Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  “Willie lives,” she told her half-sister Emilie Helm. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him.”

  Knowing the precarious state of his wife’s nerves, Lincoln did not burden her with his troubles. A Boston antislavery group, accompanied by Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, had called upon Lincoln on January 25. They complained that the Emancipation Proclamation was a failure, partly because the generals in the field did not promote it. The President told the delegation: “My own impression . . . is that the masses of the country generally are only dissatisfied at our lack of military successes. Defeat and failure in the field make everything seem wrong.”

  At the root of Lincoln’s political problems was his army’s failure in a war that had dragged on for almost two years. Republicans in the lame-duck Congress that met that winter blamed Lincoln for their defeat in the recent elections. Conservatives from the Border States cursed the Emancipation Proclamation, while Northern Radicals charged their defeat to Lincoln’s delay in ending slavery. But everyone seemed to agree then upon “the utter incompetence of the President,” and inevitably the criticism focused upon Lincoln’s shortcomings as commander-in-chief.

  Exasperated with McClellan’s blundering through the Battle of Antietam, and his slowness in pursuing Robert E. Lee, Lincoln had replaced him as head of the Army of the Potomac with Ambrose E. Burnside. Burnside’s ineptitude led to the massacre of Federal troops upon the terraces of Fredericksburg in December, a blow from which the North was still reeling. Then the efforts of Grant and Sherman to take Vicksburg resulted in at least one failure— the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs—reminiscent of Fredericksburg. The Cincinnati Commercial called Grant “a jackass in the original package,” and declared: “He is a poor drunken imbecile.”

  Desperate, and facing public pressure to reinstate McClellan, on January 26, 1863, Lincoln appointed General Burnside’s most vocal critic, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, to replace him as commander. Noah Brooks said General Hooker was the handsomest soldier he had ever seen—tall, well built, his fair skin glowing with health, his blue eyes sparkling with wit, his copper-colored hair tossed back upon his shapely head. “He was a gay cavalier, alert and confident . . . and cheery as a boy.” He was also known as a hard drinker, who had called the President and his administration “imbecile and played out.” He told one reporter that nothing would go right “until we have a dictator, and the sooner the better,” to which Lincoln responded: “Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The appointment of the brash Hooker, whose open contempt for Lincoln’s government made him a popular choice in the North, provided some relief from criticism for the President during the late winter.

  Nonetheless, in the words of historian David Herbert Donald, “Republicans of all factions were ready to court-martial the President at the first safe opportunity.” Richard Henry Dana Jr., the Boston lawyer and abolitionist, was visiting Washington at the time and noted: “the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist.” “King Lincoln,” as the Copperheads (Northerners sympathetic to the South) called him, had censored the press, suppressed free speech, and jailed political dissidents.

  Lincoln fell into a depression. “His hand trembled . . . and he looked worn and haggard.” Another White House visitor, Admiral John Dahlgren, wrote, “I observe that the President never tells a joke now.”

  The Federal City was visited by the ghosts of soldiers, and the White House was haunted by the Lincolns’ dead children. Perhaps the President himself was troubled by a voice that existed out of time: the conscience of America calling him to account. In a dark mood some nights he would read poetry; John Hay remembered Lincoln reading aloud to him from Shakespeare until the young secretary’s eyes drooped. Lincoln loved Macbeth, which contains this famous passage:

  I have liv’d long enough: my way of life

  Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;

  And that which should accompany old age,

  As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

  I must not look to have; but in their stead,

  Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

  Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

  It is the nature of poetry to endure in the mind, especially one as retentive as Lincoln’s. He once told his friend Joshua Speed: “My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.” The American conscience had never spoken more insistently and memorably than in Leaves of Grass.

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

  year of 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?

  Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves—bloody corpses of young men;

  The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are

  flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud . . .

  What would Walt Whitman think of this presidency?

  5

  THE SOLDIER’S MISSIONARY

  Abandoning the search for an office in Lincoln’s administration, Whitman turned his energies to the work that lay all around him, demanding his attention and peculiar gifts—work that brought immediate gratification. He devoted his free time and thoughts to the wounded soldiers. Thirty-five hospitals had sprung up in Washington, some with more than a thousand patients.

  The poet was a night owl. He didn’t rise until after 8:00 A.M., when he dressed and then fetched a pitcher of water from the pump on the corner. He sang all the while, ballads and marches. After enjoying a hearty breakfast with William and Nellie O’Connor at 8:30, he arrived at his desk in the Paymaster’s Office at 9:30. He was usually done with his copying early in the afternoon. In 1863 he spent almost all his afternoons and evenings in the hospital wards, taking a rest between 4:00 and 6:00 to nap, bathe, and share an early dinner with the O’Connors.

  “The O’Connor home was my home,” said Whitman. “They were beyond all others—William, Nelly—my understanders, my lovers: they more than any others . . . A man’s family is the people who love him—the people who comprehend him.” His relatives certainly did not comprehend him. The careworn, meager Nellie was in love with Whitman, as her letters to him later attest. He was a comfort to Nellie in her troubled marriage. Her handsome, philandering husband was devoted to Whitman, but William O’Connor was moody, and the men wrangled bitterly over politics. While Whitman’s thoughts about slavery matched Lincoln’s, O’Connor was a radical abolitionist who had made his opinions public in his novel Harrington. They quarreled. At least once the police rapped at the door to inquire “What all the yelling was about.” (With suspicious characters like Count Gurowski visiting, the police had more than one reason to watch this house.) Yet William O’Connor was awed by Whitman’s commitment to the soldiers.

  In a dispatch to the New York Times in late winter, Whitman recorded his impressions:

  Upon a few of these hospitals I have been almost daily calling on a mission, on my own account, for the sustenance and consolation of some of the most needy cases of sick and dying men . . . One has much to learn to do good in these places. Great tact is required. These are not like other hospitals. By far the greatest proportion . . . of the patients are American young men, intelligent, of independent spirit, tender feelings, used to a hardy and healthy life; largely the farmers are represented by their sons—largely the mechanics and workingmen of the cities. Then they are soldiers. All these points must be borne in mind.

  The newer hospitals were built “pavilion style”—clusters of wooden barracks s
urrounded by tents for cooking, laundry, and storage. The buildings were “long, one-story edifices, sometimes ranged along in a row with their heads to the street, and numbered,” or sometimes lettered, Wards 1, 2, 3; Wards A, B, C; etc. The middle shed, marked with a flagstaff, was the office of the surgeons. Each ward contained sixty or more cots. There was a ward master in each shed, and a nurse for every ten or twelve men.

  That winter Whitman frequented a pavilion-style compound called Campbell Hospital out on the Washington flats, at the terminus of a horse-railway track on Seventh Street. On a chilly afternoon he entered Ward 6. He counted more than eighty patients, half of them wounded, more than half sick. The plain board shed was whitewashed inside. Slender-framed iron bedsteads were ranged against the walls under the exposed roof-beams. Whitman walked down the central aisle, a row of soldiers on either side of him, their feet toward him, their heads to the wall. Fires burned in large iron stoves. There were no partitions, so he could hear “groans, or other sounds of unendurable suffering, from two or three of the iron cots, but in the main there is quiet—almost a painful absence of demonstration; but the pallid face, the dull’d eye, and the moisture on the lip, are demonstration enough.”

  Whitman wore a wine-colored suit with large pockets, his baggy pants tucked into his black morocco boots. With his rosy cheeks, white beard, and the leather haversack slung over his shoulder, it was no wonder the boys called him Santa Claus. According to Nellie O’Connor, one Yuletide Whitman was coming from the hospital when a suspicious policeman ordered him to “remove that false face!” Walt showed him the face was really his own, but then asked the policeman, “Do we not all wear ‘false faces’?” He was delighted to have been mistaken for St. Nick.

  The sack, no bigger than a cavalry “coach bag,” with a single clasp, was bulging with goodies: a jar of strawberry jam, oranges and apples, pickles, books, newspapers, and plugs of tobacco. The patients’ greatest desire seems to have been for writing paper, envelopes, stamps, pens and pencils, so the bag always held a good stock of those, too. Much of Whitman’s time was taken up writing letters for men without the strength, education, or hands to write their own.

  He had bought a new wide-brimmed hat with a black and gold lacing that fastened under his chin with a clasp of gilded acorns. If he would not remove his headwear for Senator Sumner, now that proud hat was “for the first time, taken involuntarily off from an effect upon us of humility that all the Presidents, Princes, Congresses, Generals of the world could never begin to produce.”

  Whitman set down his sack beside the corporal in bed 25, Henry Boardman of the Twenty-seventh Connecticut, Company B. Boardman’s family lived at Northford, near New Haven. Whitman pulled up a chair next to the twenty-year-old soldier and tenderly covered his hand with his own. “A noble-behaving young fellow—I get quite attached to him—proud spirited—would not accept any money—extremely weak, vomiting everything he took down—bad diarrhea also.” For a while he would accept nothing from the poet but a pipe and tobacco.

  Whitman wanted to know what else he could do for him.

  “I have a hankering for a good home-made rice pudding . . . think I could live a week on one,” the soldier said. Whitman jotted this in his notebook: a request to Nellie O’Connor to cook the rice pudding which was, in fact, the only nourishment that kept Boardman from starving.

  In bed 59 lay Janus Mafield of the Virginia Volunteers, eighteen years old. “Illiterate, but cute—can neither read nor write. Has been very sick and low, but now recovering. Have visited him regularly for two weeks, given him money, fruit, candy & c.” The last often serves as Whitman’s shorthand for affection; “& c” was the thing Mafield needed most. “Always the sick and dying soldiers forthwith begin to cling to me in a way that makes a fellow feel funny enough.” It was an intimacy that Whitman craved. He wrote: “These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia . . . open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity.”

  Sometimes he would put himself “in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife.” He was making good on the prophetic verses he had published seven years earlier:

  Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, but I also lie at the last gasp,

  My face is ash-colored, my sinews gnarl . . .

  I am the man . . . I suffered . . . I was there.

  In that same ward lay two servicemen from Brooklyn. “I had known both the two as young lads at home, so they seem near to me. One of them, J.L., lies there with an amputated arm, the stump healing pretty well.” Whitman had seen him on the battlefield in December, “all bloody, just after the arm was taken off. He was very phlegmatic about it, munching away at a cracker in the remaining hand.”

  In bed 23 was one who “had set his heart on a pair of suspenders.” Walt gave the soldier thirty cents instead, promising to bring the suspenders the next time.

  Slowly, heedfully, the soldier’s missionary made his way among the cots, “observed every case in the Ward, without, I think, missing one; gave perhaps from twenty to thirty persons, each one some little gift, such as oranges, apples, sweet crackers, figs . . .”

  Whitman’s hospital notebook records the men’s wounds and illnesses, and what they asked of him. Everything in Washington was expensive, so he solicited funds from friends in New York and Boston. “I have distributed quite a large sum of money, contributed for that purpose by noble persons in Brooklyn, New York (chiefly through Moses Lane, Chief Engineer, Water Works there). I provide myself with a quantity of bright new ten-cent and five-cent bills, and give small sums of, 15 or 20 cts or 25, 30 and occasionally 50 cts.—Ah, if the friends who have sent me this money could see what pleasure they have diffused, and little comforts they have brought . . .”

  Chester H. Lilly (bed 6) 145th Penn down with Erysypelas and jaundice also wounded / wants some preserve or Jelly . . . shirt and drawers for J.H. Culver Ward G. bed 24 . . . Albert J. Maurier co B 55 th Ohio amputated left leg—toothbrush . . . Erastus Haskell ward E Typhoid . . . young man in Ward H or I sitting in chair waiting to have his arm taken off—I saw him on the operating table, frothing at mouth . . . dead . . . J.W. Smith co. G 25th Ohio comp[lications] from right thigh also some fever / some fruit (strawberries or sweet peaches) . . .

  Whitman’s dispatches to the New York press, as candid as they are, do not capture the grisly scenes in the wards as vividly as do his blood-spattered notebooks, raw directories of the wounded and their pathetic yearnings.

  Wm C Thomas, we are there as—the dresser bed sores great hole in which you can stick—round edges rotted away / flies— / two men hold him / the smell is awful / great sores— the flies act as if they were mad / he has one horrible wound three bad ones / a fracture— / & several shocking bed sores—

  John Berry Co E. 25 N.J.—gave him 20 cts . . . an apple & c. rheumatism—consumptive no parents—can read but not write . . .

  Corp Justus F. Boyd bed 22 co D 6th Mich cavalry been in five months, four sick, affection of the kidneys and pleurisy— wants some paper and envelopes and something to read gave him 12 sheets paper, & 12 envelopes & three of them franked by Mr. Sumner . . .

  The least Sumner could do for Whitman was to provide postage for his patients.

  Approaching the bedside, Whitman would adapt to each case: some wanted to be humored; some were addled; many just wanted the gentle fellow to sit near them and hold them by the hand. Some would want him to read aloud from a book or letters, while others asked him to write to a parent, sister, or lover. Some, wounded in wrist or shoulder, liked to have Whitman feed them. Others asked for a cooling drink. He would go around a ward from cot to cot with a jar of raspberry preserves in one hand and a spoon in the other, offering the sweet stuff to all takers.

  Above all it was the gift of his kind presence that the soldiers valued
. He told his mother, “the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals, among the poor languishing & wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair.”

  What had frightened the Senators charmed the boys. Soldiers from the west and far north especially took to such a man “that has not the bleached shiny & shaved cut of the cities and the east.” In his little book Memoranda During the War he recalled, “it was in the simple matter of Personal Presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism, that I succeeded and help’d more than by medical nursing, or delicacies, or gifts of money, or anything else.” He prepared for his visits by fortifying himself with a nap, a bath, “clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible.”

  Whitman was troubled by how young the soldiers were, a lot of them under seventeen. He told Nellie O’Connor that many had run away from home to escape the severity of their fathers. He opined that while mothers were loving and sympathetic, he considered “the institution of the father a failure.”

  “My profoundest help to these sick and dying men is probably the soothing invigoration I steadily bear in mind, to infuse in them through affection, cheering love, & the like, between them and me. It has saved more than one life. There is a strange influence here.” He called it his “Magnetism.”