Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  At last Oscar had his leg amputated, high up on the thigh. He “has picked up beyond expectation, now looks altogether like getting well,” Whitman noted. But on May 10 Whitman wrote: “the poor diarrhea man died, & it was a boon—Oscar Cunningham, 82nd Ohio, has had a relapse, I fear it is going bad with him—lung diseases are quite plenty—night before last I staid in hospital all night tending a poor fellow . . .”

  Whitman was pushing himself. On May 18 he admitted, “I am pretty tired, & my head feels disagreeable, from being in too much.” He took comfort in the good news from a wounded man in his brother’s regiment that George was unhurt. Then Walt learned that the house where he had been living had been sold and he would have to move. He hastily rented a third-story hall bedroom at 502 Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Capitol. Unfortunately the new dwelling stood near the fetid canal that ran along the mall and into a ditch of stagnant water at Third Street. Soon Whitman was complaining of the bad air and spending a lot of time writing his letters in the lobby of the Willard Hotel.

  “Mother, it is just the same old story,” he wrote wearily on May 25, “poor suffering young men, great swarms of them come up here, now, every day, all battered and bloody . . . 4000 arrived here this morning, & 1500 yesterday.” Oscar Cunningham was sinking rapidly. “Said to me yesterday, O if he could only die.”

  “One new feature,” the poet observed, “is that many of the poor afflicted young men are crazy, every ward has some in it that are wandering—they have suffered too much, & it is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses.”

  “Mother, it is most too much for a fellow, & I sometimes wish I was out of it—but I suppose it is because I have not felt first rate myself,” he had written on May 7. On May 30 Whitman complained of a headache, a fullness in the skull he often felt in hot weather, and four days later he told his mother, “if this campaign was not in progress I should not stop here, as it is now beginning to tell on me, so many bad wounds, many putrified, & all kinds of dreadful ones, I have been rather too much with . . .”

  He had just come from Cunningham’s bedside. The soldier was dying, beyond hope. The smiling, golden-haired giant of a man Whitman had thought fit for a sculptor’s model was “all wasted away to a skeleton, & looks like some one fifty years old.” And now he was always petulant, or angry with everyone but Whitman. Congressman Martin Kalbfleisch walked into the ward where Whitman was writing a letter, looked around him at the human wreckage, trembled, and burst into tears.

  Oscar died at two o’clock in the morning, Sunday, June 5. “It was a blessed relief, his life has been misery for months—the cause of death at last was the system absorbing the pus . . .”

  On June 10 the doctors told Whitman he had spent too much time in Armory Square, where the worst wounds were, and had, Whitman wrote, “absorbed too much of the virus in my system.” Four days later they asked him to stay out of the hospitals for the time being—advice he evidently did not heed. By June 17 he was so stricken, the ward master ordered him to return to Brooklyn for a fortnight. Whitman never mentions a diagnosis, but the physicians told him he must leave town, that he needed “an entire change of air, & c.”

  He would not return to Washington for six months. By that time the war would be almost over.

  10

  WHY LINCOLN LAUGHED

  The picture of the President in his nightshirt on the eve of the Battle of the Wilderness, convulsed with laughter, bursting to share with his overworked secretaries Thomas Hood’s joke, is a staple of Lincoln biographies. Curiously, no account of the incident mentions which of Thomas Hood’s myriad stories and poems Lincoln read aloud to Nicolay and Hay—what at that critical moment the sleep-deprived President found so funny. In his diary Hay refers to the piece as “An Unfortunate Bee-ing.” Is there such a story?

  Thomas Hood (1799–1845) was an English poet and humorist whom laughter served as the best medicine against the depredations of poverty and consumption. He was also an ingenious illustrator who drew hilarious double-entendre caricatures for his own stories. Some of these featured an honest, well-intentioned yeoman who stumbles into preposterous disasters.

  There is no tale in Hood’s eight-volume Complete Works called “An Unfortunate Bee-ing.” Hay, in his description of the event in his diary, seems to have mistaken the caption to an illustration for the story’s title.

  On page 531 of an 1860 collection, The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, the mystery is solved: there is the illustration and story that Lincoln found so amusing. It shows a man who has knocked over a beehive. His back is to us, his fists are raised skyward in imprecation, his right knee is lifted as if by an antic dance he might shake off the bees that pour from the broken hive and surround him. The caricature illustrates “The Scrape-Book,” a story first published in a comic annual in 1831. Under the title is the epigram “Luck’s All!”

  Some men seem born to be lucky. Happier than kings, Fortune’s wheel has for them no revolutions . . . At games of chance they have no chance; but what is better, a certainty. They get windfalls, without a breath stirring—as legacies. Prizes turn up for them in lotteries. At the very worst in trying to drown themselves, they dive on some treasure undiscovered since the Spanish Armada; or tie their halter to a hook, that unseals a hoard in the ceiling. That’s their luck.

  There is another kind of fortune, called ill-luck; so ill, that you hope it will die;—but it don’t. That’s my luck.

  Other people keep scrap-books; but I, a scrape-book.

  The next three pages take the form of a fictional diary (coincidentally for April and May, when Lincoln was reading it), narrating the mishaps and calamities of Hood’s “Unfortunate” and his long-suffering bride, Belinda. These include being run down in a rowboat by a coal-brig, and then “providentially picked up by a steamer that burst her boiler . . . Saved to be scalded!” Throwing a punch at a thief attempting to snatch Belinda’s purse, the man misses the thief and blackens Belinda’s eye, whereupon “Belinda’s part is taken by a big rascal, as deaf as a post, who wanted to fight me for striking a woman.” Then his number comes up in the lottery—but he loses the ticket.

  The centerpiece of this catalog of misadventures concerns the week of the protagonist’s wedding day, April Fools’ Day, when he stumbles over his father-in-law’s beehives.

  He has 252 bees: thanks to me he is now able to check them. Some of the insects, having an account against me, preferred to settle on my calf. Others swarmed on my hands. My bald head seemed a perfect hummingtop! . . . Rushed bee-blind into the horsepond, and torn out by Tiger, the housedog. Staggered incontinent into the pigsty, and collared by the sow . . . for kicking her sucklings.

  Wanting oil for his wounds, he finds only “lamp-oil”—the irritant kerosene.

  Relieved of the stings at last—what luck!—by 252 operations.

  The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray said that “humor is the mistress of tears,” and Lincoln himself excused one of his laughing fits with the comment “I laugh because I must not cry; that is all; that is all.” But “The Scrape-Book” and Thomas Hood’s drawing of “An Unfortunate Bee-ing” are so relevant to Lincoln’s own predicament in 1864 that the emblem warrants close examination. As fancifully rendered by Hood, the ovoid hive is broken in half; the top half rests on a bench, like a little igloo, while the bottom is turned up, on the ground next to the unfortunate victim’s feet. Bees rush from both hemispheres to attack the hapless bridegroom.

  An Unfortunate Bee-ing

  A more perfect caricature of the broken Union of States, the furious citizens of the North and South, and Lincoln’s ill luck in happening upon the presidency at this moment could scarcely be devised. Will Rogers said that “everything is funny as long as it’s happening to someone else,” but the more familiar the fool, the more disposed we are to laugh, relieved that this time we have escaped his folly and torment. Lincoln delighted in wordplay and the reductio ad absurdum. For these reasons and others he laughed that night as he read a
loud, to John Hay and John Nicolay, Thomas Hood’s story “The Scrape-Book.”

  There were a few more days left in 1864 than there were bees in Hood’s story. The President was stung most days, especially during the summer by the members of his own party. Lincoln’s problem—fortunately for posterity—was that he kept doing what he thought was right, often with flagrant disregard for public sentiment and party politics. Grant’s pursuit of Lee that spring from the inferno of the Wilderness to a crushing defeat at Cold Harbor had cost the Union fifty thousand men. Mary Lincoln complained: “Grant is a butcher and not fit to be at the head of an army. He loses two men to the enemy’s one. He has no management, no regard for life . . .” At the height of widespread antiwar demonstrations in the North and South, and appeals to Lincoln to negotiate for peace, the President stood behind Grant and issued a call for five hundred thousand more volunteers. It seemed that the entire Union was tilting toward Virginia and men were spilling into a deep ditch near Richmond, where Grant smoked cigars and whittled, waiting for the abyss to fill so he could march across it and finish the horrid war.

  Disapproval of Lincoln was so widespread that a week before the National Union Convention in Baltimore, which would nominate him for a second term, a group of disgruntled Republicans held a rump convention in Cleveland. On May 31 many liberals, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Cullen Bryant, and radical followers of Wendell Phillips, convened to protest “the imbecile and vacillating policy of the present Administration in the conduct of the war” and to nominate their handsome hero John C. Frémont for president.

  Frémont might represent a serious threat, Hay confided to Lincoln, if he had more ability.

  “Yes,” said Lincoln, “he is like Jim Jett’s brother. Jim used to say that his brother was the damnedest scoundrel that ever lived but in the infinite mercy of Providence he was also the damnedest fool.”

  The Ohio convention fizzled, as newsmen like Greeley, who at first welcomed the movement, withdrew their support. Prominent Eastern Republicans like Sumner stayed away, fearful of permanently alienating Lincoln. Nevertheless, the Frémont candidacy might divide the party sooner or later, depending upon Grant’s performance on the battlefield. Frémont continued to challenge Lincoln long after the Baltimore convention of the National Union (Republican) Party. There, on June 7, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were unanimously nominated to run on a ticket whose platform included a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

  In Baltimore there was agreement but little enthusiasm; a sense of inevitability in the nomination—almost resignation. Illinois Republican Clark Carr murmured that the people “think that God tried his best when he made Mr. Lincoln and they are all for his reelection.” Lincoln’s campaign manager David Davis told him, “the opposition is so utterly beaten that the fight is not even interesting.” In fact, there was no prominent Republican other than Frémont—and the invalidated Chase—who wanted Lincoln’s job during that terrible time. It looked doubtful that any Republican could win the office, and it seemed only fitting and just that Lincoln should be the man to lose it.

  He occupied a lonely height where he saw dangers invisible to others. Knowing the precarious balance of politics in New York, he fought Salmon Chase’s appointment of an incompetent Radical for the important position of assistant treasurer of the United States in New York City. Chase had grown accustomed, when crossed, to expressing his indignation by formally tendering his resignation, ever confident the President would not accept it. This time, the fourth, Lincoln stunned the Secretary and outraged the liberal Senators—not only by accepting Chase’s resignation, but by naming a successor within hours.

  A deputation of Chase’s friends scurried to the White House, demanding an explanation for the change in the cabinet. Lincoln described his disagreement with Chase over the New York appointment; then he told them what he had written to Chase the day before: “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems cannot be overcome, or longer sustained.” The President was not about to imperil the Union Party’s power in New York State for the sake of Salmon Chase’s delicate pride.

  In late June the thermometer climbed into the nineties and hovered there as Congress remained in session long after adjournment time. In withering heat they had been debating a Reconstruction bill, drafted by Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis and Senator “Bluff ” Ben Wade of Ohio, two radicals sworn to derail Lincoln’s own moderate plans for Reconstruction, already under way in Louisiana and Tennessee. The Wade-Davis Bill passed narrowly in the Senate by an 18–14 vote on July 2. The congressional plan was more stringent than Lincoln’s: it required a majority of voters—swearing allegiance to the Union—to set up a new state government, rather than 10 percent; it barred most former secessionist leaders from voting and office holding, rather than a few; and it refused to pay the Confederacy’s war debts. The central point of the bill, however, was the immediate emancipation of slaves in all the states. On July 4, the document lay on Lincoln’s desk in his grand office in the Capitol, and the weary legislators were waiting for him to sign it, so they could go home.

  He would not sign the bill, though he carefully read and signed others. When the Radical Senator Zachariah Chandler from Michigan peevishly pointed out, “the important point is that one prohibiting slavery in the reconstructed states,” Lincoln coolly replied: “That is the point on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act.” The lawyer in Lincoln was speaking, and so was the political visionary. Abolition was not a matter for Congress to decide by legislation. Nothing short of an amendment to the Constitution, or the slow deliberation of the separate states, would put an end to slavery.

  When Chandler fumed, “It is no more than you have done yourself,” the President replied, “I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”

  Lincoln’s pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill was one of the most courageous uses of executive power in American history, and certainly the most contentious. “I am inconsolable,” Charles Sumner lamented. Lincoln knew he was in for trouble, but explained to John Hay, “At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.” He could not have foreseen the virulence of the backlash in his own party.

  In August, Ben Wade asked Horace Greeley to publish a manifesto attacking Lincoln for the pocket veto of Congress’s plan for Reconstruction. Greeley, long exasperated with the President, and freshly piqued by his own failure to negotiate peace with the Rebels at a conference in Niagara Falls, was only too happy to give two and a half columns of the Tribune to Wade and Davis’s proclamation, “To the Supporters of the Government.”

  The Congressmen wrote: “A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated.” Charging Lincoln with “dictatorial usurpation” and calling his veto a “rash and fatal act . . . a blow at the friends of his Administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of republican government,” the two Republicans menaced Lincoln’s renomination.

  “If he wishes our support,” they wrote, “he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make the laws—to suppress by arms armed Rebellion, and to leave political reorganization to Congress.”

  The document was unique in the annals of American history, shocking to all who read it, regardless of their politics. Nicolay and Hay would call the Wade-Davis manifesto “the most vigorous attack that was ever directed against the President from his own party during his term.” It was clearly a maneuver to destroy Lincoln’s candidacy. James Gordon Bennett, writing for the New York Herald, predicted that the manifesto would bring about a new convention that would annul the nominations of both Frémont in Cleveland and Lincoln in Baltimore and replace them with a ticket of “acknowledged ability and patriotism.” Bennett called for Lincoln to withdraw voluntarily. Thurlow Weed, who had done
so much for Lincoln in New York, told Benjamin Butler: “Lincoln is gone, I suppose you know as well as I. And unless a hundred thousand men are raised sooner than the draft, the country’s gone too.”

  As if on cue, in the midst of the Wade-Davis fracas, Rebel forces under General Jubal A. Early had stolen upon Harpers Ferry and crossed the Potomac to attack Washington. How could such a large Confederate army have gotten so far north as to threaten the capital itself? It had been bad enough that Grant’s siege of Petersburg had failed to dislodge Lee from his labyrinth of trenches. Now Lincoln had to suffer the embarrassment of an invasion. If Early occupied Washington for forty-eight hours, the Union would be disgraced and the Confederacy recognized abroad.

  In his long frock coat and stovepipe hat Lincoln stood on the parapet of Fort Stevens and watched the Confederate soldiers approach, overwhelming the Union pickets, until the Rebels came within shooting distance. A man standing near the President was shot in the leg. Worse things could befall the President than being shot by an enemy soldier on the earthworks of Fort Stevens. Small wonder that Lincoln stood defiantly, spyglass in hand, remaining a conspicuous target until General Horatio Wright warned he would have him forcibly removed. At least the raiders weren’t Republicans. As Lincoln confessed to Noah Brooks, “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man.” He had been made to suffer more keenly at the hands of Ben Wade and Horace Greeley than he had been thus far by the Democrats or the Rebels.