Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  “Great is justice!” Whitman sings in “Poem of a Few Greatnesses.”

  Justice is not settled by legislators and laws—it is in the soul,

  It cannot be varied by statutes, any more than love, pride, the

  attraction of gravity, can

  It is immutable—it does not depend on majorities—majorities or

  what not come at last before the same passionless and exact tribunal.

  Every poem in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass is luminous with the passion for justice, liberty, and truth.

  There is one flagrant exception. The most outrageous, obscene poem in the book Lincoln read in 1857 bears the seductive Euclidean title “Poem of The Propositions of Nakedness.” The fifty-six “propositions” ironically invite the reader to turn the world upside down, to desecrate the spiritual laws that rule the ideal republic Whitman has proposed in the preceding three hundred pages of Leaves, his “new Bible.”

  Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! Let the days be darker

  than the nights!

  . . .

  Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right!

  Every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!

  Let none but infidels be countenanced!

  . . .

  Let there be no God!

  Let there be money, business, railroads, imports, exports, custom,

  authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!

  Let judges and criminals be transposed! Let the prison-keepers be put in prison! . . .

  . . .

  Let the slaves be masters! Let the masters become slaves!

  . . .

  Let shadows be furnished with genitals! Let substances be deprived of their genitals!

  Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! Let them dance on, while seeming lasts! . . .

  . . .

  Let the white person tread the black person under his heel!

  Although the opening lines of this invitation to a nightmare (“Respondez! Respondez! / Let every one answer!”) indicate that Whitman was calling for a protest, it appears that the poet’s strategy failed, and his audience was simply appalled by the horrible lines that followed. In a rare instance of self-censorship, he removed the verses from future editions. The only man in America who responded in a way that might have pleased him was Lincoln. Whitman’s mad poem perfectly described the chaos of a nation divided against itself, the dark side of the American psyche, which the candidate attacked. The “House Divided” speech is a kind of exorcism.

  The first few minutes of Lincoln’s great speech, with its sharp architectural imagery and its hint of a coming conflict, would never be forgotten.

  If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

  We are now far into a fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.

  Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

  In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.

  “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

  I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

  Like the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, these sentences boldly stake their ground and point their direction. Lincoln proposes a conspiracy theory: that leaders of all three branches of government—the President, the Congress, and the Court—colluded in revoking the Missouri Compromise and depriving the Negro of his rights under the Constitution. The orator begins by vividly likening the “complete legal combination” to a “piece of machinery.” But as he gathers momentum in narrating the skullduggery of presidents, senators, and judges, he returns to the dominant architectural figure. In the middle of the speech he exclaims: “Under the Dred Scott decision, ‘squatter sovereignty’ squatted out of existence, tumbled down like temporary scaffolding—like the mould at the foundry served through one blast and fell back into loose sand—helped to carry an election, and then was kicked to the winds.”

  This is powerful poetry, and an hour of such concentrated imagery would not do. Lincoln eases into a straightforward story of events leading up to the Dred Scott decision. The speech is almost operatic in its balance of lyricism and narration. When it comes time to nail the lid on his argument, the “rail-splitter” echoes Whitman’s “Broad-Axe Poem,” which contains the lines

  The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,

  The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

  The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them regular,

  Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises, according as they were prepared . . .

  No one can “absolutely know” the Dred Scott decision was a conspiracy, Lincoln admits. “But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen [Douglas], Franklin [Pierce], Roger [Taney] and James [Buchanan], for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house . . . all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting . . . and not a piece too many or too few . . . in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning . . .” Lincoln’s use of their Christian names is rhetorically masterful, as he reduces the enormity of the men’s crime to the misguided foolery of a few mischievous boys.

  There is much more poetry in this speech, but I will cite only Lincoln’s variation on the proverb “A living dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4), because when Lincoln pinned this on Stephen Douglas it stuck. Like the image of the house divided, it was something neither the newsmen nor the two candidates ever let rest. Douglas, with his mane of thick, wavy hair, his short neck and broad features, looked a little bit like a lion. Lincoln said: “Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don’t care about it. His avowed mission is impressing the ‘public heart’ to care nothing about it.”

  Lincoln had turned a corner back in 1857. He had developed the power to raise his oratory to the level of dramatic poetry whenever the occasion called for it.

  When Lincoln had emptied his hat of notes, then stitched the notes together into a first draft—which he laboriously revised into a second, third, then a fourth draft—when at last he had finished the final draft of the speech under the watchful eye of his law partner Herndon, he got up and closed the office door. He turned the key in the lock and drew the curtain across the glass.

  Lincoln read the speech aloud to Herndon, pausing at the end of each paragraph for his friend’s comments and questions. After the first seven sentences Herndon said, “It is true, but is it wise or politic to say so?” And Lincoln replied that he would rather be defeated with the “house divided” expression in his address than win the election without it.

  On June 16, the day before the convention, Lincoln invited a dozen friends to the statehouse library so that he could try the speech out on them. When he had read the last lines—“If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come”—he asked for everybody’s opinion. One man called it “a damned fool utterance”; one said the doctrine was “way ahead of its time,” while another claimed it would drive away voters who had recently left the Democratic Party. Not a man present had a good word for the speech but Billy Herndon. He agreed with the others that it was “rank,” but he confessed it suited his own views.

  “Lincoln,” said Herndon, “deliver th
at speech as read and it will make you President.”

  2

  NEW YORK, 1861

  Omnibuses—white, red, black, and yellow horsecars drawn by teams of Cleveland bays—plodded up and down Broadway from the Battery to Union Square, their shouting drivers sometimes making a traffic jam at the lower end of Manhattan. Everybody in New York rode in a Broadway horsecar—rich merchants, bankers, lawyers, and mechanics; young ladies, actresses, matrons, and harlots; and noisy boys—all jostled and bounced together on long benches in the open-air Knickerbocker coaches. Along the Broadway and Fifth Avenue line, the Broadway and Twenty-third Street line, the Yellow Bird, the Madison Avenue–Bleecker Street, from four o’clock in the morning until midnight the drivers raced their teams and reined them in to gather up the fares.

  “Everything appertaining to them is a study, perhaps even a fascination, if once you begin to see it. One lounging man appears to think so, at any rate,” says Walt Whitman. He cannot resist “as the driver of that handsome Fifth Avenue pulls up, casting at the lounger a friendly and inquiring glance, as much as to say, Come take a ride Walt Whitman?” He turns from the thoroughfare where beautiful women, celebrities, fops, “any well-dressed nobodies” are window-shopping, seizes the handle by the driver’s box, and swings up gracefully. He calls himself the “pet and pride of the Broadway stage-drivers,” and he says: “As onward speeds the stage, mark his nonchalant air, seated aslant and quite at home. Our million-hued ever-changing panorama of Broadway moves steadily down; he, going up, sees it all, as in a kind of half dream.” The drivers southward bound salute the poet in recognition; silently he returns their salutations, “the raised arm, and upright hand.”

  “Every blade of grass is a study,” Abraham Lincoln told a crowd of Wisconsin farmers late in 1859. “And not grass alone; but soils, seeds, and seasons . . . the thousand things of which these are specimens—each a world of study within itself.” Walt Whitman was a collector of human specimens, each one a leaf of grass that would enrich the luxuriating field of his “New American Bible.” Many pages of Whitman’s diaries and notebooks are simply lists of names and addresses, along with thumbnail sketches of men that he found engaging. “Bill Guess—aged 22. A thoughtless, strong, generous animal nature, fond of direct pleasures . . . Taken sick with the small-pox . . . a large, blond fellow, weighed over 200; Peter—— ——, large, strong-boned young fellow, driver. Should weigh 180. Free and candid to me the first time he saw me. Man of strong self-will, powerful coarse feelings and appetites. Had a quarrel, borrowed $300, left his father . . . ; December 28—Saturday night Mike Ellis—wandering at the corner of Lexington Av & 32nd St.—took him home to 150 37th Street— 4th Story back room—bitter cold night—works in Stevenson’s Carriage factory.” He mentions “Dan’l Spencer . . . somewhat feminine—5th av (44) (May 29)—told me he had never been in a fight and did not drink at all . . . Slept with me September 3rd” and the stage driver George Marler, “driving No. 8 on 4th Ave. large-nosed, tallish fellow—Western, is from Ohio—has traveled with a show as ‘candy butcher.’ ”

  Riding the side-wheel ferries across the Hudson River, prowling the wharves and lumberyards along the water, strolling along Broadway, riding on the omnibuses, where he helped this or that driver collect fares in exchange for a free ticket and a chance to chat with passengers, Whitman was looking for love, “Picking out here one that I love, to go with on brotherly terms.” It was the kind of love that he had known and lost, the kind that had inspired the erotic cluster of forty-five poems he called “Calamus” after the aromatic marsh plant with its phallus-shaped spadix. He had had good luck on the omnibuses. Whitman was fond of the type of man who drove the horses—strong, skillful and intelligent (if sometimes illiterate), usually country-bred. In fact, the man he had loved in the late 1850s, Fred Vaughan, a younger man from Brooklyn who inspired the “Calamus” poems, was himself a stage driver. For a while they had stayed together in the Whitman house on Classon Avenue.

  He and Fred Vaughan had parted. Now Whitman had the poetry to console him, free-verse poems he called his “sonnets,” to record that manly love he named “adhesiveness” (a term borrowed from phrenology, where it refers to our propensity to bond with one another) to distinguish it from the “amative love” between men and women, which the poet found less appealing to him personally. In his day Whitman was considered an authority on erotic love, to his greater glory and notoriety among the general public.

  A new, enlarged edition of Leaves of Grass bound in orange cloth was available in the Astor Place bookstores. Blind-stamped with symbolic devices—the Western hemisphere nestled in clouds, a rising sun with nine spokes of light, a pointing hand with a butterfly perched on its index finger—the 456-page crown octavo was enriched by more than a hundred new poems. These included the “Calamus” cluster, as well as what are now known as “Starting from Paumanok” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “Calamus” was now counterbalanced by a sequence called “Enfans d’Adam,” erotic poems about heterosexual love so explicit that Ralph Waldo Emerson begged his friend to delete them. Whitman told Emerson that expurgation of “Enfans d’Adam” would be “apology,” “surrender,” and “an admission that something or other was wrong.”

  “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book,” Whitman told his friend Horace Traubel.

  The 1860 edition of Leaves was a rich, handsome volume. Whitman’s new publishers, the young partners W. R. Thayer and Charles W. Eldridge, out of Boston, promised, “We can and will sell a large number of copies.” The poet was proud of the new edition and hoped Thayer & Eldridge would deliver upon that promise. But despite the firm’s expensive promotional brochures, display ads, and puffery, this edition fared only a little better than its predecessors, selling a couple of thousand copies. And by the end of 1860 the publishers were bankrupt. Their plan to create for Whitman “an overwhelming demand among the mass public” had failed.

  As if in anticipation of failure, the new poems in the reddish-brown colored book are tinged with melancholy and dread. The joyous, optimistic speaker of the poems Lincoln once read in his office now sang in sorrowful tones of a bird that has lost its mate:

  O darkness! O in vain!

  O I am very sick and sorrowful

  O brown halo in the sky, near the moon, drooping upon the sea!

  O troubled reflection in the sea!

  O throat! O throbbing heart!

  O all—And I singing uselessly all the night!

  . . .

  O past! O joy!

  In the air—in the woods—over fields,

  Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved!

  Loved—but no more with me,

  We two together no more.

  The many poems of love and lost love, which were certainly personal, Whitman insisted were political. In the “Calamus” cluster, as in the “Enfans d’Adam,” the Dionysian Whitman imagined erotic love, especially the “love of comrades,” to be the true foundation of democracy and the Union. In an open letter to Emerson included in the book, he explained that his poetry was meant to unify the nation, “for the union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to this life than the union of These States is to their life.” In this effort, too, the poet realized he had fallen short, when South Carolina seceded from the Union six weeks after Abraham Lincoln was elected president. By January 26, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had joined South Carolina. Now it would take something more than poetry to unify the nation.

  Most of the finest poetry Whitman would ever write was now printed and bound in the 1860 edition—all but a few poems he would later compose about the war and Abraham Lincoln. His great work had been done in the seven years previous. Writers are mercifully spared such knowledge, yet a poet’s power of prophecy is often most acute in telling his own fortune. Whitman may have sensed that his creative power was waning.

  The poet was in low spirits at the turn of the year 1860–1861, a dark peri
od he called a “slough” or “stagnation.” In a draft of verses, he wrote of “Years that whirl I know not whither / Schemes, politics fail—all is shaken—all gives way / Nothing is sure.” The domestic situation in the Brooklyn home where he lived with his mother, four brothers, and the brothers’ wives and children was wretched. The oldest brother, Jesse, a laborer and sailor who came and went erratically, was in the tertiary stage of syphilis. His madness ranged from catatonia to fits of violence in which he threatened even his ailing mother, sixty-six-year-old Louisa. The family had moved to a house on Portland Avenue in 1859, and there Walt, Jesse, Eddie, George, and Louisa were joined by Jeff (Walt’s favorite brother); his wife, Martha; and their daughter Mannahatta (Hattie). Nearby lived the thirty-four-year-old brother Andrew, dying of alcoholism and T.B.; his slatternly wife, Nancy; and their two children. The two babies were so pathetically neglected that Walt and his mother were constantly concerned for their welfare.

  Whitman’s self-spun legend of the happy, robust poet, and the exuberance of many of his poems, might persuade us he was exceptionally fortunate. His greatest good fortune was his temperament. The full-scale biographies of Whitman by Gay Wilson Allen, Justin Kaplan, Jerome Loving, and others tell the story of Whitman’s troubled family, his compassion for them, and his unfailing loyalty. Whitman’s household—the rooms and lives that surrounded the table where he wrote—was, in 1861, not a place where a man would go for peace, comfort, or even a good night’s sleep. Little is known about Whitman’s work habits, but we do know he was a late riser; doubtless he wrote much of his poetry while the rest of the clan slept or tried to sleep. The house on Portland Avenue was a place to be avoided at any opportunity.

  That winter Walt Whitman was not writing much. He was loafing and worrying. The face that looks out from the frontispiece of the 1860 Leaves is not the lean, defiant young man (“a hundred and sixty-five or thereabouts”), his hat cocked to one side, that Lincoln saw in the 1856 edition. The 1860 engraving Whitman called “characteristic” portrays a wavy-haired Byronic figure sporting an elaborate bow tie dangling low from an open collar that shows plenty of breastbone. “I was in full bloom then: weighed two hundred and ten pounds . . .” This later engraving, based on a painting by Charles Hine, shows signs of dissipation: pouches under the eyes, premature wrinkles in the brow and over the eyelids. Whitman had grown fond of the beer they served in Pfaff ’s Cellar, not to mention the Frankfurter Wurst, the Schwarz brot, and the Schweizer Käse. But it was the lager that added the forty-five pounds and made the graying poet look so much older than his forty-one years. Nobody ever reported Walt Whitman drunk, although he could be seen sipping beer at his table against the wall at Pfaff ’s every evening.