WHITNEY 



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WHITNEY 



man. It is said that he drove a cab one entire 

 winter to help a disabled cabman. His interest 

 was repaid by the affection and confidence of 

 the working people, and he became a political 

 speaker of considerable influence among them. 

 He wrote a novel, of which nothing but the 

 name, Frank Evans, remains, and for a time he 

 edited the Brooklyn Eagle. On his return from 

 a long walking trip through Canada, the West 

 and the South, he edited an unsuccessful Free- 

 Soil paper, then worked at building and selling 

 houses, meanwhile planning his first collection 

 of Leaves of Grass. This came out in 1855 

 and received only ridicule until Emerson 

 praised it highly. 



During the War of Secession Whitman vol- 

 unteered as an army nurse to care for his 

 wounded brother, and remained in the hospital 

 until peace was established, supporting himself 

 by writing for the New York Times. Later he 

 worked in the departments of the Interior and 

 the Treasury until 1873, when a light stroke of 

 paralysis, perhaps due to his army life, forced 

 him to retire. At Camden, N. J., he spent his 

 later years serenely, despite feebleness and pov- 

 orty. He never married. Whitman was over 

 feet tall, finely proportioned, and in his 

 earlier years rugged looking. 



His last years were devoted to enlarging his 

 Leaves of Grass, which has excited much dis- 

 cussion. Whitman's purpose was to describe 

 the development of America and to be the 

 prophet of democracy, of freedom, of natural- 

 ness and of the brotherhood of man. His ef- 

 forts at naturalness are often extreme and 

 sometimes ludicrous, and his poetry lacks the 

 meter and rhyme which would make it more 

 widely readable. Aside from its roughness and 

 its many failures, however, it has at times an 

 original force and a surencss of insight which 

 make it rank with the truest poetry produced 

 in America. In Europe Whitman has always 

 been very popular, as the most representutm 

 American writer, ami In- i un grows in his 

 >wn country constantly. His widest known 

 poem is that on the death of Lincoln, "0 Cap- 

 tain! My Captain!" A.MCC. 



Consult Noyea'0 Approach to Whitman; Bur- 

 roufths'a Whitman: A Study. 



WHITNEY, whit'ni, ADELINE DUTTON TKMN 

 (1824-1906), a writer of poems and novels for 

 young people, which were widely read in 1 in- 

 own day. She was bora and educated in Bos- 

 ton, and was a cousin of George Francis Train, 

 a well-known author and lecturer. At the age 

 of niii.-fi-i-n -hr married Seth D. Whitney, of 



Milton, Mass. Although she was a contribu- 

 tor to periodicals in her girlhood, her best 

 literary work was done after 1859, when she 

 wrote more than twenty volumes, all of which 

 were entertaining in style and wholesome in 

 tone. Probably her best-known story is Faith 

 Gartncy's Girlhood. Included among her other 

 works are Patience Strong's Outings, Real 

 Folks, Pansies and We Girls. 



WHITNEY, ELI (1765-1825), an American 

 inventor, whose cotton gin is one of the most 

 important of all inventions connected with thr 

 world of industry. He was bora at Westboro, 

 Mass., and was graduated at Yale in 1792. In 

 the same year h* 

 removed to Geor- 

 gia to teach 

 school, soon form- 

 ing an acquaint- 

 ance with the 

 widow of General 

 Nathanael 

 Greene, who 

 lived on the 

 banks of the Sa- 

 vannah River. 

 Mrs . Greene 

 found him such 

 an adept in mak- 

 ing useful devices that when some of hi-r 

 bors complained of the uselessness of cultivat- 

 ing cotton because of the seed, she appealed to 

 Whitney to see what he could do about sepa- 

 rating the seed from the cotton. 



For several months Whitney worked at a 

 machine, forced first to make his own tools. 

 Toward the close of the year 1792 his simple 

 mechanism was nearly completed, and he found 

 that under the guidance of one man it would 

 clean a thousand pounds in the time required 

 to clean five pounds by hand. He had we 

 secretly, but before his gin was completed .* 

 lawless men broke into his shop and car 

 off his invention. Before he could secure a 

 patent several machines were constructed on 

 his model. With a Mr. Miller, a man of 

 means, he went to Connecticut in 1793 to 

 manufacture cotton gins. The succeeding 

 years were filled with misfortune. Lawsuits 

 took all his profits aa well as the $50,000 

 granted to him by the state of South Carolina ; 

 rivals declared that a marlr.n. like his had 

 ii her been constructed in Switzerland, and 

 that his machine tore the fiber of the cotton; 

 ln< part nor died, and a fire utterly destroyed 

 his factory. 



ELI WHITNEY 



