Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  The three cars of the presidential train had pulled into the station at 3:00 P.M. sharp. Lincoln’s chest was sore and his voice hoarse from the fifty-three speeches he had given during the week it had taken him, his family, and his Negro house servant (known simply as William) to travel the sixteen hundred miles from Springfield. He had wished for the people to become acquainted with him, and so he had chosen a roundabout route on a dozen railroads.

  His entourage included the two boys, Tad and Willie, and young Robert, dubbed “the Prince of Rails”; Lincoln’s brother-in-law and personal physician W. S. Wallace; Lincoln’s young private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay; the Illinois judges N. B. Judd and David Davis, old friends who had advised Lincoln during his campaign; half a dozen army officers including Colonel Ward Hill Lamon, an old friend intensely concerned for Lincoln’s safety; editor Horace Greeley; and a separate carload of newsmen.

  At whistle-stops where he had no time for a full speech he would stand before the crowd at the back of the train and repeat the formulaic phrases:

  I see that you have provided a platform, but I shall have to decline standing on it . . . (Laughter and applause) The Superintendent tells me I have not time . . . I come only to see you and give you the opportunity to see me; and I say to you, as I have said before to crowds where there were so many handsome ladies as there are here, I have decidedly the best of the bargain . . . With your aid, as the people, I think we shall be able to preserve—not the country, for the country will preserve itself, (cheers), but the institutions of the country— (great cheering) . . . If I can only be as generously and unanimously sustained as the demonstrations I have witnessed indicate I shall be, I shall not fail . . .

  The snow had been deep at Batavia and Utica, so Lincoln was grateful for milder weather in Manhattan. A Times reporter complained that during the entire trip Mr. Lincoln had worn a “shocking bad hat” and a thin, threadbare overcoat. After leaving Utica, Mary Lincoln ordered William to bring Mr. Lincoln’s new coat and hat out of the boxes he had not thought to unwrap. In his new stovepipe topper and black broadcloth overcoat Lincoln looked “fifty percent improved,” the newsman allowed, and “the country may congratulate itself that its President-elect is a man who does not reject, even in important matters, the advice and counsel of his wife.”

  The superintendent of police had detailed thirteen hundred of New York’s finest “to keep the enthusiasm of the crowd within the bounds of good manners.” One hundred and fifty, in shiny new belts and yellow calf gloves, awaited the party at the depot, which was decorated with flags. Thirty-five carriages were drawn up outside the station on Thirtieth Street. Mary kissed her husband and smoothed his hair. Lincoln and his party advanced through the passenger room behind police and bodyguards. Outside, the President-elect bowed gracefully to the cheering crowd.

  As the New York Times reported, “Amid cheers and the waving of handkerchiefs he entered his carriage—the same in which the Prince of Wales rode, drawn by six black horses.” The procession of eleven barouches followed a squad of mounted policemen. First came a four-horse carriage bearing the reception committees of the Common Council, next the President-elect’s barouche flanked by a platoon of policemen, and then nine more carriages followed; bringing up the rear was the express wagon, drawn by four plumed steeds, which carried the party’s baggage. “Both sides of Thirtieth Street were packed with people, who cheered lustily as Mr. Lincoln passed—and he returned the compliment by raising his hat and bowing,” the Baltimore Sun noted.

  The parade turned down Ninth Avenue to Twenty-third Street, rolled along Twenty-third to Fifth Avenue, then down Fifth to Fourteenth Street and along Fourteenth to Broadway. Flags were flying almost everywhere, and the streets were lined with people waving and cheering, the crowd swelling as the procession moved downtown. Across Twenty-third Street at Eighth Avenue stretched a banner, WELCOME LINCOLN, and over it the Stars and Stripes. A group of boys dressed in military coats and caps waved flags inscribed LINCOLN AND HAMLIN.

  Another banner spanning the street bore the words from Genesis FEAR NOT, ABRAHAM, I AM THY SHIELD AND THY EXCEEDING GREAT REWARD. From hotel balconies and windows, ladies waved their handkerchiefs. “Mr. Lincoln bowed and smiled constantly, and seemed vastly delighted with the spectacle.”

  Putnam, the publishing house at 532 Broadway, had hung out a placard with the famous words from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech RIGHT MAKES MIGHT! A merchant two blocks south displayed the message WELCOME ABRAHAM LINCOLN, WE BEG FOR COMPROMISE. This gave Lincoln pause. He was not about to compromise his principles regarding the spread of slavery.

  The crowd in front of the Astor House was packed at 4:30 P.M. when the presidential cavalcade arrived, and it was only with great firmness that the police were able to make way for them. Walt Whitman stood on the top of the omnibus hoping to glimpse the man who had won his vote.

  The five-story Greek Revival–style hotel had a four-columned portico, surmounted by an ornate triangular gable and cornice. According to reporters the President-elect and his escort alighted immediately, went up the steps between the Doric columns, and entered the hotel. At the crowd’s deafening command, and after much coaxing of aldermen, Lincoln was prevailed upon to mount the coping of the hotel doorway by climbing out the window, so that he might say a few words to the crowd, estimated at 250,000, that had thronged to see him. He was hoarse. “After bowing his acknowledgments for his enthusiastic reception,” he said:

  Fellow Citizens—I have stepped before you merely in compliance with what appeared to be your wish, and with no purpose of making a speech. In fact, I do not propose making a speech this afternoon. I could not be heard by any but a very small fraction of you at best; but what is still worse than that is, that I have nothing just now worth your hearing. (Loud applause.) I beg you to believe that I do not now refuse to address you through any disposition to disoblige you, but the contrary. But at the same time I beg of you to excuse me for the present.

  There was vibrant applause. A Councilman Barney called to the crowd, “That’s enough,” and he and Alderman Cornell handed the weary President-elect back through the window of the hotel.

  Eighteen years later Whitman would recall that from the top of the omnibus he had “a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind as he stood observing the people. He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.” Whitman did not recall any speech.

  Press reports of Lincoln’s New York reception differ somewhat—from that of the Republican New York Times, which describes “an immeasurable outpouring of the people [that] flooded the avenues and streets” and says, “the harmony of incessant cheers was unbroken by indecent language or gesture . . . Certainly no welcome could have been more cordial or respectful,” to that of a Democratic newspaper that called the crowd subdued and small compared to the recent turnout for the Prince of Wales. There is little mention of assassination plots or potential violence.

  After his election Lincoln had begun to appear in Whitman’s dreams, and there is much that is dreamlike in the poet’s memory of that February afternoon in 1861. Although Whitman had been an acutely observant journalist, his account, written in 1879, is suffused with dread, as if he is anticipating the tragedy to come. And it differs so sharply from the news reports we must suspect that the poet has imposed upon this thrilling moment the memories and impressions of later years, when he would see the President much more closely.

  Two or three shabby hack barouches made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance. A tall figure stepp’d out of the center of these barouches, paus’d leisurely on the
sidewalk, look’d up at the granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d around for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds. There were no speeches, no compliments—no welcome—as far as I could hear, not a word said. Still much anxiety was conceal’d in that quiet.

  This is a vivid, accurate portrait of Lincoln getting out of a hackney cab, rather than of the President-elect descending from the regal barouche whose six black steeds had transported the Prince of Wales. The silent, sullen crowd was not the cheering multitude described in the Times, Tribune, and Herald. And the long minute the poet beheld the President-elect for the first time seems to exist nowhere in history but in Whitman’s recollection. His “capital view of it all” from the top of the omnibus was at once much better and far worse than others’, if he saw Lincoln so plainly for so long a time and yet did not see him stretch his leg over the windowsill and climb onto the coping to address the crowd. Whitman seems to have been deaf to their applause, too.

  “Cautious persons had fear’d some mark’d insult or indignity to the President-elect,” Whitman recalled, and this is true. The Times observed: “mischief makers have been feverishly busy all Winter . . . impressing upon the masses the conviction that the responsibility for their woes rests mediately upon the Republican Party, but directly upon Mr. Lincoln for not announcing the programme of his Administration, and so giving peace to the country. Acts of outrage and violence have been counseled and justified.” But Whitman’s 1879 account claims that Lincoln then “possess’d no personal popularity at all in New York City, and very little political,” and this is far from true. Of course, Lincoln had his enemies in New York. While most of the ships harbored in the East River displayed bunting of red, white, and blue, the American ensign, or the English Jack—the Texas and New Orleans hoisted no colors, nor did any other Southern vessel. All the hotels displayed the American flag excepting the Democrat-owned New York Hotel uptown, and so did every newspaper office but the Democratic Day-Book. Even among Republicans, Lincoln had his critics. Men like the spurned candidate Salmon Chase were exasperated by the President-elect’s stubborn silence about the Secession crisis. Some, like Seward, feared that Lincoln would not compromise with the seceding states, and many more Republicans felt he was insufficiently “radical” in his stand against slavery.

  But ever since the Cooper Union speech had sent shock waves through the intellectual community, Lincoln had enjoyed mounting popularity in New York. With the help of Greeley’s paper, and the political muscle of Seward and ward boss Thurlow Weed, Lincoln had carried New York on election day, along with the rest of the Northeastern states—all but New Jersey, which he split with Douglas. Whitman’s impression of “a sulky, unbroken silence” caused by “the few political supporters of Mr. Lincoln” being bullied by “the immense majority, who were anything but supporters,” is false. Yet historians have echoed Whitman’s story until it has become part of the legend of Lincoln’s harrowing journey to Washington, which was mostly joyful, though not without peril. “I have no doubt,” said the poet, “many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast pocket there, ready, soon as break and riot came.”

  Subsequent events account for the melodrama of Whitman’s vision. It is meant to distinguish the poet’s affection from the mob’s—though they were probably not so different. The gaunt man with the sweet smile, from beyond the Alleghenies, had rare charisma, and Whitman felt it immediately. During that moment, fixed forever in the poet’s memory, the real crowd milled into a blur and fell silent, and there was no one left but Lincoln and Whitman.

  News from Washington and the Southern states grew more worrisome by the hour, yet Lincoln’s two days in New York City had a holiday air. His boys visited Barnum’s Museum across the street; in the evening the Lincolns went to the opera to hear Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. At midnight the National Guard band and a German quartet appeared outside the hotel to serenade them.

  The fifty-two-year-old President-elect charmed everyone from New York’s Mayor Fernando Wood to ninety-four-year-old Joshua Dewey, who had voted in every election since George Washington’s. Lincoln would stand back-to-back with any man the crowd pushed forward to challenge his height of six feet three inches. Few did. He accepted hats from competing haberdashers, and when asked which hat he favored Lincoln drawled, “They mutually surpassed each other.” He shook hands with thirty veterans of the War of 1812.

  “His style of shaking hands and chatting with people is prepossessing,” wrote a reporter, “frank, genial, unassuming, and in a word—Western.” According to the Times, “The brief remarks of Mr. Lincoln, in reply to the courtesies tendered to him, were in exceeding good taste . . . We know enough of Mr. Lincoln to appreciate his entire sincerity and patriotism . . . He is an earnest man, but not an obstinate or impracticable one. His speech gives us the assurance of a vigorous and firm, but conciliatory Administration.” Lincoln told his audience at City Hall: “There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, under which . . . the whole country has acquired its greatness, unless it were to be that thing for which the Union itself was made.” The statement is afloat in ambiguity.

  These details and more were available in the daily newspapers Walt Whitman perused, with increasing fascination, since he had seen the President-elect climb down from a barouche and survey the crowd in front of the Astor House. Now Whitman was keenly interested in presidents, and in the president’s symbolic role in the life of the democratic republic. The word “President” appears sixteen times in the 1856 Leaves of Grass and many more times in the later editions. In his youth he hated presidents, by and large, with an oedipal enthusiasm, feeling that none of them did justice to that sacred office. In his pamphlet “The Eighteenth Presidency!” he railed against Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan, called them disunionists and political corpses that had been lifted out of putrid graves, painted, and stuffed by “electioneers, body snatchers, bawlers, bribers, compromisers . . . blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlot’s money twisted together.” In the White House, said Whitman, Franklin Pierce “eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States.”

  The new President was obviously cut out of different cloth. He looked remarkably like the Redeemer President that Whitman had envisioned in that same vehement pamphlet, “heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced” (at last the beard was growing!), who had “come down from the West across the Alleghenies . . . with the tan all over his face, breast and arms.” Of course he was not yet “heroic” and might not be “fully-informed,” but he might have the makings of a hero if he could be properly informed . . .

  Whitman began dreaming of Lincoln, jotting in his notebook: “Two characters as of a dialogue between A. L——n and W. Whitman—as in a dream / or better? Lessons for a President elect / Dialogue between WW and ‘President elect.’ ” He imagined talking to the future President. He imagined the man from Illinois talking back to him. The questions he would ask Lincoln had been worked out years before:

  Who are you that would talk to America?

  Have you studied out my land, its idioms and men?

  Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,

  pride, freedom, friendship, of my land? its substratums and objects?

  Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first

  year of the independence of The States?

  Have you possessed yourself of the Federal Constitution?

  Do you acknowledge liberty with audible and absolute

  acknowledgment, and set slavery at naught for life and death?

  . . .

  Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions?
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  Are you not of some coterie? some school or religion?

  All of these questions had been put to the future President in the 1856 Leaves of Grass. No man who ever ran for the office could have answered them more to the poet’s satisfaction than this “rail-splitter” who was on his way to the White House.

  part two

  THE WAR OF THE REBELLION

  3

  THE FEDERAL CITY, NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1863

  The last night of the year had been a restless one for the President: he went to bed after twelve and rose before dawn. At midnight all around the crowded city soldiers and civilians fired their guns over the grave of the Departed Year. The New Year was welcomed by the prayers and thanksgiving of preachers and the fanfare of bands, “the boisterous laugh of the gay and thoughtless,” the whirl of dancers, “the flowing bumpers of worshippers at the shrine of Bacchus, and the rattle of musketry by ever hopeful and happy ‘Young America,’ ” the Morning Chronicle observed. The merrymaking that flowed up Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street past the Willard Hotel, and down Vermont Avenue past St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, went on in the light of the swelling moon. But it stopped at the gates of the President’s House.

  The fireworks thundered all night. Then as the sun rose, the streets around the White House began to fill with citizens who had come from far and wide to greet Mr. Lincoln at the president’s customary New Year’s levee.

  Lincoln did not drink, and in any case this was not a night for him to celebrate. Military dispatches from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, were appalling. On December 31 the Rebels, led by General Braxton Bragg, had attacked General William Starke Rosecrans’s Federal Army of the Cumberland. “Our entire line suffered terribly this morning,” said Anson Stager’s telegram. “Four regiments of regulars lost half of their men, and all of their commanding officers . . . Majors Rosengarten and Ward were killed, Generals Stanley, Rousseau and Palmer were wounded . . . The Fifteenth Wisconsin lost seven captains. General Negley’s artillery is still mowing the rebels in the center.” In his third dispatch the telegraph superintendent admitted, “the greatest carnage of the war has occurred.” Soon the President, then the country, would learn that there were twenty-four thousand casualties at Murfreesboro. Two weeks earlier, at Fredericksburg, eighteen thousand soldiers had been killed and wounded, and the President had said, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”