Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  George was not there. He had lost neither life nor limb. Two days later, when Walt finally located him in one of the scattered tents of New York’s Fifty-first Regiment, George was recovering from a bullet wound in his cheek. He said you could push a stick all the way through it. George was hearty and cheerful, and was preparing to return to active duty as a newly promoted captain.

  Walt spent Christmas with his brother and the Army of the Potomac in a campground near the Rappahannock. By the bivouac fires he heard stories of men at war, “more wonderful than all the romances ever written”; of bravery and cowardice, folly and suffering; “of a dead man sitting on the top rail of a fence . . . shot there at sundown, mortally wounded, clung with desperate nerves, and was found sitting there, dead, staring with fixed eyes in the morning.”

  He shared a tent with George and three other men; ate their green corn, hard crackers, chicken, and potatoes; and drank their whiskey-spiked coffee. He watched the artillery drill to the sounds of a bugle, and heard the hooves of cavalry, the clatter of sabers. Once, under a flag of truce, he helped bury the dead lying on the battlefield. He listened to the growling of the men in the ranks. “Even the good fellows would burst if they couldn’t grumble,” he wrote. Whitman was amazed at how young they were. So many boys and youths were fighting—“and only a sprinkling of elderly men.”

  He spent most of his time that week with the sick and wounded in the drafty tents that had been pitched for “division hospitals.” He wrote, “I go around from one case to another,” soldiers lying on the frozen ground, their blankets spread on pine twigs. “I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit with him for hours, if he wishes it.”

  He wrote to his old friend from Pfaff ’s, Fred Gray, of a nineteen-year-old Mississippi captain who had lost his leg at Fredericksburg. He was taken as prisoner to the Lacy Mansion hospital where Whitman “cheered him up . . . our affection is quite an affair, quite romantic . . .”

  The poet had found a new vocation; or rather, he renewed the passion that he had first discovered among the wounded stage drivers in New York Hospital. As Gay Wilson Allen has written, “This work of bolstering the morale of the sick and discouraged was the one thing that Walt Whitman seemed especially created to do.” At dawn on December 28, when Whitman left Falmouth, he found himself in charge of a trainload of sick and wounded men bound for the Federal City. One of these was the Rebel captain with whom he had developed such an intense bond. Federal soldiers and Rebels were not treated separately. They were all loaded on flatbed cars and hauled ten miles to Aquia Creek, which flows into the Potomac; there they boarded a steamer bound north. Walt moved from stretcher to stretcher, consoling and encouraging the men. There was no one else to do this, no one else to take messages assuring their wives and mothers that they were alive. As the boat steamed toward Washington, Whitman took dictation, ladled water, and rearranged aching limbs and stumps, all the while gently talking to the soldiers. When the ship reached the Sixth Street wharves where the ambulances were waiting, only one of Whitman’s patients had died.

  George Whitman did not need his brother’s help, but many other men did, especially in the Federal City. So Walt decided to stay a while and visit the hospitals there.

  On that sunny New Year’s Day, Walt and his young friend, the lithe William O’Connor, stood across from the White House, a little removed from the surge of the crowd, the “welter of life gathered to that mad focus.” The writers had no intention of getting in line under the colonnade. In his shabby country clothes, his open collar, Whitman was not properly attired to meet the President (might in fact never be properly dressed for it). Besides, there would be plenty of time to meet Mr. Lincoln, years and years, and much better occasions than a New Year’s levee, when one had to wait in line with so many other people for the privilege of five seconds of the President’s attention.

  “A profound conviction of necessity, affinity” had drawn Whitman to the capital, focus of the Union’s administration and the nation’s suffering. “America, already brought to Hospital in her fair youth,” is how he put it in an often-quoted letter to Emerson.

  Electricity was in the air, Whitman believed, quite literally; and in the words of Justin Kaplan, “Whitman was a sort of storage battery or accumulator for charged particles of the contemporary.” In his thirties the poet studied phrenology, the popular “Science of Mind” as practiced by his friend Orson Fowler in a studio in lower Manhattan. Fowler, a proponent of animal magnetism—a theory that also interested Nathaniel Hawthorne—imagined the universe as an enormous battery of “irradiating power” or “nervous force” whose workings resembled the magnetic telegraph. “Men and women, horses, cows . . . even rocks and puddles, were all part of a network of sending and receiving stations relaying an invisible electric fluid.”

  Such notions were common at the time. Goethe popularized the idea of “elective affinities,” in his 1809 novel of that title. The term refers to a phenomenon that occurs when certain chemical compounds meet: their component elements “change partners,” so to speak. Goethe’s fictional lovers are mysteriously in tune, and “magnetically” drawn to each other. Animal magnetism, along with elective affinities, hydropathy, and phrenology, were “sciences” that informed Whitman’s actions. The poet believed in the force of his own animal magnetism, and many of his war letters speak of his healing others by this gift.

  Years after the war, Whitman would recall the long hospital wards, “the clank of crutches on the pavements of the floors of Washington,” the Grand Review of veterans bound for home, a dying Irish boy in the corner of a ward with a Catholic priest and a makeshift altar—these and a thousand other “first class pictures, tempests of life and death . . . and looking over all, in my remembrance, the tall form of President Lincoln, with his face of deep-cut lines, with the large, canny eyes, the complexion of dark brown, and the tinge of weird melancholy saturating all.”

  In 1863, as the poet rents rooms near the White House, takes his walks in view of the mansion, and learns the President’s schedule so well he can watch him come and go daily in his carriage, it becomes clear that Lincoln himself has drawn the poet to the Federal City, as magnet to magnet. At first Walt told his family he would return in a week after checking up on some wounded Brooklyn soldiers, to make sure his friends from home were properly cared for. Yet he stayed, long after his Mississippi captain had gone. There were many hospitals from Falmouth to Manhattan where Whitman might have found more suffering soldiers than he could comfort, and cheaper rent. But he wanted to live in Washington because Lincoln was there. They were Elective Affinities— the poet as public servant, the President as dramatic poet. The compounds of the two personalities had “exchanged” essential elements.

  Whitman went to Washington to heal and console the men in the hospitals. But his actions during that year indicate he had other things in mind, more complex, inchoate, and incommunicable urges and schemes. “Lincoln is particularly my man—particularly belongs to me; yes, and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man: I guess I particularly belong to him; we are afloat on the same stream—we are rooted in the same ground.”

  In the years to come a rich literature would spring from the connection between the President and the poet. But on this New Year’s Day, Lincoln had no idea of the poet’s proximity, and Whitman knew little of Lincoln. In a few hours the President would leave the crowd, slip upstairs to his office, and, with his swollen, trembling fingers, sign a paper that would free slaves.

  Whitman and O’Connor, having seen enough of the holiday crowd, turned the corner and walked south on Fifteenth Street, past the two-story State Department building and the thirty colossal Ionic columns of the Treasury building, with its portico at the south corner. Across the street rose the five-story red-brick edifice of the Army Paymaster’s Office, where Charlie Eldridge had
already gotten Whitman a job. Throughout January, February, and March Whitman spent a few hours each day in Major Lyman Hapgood’s office on the fifth floor, copying pay documents. From his desk at the southeast window, Whitman shared Lincoln’s view of the Potomac River and the wooded hills of Arlington.

  The two writers headed up the avenue toward the Capitol, passing the fashionable Willard Hotel on the northwest corner of Fourteenth and Pennsylvania. The four-story hotel, with its graceful balcony on the second floor curving around the four-columned portico of the corner entrance, was the social and political nerve center of the Union. The Lincolns had stayed there before his inauguration. Its dining rooms, lounges, and barbershop were a hive of conviviality for affable politicians, journalists, lobbyists, contractors, generals, and spies; the saloons were hubs for deal making, focal points for rumors and reports.

  The newsman and poet John James Piatt, from Indiana, twenty-eight, and his pretty wife, Sarah, likewise a published author of rhymed, sentimental verses, had breakfasted at the Willard. Dressed formally—he in swallowtail coat, black tie, and wing-collar; she in silk and lace, a wicker-birdcage skirt and crinolines—they were on their way to pay their respects not only to the President and First Lady, but also to secretary John Hay. The Piatts knew Hay through Hay’s close friend, William Dean Howells. In 1860 Howells and Piatt had published a book together called Poems of Two Friends, and Hay had stopped in Columbus, Ohio—en route to Lincoln’s inauguration—to congratulate Howells and his friend on the new volume.

  Mr. and Mrs. Piatt exited the hotel. As they crossed the street, they hailed William O’Connor, “then a friend of two years standing, accompanied by a large, gray-haired, gray-bearded man, dressed rather shabbily, in what might be called ‘country clothes,’ ” Piatt recalled. Since returning from Falmouth, where he had slept on the campground, the poet had not refurbished his wardrobe.

  Piatt recalled that O’Connor “at once introduced his companion to us. I did not need to be told who Whitman was.” Indeed, the intimate friend of William Dean Howells (who idolized Whitman) did not need to be told who Whitman was any more than did John Hay, who would soon learn that the writer had moved into the neighborhood. By 1863, few literary people in America were unaware of Walt Whitman’s name. Although the exchange was brief, “our greeting was cordial;” Piatt was glad to meet the renowned poet, if only briefly. The stylish couple had to hurry to arrive at the White House in time to join the receiving line. They must have made a good impression. In a letter to Secretary Seward, Lincoln later recommended John J. Piatt for a “moderate sized consulate,” one of those “which facilitate artists a little in their profession.”

  Meanwhile the artist who created Leaves of Grass was moving in the other direction along the muddy thoroughfare of Pennsylvania Avenue, past the cupola of the Central Guard House and the Hay Market at Ninth Street, heading toward Armory Square Hospital on the Mall, in front of the Capitol. A crane slanted above the Capitol’s unfinished dome. At the hospital pavilion, and in the frescoed halls of the Capitol, Whitman would seek his fortune in public service.

  According to John Hay and John Nicolay, the President did not return to his office from the public reception until mid-afternoon, as “the rigid laws of etiquette held him to this duty for the space of three hours.” Mary had gone up to her bedroom long before, grieving over her lost son, her fragile nerves unequal to the occasion.

  Lincoln’s right hand was so wrung out that he found it difficult to hold the pen steady. He sat at the long table where William Seward and his son Frederick had spread the broad parchment. Fewer than a dozen people had dropped by to witness the official signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, “merely from the personal impulse of curiosity joined to momentary convenience.”

  Lincoln is supposed to have said: “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act.” But the source is suspect, and the line sounds too self-conscious for this President. Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward quotes Lincoln as saying, “this signature is one that will be closely examined, and if they find my hand trembled they will say ‘he had some compunctions.’ ” The President carefully wrote his name at the bottom of the paper. “The signature proved to be unusually clear, bold, and firm, even for him, and a laugh followed at his apprehension.” William Seward signed beneath, the great seal was affixed, and handwritten copies quickly went out to the press.

  The black preacher Henry Turner grabbed his copy of the Proclamation and ran up Pennsylvania Avenue to read it to a crowd of Negroes who were waiting on the corner with joyful impatience. New Year’s had heretofore been “Heart-Break Day,” set apart by custom for the changing of masters and the breaking up of families. Arriving out of breath, Reverend Turner handed the paper to another man, who read it aloud with earnest passion.

  An old man named Thornton wept when he recalled a New Year’s Day long ago. (The quotes that follow are taken verbatim from the Washington Chronicle, in the dialect journalists used in 1863.) “I cried all night. ‘What de matter, Thornton?’ Tomorrow my child is to be sold, neber more see till judgment—no more dat! No more dat! Can’t sell your wife and children any more!”

  Another said: “God has placed Mr. Lincoln in de President’s chair, and I thanks Him that He would not let de rebels make peace until we black folks was free.” Today “was hailed by the contrabands as the dawn, not only of a new year, but of a new life.” The black audience cheered, clapped, and sang a song of jubilee.

  A crowd gathered in front of the White House. Blacks and whites called for the President. At last he came to the window and bowed. They cheered and blessed Lincoln, and someone cried out that if he would only “come out of that palace, they would hug him to death.”

  Whitman was not among them, consumed as he was with his work in the hospitals. He wrote in his notebook: “the phlegmatic coolness, all through Washington, under the new emancipation document, from the executive, is noticeable. I hear little allusion made to it in the public places of the city, where people most do congregate.”

  The jubilation in front of the White House on New Year’s Day was rather isolated. After all, this was a Southern town, and most of its citizens did not welcome the liberation of slaves. The President had made some people happy (most of them faraway in the North) and many more furious. For a while many soldiers felt betrayed. A typical comment came from a Hoosier: “I think the Union is about played out. I use to think that we were fighting for the Union and Constitution but we are not. We are fighting to free those colored gentlemen. If I had my way about things I would shoot ever nigger I come across.” Within weeks even a Boston antislavery group, accompanied by a Massachusetts senator, would call upon the President to complain that his Proclamation was a failure.

  But Lincoln had calculated his risk. He guessed that the Emancipation Proclamation would inspire more volunteers for the Union cause than deserters. And he was right.

  4

  FEBRUARY 1863

  General Tom Thumb, three feet tall, and his thirty-two-inch bride, Lavinia Warren, craned their necks while reaching up to shake the President’s hand. The bride’s head came to the level of his trouser pockets. She wore white satin and a diamond necklace, and was by all accounts strikingly beautiful. The “General” wore a black suit, patent leather boots, a faultless necktie, a large breast-pin of brilliants, a gold watch with an elaborate chain, and snow-white kid gloves. Despite P. T. Barnum’s pleading, no photographs were permitted. Jokes were superfluous, though Lincoln could not resist chuckling: “God likes to do funny things; here you have the long and short of it.”

  The honeymooning couple were perfect White House guests for Valentine’s Day in this bleak season. The entertainer Charles S. Stratton, age twenty-five, a.k.a. Tom Thumb, was known for cavorting half-naked onstage as Cupid, with a bow and a quiver of arrows. On February 13 Mrs. Lincoln gave a party honoring the newlyweds, with fifty of Washington’s finest, including cabinet members Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, Gide
on Welles, Montgomery Blair, and John P. Usher, some senators and congressmen, Generals Benjamin Franklin Butler and Thomas H. Clay, and a few newsmen.

  On Valentine’s Day this story brightened the newspapers. Lincoln had remarked to Tom Thumb that “he had thrown him completely in the shade”—which suited the President perfectly. Bad weather had throttled the war. John Nicolay quipped, “The Army of the Potomac is for the present stuck in the mud, as it has been nearly the whole of its existence.”

  Perhaps no man in the Federal City was happier than Walt Whitman. On Sunday afternoon, February 15, after making his rounds at the hospital, he had the fifth floor of the Paymaster’s Office all to himself for his writing. This was one of the highest vantage points in the city. “The lovely Potomac spreads, reflecting the evening clouds—the great white Capitol with its huge, pope’s tiara–looking dome, lifts itself calmly on Capitol Hill, with windows gilded by the day’s last yellow-reddish halo.” The dome stood unfinished upon Lincoln’s inauguration. He had insisted the work go forward as a symbol of the Union’s endurance, even as the war depleted the Treasury.

  Whitman watched the shadows deepen rapidly around the towers of the Smithsonian. From his east windows he could see the Patent Office building, now serving as a hospital. “Its severe and grand proportions show well, as they catch the last flood of light . . . the mists and darkness grow heavier and heavier over there on the Maryland side.” Toward the north he surveyed the long white barracks of hospitals as far as the Soldiers’ Home, where the Lincolns spent their summer nights. A steamship was trailing smoke just to the north of the Potomac Bridge, beyond the gray stone of the half-finished monument to George Washington. Above the river, on the darkening hills, the fires of forts and camps glowed and flickered.