Only the youngest son, Edward (born in 1835), who was mentally and physically handicapped, carried a name that tied him to neither the family's nor the country's history.
Trained as a carpenter but struggling to find work, Walter Sr. had taken up farming by the time Whitman was born. When Whitman was almost four, his father moved the family to Brooklyn, across from "Mannahatta," as Whitman later called New York in his celebratory writings about the city. One of Whitman's favorite stories about his childhood concerned the time the Marquis de Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands: the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants where the nation was being invented day by day.
Whitman's father was of English stock and his mother of Dutch and Welsh descent. The combination led to what Whitman always considered a fertile tension in the children between a smoldering, brooding Puritanical temperament and a sunnier, outgoing Dutch disposition.
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