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"The Best Side of a Case of Crime": George Lippard, Walt Whitman, and Antebellum Police Reports

Many nineteenth-century American authors spent part of their careers writing for newspapers. Some authors whose literary reputations are now founded on works that had little to do with journalism found it expedient to be connected with newspapers, where they began to build careers as professional writers. In such cases, how did apprenticeship on a newspaper affect a writer’s subsequent literary work in terms of subject matter, tone, or ideology? One answer to this question emerges from a look at the early writings of two authors whose careers follow a similar trajectory, beginning as journalists and moving on to more self-consciously literary forms of publication: George Lippard and Walt Whitman. In the 1840s, both Lippard and Whitman were working journalists, Lippard writing for Philadelphia’s Spirit of the Times and Citizen Soldier and Whitman for a number of publications, most notably as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Moreover, they both worked in the same staple format of the antebellum daily paper: the police report. Finally, critics praise both Lippard and Whitman for sympathizing in their literary work with outcast elements of society, a position that would have been particularly hard to reconcile with the demands of crime reporting. In this essay, I examine the police reports of Lippard and Whitman to see how they handled the form and where their reporting anticipated the racially and socially progressive perspectives of their later works. Such an inquiry requires familiarity with the police report as it appeared in two of the pioneering penny papers of the period, the New York Sun and the New York Herald, since the content, purpose, and ideological import of such reporting had been firmly established by the time Lippard and Whitman came to the format. A number of scholars have analyzed in broad terms newspaper crime reporting of the antebellum period. In Dan Schiller’s account, news about crime was the arena in which penny papers staked their claim as defenders of the interests of the common man. Appropriating the rhetoric of the labor press that died out after the Panic of 1837,