Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.

  From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud.

  Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!

  He wrote to a friend, in 1846, “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is.”

  As late as 1846 Lincoln was writing skillful imitations of Augustan English poetry, showing the influence of Thomas Gray.

  As distant mountains please the eye,

  When twilight chases day—

  As bugle-tones, that, passing by

  In distance die away—

  As leaving some grand water-fall

  We ling’ring list its roar,

  So memory will hallow all

  We’ve known, but know no more.

  These verses and others were inspired by a visit in 1844 to his childhood home in Perry County, Indiana, where his mother and sister were buried. During that visit he saw his old schoolmate Matthew Gentry, who, “At the age of nineteen . . . unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity.” Lincoln wrote of him:

  But here’s an object more of dread

  Than ought the grave contains—

  A human form with reason fled,

  While wretched life remains.

  Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright,

  A fortune-favored child—

  Now locked for aye, in mental night,

  A haggard mad-man wild.

  . . .

  And when at length, tho’ drear and long,

  Time soothed thy fiercer woes,

  How plaintively thy mournful song

  Upon the still night rose.

  I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,

  Far distant, sweet and lone—

  The funeral dirge, it ever seemed

  Of reason dead and gone.

  These tuneful stanzas, charged with pathos, come from a long narrative poem called “The Maniac,” published anonymously in the Quincy Whig on May 5, 1847. The story behind the poem helps to explain Lincoln’s lifelong obsession with madness, as well as its antithesis, rational thought. Eight months later the poet took a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. While no one nowadays wishes Lincoln had given up politics, the critics Jacques Barzun and Edmund Wilson have both proposed that Lincoln—alone among our presidents—could have made a lasting contribution to American letters if he had preferred a literary career.

  In 1849 Lincoln returned from his rather clumsy if high-minded term in Congress with the new awareness that he lacked literary culture. His two years in Washington among college graduates had exposed this fault, and so, according to Herndon, Lincoln “extended somewhat his research in that direction.” The trauma of losing a child might have led him to seek solace among books—Eddie Lincoln, age four, died of tuberculosis on February 1, 1850. During the next seven years, as Lincoln built up his law practice and worked behind the scenes in Illinois politics, he spent his leisure hours reading Shakespeare, Pope, Holmes, and Francis Bacon, as well as the occasional book Herndon recommended, such as his favorites Parker and Emerson, and the poems of Walt Whitman.

  Lincoln was fatefully drawn into the crucial controversy of those years: the fight over slavery in the territories, which led to armed conflict (“Bleeding Kansas”) in 1856, and finally the argument over the Dred Scott decision in 1857. His opinions launched him into the front ranks of the fledgling Republican Party. This was the Free-Soil Party that nominated John Frémont to run for the presidency in 1856 against the Democrat James Buchanan. Lincoln, incensed over Stephen A. Douglas’s concept of popular sovereignty, spoke out. This is not the place to recount Lincoln’s rise in the Republican Party on the tide of free-soil sentiment, his combination of calculation and insouciance, cold-blooded ambition and reckless idealism. Others have told it often and well. Here we are concerned with Lincoln’s literary development—how words transformed him from a local politician into a national figure, a statesman who, some said, might make a good presidential candidate in 1860.

  First Lincoln would have to lose an election, the nationally publicized battle with Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1858. Walt Whitman’s earliest mention of Lincoln came in a brief newspaper notice of Lincoln’s debates with Douglas in that year. Lincoln, upon his nomination in Springfield on June 16, 1858, delivered a speech, now called the “House Divided” speech, that rocked the Republican convention. Published in the Illinois State Journal on June 18 and the Chicago Tribune on June 19, it was quoted, and attacked or defended, by everyone concerned about the future of slavery and the Union. Quoting St. Mark, Lincoln proclaimed: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” The speech sounded so radical that some feared it might cost him the Senate seat; the message was so resonant others believed it would win him a presidential nomination. This is the first of Lincoln’s speeches to be widely regarded as a work of literature.

  Lincoln had used the figure of the “house divided” in an 1843 campaign circular he wrote for the Whig Party, urging the party to adopt a convention system; and that figure was taken up by abolitionists and Southern apologists alike during the early 1850s. The draft of a similar speech discovered after Lincoln’s death indicates that the candidate also employed the figure in a talk given on May 18, 1858, in Edwardsville, Illinois.

  The “House Divided” message arose from Lincoln’s fury over the Dred Scott decision. On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in the territories, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Dred Scott’s residence in Minnesota did not make him a free man because Minnesota had never been free soil. Furthermore, as a slave and a Negro, Scott had no legal rights under the Constitution—he could not sue for his freedom in the U.S. courts even if he lived in a “free” state. Dred Scott returned to his master.

  The Dred Scott decision, handed down only days after Buchanan’s inaugural address (in which Taney’s opinion was blatantly foreshadowed) and so soon after blood was shed in Kansas over the slavery issue, made Lincoln suspect a conspiracy was afoot among the proslavery Democrats. While Lincoln was not an abolitionist, he hated slavery. He knew Taney’s ruling was not only an attack on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—it opened the door to slavery of all kinds, in every state of the Union.

  Stephen A. Douglas was the chief spokesman for the administration’s policy in Kansas. He visited Springfield in mid-June of 1857, speaking on several topics, including Kansas and Dred Scott. Lincoln sat in the audience, fuming over Douglas’s defense of the Court’s decision. The day Douglas left town, Lincoln started formulating his response. He labored over it for two weeks; then he delivered the message in the Illinois statehouse on June 26. Taken paragraph by paragraph, this hour-long argument contains more poetic tropes than any speech Lincoln had ever given. And it is poetry of surprises, challenges, and brazen disregard for propriety and convention. It is Whitmanesque. Lincoln appears to be under the poet’s spell.

  In the first twenty minutes or so of the speech he is the old familiar Lincoln, quoting Douglas’s popular-sovereignty beliefs and sarcastically reducing them to absurdity: “If there should be one real living free state Democrat in Kansas, I suggest it might be well to catch him, and stuff and preserve his skin, as an interesting specimen of that soon to be extinct variety of the genus, Democrat.” But when he comes to the topic of Judge Taney’s decision against Dred Scott, Lincoln adopts a new tone; from this point on the language is charged with naked passion and frank sexuality. Every paragraph ends in a poetic flourish—a figure of speech or a metrical coup. Contrasting the old reverence for the Declaration of Independence—its insistence upon inclusiveness and equality— with the outrage of Taney’s decision, Lincoln says:

  In those days, our Declaration of Independence wa
s held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they would not at all recognize it. All the powers on earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry.

  His description of the imprisoned Negro is the most sophisticated extended metaphor Lincoln has ever drawn:

  They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places . . .

  This little-known speech given in midsummer of 1857 is the work of a seasoned orator in control of a rich battery of figures and metrical rhythms—an orator who grasps the charm of poetry and its power to unleash the emotions of both speaker and audience.

  Douglas had long played upon the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races;” hoping to “fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries . . . he therefore clings to this hope,” said Lincoln, “as a drowning man to the last plank.” Until this moment both Douglas and Lincoln had handled the subject gingerly, with due respect for the explosive—unspeakable— sexual content that lay just under the surface of their polite controversy. But from here on out, Lincoln, like a true “camerado” of Walt Whitman, lays the subject bare:

  Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.

  This was so shocking, Lincoln would never need to express himself more boldly on the subject. I can just leave her alone. A short time later, toward the end of his speech, Lincoln uses understatement to establish that a number of slave masters could not resist the allure of the captive female. He devotes a paragraph of statistics to the proportion of mulattos to blacks—far greater in the slave states than in the free. In 1850 there were 405,751 mulattos in the United States. “Nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white masters,” he observes. Then, driving his point home, he demurely adds: “Of course, I state this case [Dred Scott’s] as an illustration only, not meaning to intimate that the master of Dred Scott and his family, or any more than a per centage of masters generally, are inclined to exercize this particular power which they hold over their female slaves.” The numbers show the percentage is large. The politician stops short of condemning the slavemasters and miscegenation, although he himself would prefer to keep the races separate, were it possible. It is not possible. And slavery does not discourage miscegenation, it abets it.

  There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and black men enough to marry all the black women, and so let them be married . . .

  The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle; and it will be ever hard to find many men who will send a slave to Liberia, and pay his passage while they can send him to a new country, Kansas for instance, and sell him for fifteen hundred dollars, and the rise.

  So ends Abraham Lincoln’s explosive reply to Stephen Douglas on June 26, 1857, with the stunning metaphor of blinding greed, and capped with a perfect verse of iambic pentameter. This was the beginning of his bid for Douglas’s Senate seat. Because Illinois, and Lincoln, were wielding more and more influence on the national political scene, the New York Times printed the speech word for word, where Whitman himself could read it.

  Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable

  to me than my mast-hemm’d Manhatta, my river and sun-set,

  and my scallop-edged waves of flood-tide, the sea-gulls

  oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the

  belated lighter . . .

  —WHITMAN, “SUN-DOWN POEM”

  On July 22 Lincoln brought his wife with him to New York via Niagara Falls, where they enjoyed a belated honeymoon. Because his work took him away from home for weeks at a time, they treasured these days alone together. Mary wanted to shop for dresses. Lincoln hoped to collect an overdue fee from the Illinois Central Railroad, whose company headquarters was in Manhattan. He figured on better luck dunning them in person, but found the railroad on the verge of bankruptcy.

  The Lincolns arrived in New York on the eve of the financial panic of 1857. Banks and businesses were closing their doors. Forty thousand workers out of jobs would soon march through the streets to City Hall bearing banners reading WE WANT WORK and HUNGER IS A SHARP THORN. Manufacturers blamed the depression on the Democrats, who had steadily reduced protective tariffs. The industrial East, as well as the Middle West, reeling from bank failures and unemployment, would turn toward the new Republican Party in 1860.

  Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! Cast black shadows at night-

  fall! Cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses . . .

  While Abraham and Mary Lincoln walked arm in arm along the Manhattan wharves, watching the gulls float on the wind and the smoke plume from the ferry, Lincoln marveled at the vast potential of the metropolis. This was the city Walt Whitman had celebrated in his “Sun-Down Poem.”

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

  On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross are more

  curious to me than you suppose . . .

  Yearning to match humankind with the golden hour, in this poem (which would later become “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) Whitman sometimes seems to be looking out at his reader from the pages of his book:

  Who was to know what should come home to me?

  Who knows but I am enjoying this?

  Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you

  cannot see me?

  As self-conscious as any tourist, Lincoln looked all around him.

  Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be

  looking upon you!

  Only months earlier Whitman had written a political tract called “The Eighteenth Presidency!” He said he would be “much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boat-man come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.” Whitman called for this “Redeemer President of These States” to come out of “the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie, the hill-side.” Now here was Abraham Lincoln, lacking only the beard, standing on the shores of Whitman’s beloved Manhattan. And at his side was Mary, with her moon face, her narrow eyes, plump cheeks, and pointed nose, as happy as she would ever be in her sad life.

  Mary dreamed of visiting Europe. But she told her husband it was not to be, because “poverty was my position.” She teased him—a lawyer who was very prosperous—with the joke “I am determined my next husband shall be rich.” Meanwhile, across the East River, in a crowded house in Brooklyn, the author of Leaves of Grass was in the throes of a financial panic of his own that was no laughing matter.

  Walt Whitman may have been famous in Lincoln’s law office, but neither he nor his publisher was making any money from his books. The thirty-eight-year-old poet was sharing an attic bedroom with his crippled, mentally retarded brother Eddie, twenty-two, in their mother’s brownstone on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. Two other brothers lived there: George, twenty-seven, a cabinetmaker who was soon to join the army, and Jeff, twenty-four, a civil engineer. To make ends meet, Louisa Whitman took in boarders. But since the death of her husband two years ea
rlier, she and the rest of the family had depended upon Walt, more for his kindness and loyalty as “pater familias” than for his erratic income as a writer, printer, and editor. Hard times had come, and though Whitman was writing a little for the Brooklyn Daily Times, he was in debt.

  In 1856, deciding to take matters into his own hands, he had accepted a two-hundred-dollar loan from Fanny Fern’s husband, James Parton, on a short-term note, to purchase the plates of Leaves from his old booksellers, Fowler & Wells. He hoped to find a more enterprising publisher, who might make more profit from the text.

  When the note fell due in the spring, Whitman had no money to pay it off. In late June, a knock came at the door. It was Oliver Dyer, Fanny Fern’s friend and editor, acting as counsel for James Parton, and come to collect the plaintiff ’s two hundred dollars. When Whitman pleaded poverty, pointing to his cramped quarters under the eaves, Dyer carried away what little the poet had that might fetch ready money, including his books and a beloved oil painting by his friend the eminent Jesse Talbot illustrating a scene from Pilgrim’s Progress. Fern, a.k.a. Sara Parton, had been more than a little bit in love with the handsome, gray-eyed poet. And when, at length, she discovered that the object of her passion did not return it in kind, she decided to demand payment on her loan. Dyer later told Whitman that James Parton had accepted his belongings as full payment of the debt. But this was a lie. Dyer probably kept the painting for himself, and the Partons ever after condemned Walt Whitman as a deadbeat and a “bill-jumper.”

  If Abraham and Mary Lincoln, on holiday in New York during the summer of 1857, had passed Walt Whitman as he strolled along Broadway, south past the Tremont Hotel toward Bleecker Street, a premier shopping district (Mary bought the finest bonnets and dresses), the happy, prosperous Western couple would have beheld a perfect specimen of midcentury bohemia. Walt—in the words of a contemporary—was “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchusbrowed, bearded like a satyr, and rank.” He wore pants of a very full cut (“bloomers”) tucked into his cowhide boots, and a red undershirt unbuttoned to the sternum, exposing his brawny neck. Over this he wore a short “roundabout” jacket, striped calico with oversized pockets and large buttons. Gray eyes, cautious yet wise and full of a tender sympathy, looked out from under a broad-brimmed slouch hat.