age twelve. He remained on the farm where he was born and continued to labor there until he moved, first to Louisville, Kentucky, then to Cincinnati. He later relocated to Troy, Ohio, where he worked and, for five months, attended grammar school. By age eighteen, Whitman was employed as a railroad construction worker before becoming a schoolteacher in Carysville, Ohio. He enrolled at Wilberforce University around 1870 and began studying there under the tutelage of Bishop Daniel A. Payne. Whitman also began writing poetry around this time. He studied at Wilberforce for six months before being appointed the school’s financial agent.
Wilberforce’s affiliation with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church fostered Whitman’s interest in pastoring—a vocation that he pursued alongside poetry until his death. He also began work as an AME pastor in Springfield, Ohio. He spent the years between 1879 and 1883 establishing AME churches in Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas.
Whitman published his first book of poetry, Essays on the Ten Plagues and Miscellaneous Poems, in 1871. According to him, the book sold around one thousand copies, though none remain extant. This was followed two years later by Leelah Misled (Richard LaRue, 1873). He published his third work, Not a Man, Yet a Man (Republic Printing Company, 1877), with the aim of funding Wilberforce’s endowment. The book’s eponymous narrative poem comprises five thousand lines and chronicles the life of a fugitive slave. The primary work of verse is followed by eighteen miscellaneous poems. The collection helped establish Whitman as the leading African American poet of the late-nineteenth century.
Whitman’s other collections are Drifted Leaves (1890), a lyrical work that features pastoral poems, two dialect poems, and an elegy to his late mother, which he published in combination with Not a Man, Yet a Man and Twasinta’s Seminoles in a new volume. In 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he published the pamphlet World’s Fair Poem (Holsey Job Print), which contains two poems: “The Veteran,” a tribute to former Civil War soldiers, and “The Freedman’s Triumphant Song,” a militant argument for African American citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era.
Whitman is best known for his Romantic epic poems. Twasinta’s Seminoles; or, Rape of Florida (Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1885), originally published as The Rape of Florida (Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1884), recounts the removal of the Seminoles from their tribal lands. The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas, or eight lines of verse in iambic pentameter concluded with an alexandrine, making Whitman the first Black poet to employ this form in an epic poem. His final epic was An Idyl of the South: An Epic Poem in Two Parts (The Metaphysical Publishing Company, 1901).
According to scholar Matt Sandler, author of The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery, Whitman’s “long poems with their antiquated diction” had become passé by the turn of the century and “could never thrive in the magazine culture that took up dialect poetry in earnest in the 1890s.” Paul Laurence Dunbar, who both elevated the genre of dialect poetry and was present with Whitman at the World’s Fair after publishing his first book, Oak and Ivy, that same year, had also been able to achieve the commercial success that eluded Whitman as well as recognition from the established American literati: Dunbar had secured the endorsement of William Dean Howells through the latter’s introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life, while Whitman had sent a letter with a similar entreaty to one of his influences, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that went unanswered.
Shortly after a visit to Anniston, Alabama, where he continued his duties on behalf of the AME Church, Whitman returned to Georgia and died in Atlanta on June 29, 1901. His daughters achieved the financial success that eluded him as the vaudeville team the Whitman Sisters—one of the most famous vaudeville acts of the early-twentieth century as well as managers of a prominent theatrical booking agency.