Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Walt Whitman’s brother George, a first lieutenant under General Ambrose Burnside’s command, survived the Union disaster at Fredericksburg in December, advancing over a narrow turf the Rebels had so perfectly enfiladed that one gunner remarked, “a chicken could not live in that field when we opened on it.” Walt called Burnside’s charge “the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever known in the earth’s wars.” Public confidence in the Commander-in-Chief collapsed, and his cabinet was at loggerheads, so that he was able to hold it together only by the most ingenious diplomacy.

  “I am heartsick,” lamented Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, “when I think of the mismanagement of our army . . . There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began.” The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong wrote in his famous diary: “Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him any more.”

  The tempest in the cabinet stirred by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s jealousy and hatred of Secretary of State William H. Seward briefly distracted the public and the press from the epic, pathetic slaughter at Fredericksburg. Radical Republican senators called for Seward to resign; as the President defended the Secretary of State, Seward’s and Chase’s indignant, reciprocal resignations descended into comic opera. Lincoln’s ingenuity in resolving the conflict in his official family “to entire satisfaction”—in his words—impressed the whole Republican Party and bought him some time to win back the confidence of the American people.

  But now there was the carnage at the Battle of Stone’s River, Murfreesboro, known at the moment only to the men fighting and dying there, to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and to President Abraham Lincoln. All evening, December 31, Lincoln had been working on the final draft of his Emancipation Proclamation, which had been the subject of a cabinet meeting that same morning at ten o’clock when Lincoln presented the document for final approval. The changes Chase and others suggested were slight. The major disagreements had been resolved by September 22, when Lincoln announced that the emancipation of slaves would be effective January 1, 1863. But the President had to write a fair copy of the document during the night and into the early morning of New Year’s Day.

  Lincoln wrote slowly and painstakingly, with little facility in his fingers and wrist. An inkblot or a misspelled word would cause him to discard the paper and begin again. The pistol-cracks and rifle-volleys outside his window mocked the shots fired in fury and terror a thousand miles away in Tennessee. And for every shot, a young soldier—losing a life or a limb. It was not a night conducive to sleep or concentration. The very document under his hand seemed to waver and tremble, disturbed by the sounds of gunfire.

  Horace Greeley, Republican Radicals, and abolitionists had been begging Lincoln to free the slaves for as long as he had been in office. As much as he wished to oblige them and suit his own conscience, he had to wait for a military victory, an impression of superiority in the war, if the Proclamation were not to seem an act of desperation. In September the Battle of Antietam—an ambiguous victory—had provided the occasion for Lincoln to act. But since then nothing had gone right. The London Times called emancipation “the wretched makeshift of a pettifogging lawyer” who had stooped to “the execrable expedient of a servile insurrection.” A bloody defeat in Tennessee would make freeing the slaves appear, more than ever, a desperate act rather than a conscientious change in policy.

  Lincoln sat in a large armchair, his legs crossed, writing beneath the glass-globed jets of a chandelier, at a desk between two high windows in his office. The silk braid of a bell cord hung to the right of the desk. A fire was burning on the hearth, with its high brass fender and andirons. The chamber Lincoln called his “shop” took up the southeast corner of the second floor. It was large enough to accommodate, on one wall, a sofa flanked by matching button-and-roll armchairs, and across the room the long oak table where the cabinet met. From above the Victorian marble mantelpiece a portrait of Andrew Jackson overlooked the meeting table toward the military maps hanging on the opposite wall: Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia. The table, desks, chairs, the slant-top escritoire with its pigeonholes and bookshelves in the southeast corner, all were as cluttered as in the Springfield office of Lincoln and Herndon, although here the maids swept and dusted. There was plenty of room to pace.

  As the light of day dawned upon the south lawn, Lincoln could see the red sandstone Gothic towers and battlements of the Smithsonian Institution through the barren trees, and the stump of the unfinished Washington Monument surrounded by cattle sheds, stockyards, and slaughterhouses. Over the Potomac loomed the lavender hills of Virginia. He put down his pen. A block away stood the Decatur House, a mansion with an auction block in its courtyard where for years anyone with enough money could buy a man, woman, or child. Near the Capitol traveling slave dealers lodged at the posh St. Charles Hotel, where the management advertised “roomy underground cells for confining slaves for safe-keeping . . . in case of escape, full value of the negro will be paid by the proprietor.” With a stroke of the pen he would put an end to this. He picked up the pen, and wrote, and put it down again.

  He could not stop thinking about the woman who had come to call on him the day before. “Yesterday, a piteous appeal was made to me by an old lady of genteel appearance, saying she had, with what she thought sufficient assurance she would not be disturbed by the government, fitted up the two South Divisions of the old ‘Duff Green’ building in order to take boarders . . .” The woman might be the same age as his stepmother Sarah, the only member of that family he ever really loved after his sister died. He had made a long pilgrimage from Springfield to Farmington to visit Sarah weeks before his inauguration, and the parting had been difficult, tearful.

  Now this lady (whose identity remains a mystery), dressed in formal black, as forlorn as Sarah, arrived on a day when Lincoln’s duties included admitting West Virginia into the Union as an independent state and trying to persuade a frustrated General Burnside not to resign his command of the Army of the Potomac. She sat outside the President’s office with hands folded primly in her lap. On a day when senators and colonels were being turned away from the anteroom where secretary John Nicolay scanned cartes de visites and petitions, guarding Lincoln from all but the most distinguished suitors, the old lady would not move before the President had heard her. She would wait in dignified silence until he agreed to see her. And at last he did.

  His unvarying approach to such calls was a pleasant nod and smile, and the query “What can I do for you?” Rising from his chair he would, in the case of “an old lady of genteel appearance,” have inquired, “How do you do?” before asking the more direct question.

  The lady was not well. She was probably in tears over her predicament, in order to have wrung such a response from the busy President. She was likely a well-bred woman who had fallen upon hard times, suffering the fate of so many other wealthy families with Southern roots.

  Duff Green, seventy-two, was a railroad and newspaper magnate, a secessionist who had lived in Washington before Lincoln’s election, after which he moved south to serve the Confederacy. Green still owned a mansion on Tenth and E and a group of houses on East Capitol Street between Second and Third Streets, which had become known as “Duff Green’s Row.” The old lady had gotten a lease on the two south divisions and fitted them out for a boarding house. Housing in Washington was scarce, so she quickly acquired boarders, including some congressmen. After being assured that her lease was secure, she had suddenly been ordered by the government to vacate Green’s Row by Saturday, January 3.

  “Independently of the ruin it brings on her, by her lost out-lay, she neither has, nor can find another shelter for her own head,” Lincoln wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. “I know nothing about it myself, but promised to bring it to your notice.”

  This was Lincoln’s way of channeling suits and suitors. Th
e fact that he addressed this appeal to the Secretary of War on January 1, a day when he would hardly have time to visit the water closet between social and military obligations, proves that he knew more about the woman’s plight than he was revealing. He wanted Stanton to do something about it immediately.

  Nothing, it seemed, occurred separately. The woman’s fate was connected to the document Lincoln was finishing, as gray dawn became golden morning and he could hear servants’ foot-steps in the corridor. Duff Green’s buildings had been appropriated by the city’s military governor, James Wadsworth. An abolitionist, Wadsworth planned to use the entire block to house “contrabands”—curious term for the runaway slaves from the South who had been flooding the city, destitute, in rags, homeless. Their tents and piteous shanties would soon litter the Ellipse, visible from Lincoln’s window. After the President had issued his Proclamation, there would be not just thousands but tens of thousands of freed Negroes in the Federal City. And General James Wadsworth wanted to shelter as many of them as he could.

  General Wadsworth reported directly to the Secretary of War, an earnest, bespectacled man whose long black beard had a distinctive silver streak at the chin. Day and night Stanton stood in the musty barrack of the War Department building, at a high desk facing the entrance to his room, scowling and barking orders. He was rarely seen anywhere else. Lincoln said Stanton was “the rock upon which are beating the waves of this conflict,” and newsmen dubbed him “Mars.” Everyone feared Stanton except Lincoln, and even the President was slow to contradict the Secretary or give him direct orders. But at the moment Lincoln could do no more for the sad lady of genteel appearance than alert the frightful, unsentimental Secretary of War. Her fate was in his hands.

  Returning to the Proclamation, the President wrote: “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” He was finished. He pulled the bell cord next to his desk to summon a courier, who would carry the manuscript to the Secretary of State’s office. There William Seward would review the document and have it copied for the press before midday, when both men would sign it. A clerk would pen the formal close, “In witness whereof . . . ,” while Lincoln had his breakfast: one egg and a cup of coffee.

  When he had dressed for the formal reception, Lincoln went to fetch Mary. She wore a black velvet dress with lozenge trimming at the waist, diamond earrings and necklace, and around her head a black shawl. This would be her first public reception since the burial of their eleven-year-old son Willie, who had died of typhoid in February 1862. The Lincolns were racked by guilt that the foul air of the canal that flowed behind the White House had killed the boy. Of all their four sons (Robert, Eddie, Willie, and Tad), Willie had been the favorite, and Mary had not recovered from the shock. She took comfort in the company of spirit mediums, whose séances held in the darkened Red Room brought her in touch with Willie’s sensitive, poetic ghost. Lincoln was concerned about his wife this morning, doubting she could hold up under the pressure of receiving a thousand visitors, who began arriving at nine-thirty.

  The gorgeous parade of the diplomats came first, ambassadors and their wives from India, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere in their colorful costumes and headdresses—red and blue saris with gold thread; fiery kimonos; the fez, the veil, the mantilla. The distinguished representatives of foreign courts, in their carriages, drove rapidly up the semicircular drive, alighted, and advanced through a screen of Ionic columns to the audience room, where they met the President and First Lady standing together. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon, chief of protocol, made the introductions. Meanwhile the army and navy officers in full parade dress were gathering at the War Department. They marched to the White House at ten o’clock and the Lincolns, standing side by side, smiling and bowing, received them in the order of their rank.

  At noon the gates were opened to the public, an overwhelming, if well dressed and orderly, crowd. Men wore formal black; women came in silks and lace, satins and feathers, but unbonnetted. “With the stirring events of the times and our largely increased community,” said the Washington Chronicle, “the desire this year was greater than ever to call on the patriotic Chief Magistrate . . . Aware of the public sentiment, and anticipating the extreme pressure on New Year’s morning, every arrangement was made at the mansion to facilitate the general movements of the people . . .”

  The threat of assassination was constant. A detachment from a Pennsylvania regiment plus most of the metropolitan police were on hand to supervise the crowd. Officers stood guard under the portico, behind the projecting semicircular colonnade, forming a line up the two flights of steps, ushering people into the vestibule in installments. Canvas had been spread over the new carpeting in the East Room to protect it from muddy boots.

  The crowd pressed forward in columns, first to the Red Room, where Mrs. Lincoln greeted them. The short, plump First Lady stood under the full-length portrait of George Washington, which Dolly Madison had rescued from the English invaders in 1814 by clipping it from the frame with her sewing scissors. Mary knew the story. The White House still showed the scorch marks from the day British General Robert Ross had set it afire. The copper roof, lapped instead of grooved, leaked; yet Mrs. Lincoln had quickly spent more than twenty thousand dollars on carpets, damask curtains, gold-fringed tapestries for the Green Room, a Limoges dining service, French wallpaper, drapes, ornately carved armchairs and sofas, and new gasoliers of brass with milk-glass globes.

  From Mrs. Lincoln’s parlor the visitors passed into the Blue Room. There the President stood smiling, his little boy Tad at his side, while Marshal Lamon performed the ceremony of introduction. Vigilant, protective, the burly, mustachioed marshal was almost as tall as Lincoln—they made an imposing pair. Noah Brooks, a correspondent for the Sacramento Union, recalled a tumultuous scene as the crowd filled the reception rooms. “It required no little engineering to steer the throng, after it met and engaged the President, out of a great window from which a temporary bridge had been constructed for an exit.”

  The President stood serenely, “availing himself of every opportunity to drop a pleasant word or remark,” the Chronicle reported. Noah Brooks, who was also a friend of Lincoln’s, knew that after a couple of hours of hand-shaking the President’s fingers would be so swollen he could hardly write; the white kid glove on Lincoln’s busy right hand looked as if it had been dropped in the dustbin. Brooks noticed that Lincoln “often looked over the heads of the multitudinous strangers who shook his hand with fervor and affection.” The President’s thoughts “were far away on the bloody and snowy field” in Tennessee, where men were dying to save the Union, or destroy it.

  Walt Whitman had recently arrived in the Federal City from a battlefield in Virginia where he had spent Christmas with the troops. “My place in Washington was a peculiar one—my reasons for being there, my doing there what I did do. I do not think I quite had my match . . . No one—at least no one that I met—went just from my own reasons—from a profound conviction of necessity, affinity—coming into closest relations—relations oh! so close and dear!—with the whole strange welter of life gathered to that mad focus.”

  New Year’s Day, William O’Connor took Whitman from their rooming house on L Street on a stroll down Vermont Avenue toward Lafayette Square to see the hoi polloi jostling to shake Lincoln’s hand. The morning was brilliant, clear and not too cold. O’Connor was a writer—Thayer & Eldridge had published his antislavery novel Harrington. Slender and blue-eyed, he was well-favored, said to resemble the “Chandos” portrait of young Shakespeare. O’Connor first met Whitman in the Boston office of their bold new publisher. After the firm’s bankruptcy, both Charlie Eldridge and his novelist landed in the civil service: Eldridge in the Army Paymaster’s Office, and O’Connor as a clerk at the Light-House Board. Whitman liked the “gallant, handsome, fine-voiced, glowing-eyed man” and his wife, Nellie, a wise woman wh
ose austere features belied her generous nature. She adored the visitor even more than did her husband, who wrote of Whitman: “He is so large and strong—so pure, proud and tender, with such an ineffable bonhomie and wholesome sweetness of presence; all the young men and women are in love with him.”

  Whitman was lucky to find such friends in Washington. He had left New York after the Battle of Fredericksburg because the Tribunehad listed his brother among the wounded. Walt had come hoping to find George in one of the hospitals and to take care of him. He arrived on December 16, 1862, flat broke, having had his pocket picked while changing trains in Philadelphia. When he couldn’t find George in Washington, he decided to search in Virginia, but first he looked up his old friend O’Connor. The novelist loaned him money; Eldridge inquired at the Paymaster’s Office about a job for him; Nellie O’Connor fed him and made him up a bed.

  The next day, the seventeenth, Whitman took the boat down to Falmouth, Virginia. After reaching the front, near Falmouth Station, he came to Lucy Mansion, a makeshift field hospital where Clara Barton was bandaging and feeding hundreds of soldiers. Whitman studied a heap of amputated arms, legs, and feet piled under a tree in front of the building, wondering if any of them had belonged to his brother. In a nearby garden he glimpsed a row of corpses, “each covered with its brown woolen blanket,” and in the dooryard fresh graves, mostly of officers, each marked by a barrel stave with name and rank hastily carved.