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The American Civil War

Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” soon after the end of the Civil War. Although the conflict had complex social, political, and economic origins, it largely erupted over the matter of whether to allow slavery in the western territories. Northern states had already outlawed the institution of slavery, and they protested the establishment of new slave states. By contrast, Southern states depended on slave labor, and they worried that any limit placed on slavery portended the end of the institution as a whole. The tension over the future of American slavery came to a head in 1860 with the election of President Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the establishment of slave states in the West. At first seven, then eleven slave states declared their secession from the Union and, in 1861, organized under the banner of the Confederate flag. The war waged on for four bloody years, until the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered on April 9, 1865. Only five days after the war’s official end, Lincoln was assassinated by the disaffected actor John Wilkes Booth. It’s in the immediate wake of these events that Whitman wrote this poem, recording the country’s contradictory atmosphere of celebration and devastation.

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