[Our friends at Santa Fe, New Mexico, have just finish'd their
long-drawn-out anniversary of the 333d year of the settlement of their
city by the Spanish. The good, gray Walt Whitman was asked to write
them a poem in commemoration. Instead he wrote them a letter as
follows:--_Philadelphia Press_, August 5, 1883.]
CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, _July 20, 1883_.
_To Messrs. Griffin, Martinez, Prince, and other Gentlemen at Santa Fé_:
DEAR SIRS:--Your kind invitation to visit you and deliver a poem for the
333d Anniversary of founding Santa Fé has reach'd me so late that I have
to decline, with sincere regret. But I will say a few words offhand.
We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort
them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed,
and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England
writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion
that our United States have been fashion'd from the British Islands
only, and essentially form a second England only--which is a very great
mistake. Many leading traits for our future national personality, and
some of the best ones, will certainly prove to have originated from
other than British stock. As it is, the British and German, valuable as
they are in the concrete, already threaten excess. Or rather, I should
say, they have certainly reach'd that excess. To-day, something outside
of them, and to counterbalance them, is seriously needed.
The seething materialistic and business vortices of the United States,
in their present devouring relations, controlling and belittling
everything else, are, in my opinion, but a vast and indispensable stage
in the new world's development, and are certainly to be follow'd
by something entirely different--at least by immense modifications.
Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be
establish'd, through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic
and democratic attributes--not one of which at present definitely
exists--entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on
it, and to justify it.
To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character
will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander
historic retrospect--grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for
patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor. (It is time to dismiss
utterly the illusion-compound, half raw-head-and-bloody-bones and half
Mysteries-of-Udolpho, inherited from the English writers of the past 200
years. It is time to realize--for it is certainly true--that there
will not be found any more cruelty, tyranny, superstition, &c., in the
_résumé_ of past Spanish history than in the corresponding _résumé_ of
Anglo-Norman history. Nay, I think there will not be found so much.)
Then another point, relating to American ethnology, past and to come,
I will here touch upon at a venture. As to our aboriginal or Indian
population--the Aztec in the South, and many a tribe in the North and
West--I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as
time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence,
a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America, from its
many far-back sources and current supplies, develops, adapts, entwines,
faithfully identifies its own--are we to see it cheerfully accepting
and using all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside
globe--and then rejecting the only ones distinctively its own--the
autochthonic ones?
As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we
do not begin to appreciate the splendor and sterling value of its
race element. Who knows but that element, like the course of some
subterranean river, dipping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now
to emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?
If I might assume to do so, I would like to send you the most cordial,
heartfelt congratulations of your American fellow-countrymen here. You
have more friends in the Northern and Atlantic regions than you
suppose, and they are deeply interested in the development of the great
Southwestern interior, and in what your festival would arouse to public
attention.
Very respectfully, &c.,