Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  At the end of November, on a quiet Saturday morning, John Hay sat drinking whiskey with his friend Wayne McVeagh in the bedroom across from the President’s office. McVeagh, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Central Committee and a staunch Lincoln supporter, was worried that Lincoln might not carry Pennsylvania, and he was alarmed over the support Chase was getting in New York.

  “Chase is at work night and day, laying pipe,” said McVeagh. Chase had attracted Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy, who had much to gain from the Treasury’s backing in building the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, in which Pomeroy owned stock. Pomeroy assembled a Chase-for-president cabal that included Ohio Senator John Sherman, Major General (soon-to-be-Congressman) James Garfield, and a radical senator from Missouri called B. Gratz Brown. The committee also included the gang of Chase’s Treasury agents in New Orleans; it was generously funded by the brilliant financier Jay Cooke (who marketed the enormous Civil War loans of the Union) and Chase’s new son-in-law, William Sprague.

  Chase needed a new campaign biography. Casting about for a writer who would do him justice, the candidate hooked a thirty-seven-year-old poet and author of boys’ books named John Townsend Trowbridge. Trowbridge’s most famous book, Neighbor Jackwood (“a true New England novel”), had gone to the stage with moderate success in 1857. With Cooke’s deep pockets and powerful editorial contacts, Chase was able to make the writer an irresistible offer. In late November, the Secretary invited Trowbridge to come to Washington and be his guest in the town house at Sixth and E Streets.

  Despite the sadness Whitman had seen and felt in his family home, he returned to Washington on December 2 refreshed from a month of opera-going and dining out with his friends in Manhattan. After three weeks of recreation he had written to a soldier at Armory Square Hospital: “I have had enough of going around New York—enough of amusements, suppers, drinking & what is called pleasure . . . I cannot bear the thought of being separated from you—I know I am a great fool about such things . . . at the gayest supper party, of men, where all was fun & noise and laughing & drinking, of a dozen young men, & I among them, I would see your face before me . . . & my amusement or drink would be all turned to nothing.”

  His New York friends were witty, handsome, and well educated; some were rich and others were published authors; all were good men, he believed. Yet now he perceived something was lacking in their company: “there has never passed so much between them & me as we have,” he wrote to his soldier, including all the wounded men and their nurses, “there is something that takes down all artificial accomplishments, & that is a manly and loving soul.”

  Although the constant strain of caring for Eddie and Jesse had taken its toll on Louisa Whitman, Walt found his sixty-eight-year-old mother “active and cheerful.” Andrew was dying of consumption, struggling for breath. “My brother is bound for another world,” Walt wrote to Charles Eldridge, “he is here the greater part of the time.” Andrew did not want to die in the squalor of his own lodgings, and his drunken wife Nancy, furiously jealous, stormed into Louisa’s home to make scenes. Nancy would lead the invalid away, and the next day Andrew would hobble back again to be nursed by his sister-in-law Martha, Jeff ’s wife, and his mother. Martha’s children were Hattie, two years old, and the newborn Jessie Louisa.

  Whitman marveled over his mother’s strength and courage “under her surroundings of domestic pressure—one case of sickness & its accompanying irritability—two of grown helplessness—& the two little children, very much with her . . .” While Walt’s presence was always a comfort, there was not much he could do for his dying brother or for Louisa either, besides helping with the babies a few hours a day. The minute he could get out of that house he was gone, crossing on the Fulton Ferry to join his friends in Manhattan. He had learned something about triage and survival, and he meant for this month in New York to strengthen him for the work that lay ahead.

  He was bound to leave Brooklyn—by the terms of his furlough —on December 2, although he could see that Andrew’s life hung by a thread. Back in the Federal City on December 3, Walt received the telegram informing him of his brother’s death. He could not return for the funeral, but sent his regrets that he had not stayed in Brooklyn a little longer.

  He narrowly escaped a spectacle that would have canceled whatever good his leave of absence had done him. Andrew began to suffocate the morning Walt left Brooklyn. By that evening the dying man’s torment was so pitiful that his wife drank herself into a stupor and passed out beside him. According to Louisa, “In the morning she [Nancy] brought such a smell that Jeffy got sick.” Poor Andrew inhaled that stench with his final breath. Meanwhile the lunatic Jesse was so unhinged by the trauma he threatened to strike the wailing child Hattie, and to clobber her mother, Jeff ’s wife. Jeff wrote to Walt, “to have this infernal pup—a perfect hell-drag to his mother—treat Martha so—to threaten to brain her—call her all the vile things he could think of—is a little more than I will stand . . . Had I been home I would have shot him dead on the spot. I wish to God he was ready to put along side of Andrew.” Jeff and Walt began their planning to have Jesse committed.

  Years later Whitman told a biographer: “I was always between two loves at that time—I wanted to be in New York; I had to be in Washington. I was never in the one place but I was restless for the other.” He meant that his vocation in Washington (“It was a religion with me”) had become his guiding star, his master, superceding his devotion to his family. But he never admitted that he left Brooklyn in part for the same reason his brother George enlisted in the Thirteenth Regiment: the crowded family home on Portland Avenue was bedlam, a sinkhole more threatening to the healthy brothers than the War of the Rebellion.

  He was relieved to return to his third-floor garret on Sixth Street, “a very good winter room, as it is right under the roof & looks south, has low windows, is plenty big enough, I have gas”— gaslight, but no heating fuel. For cooking and heating he used a little sheet-iron stove, which he fed parsimoniously with sticks of wood. “I am quite by myself, there is no passage up here except to my room, & right off against my side of the house is a great old yard with grass & some trees back, & the sun shines in all day . . .” There was a good big bed, a pine table, and several chairs stacked with newspapers. He made a cupboard out of an oblong pine box by setting it on end against the wall.

  His interval in Brooklyn—where the muses had first discovered him—had reminded Whitman: “I must be continually bringing out poems—now is the hey day. I shall range along the high plateau of my life and capacity for a few years now, & then swiftly descend.” This was prophetic. He had returned to Washington with forty-odd poems, most of them written before 1863, that he now planned to publish under the title Drum-Taps. The sheaf of poetry lay in a steamer trunk at the foot of his bed. Since he arrived in Washington he had written a good deal of fine journalism but few verses. “I must bring out Drum-Taps,” he told Charles Eldridge, his former publisher.

  Unknown to Whitman, just across the street an old friend of his, John Trowbridge, was plotting with Salmon Chase to defeat Lincoln in the next presidential election. Three years earlier, while Whitman was reading the proof sheets for the third edition of Leaves of Grass in Charles Eldridge’s stereotype foundry in Boston, John Townsend Trowbridge had first met the poet. Trowbridge remembered, “The tremendous original power of this new bard, and the freshness, as of nature itself, which breathed through the best of his songs . . . inspired me with intense curiosity as to the man himself.” Upon first seeing him that spring day, Trowbridge was struck by the contrast between the grandiose, renegade speaker of Leaves of Grass and the gentle, soft-spoken, and plainly dressed fellow bent over his proofs in the dingy office. Later, Trowbridge could recall from that meeting only a single line of conversation. When he asked Whitman how the poems impressed him at this rereading, all set up in type, the poet replied, “I am astonished to find myself capable of feeling so much.” This is a striking reminder of Whitman’s emotiona
l vector—how far he journeyed from his apathy in the early 1860s to his passionate awakening in wartime Washington.

  The two writers shared a sense of humor, a delight in wordplay, and admiration of Emerson. Whitman told Trowbridge that when he had worked as a carpenter he carried a volume of Emerson in his lunch pail, and read about the “Over-Soul” and “Spiritual Laws” while seated on a pile of boards, taking his noon meal. Emerson had helped Whitman find himself. To Trowbridge the poet confided, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” By the time Whitman left Boston, Trowbridge felt that “a large, new friendship had shed a glow on my life.”

  Late in 1863, finding himself in the Federal City in Chase’s employ, John Trowbridge asked his fellow Bostonian William O’Connor, “Where’s Walt?”

  “What a chance,” O’Connor replied. “Walt is here in Washington, living close by you, within a stone’s throw of the Secretary’s door.” O’Connor asked Townsend to come around on Sunday for dinner, and he would have Whitman there, too.

  Trowbridge was a handsome, slender gentleman of thirty-six, with a goatee, a Roman nose, and wide-set, slightly down-turned, watery eyes. Barbarous treatment by an oculist, who scored the sclera of both his eyes with a lancet when the boy was twelve, had left his eyes permanently weak and rheumy—a challenge to his literary ambitions. More than anything he had wanted to be a poet; he had published verse in the Atlantic, but his poetry would never get as much attention as his “juvenile fiction,” and so his affection for Whitman was complex, tinged with envy.

  He found Whitman much the same as before, “except that he was more trimly attired, wearing a loosely fitting but quite elegant suit of black.” That day, December 6, was probably the day of Andrew’s funeral. Trowbridge recalled that Walt “was in the best of spirits; and I remember with what a superb and joyous pace he swung along the street, between O’Connor and me, as we walked home with him, after ten o’clock.”

  Whitman led his friends to the ramshackle wooden house and up the dimly lit stairs, unlocked his door and swung it wide, scratched a match for the gaslight, and welcomed them to his room. A gust of winter wind swept in an open window. He did not light a fire. Whitman cleared the chairs of newspapers, and the three sat in their overcoats—Walt and John on the chairs, William on the bed—passionately conversing, making ghosts with their breath. They talked about books, about Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, and whether Bacon had or had not written the works of Shakespeare. They talked of Leaves of Grass. “In my enjoyment of such high discourse,” Trowbridge recalled, “I forgot the cheerless garret, the stove in which there was no fire, the window that remained open (Walt was a fresh-air fiend), and my own freezing feet.”

  Trowbridge does not record any talk of politics, which would have been awkward. Whitman recently had told his mother: “Mr. Lincoln has done as good as a human man could do . . . I realize here in Washington that it has been a big thing to have just kept the United States from being thrown down & having its throat cut— & now I have no doubt it will throw down secession & cut its throat . . .” Whitman had believed this before Gettysburg. Trowbridge—if not wholly cynical or mercenary—had come to Washington with a different opinion about Lincoln. With his pen, Trowbridge would try to help Salmon Chase unseat Whitman’s “redeemer President.”

  No clashing of politics rippled the stream of the men’s literary conversation, which was so absorbing that Trowbridge forgot the lateness of the hour. “I also forgot that I was a guest at the great house across the quadrangle, and that I was unprovided with a latch key,” he later wrote. Long after midnight he said goodbye to Whitman and O’Connor, and hurried to Secretary Chase’s door. Trowbridge was locked out. His embarrassment was eased by the thought that during wartime the Secretary was accustomed to receiving dispatches at all hours. The guest rang boldly, the vestibule gas lamp increased its glow, and a servant let him in.

  “In the fine, large mansion, sumptuously furnished, cared for by the sleek and silent colored servants, and thronged by distinguished guests, dwelt the great statesman; in the old tenement opposite, in a bare and desolate back room, up three flights of stairs, quite alone, lived the poet,” Trowbridge recalled, years later. He would savor the irony that he had known them both, “passing often from the stately residence of the one to the humble lodging of the other . . . Great men both, each nobly proportioned in body and stalwart in character, and each invincibly true to his own ideals and purposes; near neighbors, and yet very antipodes in their widely contrasted lives.” Chase was by nature solitary, happiest in his study. His best friend in Washington was the erudite Charles Sumner, equally somber, righteous, and aristocratic, if more gregarious. Chase was so wealthy that “the slenderest rill of [his riches] would have made life green for the other [Whitman], struggling along the arid ways of an honorable poverty.”

  Both men were ambitious, Chase believing it was his destiny and right to be the next president, Whitman determined to become the great American poet, the bard of freedom and democracy for the ages. While Trowbridge admired and respected the Secretary, for Whitman he felt so powerful an attraction he could only describe it as “something like a younger brother’s love.”

  On the morning of December 8, Trowbridge was invited to breakfast with Whitman in his garret. The poet warned his friend not to come before ten o’clock.

  At that hour John Trowbridge found Whitman partly dressed, cutting slices of bread from a loaf with a jackknife. A fire glowed in the little stove, on which a teakettle simmered. Trowbridge speared a bread slice with a sharpened stick and began toasting the bread through the open door of the stove, over the sparse coals. Whitman buttered the bread with his knife, then poured tea into cups at a corner of the table that had been cleared of newspapers and books for that purpose. “His sugar bowl was a brown paper bag. His butter plate was another piece of brown paper,” in which he had carried away the lump of butter from the corner grocery.

  While they breakfasted they conversed. When the last slice of toast had been eaten, the paper went into the stove to burn. With no dishes to wash, the writers could get on with the main item on their agenda, which was poetry. Whitman unlatched his trunk and brought out the manuscript of Drum-Taps, almost ready for publication.

  For an hour Whitman read his poetry aloud, and then they discussed it. The poet had started his book early in the war as a cluster of reveille poems, a call to arms (“taps” was short for “tattoo,” the sound of the war drum); it would be years before the irony of the title could be fully appreciated. Taps, of course, is the bugle melody played at military funerals, a dirge. Writing the reveille poems, Whitman had no idea what a calamity he was summoning, for his countrymen and for himself.

  1

  FIRST, O songs, for a prelude,

  Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum, pride and joy in my city,

  How she led the rest to arms—how she gave the cue,

  How at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she sprang:

  (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!

  O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)

  How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with

  indi ferent hand;

  How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were

  heard in their stead;

  How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of

  soldiers,)

  How Manhattan drum-taps led.

  2

  Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading;

  Forty years as a pageant—till unawares the Lady of this teeming

  and turbulent city,

  Sleepless, amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,

  With her million children around her—suddenly,

  At dead of night, at news from the south,

  Incens’d, struck with clinch’d hand the pavement.

  3

  A shock electric—
the night sustain’d it;

  Till with ominous hum, our hive at day-break, pour’d out its

  myriads.

  4

  From the houses then and workshops, and through all the doorways,

  Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.

  5

  To the drum-taps prompt,

  The young men falling in and arming,

  The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s

  hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)

  The lawyer leaving his office and arming—the judge leaving the

  court;

  The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing

  the reins abruptly down on the horses’ backs,

  The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all

  leaving;

  Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm . . .

  . . .

  6

  Mannahatta a-march!—and it’s O to sing it well!

  It’s O for a manly life in the camp!

  7

  And the sturdy artillery!

  The guns bright as gold—the work for giants—to serve well the

  guns:

  Unlimber them! (no more as the past forty years, for salutes

  for courtesies merely;

  Put in something now besides powder and wadding.)

  8

  And you, Lady of Ships! you Mannahatta!

  Old matron of the city! this proud, friendly, turbulent city!

  Often in peace and wealth you were pensive, or covertly frown’d

  amid all your children;

  But now you smile with joy, exulting old Mannahatta!

  Trowbridge recalled that Whitman “read them unaffectedly, with force and feeling, and in a voice of rich but not resonant tones.” The poems dramatically descended from patriotic exuberance to disillusionment and horror.