Like Poe, he largely eschewed overt political or social messages.
For-Whitman life began near Munfordville, Kentucky, and the Green River on a white Kentuckian's small Hart County estate, which was much more a family farm than the stereotypical plantation of the legendary antebellum South. The son of slaves, Whitman was orphaned after the deaths of his mother in 1862 and his father in 1863. As their slave child he was early set to work in the fields. Yet he was never to speak bitterly of his experience of bondage, and he seemed always to have remembered with genuine affection the locality of his birth. In the years after emancipation and the end of the Civil War Whitman took to the road. After living in Louisville and Cincinnati, he went to Troy, Ohio, where he worked first in a shop where plows were made and then as a laborer in a railroad-construction gang. He also went to school for a total of seven months. Armed with this exposure to learning, he taught in Carysville, Ohio, and then in Kentucky, near his first home. No later than 1870 he resumed his formal education at Wilberforce University, although apparently for a period of only six months.
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