Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  The law students got to Whitman first. Perhaps they had read about Leaves of Grass in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, where the eminent Charles Eliot Norton had announced that words “banished from polite society are here employed without reserve” and called the book a curious mixture of “Yankee Transcendentalism and New York rowdyism”; or they might have caught notice of it in the New York Criterion, where the dyspeptic Rufus Griswold referred to it as “this gathering of muck.” In America’s most influential literary journal, the North American Review, Edward Everett Hale rhapsodized about Leaves of Grass. And in May 1856 no less an authority than Fanny Fern—the highest-paid columnist in the country—referred to Whitman in the New York Ledger as “this glorious Native American.” The book was widely praised and condemned, much discussed, if not much purchased or read.

  According to Henry Bascom Rankin, who was a student in the Lincoln-Herndon office in 1857, “discussions hot and extreme sprung up between office students and Mr. Herndon concerning its poetic merit.” A few verses:

  I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning,

  You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart . . .

  I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,

  I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

  Poetry indeed! These long, racy, unrhymed verses did not look like any poetry the provincial law students had ever seen, no matter what Emerson or the bluestocking Fanny Fern wrote.

  The talk of Whitman that animated the law office during the unseasonably warm spring of 1857 relieved the furious, anguished discussion of the Supreme Court’s recent decision about Dred Scott, which aroused Lincoln from a spell of political torpor. Yet even Scott’s fate led them back to Leaves of Grass:

  I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

  Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

  I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinned with the ooze of my skin . . .

  The argument over Whitman did not differ much in Springfield from the dispute in Boston and New York. Was this poetry? Then there arose the livelier controversy over the book’s brazen immodesty. Was Leaves of Grass indecent? Many of the verses sounded shameless, unfit for mixed company. Take for example the anonymous woman watching twenty-eight young men bathing by the shore, who comes “Dancing and laughing along the beach” to caress their naked bellies:

  They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

  They do not think whom they souse with spray.

  Was this Walt Whitman actually depicting a sexual act outlawed everywhere but in the debaters’ dreams? It was shocking, pornographic. The men wondered whether such a book should be allowed on library shelves, or in homes where women and children might casually be seduced by it. Who was responsible for the corruption of morals: the author, the printer, the Chicago bookseller, or buyers of Leaves of Grass like Billy Herndon?

  The students wrangled, and read the poems aloud, with Herndon sometimes acting as Whitman’s advocate, other times as an impartial referee. Visitors dropping by, such as Dr. Newton Bateman, superintendent of schools, would join in the discussion provoked by lines such as:

  A woman waits for me—she contains all, nothing is lacking,

  Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the

  right man were lacking.

  Lincoln worked quietly at his desk, raking his coarse hair with his long fingers, or he came and went, apparently oblivious to the disturbance the new book was causing in the workplace. Having lost a year to politics, stumping for the Republican John Frémont during the presidential campaign of 1856, advocating “free soil, free labor and free men,” he had a lot of catching up to do in his neglected law practice. He was also having a spell of depression, “the hypochondria,” as it was called in those days. This mood afflicted him periodically, often between periods of intense business or creative work. So he turned his back on the students, and Herndon and Dr. Bateman, as they challenged one another’s taste in literature and questioned one another’s morals, reading passages of Leaves of Grass and attacking or defending Whitman as the spirit, or the letter, moved them. The poet was utterly uninhibited, whether he was describing himself, or addressing the President:

  Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,

  Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women, or apart from

  them—no more modest than immodest

  . . .

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart

  of on the same terms.

  Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?

  It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there every one, and still

  pass on.

  One day, after the debaters had departed, a few clerks, including Henry Rankin, remained, copying documents. Lincoln rose from his desk. This was always a sight because sitting down Lincoln appeared to be of average height, but his limbs were so disproportionately long that when he unfolded and stretched them it was as if a giant had sprung up out of a common man.

  “Quite a surprise occurred,” Rankin recalled, in a memoir written years later. Lincoln picked up the book of poems that had been disturbing the peace and began to read, as he rarely did, in devoted silence, for more than half an hour by the Regulator clock. When the pressure of perusing the poetry silently became more than Lincoln could endure, he thumbed back to the first pages of Leaves of Grass and began reading aloud, in that tenderly expressive voice with the Kentucky accent and continual undercurrent of whimsical humor.

  I celebrate myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,

  I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

  The light of afternoon streamed through the office windows, gilding the dust motes.

  Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

  I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

  The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

  The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

  It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

  I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,

  I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

  The smoke of my own breath,

  Echos, ripples, buzzed whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch, vine

  My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart . . .

  “His rendering,” Rankin remembered, “revealed a charm of new life in Whitman’s versification.” Here and there Lincoln found a verse too coarse, a line or phrase he felt the poet might have avoided. But on the whole he “commended the new poet’s verses for their virility, freshness, unconventional sentiments, and unique forms of expression.”

  Lincoln put the book back down on the office table, desiring Herndon to leave Whitman there where he might not get lost in the tide of books, newspapers, and documents. “Time and again, when Lincoln came in, or was leaving, he would pick it up, as if to glance at it for only a moment, but instead he would often settle down in a chair and never stop reading aloud such verses or pages as he fancied.”

  Once Lincoln made the mistake of taking Leaves of Grass home. The next morning he brought the book back, grimly remarking that he “had barely saved it from being purified in fire by the women.” This anecdote goes a long way toward explaining the politician’s lifelong reticence about the poet and his book. Of course, by “the women�
� he meant his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who controlled nearly everything that went on inside the big, two-story house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson where they lived with their three boys.

  It is uncertain what verses or pages Lincoln fancied. The feuds among Lincoln’s early biographers, struggling over the soul of the martyred President, have few parallels in American letters. In 1928 a rival biographer, Reverend William E. Barton, in a popular book that took pains to disassociate Lincoln from Whitman, challenged Rankin’s memory. As early as 1932, however, the scholar Charles Glicksberg, in Whitman and the Civil War, declared that Barton’s book was “marked throughout by a hostile spirit toward Whitman” and discredited Barton’s premise that Lincoln was unaware of Whitman’s existence. Modern scholars, such as Whitman biographers Gay Wilson Allen and Jerome Loving, and David Herbert Donald, who wrote books on both Herndon and Lincoln, likewise have accepted Rankin’s story in spite of Reverend Barton.

  One of the points that authenticate Rankin’s account is his dating of Lincoln’s encounter with Leaves of Grass. Only in that year, two years after the first publication of Whitman’s poems in 1855, would the ex-Congressman and future President Lincoln have had the freedom and inclination to study such a literary curiosity. Only in 1857 could the reading of Whitman have produced such an impact on his oratory.

  Billy Herndon, who knew Lincoln better perhaps than any man in Lincoln’s day, said he was the rare man without vices, but with a flagrant disregard for propriety, “the appropriateness of things.” He was so heedless of his appearance that he forgot to comb his coarse black hair. He cared so little about clothing that sometimes he wouldn’t wear this piece or that. After all, he was raised on a farm in Kentucky, barefoot. “He never could see the harm in wearing a sack-coat instead of a swallowtail to an evening party, nor could he realize the offense of telling a vulgar yarn if a preacher happened to be present.”

  Abraham Lincoln was, therefore, the last man in Illinois who would have dismissed Walt Whitman’s verse on the grounds of its being vulgar or unseemly. Lincoln had a single-minded interest in the truth. Herndon wrote: “No lurking illusion or other error, false in itself and clad for the moment in robes of splendor, ever passed undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his mind . . . He threw his whole mental light around the object, and, after a time, substance and quality stood apart, form and color took their appropriate places, and all was clear and exact in his mind . . . He crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham.”

  Whitman’s Adamic nakedness in itself would have appealed to the lawyer’s “perfect mental lens.” Lincoln’s favorite author was not Shakespeare, Burns, or Byron, though he loved them all. It was the Greek geometer Euclid; Herndon marveled during their circuit-riding days how Lincoln could lie awake concentrating until 2:00 A.M., memorizing the propositions of Euclid by candlelight while the other lawyers snored in the hotel room. The Greek formed Lincoln’s style of debate. Now Lincoln was searching for a still center of the turning world of human nature, a diamond-hard pivot on which he might set his compass to draw the circle of an American civilization. “I am the poet of commonsense and the demonstrable and of immortality,” said Whitman. “Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so, / Only what nobody denies is so.”

  The new world ideal appeared in Leaves of Grass, this naked poet, this “body electric.” Whitman boldly identified not only with every other human being—black, white, or red; slave or master—but with every atom of the universe, in every moment of history since Creation, and with God Himself! The poet had even distinguished between the accidents of his birth, upbringing, and present circumstances, and the essential man that underlay all those trappings.

  Trippers and askers surround me,

  People I meet—the effect upon me of my early life, of the ward and

  city I live in, of the nation,

  The latest news, discoveries, inventions . . .

  My dinner, dress, associates, looks, work, compliments, dues,

  . . .

  . . . loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,

  They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

  But they are not the Me myself.

  Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

  Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary . . .

  . . .

  I believe in you, my soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you,

  And you must not be abased to the other.

  Lincoln never completely overcame his embarrassment over his humble origins, particularly the question of his mother’s illegitimacy. This fueled his ambition even as it colored his abiding melancholy. Now came this personification of democracy, this unencumbered, free-spirited poet, demonstrating to him the soul’s liberty from breeding and class. Everything in Whitman’s philosophy and point of view appealed to Lincoln’s powers of reason, passion for democracy, vigilant conscience, and what Herndon called “his intense veneration of the true and the good.”

  In Lincoln’s study the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass had fallen upon rich and fertile ground. Whether Lincoln read all 384 pages of the book is uncertain. But the poetry of Whitman Lincoln did read left its mark upon him in 1857. In that transitional year a change came over Lincoln. The change is evident in his speeches, an alteration in idiom that has never been thoroughly explained. Lincoln’s early successes in debating, in the courtroom, and “on the stump”—campaigning for himself or his colleagues—resulted from his spellbinding powers as a storyteller and his mastery of logical demonstration and analysis. The “rail-splitter” was a firstclass logic-chopper. Again Herndon bears witness: “He reasoned from well-chosen principles with such clearness, force, and directness that the tallest intellects in the land bowed to him. He was the strongest man I ever saw, looking at him from the elevated standpoint of reason and logic.”

  Here is an excerpt from an early speech protesting the repeal of the Missouri Compromise:

  Equal justice to the south, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the south yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? It is kindly provided that of all those who come into the world, only a small percentage are natural tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave States than in the free. The great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain.

  The combination of wit, common sense, and juridical reasoning is practically irresistible. Yet for all his passion for truth and justice, for all the folksy humor of Lincoln’s early speeches, and his exceptional powers of persuasion, we can find nothing in the first thousand pages of Lincoln’s prose to call sublime—little that we can rightly call literature. His discourse is the analytic, clear medium of an advocate, leavened by barnyard metaphors, tall tales, biblical parables, and fables modeled upon Aesop.

  One can begin to see the change coming in 1854, as Lincoln lashed out against the Kansas-Nebraska Act sponsored by Senator Stephen A. Douglas. This act, permitting settlers in new territories to decide for themselves for or against slavery, spelled the “end of the Missouri Compromise,” which for thirty-four years had banned slavery above latitude 36°30′. Lincoln was grudgingly tolerant of slavery as a necessary evil—where it already existed— but he fiercely opposed the extension of the peculiar institution in the West, which the new law would make inevitable.

  The speeches he gave that year in Bloomington, Springfield, and Peoria, dismantling Douglas’s arguments for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, are models of classical rhetoric invigorated by Lincoln’s belief that the new law was unjust. In their way, t
hese talks are quite convincing. Yet they do not seize the imagination; they do not resonate. Like his stump speeches for the free-soil presidential candidate John Frémont, these were not rousing, for all their righteous indignation. Lincoln had learned to draw up a clear demonstration of a just principle, and the slavery controversy had motivated him. But he had yet to develop that lyric eloquence for which he is now remembered.

  It would take a touch of the poet to move Abraham Lincoln’s oratory from the cold light of rhetoric into the warm iridescence of dramatic literature, with its multicolored rays, its distinct shadings. He had it in him. In his youth he wanted to be a poet. He was familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, and memorized “The Raven,” as well as many verses of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He admired the poem “Mortality,” by the Scot William Knox, and also got it by heart.

  ’Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,