Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  As O’Connor tells it, a congressman, accompanied by his friend A. Van Rensellaer, had come to visit the President on business. When they found that Lincoln was not in his second-story office, they looked for him downstairs. The three met in the vestibule, and the President led them into the East Room, where they stood by the front windows. There the congressman had his four-minute interview with Lincoln and handed him a letter. Lincoln glanced at it, then raised his eyes to watch as a man passed by outside. The figure was familiar to him from his summer carriage rides to the Soldiers’ Home—the old man with kind eyes who had stood by the curb on Vermont Avenue in the evenings, waving to him, nodding, exchanging courtesies. The man moved slowly, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, his broad-brimmed hat tipped back on his head.

  Lincoln asked who the man walking by the White House was. Van Rensellaer told the President that the fellow was Walt Whitman, the poet who had written Leaves of Grass and other things, letters and articles for the New York press.

  “Mr. Lincoln didn’t say anything but took a long look till you were quite gone by,” Van Rensellaer reported to Whitman in a letter on July 30, 1865.

  “Then he says,” Van Rensellaer wrote, “(I can’t give you his way of saying it but it was quite emphatic and odd) ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he looks like a man.’ He said it pretty loud but in a sort of absent way and with the emphasis on the words I have underscored. He didn’t say any more but began to talk about the letter and in a minute or so we went off.”

  Because this is the only testimony apart from Whitman’s that the President ever recognized him by sight, the letter has been scrutinized repeatedly. (After Whitman’s death the document passed into the distinguished collection of Oscar Lion.) Reverend William E. Barton called the letter a fraud, arguing that Van Rensselaer did not exist. Trying to prove, in the late 1920s, that a man did not exist in 1865—when a letter with his signature on it has survived—is a tortuous exercise. Anyone interested may read Barton’s elaborate complaint in his 1928 book on Whitman and Lincoln.

  Let us imagine that Lincoln’s observation of Whitman that winter happened as described. Even Barton, after all, admitted: “The incident as related in the letter of A. Van Rensellaer is not inherently improbable. It might even have occurred just as it is told.”

  Historiography assigns due weight to hard facts, prudently distinguishing degrees of authenticity that separate myths from true events. Van Rensellaer’s story is not intrinsically significant history, even in a book about Lincoln and Whitman. And it has been vigorously disputed. Its importance lies in the value with which Whitman, his friends, and subsequent generations have endowed it. Whitman believed that the President had spoken those words. The affinity he felt for Lincoln was thereby sanctioned: Lincoln might have taken courage in the poet’s quiet affection, his salubrious influence, even from afar.

  During this season, the President had been bedridden with variola minor (a kind of smallpox), overwhelmed by military responsibilities and problems in planning for Reconstruction, and surrounded by schemers worse than Salmon Chase. Lincoln must have felt like a prisoner. One of his best friends, Illinois Congressman Owen Lovejoy, was dying. At fifty-three, Lovejoy was three years younger than the President. Visiting his friend’s sickbed on February 6, Lincoln said: “This war is eating my life out. I have a strong impression I shall not live to see the end.” Yet he was bound to be reelected. Ambition had lured him into the marble mansion, and now his sense of duty had trapped him there.

  Gazing out the window at the freewheeling poet ambling past, tall, brawny, his hair and beard growing wild, the spirit of the open country breezing about his loose clothing, Lincoln might certainly have remarked with admiration and envy, “Well, he looks like a man,” as much as to say, There’s nobody here in this mausoleum who looks much like a man these days, including myself. The President would have been struck by the difference between the guileless, homespun poet of Leaves of Grass, avatar of truth and liberty, and the slick courtiers who assailed him daily in the White House.

  Fact or myth, the story endures. It has earned an important place in the Lincoln-Whitman dossier because the poet so passionately loved and believed it.

  Spring brought the fragrance of lilacs and blossoming magnolias, the purple Judas trees, sassafras, and the spreading branches of white-blossomed dogwood. The war would heat up with the weather.

  Weary of his routine in Washington, Whitman confided in an officer friend, “I had a great desire to be present at a first class battle.” Having studied the war’s effect on his soldiers, he wanted to witness the gunfire and saber strokes that caused their wounds. More than once he had expressed his wish to join the army and fight side by side with his comrades. That spring he would write, “it has no terrors for me, if I had to be hit in battle, as far as I myself am concerned—it would be a noble and manly death, & in the best cause.”

  Accompanying his boss Major Hapgood on a paymaster’s mission to Culpeper, Virginia, in February, Whitman came close enough to the front lines to help out in division hospitals. He found no wounded men there, only “some poor creatures crawling about pretty weak with diarrhea . . . they keep them till they get very bad indeed, & then send them to Washington.” He saw no battles or bloodshed, and wrote to his mother: “have had a very good time, over woods, hills, & gullys, indeed a real soldier’s march . . . I never cease to crave more & more knowledge of actual soldiers’ life and to be among them as much as possible.” A few days of it satisfied Whitman, who understood that his duty lay in the Washington hospitals. “I am very clear that the real need of one’s services is there after all—there the worst cases concentrate, & probably will, while the war lasts.”

  There was not much fighting until April, so it was mostly “sick cases” that arrived at the hospitals. Diarrhea was the worst scourge, killing more soldiers than gunfire. In addition, Whitman wrote, “There is a great deal of rheumatism & also throat diseases, & they are affected by the weather.” One soldier, who seemed to Whitman quite young, groaned as the stretcher bearers carried him through the hospital gates. When they set down the stretcher to examine him they found he had died. “The worst of it is too that he is entirely unknown . . . it is enough to rack one’s heart, such things—very likely his folks will never know in the world what has become of him—poor, poor child, for he appeared as though he could be but 18.”

  Whitman’s letters home are full of dread, “to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads & trains & boat loads of poor bloody & pale & wounded young men again . . . I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals & c.” Anticipating Grant’s offensive in May, the commanders in the South were clearing out the division hospitals, sending the dregs of the sick and wounded to Washington. At the end of March Whitman wrote: “I feel lately as though I must have some intermission . . . my feelings are kept in a painful condition a great part of the time—things get worse and worse, as to the amount & sufferings of the sick . . .” And the doctors and nurses were getting “more callous and indifferent.”

  During those tense months of waiting for the next offensive, the poet developed a strong attachment to an Ohio boy named Oscar Cunningham. He had arrived at Armory Square with a bad gunshot wound high in his right thigh. Whitman said that when he first saw Oscar he thought the fellow ought to be a sculptor’s model, “for an emblematical figure of the west.” He was a handsome giant with a large head and golden hair, “thick and longish & a manly noble manner and talk.” The doctors were trying to save his limb. But as of April 12, the poet noted it was in “horrible condition, all livid & swollen out of shape.” Erysipelas had inflamed his leg and foot. While the doctors remained hopeful about this case, Whitman was disheartened.

  Another man who occupied the poet’s thoughts was one of many wasting away from dysentery. The soldier’s dwindling from the full figure of manhood—from flesh, blood, muscle, and sinew to skin and bone—became an allegory of Whit
man’s own waning strength and courage during that terrible season.

  At night the patient to whom Whitman only refers by the pathetic sobriquet “the diarrhea man” desired Whitman to ask God’s blessing on him before leaving. “I am no scholar & you are,” he whispered to the poet.

  “Poor dying man, I told him from the bottom of my heart God would bless him, & bring him up yet—I soothed him as well as I could, it was affecting, I can tell you.”

  Much of Whitman’s correspondence from this period concerns the whereabouts and welfare of his brother George, still a captain in the Fifty-first New York Regiment, under Burnside’s command. George was not able to write nearly enough letters to please his mother and assure her of his safety. In the Federal City, between the military hospitals and the halls of Congress, Whitman had rich sources of intelligence concerning troop movements, and sometimes second- or third-hand news of George himself. The poet’s circle of friends in Washington had grown to include John Burroughs, working in the Treasury; Ohio Congressman James Garfield; and New York Congressmen Martin Kalbfleisch and Anson Herrick. If Lincoln got reelected, there was still a possibility Whitman might have a job in the administration.

  But for the time being he was giving his full attention to the hospital work, grateful for every day that passed without his brother coming through the door of Ward K on a stretcher. So one can imagine Whitman’s excitement after the rainy night of April 24, as he woke to the sun breaking through the clouds and rumors that Burnside’s army was marching in from Annapolis. There was nothing about troop movements in the newspapers.

  Burnside’s entire Ninth Corps, thirty thousand strong, was on its way to join Grant’s army in Virginia. The parade marched down Fourteenth Street in mud past the Willard Hotel, where the President waited with General Burnside to review the troops. Lincoln stood with his head uncovered on that cool, clear day, behind the curved balustrade above the southeastern portico, smiling at the soldiers, from the first flag-bearer and drummer to the last footsore private; the tall Commander-in-Chief kept smiling and waving most of the day. John Burroughs joined Walt Whitman for three hours, as he stood across the street just to Lincoln’s left, alternately watching the President and looking north, scanning the faces of oncoming soldiers, looking for his brother.

  Now and then a mud-spattered soldier would recognize Whitman, leap out of line and hug his old friend, then run to rejoin his outfit.

  After three hours Walt picked George out of the ranks. “I joined him just before they came to where the President & General Burnside were standing with others on a balcony.” In the excitement of seeing his brother for the first time in a year, Captain Whitman forgot to salute the President, forgot indeed to search for Lincoln’s face in the group looking down on the parade and the crowd. Walt fell in to march at his brother’s side, greeting him warmly before pointing out President Lincoln behind them on the portico. George “was a little annoyed at forgetting it—I called his attention to it, but we had passed a little too far on.” And Captain Whitman, observing strict military decorum, “wouldn’t turn round even ever so little.”

  The Corps was headed south for Long Bridge, the wide ranks stepping quickly, and the poet marched with his brother “for some distance & had quite a talk—he is very well, he is very much tanned and looks hardy, I told him all the latest news from home— George stands it very well, & looks & behaves the same good & noble fellow he always was & always will be.” According to John Hay: “This is the finest looking & best appointed force I have ever seen . . . a little gorgeous and showy . . .” Both Hay and Whitman admired the five regiments of new black troops, Hay observing that they “looked well & marched better than others: As in fact they always do,” and the poet expressing the anomaly of the President saluting Negroes, “with his hat off to them just the same as the rest as they passed by.”

  Whitman’s letter to his mother the next day captures the glory of the five-hour parade, and also his underlying sadness. “Mother, it was a curious sight to see these ranks after ranks of our own dearest blood of men, mostly young, march by, worn & sunburnt & sweaty . . . it is a great sight to see such a big Army . . . they are all so gay too, poor fellows.” Whitman did not know exactly where the army was headed, “only that there is without doubt to be a terrible campaign here in Virginia this summer . . . I do not feel to fret or whimper, but in my heart and soul about our country, the army, the forthcoming campaign with all its vicissitudes & the wounded & slain—I daresay, Mother, I feel the reality more than some because I am in the midst of its saddest results so much.”

  Walt’s brother and the rest of Burnside’s army were marching into the nightmare Battle of the Wilderness, less than ten days away.

  On April 27 Whitman sat at the bedside of a soldier of the Sixth of Maine who had just had his leg amputated. The boy was calmed now, by morphine and the poet’s presence, and Whitman was taking a quiet moment to write a letter to James Kirkwood, a patron. “The sick are coming in pretty freely here, poor wrecks and phantoms—a sign of action, as they are breaking up the field hospitals. One’s heart bleeds for them . . . if you have any friends able to send me aid . . . show them this letter . . .”

  The sight of Lincoln’s kind face on Monday had inspired him. “I see the President often. I think better of him than many do. He has conscience & homely shrewdness—conceals an enormous tenacity under his mild, gawky western manner.” Tenacity was what Whitman wanted, the strength to endure the crisis in Washington. “The difficulties of his situation have been unprecedented in the history of statesmanship. That he has conserved the government so far is a miracle in itself.”

  That Lincoln kept himself sane was another kind of miracle. With only the vaguest sense of Grant’s battle plans, the President awaited a catastrophe. “Grant has gone into the Wilderness, crawled in, drawn up the ladder, and pulled in the hole after him,” the President told the curious. Some who saw him that week said he was so despondent they could hardly look at him without weeping. Yet John Hay recalled that one night when the secretaries were working after midnight the President came into the office laughing uproariously. He was wearing his nightshirt and clutching a volume of Thomas Hood’s humorous writings. He couldn’t contain his mirth, but had to read aloud to Nicolay and Hay the tale about “An Unfortunate Bee-ing.” Lincoln was oblivious that with the nightshirt “hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich he was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at.”

  Hay was struck, as Whitman would have been, by the complexity of Lincoln’s personality: “Occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army in the world, with his own fame & future hanging on the events of the passing hour, he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhommie & good fellow ship that he gets out of bed & perambulates the house in his shirt to find us,” in order to share the pleasure he was taking in one of Hood’s little jokes.

  During that first week in May, Lincoln scarcely slept. There were black rings under his eyes. “I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety,” he said, “or it will kill me.” He went to the opera and sat in his box “either enjoying the music or communing with himself,” one reporter observed. In the middle of the night he read Shakespeare, or Thomas Hood.

  The “Wilderness” was aptly named, a thirty-mile-long stretch of woods, thorny underbrush, and swampland below Culpeper. Grant hoped to move his army swiftly through the forest and attack Lee’s forces on open ground north of Richmond. But knowing that the density of thickets, second-growth trees, and the uneven ground would countercheck Grant’s greater numbers, Lee decided to ambush the Federals in the Wilderness on May 5.

  For two days and nights the armies struggled savagely in the gloom. Gun smoke mixed with the haze of brushfires ignited by red-hot bullets made it impossible for soldiers to see more than a few yards ahead. They fired and hacked away blindly, often killing their own men. The stench of burning fle
sh filled the air. Sparks from the flaming tinder caused cartridge bandoliers to detonate, sending shells slicing through the torsos of the men wearing them. Rather than dying from the flames that engulfed them, wounded fighters took their own lives. One Confederate soldier called it “a butchery pure and simple.” Grant’s aide-de-camp wrote, “It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.”

  Twenty-two thousand men were killed and wounded in the battle. The only welcomed news that reached the telegraph office was Grant’s resolution not to give up. “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” he stated. When Lincoln read this telegram to a crowd outside the White House, people did not know whether to cheer or weep. As Grant marched on to Spotsylvania, some (including Mary Lincoln) called the cigar-chewing General a butcher.

  Ambulances jammed the highways heading for Falmouth. Whistling steamers arrived every hour at the Sixth Street wharves with their gruesome cargo of dead and wounded men.

  “The arrivals, the numbers, and the severity of the wounds, outvied anything that we had seen before,” Whitman wrote. “For days and weeks the melancholy tide set in upon us. The weather was very hot; the wounded had been delayed in coming, and much neglected. Very many of the wounds had worms in them. An unusual portion mortified [became gangrenous].”

  Whitman continued to report on Oscar Cunningham and the soldier who was wasting away from dysentery—as if his own fate was somehow bound up in theirs. “The poor fellow . . . with diarrhea . . . is only partly conscious, is all wasted away to nothing, & lies most of the time in half stupor, as they give him brandy copiously—yesterday I was there by him a few minutes, he is very much averse to taking brandy . . .” The man was painfully dehydrated; naturally the last thing he wanted was the fiery liquor, and he fought the medics who tried to make him drink it. “He is almost totally deaf the last five or six days—there is no chance for him at all.” On May 6 the soldier was still alive, “but O what a looking object, death would be a boon to him, he cannot last many hours . . .”