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               The telegraph was developed for the purpose of uniting people across large distances, including a world-wide “civilization” of even the lowest of underdeveloped peoples. The first appearance of the electric telegraph in the United States was in 1828, invented by Harrison Dyar. Later, other versions of the electric telegraph were developed, including Joseph Henry’s electromagnetic (bell strike) version and Samuel Morse, who proved that signals, in code, could be transmitted over the wire signals sent through electromagnets. Paul Gilmore states in his article, “The Telegraph in Black and White,” “Because electricity was understood as both a physical and spiritual force, the telegraph was read both as separating thought from the body and thus making the body archaic, and as rematerializing though in the form of electricity, thereby raising the possibility of a new kind of body” (Gilmore, 806).  As the technology of the telegraph, telephone, and other electrical devices progressed, Whitman and other prominent authors, like Thoreau and Emerson, began to realize the connections between the electricity and the superiority/inferiority complexes of the white and black races. Other notable dichotomies are visible through the works of Whitman, who in particular, made some interesting associations between the electricity of the telegraph and sexuality and spirituality on the individual level as well as through interracial relationships. “Whitman [then] illustrates how the technology of electricity and the telegraph became a vehicle for imagining not simply a cultural and spiritual exchange between races which would unite them in brotherhood, but also a bodily, sexual exchange which would link the nation and the world in one blood” (Gilmore, 824).  Although the two ideas of spirituality and sexuality seems to be somewhat unrelated, Whitman does a fascinating job of expressing how closely related the telegraph’s inner-workings are to spirituality and sexuality, especially when observed through the lens of race.

               It was apparent that around Whitman’s time, many people approached the use of the developing telegraph as a metaphor for white superiority. “The telegraph was imagined as uniting white Americans into one body that would maintain the slave system, but at the same time, it separated white Americans from the body by making them the disembodied “brain of humanity” (Gilmore, 815). One interpretation of this statement would be that although the telegraph was an effort to connect all human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, or the like, the overall achievement would actually be that the white Americans would be the ones in control of its operation and therefore still have an upper-hand over the blacks, specifically because of the time period; that is the Civil War era, where there was debate over the legitimacy of having slaves and slave trade. Therefore, in the context of the United States, although the telegraph’s position was to unite the nation for communication purposes, it would still leaving the white Americans to be the controlling factor, while the blacks would be left in still an inferior role, whether slaves or free.

               Whitman’s position to the subject of racial inferiority was quite the opposite, as readers have come to know through his poetry. Examples that prove Whitman’s opinion of racial equality would be Leaves of Grass as well as his prose works. Whitman’s tendency towards linking the races is alluded to in a few of his poems in Leaves of Grass where he celebrates the telegraph for communalizing nations and peoples. “While the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass, especially “I Sing the Body Electric,” celebrates the possibilities of cross-racial identifications, and perhaps even cross-racial sex, and describes ‘the procreant urge of the world’ as ‘electrical,’ these possibilities become explicitly linked to technologies like the telegraph in the postbellum poems, “Passage to India” (1871) and “Years of the Modern” (1865)” (Gilmore, 823). Here, Gilmore is stating that Whitman writes in the hopes of having interracial connections at some point in time, not only platonic, but relationships that can also be intimate or sexual.

                Whitman’s own sexuality is something that scholars even today attempt to reveal and so it really comes as no surprise that he sexualized the electricity of the telegraph as a reflection of his sexual nature. By the time Whitman began writing Leaves of Grass, the telegraph had become one of the few references for attributing the body as being electric. Even though adjustments were made to Leaves of Grass after the Civil War, “Whitman repeatedly mentions electricity, twice alluding to the telegraph” (Gilmore, 479). Whitman’s poem “To a Locomotive in Winter” portrays the uses of an inanimate object and the technological advances of it to further exemplify the body as “electric.” In his article entitled, “On Whitman’s ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’,” author Michael Collier states, “‘To a Locomotive in Winter’ is a thrilling example of ‘golden brass and silvery steel…side-bars and connecting rods…spring and valves’ to personify and humanize something mechanical to imbue a particular with his all-encompassing inclusive, idiosyncratic, obsessive, and modern sensibility” (Collier, 205). Of course Whitman, a man who was quite in tune with his own sexuality, even though he makes it quite hard for his readers to understand, inevitably changes the idea to not only is the body electric, but further that sex is manifested as electric. Whitman expands on the sexual implications in the 1855 version of “Song of Myself” when he claims, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. / I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, / To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand” (Whitman, 55). This section of text seems to be quite sensual insofar as he states that simply touching is so electrically charged (sexually stimulating) that all he can bear is just that. 

                The final implication of the telegraph was the spirituality that Whitman was able to produce from it. The final two statements in Whitman’s poem, “I Sing the Body Electric” read, “O I say these are not the parts of the poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul,” (Whitman, 258) which emphasizes the ideals that Whitman has regarding electricity “as both spiritual and physical” (Gilmore, 148). It seems that Whitman wants to describe his own poetry as telegraphic or electric. However, “the kind of connection Whitman strives to achieve and his sense that such complete knowledge, such thorough communication, is impossible” (Gilmore, 153). The transcendence of message from sender to receiver in a telegraph is by far much easier than poet/writer to reader, due to lack of or skewed interpretation, diction, tone, mood, et cetera. Still, he clearly wants to suggest that similar to the electricity in the body is equivalent to sexual desire, so too is electricity indicative of spirituality.

               Whitman’s use of the telegraph in his writing was not necessarily that of his own physical use of such an item. Rather, he wrote about the capabilities that the telegraph had to explore his interpretations of larger worldly issues, like race, sexuality, and spirituality. It is intriguing to think that this one man managed to accentuate the concept of worldly connection to broader issues that affect all people of the world; that one immaterial object, although used for communication, became another hindrance to the equality of races, that he already believed in, and also represented other human ideas.

Some more pictures of telegraphic items:

Listen to the Alphabet in Morse Code on YouTube:

Alphabet in Morse Code

 This sign is called “Early Telegraph”. It stands today in Elizabethtown, PA (near Lancaster) and it reads: “First commercial telegraph line in the U.S. ran along this railroad right-of-way. Completed from Lancaster to Harrisburg, 1845. The first message, ‘Why don’t you write, you rascals?’, was received, Jan. 8, 1846.” 

Works Cited:

1. Collier, Michael. “On Whitman’s ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’.” Virginia Quarterly Review. Page 205.
2. Gilmore, Paul. “Mad Filaments: Walt Whitman’s Aesthetic Body Telegraphic.” Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism. Stanford University Press. Standford, California. 2009. Pages 148, 153.
3. Gilmore, Paul. “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics.” American Literature, Volume 76, Number 3. Duke University Press. 2004. Page 479.
4. Gilmore, Paul. “The Telegraph in Black and White.” ELH 69. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. Pages 806, 815, 823-24.
5. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass; “I Sing the Body Electric.” Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. The Library of America. Penguin Books. New York, NY. 1996. Pages 55, 258.