Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  After soldiers died, Whitman often took it upon himself to write letters to their parents. The official notifications sent by the government were brief and matter-of-fact. The poet wanted to mark the soldier’s passing in a more fitting manner.

  When Erastus Haskell died of typhoid fever, Whitman sent a letter to his parents in Breesport, New York. “I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few words about the last days of your son,” Whitman began. He indicated that the dying soldier’s wish had been to send his love to his parents, brothers, and sisters. He described Erastus as “a quiet young man, behaved always correct & decent, said little.” And Whitman also commented on a fife that lay on Erastus’s bed stand. He had promised to play for Whitman, had he recovered his health. “He is one of the thousands of our unknown American young men in the ranks about whom there is no record or fame, no fuss made about their dying so unknown, but I find in them the real precious & royal ones of this land.” He closed by assuring the Haskell family that although they were strangers, although they were unlikely ever to meet, he, Whitman, also sent them his love.

  Whitman was overflowing with emotion. Surrounded by death, he’d become more fully alive, receptive to all this raw feeling coursing through him. He was like a crucible for poetry. He talked to Eldridge about bringing out a fresh collection of his work. Never mind that Eldridge was a failed publisher, in no position to help. Never mind that Whitman had no other publishing prospects. He’d been at this point before. Whitman started planning a new collection anyway, focused on his Civil War experiences, everything from watching soldiers on Broadway in 1861 to the visit with brother George at the front to his current role, ministering to the wounded in Washington. After three editions of Leaves of Grass, he envisioned it as his first work outside of that franchise. The subject matter seemed to demand its own stand-alone volume.

  Some of Whitman’s finest new poems would grow out of his hospital service. There’s “The Wound-Dresser,” a lovely poem, and also a source of confusion for future generations. (Whitman wasn’t a nurse and wasn’t charged with dressing wounds. But he was certainly capable of inhabiting the persona of someone who was and did.) There’s also “Come Up from the Fields, Father,” where the poet imagines a couple who lives on a farm, receiving a letter such as he’d sent to the Haskells, with news of their son:

  Open the envelope quickly,

  O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

  O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

  For now, Whitman was mostly gathering ideas. He was making notations, trying to capture feelings and observations in the moment. Per his usual methods, he would need to live with this material for a while, painstakingly spinning it into poetry.

  Following a hospital visit, Whitman’s habit was to go for a long walk. Time was, he’d promenaded Broadway. He’d cased Washington Street during his earlier stay in Boston. Now it was DC that he explored on foot. A favorite destination was the Capitol, currently under renovation. Scaffolding surrounded the unfinished dome. Blocks of granite and architectural flotsam—lintels and pilasters—were scattered about the grounds, giving the appearance of a Greek ruin. It was possible to walk into the building at any hour. He enjoyed wandering the maze of hallways, hearing the click of his boot heels on the marble floor.

  Hours after he’d left a hospital, sometimes Whitman would start trembling uncontrollably, recalling the horrors he’d seen earlier. By then, he might have meandered to some distant corner of Washington.

  One night he ambled right onto the lawn of the White House. He remained for quite a while. “To-night took a long look at the President’s House,” he noted. “The white portico—the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow—the walls also—the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades.”

  Standing on the White House lawn at midnight seemed perfectly natural to Whitman. After all, he saw Lincoln nearly every single day. Sometimes, while Whitman was walking to a hospital, the president hurried past, surrounded by advisers. Or he would see Lincoln in a carriage, en route to the country house where he often slept during warm weather. Mary Todd might be beside him. Once, Whitman saw Lincoln’s young son, Tad, riding alongside the carriage on a pony.

  In the poet’s eyes, Lincoln was the “Redeemer President,” a living symbol of union. Ever since Whitman had watched him move through that hostile crowd in New York, he’d felt a special bond. “I see the President often,” Whitman noted. “I think better of him than many do. He has conscience & homely shrewdness—conceals an enormous tenacity under his mild, gawky western manner.” Following another spotting, Whitman wrote, “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”

  Lincoln, for his part, was almost certainly aware of Leaves of Grass. Around 1857, William Herndon, his law partner, purchased a copy of the work, likely the second edition. This is extraordinary, when one considers how few were sold. Nevertheless, one wound up in the possession of a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. Just as Whitman was an artist with a rare grasp of politics, Lincoln was a politician with an unusual relish for the arts. It’s quite possible that Lincoln read the work.

  Now, only a few years later, Whitman saw him constantly. One time, Whitman looked out the window of one of his rented rooms (this one at 456 Sixth Street) right when Lincoln pulled up in a carriage. Whitman lived in a garret, but it also happened that Salmon Chase, the treasury secretary, lived in a mansion across the street, steeped in every luxury and attended by a gaggle of servants. Presently, Secretary Chase emerged from his home. He walked up to Lincoln’s carriage, and the two men conversed for about fifteen minutes.

  There was such a curious sense of enclosure to wartime Washington. Enemy cannon fire was constantly heard from nearby Virginia battlefields; General Lee threatened to descend on the city at any moment. That, combined with the capital’s small size, fostered the illusion of an intimate village—the treasury secretary across the street, the president just down the way. Whitman saw Lincoln so often that he began to notice variations in his appearance and demeanor. “I had a good view of the president last evening,” Whitman wrote to his mother, “—he looks more careworn even than usual—his face with deep cut lines, seams, & his complexion gray, through very dark skin, a curious looking man, very sad.” Whitman saw Lincoln so often that it must have seemed almost real when he pronounced, “I love the President personally.”

  But it wasn’t. There was a genuine connection on Whitman’s part, for he observed the president minutely. It’s possible that one existed for Lincoln, too, as he may have read Leaves of Grass. But the two never met.

  Whitman was lonely. Though surrounded by people, he was finding, as he often did, that it was difficult to forge meaningful connections. At the hospitals, he’d come to realize, only two outcomes were possible. Soldiers got better and rejoined their units. Or they died. Either way, they moved on, leaving him behind. Whitman continued to pine for romantic love.

  When a soldier named Tom Sawyer rejoined the 11th Massachusetts Volunteers, Whitman pursued him with a series of mooning letters. “If you should come safe out of this war,” the poet wrote, “we should come together again in some place where we could make our living, and be true comrades and never be separated while life lasts.” In another missive, he wrote, “Not a day passes, nor a night but I think of you.”

  Whitman had made Sawyer a parting gift of a shirt, underwear, and socks. He was hurt when Sawyer returned to the front without bothering to pick them up: “It would have been a satisfaction to me if you had accepted them.” Whitman wondered whether the intensity of his feelings had left the soldier bewildered: “I suppose my letters sound strange & unusual to you as it is, but as I am only expressing the truth in them, I do not trouble myself on that
account.” As time went on, Whitman despaired of ever hearing back from Sawyer: “I do not know why you do not write to me. Do you wish to shake me off?”

  Sawyer, evidently, was spooked by this onslaught of needy epistles. He wasn’t exactly a wordsmith, either, being—per Whitman’s usual preferences—something of a raw, uneducated young man. After many months, Sawyer wrote Whitman a brief note: “I hardly know what to say to you in this letter for it is my first one to you. . . . I hope you will forgive me and in the future I will do better and I hope we may meet again in this world.”

  Granted, Sawyer held out the possibility of seeing one another again. But what comes through most clearly is his hesitancy. Whitman knew enough about matters of the heart to recognize that this wasn’t going to work out.

  Each morning, when Whitman awakened in his cramped garret room, he would fire up some coals in a little sheet-iron stove. He would riffle around the pine box that served as his cupboard, withdrawing a parcel of tea leaves, a paper bag full of brown sugar, and the assorted other fixings for the heartiest breakfast possible on a pauper’s dime.

  To make toast, Whitman used a pointed stick to hold pieces of bread over coals in the stove. He used a jackknife to spread butter. As he prepared breakfast, he enjoyed singing to himself. One of his favorite songs, “The Greatest Pain,” was based on a seventeenth-­century poem by Abraham Cowley and contains the following verse:

  A mighty pain to love it is

  And yet a pain that love to miss

  But of all pains, the greatest pain

  It is to love, but love in vain!

  Besides skittish Tom Sawyer and wounded soldiers in the hospitals, Whitman’s only other source of social connection in Washington was a literary salon. It was organized by William Douglas O’Connor, a fellow Thayer & Eldridge author, who had published a novel called Harrington. The group numbered about a dozen. Many of them, like Whitman, were transplants to wartime Washington, doing menial jobs in government departments. Eldridge was a regular. Others included Arnold Johnson, an assistant to Senator Sumner of Massachusetts; Frank Baker, a medical historian at the Smithsonian; and J. J. Piatt, a poet from Ohio.

  O’Connor’s wife once described the group as a “stimulating mental society,” filled with “fun and good-natured banter.” Literature was a frequent topic of discussion, as were abolitionism, foreign relations, the Mormon question, and the matter of which dictionary was more authoritative, Webster or Worcester. Another favorite activity was playing the game Twenty Questions. For one round, the correct answer was the white beard of Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy. But there was something so prescribed about the group’s conversational topics and its parlor games. Even the timing—the get-togethers were held on Sunday evenings—smacked of formality.

  Clearly, O’Connor’s straightlaced salon was no Pfaff’s.

  Whitman hungered for news of his subterranean haunt. “I happened in there the other night, and the place smelt as atrociously as ever,” wrote John Swinton in an 1863 letter to Whitman. Swinton was a New York Times editor and peripheral member of Clapp’s circle. He commended Whitman for his work in Washington, adding, “It must be even more refreshing than to sit by Pfaff’s privy and eat sweet-breads and drink coffee, and listen to the intolerable wit of the crack-brains.” Swinton also mentioned that “Pfaff looked as of yore.” The saloon’s proprietor, it seems, was still his rotund, cheerful self. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to report.

  The old crowd was thinning out. O’Brien was dead, Ludlow traveling. Ward and Menken dropped by Pfaff’s when they were in New York. Each was touring ceaselessly, so their visits were becoming more and more infrequent.

  Left behind were Clapp and Clare. In the depths of war, one can only imagine the kind of Bohemian irregulars and misfits who now joined them at that long table. One can only imagine how curdled Clapp’s quips had grown, as the King of Bohemia was forced each night to reign beside Queen Clare, whom he desired, who respected his keen intellect—yet who would have nothing to do with him sexually. He must have been a terror. By now, Whitman was drifting away from Clapp. The Saturday Press was defunct, and his onetime champion could do nothing to advance his poetry.

  From Washington, Whitman also corresponded with some of the men he knew from the other portion of Pfaff’s saloon. To Hugo Fritsch, he reminisced about “our meetings together, our drinks & groups so friendly, our suppers with Fred & Charley Russell &c. off by ourselves at some table, at Pfaff’s off the other end.” In another letter, addressed jointly to Fred Gray and Nathaniel Bloom, he wrote, “My darling, dearest boys, if I could be with you this hour, long enough to take only just three mild hot rums.” (Hot rums? Two rooms. In the vaulted one, at Clapp’s table, his drink was lager, but he appears to have enjoyed different drinks in that other, larger, room.)

  Whitman had been so ready to escape Pfaff’s. Having done so, as often happens, nostalgia quickly set in. “I was always between two loves at that time,” he said many years later. “I wanted to be in New York, I had to be in Washington.” Whitman recognized how badly the wounded soldiers needed him. They had become his priority, their care a calling—one that was higher right now than poetry, higher right now than anything else in his life.

  Whitman was in Washington for some of the major battles of the Civil War. He was there during Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and Wilderness and Spotsylvania. In notebook entries and letters home, however, he didn’t tend to refer to these engagements by name. Over time, it seems, he grew to see the fighting as simple carnage—all guts, no glory. Whitman got so that he could gauge the severity of a distant battle by the level of activity in the Washington hospitals. After major clashes, the doctors and nurses rushed to free up cots, releasing patients who looked to have gotten better, even those who showed the first vague hints of wellness. A strange tension would then settle over the hospitals, everyone waiting.

  Then, the deluge. Wounded soldiers flooded into Washington. Whitman made his rounds. He filled his notebooks with fresh notations, listing soldiers’ names, companies, hospital wards, and cot numbers. But all too often, in the turmoil and frenzy, they were reduced to that—notations. A notation would get better. Or a notation would die. “I feel lately as though I must have some intermission,” he pleaded.

  But the wounded kept coming, wave upon wave. “O mother,” he wrote in one letter, “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.” In another, he cataloged the horrors of his recent days. He concluded, “Mother, I will try to write more cheerfully next time—but I see so much.”

  Under terrible stress, Whitman’s own health began to suffer. Prior to the war, he proudly claimed, the only ailment he’d ever experienced was a bout of sunstroke, something he attributed to an ill-advised hatless stroll following a haircut. But now he started to develop various mysterious maladies. He had dizzy spells and terrible ringing headaches. By day, he was oversensitive to light, and at night he lay awake, tossing and sweating. His symptoms hadn’t coalesced into any definable syndrome or condition. Yet Whitman would never be the same.

  In his poetry, Whitman had passionately defended the Union. Now, he had compromised his precious health, aiding the soldiers. It was a willing sacrifice. So many others were giving so much more.

  14: Twain They Shall Meet

  THE SUMMER OF 1863 found Adah Menken and Artemus Ward continuing to tour, relentlessly. A great opportunity was about to come their way. Soon they would be plying their respective entertainments—the equine drama Mazeppa and comedy routine The Babes in the Wood—in some of the most dramatic settings imaginable, surrounded by some truly memorable characters. Menken and Ward were about to travel out West.

  During the brief time they’d been performing their acts, both had grown incredibly popular. Menken played sold-out houses everywhere she went. Though no reliable box-of
fice figures exist, Menken was easily outearning most of the day’s foremost actors such as Edwin Forrest and James Murdoch, her co-star for that dubious performance of Macbeth in Nashville. She was trouncing such top-draw novelty acts as Bihin the Belgian Giant, Dora Dawson the Double-Voiced Singer, and Charles Signor Bliss, a so-called antipodean walker who could stride upside down across ceilings. “My business is still immense,” she boasted.

  By now, Menken had pretty well blanketed the Union—save for recent-entry Kansas and distant California. She had even slipped down into the border state of Maryland to play a theater in Baltimore. Though Maryland had not seceded, sentiment in Baltimore tilted toward the Confederacy. So Menken requested that her dressing room be painted Confederate gray. Around the edge of the room’s mirror, she slipped photos of Jefferson Davis and generals such as Braxton Bragg.

  Menken could be savvy—and shameless—about courting the public. Perhaps, too, someone as boundary defying as Menken (born in the South, living in the North, probably biracial, casually bisexual) simply didn’t wish to be hemmed in by considerations such as Union and Confederate. Regardless, the ploy worked, stirring up great excitement. “It is really true that we must turn people away,” she wrote to one of her handlers (by now, she required an entire retinue of them). “Tonight is the 13th of ‘Mazeppa’ and the house last night was crowded. . . . Such a run of a piece was never known in Baltimore.” Better yet, her brief secesh dalliance didn’t have any adverse professional consequences. Menken quickly resumed her successful touring through the Northern states. (Audiences weren’t flocking to Mazeppa for her political views.)