Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  “On the Virginia side I see the transparent copper-colored clouds hang up there, gradually fading—sweep my eyes in admiration around the unsurpassed broad-stretched environ-scenery of river, hill, and wood, that marks this one of the most beautiful natural locations on the continent.”

  He had a cheerful disposition that dispelled gloom. The newspaper lying on a desk reported, “The body of an infant, supposed to be only three or four days old, was found in the canal, at the foot of North Capitol Street.” In a city with hundreds of brothels this was a common occurrence. Two months earlier, on the day Whitman arrived in Washington, a dead horse lay at the corner of Ninth and G Streets next to the Patent Office. A week later the newspapers were still ridiculing the authorities for not removing the carcass. The citizens relied upon packs of dogs, free-ranging pigs, and flocks of crows to dispose of garbage and carrion.

  One week after Whitman described the city’s beauty at twilight, Noah Brooks reported in the Sacramento Union, “At this writing the city of Washington is probably the dirtiest and most ill-kept borough in the United States.” The streets were “seas or canals of liquid mud” with “conglomerations of garbage, refuse and trash, the odors whereof rival those of the city of Cologne which Coleridge declared to be ‘seventy separate and distinct stinks.’ ” It was particularly noisome where Whitman worked, near the White House, where the Tiber Creek branch fed a polluted backwater. Brooks mentions the Mall, “the Island, upon which the Smithsonian Institution and other buildings [including Armory Square Hospital, where Whitman nursed soldiers] stand,” and writes that it “is bounded on two sides (N. & E.) by a stagnant canal of ooze, open to the sun’s hot rays, the receptacle of all the imperfect system of drainage,” with human waste, dead cats, dead livestock, dead babies. At a sloping intersection, Brooks observed “a torrent of thick, yellow mud flowing in unruffled smoothness over the concealed crossing” and bearing on its surface the waste that had been swept or bailed out of houses, stables, shops, and saloons. He described the spavined horses condemned to toil in that noxious sludge until “turned out to wander in the bone through the scenes they knew in the flesh.” Nags dropped dead and were carried away by the carrion cart, which in cold weather took its time. “Everybody has heard of the great corruption of the city,” Brooks concludes, “but I will venture to say that its moral corruption is far exceeded by the physical rottenness of its streets.”

  Brooks expressed the majority opinion, which an earlier visitor put succinctly: “In truth it is impossible to imagine a more comfortless situation for a town, or a town more foolishly and uncomfortably laid out.” Another critic, Charles Dickens, scorned the city plan, citing the absurd distances of the stone-and-marble Post Office, the Patent Office, the Treasury, and the Capitol from one another, and the lack of brick streets. He called it the “City of Magnificent Intentions” and a “monument raised to a deceased project.”

  But Walt Whitman, from his high window, idealized the Federal City and admired the sunset, which in 1863, much as today, was magnificent, owing to the particular atmosphere and low cloud formations produced by the tidal estuary. Then, looking down, he saw a string of army wagons lumbering along Fifteenth Street and turning onto Pennsylvania Avenue, white canvas arching over each wagon, each pulled by a six-mule team, with the teamsters walking alongside their mules. He watched squads of the provost guard march by, and a party of cavalry galloping along.

  “I see sick and wounded soldiers (but that’s nothing now—I have seen so many thousands of them)—the light falls, falls, touches the cold white of the great public edifices—touches with a kind of death-glaze here and there the windows of Washington— first lingers on the gilt balls and crosses on the steeples—I see the street-lamps beginning to be touched up, like bright sparks in the distance.” A church bell tolled nearby, melodiously, mournfully, and Walt Whitman closed his notebook.

  The Paymaster’s Office was where Whitman worked between 9:30 A.M. and 2:00 P.M., to earn the few dollars he needed to pay for his lodging in the O’Connors’ rented quarters at 394 L Street, his meals and ale, and such incidentals as writing paper. His notebooks were cheap papers folded in half and pinned together or stitched neatly by Nellie O’Connor. Whitman also made “some money by scribbling for the papers” in his bright third-story front room, next to the rooms of the O’Connors and their little girl. But most of his afternoons and evenings he spent in the hospitals—at Armory Square on the Mall, a twenty-minute walk from home; at Campbell Hospital, equidistant, at the north end of Seventh Street bordering woods and fields; and sometimes at the Patent Office wards in the city center. Depending upon the fighting there could be as many as forty thousand wounded men, Rebels and Federals warded together, in the fifty hospitals that had sprung up to accommodate them.

  What began as a kindly visit to two Brooklyn boys in Campbell Hospital on January 2 became an obsession. “O my dear sister,” he wrote the next day to Martha Whitman, “how your heart would ache to go through the rows of wounded young men, as I did— and stopt to speak a comforting word to them.” A hundred men lay in the long, neatly whitewashed hospital shed. One was groaning in pain. Whitman tried to comfort the boy and then, upon inquiring, found that no doctor had examined him.

  “So I sent for the doctor, and he made an examination of him—the doctor behaved very well . . . said that the young man would recover—he had been brought pretty low with diarrhoea, and now had bronchitis, but not so serious as to be dangerous. I talked to him some time—he had not a cent of money—not a friend or acquaintance—I wrote a letter from him to his sister . . . I gave him a little change I had—he said he would like to buy a drink of milk, when the woman came through with the milk. Trifling as this was, he was overcome and began to cry.”

  Walt Whitman did not go to Washington to become an official soldier’s nurse, or delegate of the Christian Commission of the YMCAs (to which he was appointed later that January), or a “Soldier’s Missionary,” as he somewhat ironically signed himself on the inside cover of his notebook. At first he had a more distinguished, if not higher, ambition.

  Whitman eagerly explored the newly designed halls of Congress. When the Thirty-seventh Congress was in session the Capitol shone at night like a lantern. In the cold winter its warmth and gaslight acted as a magnet to the idle and the curious, to soldiers, journalists, lobbyists, and visitors from all over the world.

  Approaching from the north, he admired the allegorical frieze set in the pediment overhead: a female figure of America in the blaze of the rising sun; on her right, a soldier, a tradesman, a student, a mechanic, and a sheaf of wheat. Upon the tympanum of the central pediment sits the “Genius of America” crowned with a star and bearing a shield. She faces a symbolic figure of Hope, whose attention she directs to a figure of Justice who holds the scrolled Constitution in her right hand, the scales in her left.

  The magnificent dome of the Capitol, its marble statuary, and its corridors frescoed by Constantino Brumidi filled the poet with hope—despite his healthy cynicism concerning the nation’s lawmakers. “All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,” he had written in Leaves of Grass.

  “You pass through a splendid corridor, I should say as beautiful a piece of interior finishing as there is in the world—the white ceiling, arched, and simply ornamented, the delicate colors of the tessellated pavement, blue, white, brownish, yellow . . .”

  The poet stood in a window niche, scribbling in his notebook. “Then as you turn to go toward the gallery—the superb and massive marble balustrades and staircase with the columns of mottled brown & white, and the steps of pure white, the hodge-podge of pictures in the great panel (a masquerade or nightmare dream, of an overland emigrant train crossing the Rocky Mountains)—the blue bay of San Francisco frescoed underneath—the whole grandeur and beautiful proportions and color and enduring material of this staircase . . .”

  Whitman was fascinated by the drama of the Hall of Representatives, with the members in se
ssion under the elaborate ceiling of iron and glass, “lighted from gas which is itself not visible, except as its powerful jets shine through the panels of astral glass overhead—pouring a broad flood of light down on the members—over the broad surrounding horse shoe of members desks . . . the members are idling in their seats—the galleries are full—the clock points to eight . . .”

  He became a student of the legislature, a familiar figure in the halls of Congress, which in those days were accessible to everyone. Soon he would claim: “I have watched their debates, wrangles, propositions, personal presences, physiognomies, in their magnificent sky-lighted halls—gone night and day . . .”

  He was amused by how insignificant the politicians looked. “These then are the men who do as they do, in the midst of the greatest historic chaos and gigantic tussle of the greatest of ages.—Look at the little manikins, shrewd, gabby, dressed in black, hopping about, making motions, amendments.—It is very curious.”

  The congressmen seemed to Whitman unequal to their task. “What events are about them, and all of us? Whither are we drifting? Who knows? It seems as if these electric and terrible days were enough to put life in a paving stone,—as if there must needs form, on the representative men that have to do with them, faces of grandeur, actions of awe, vestments of majesty.”

  There must be an office here for him.

  Shortly after arriving in Washington on December 29, 1862, Whitman had written Ralph Waldo Emerson a curious and enigmatic letter:

  I fetch up here in harsh and superb plight—wretchedly poor, excellent well, (my only torment, family matters)—realizing at last that it is necessary for me to fall for the time in the wise old way, to push my fortune, to be brazen, and get employment, and have an income—determined to do it . . . I write to you, ask you as follows:

  I design to apply personally direct at headquarters, for some place. I would apply on literary grounds, not political.

  I wish you would write for me something like the enclosed form of letter, that I can present, opening my interview with the great man.

  Whitman’s “enclosed form of letter” has not survived—a pity, since it might shed some light upon the obscurities and innuendoes of his petition. Who was “the great man”? Whitman knew that in February 1862 Emerson had been introduced to Abraham Lincoln by Senator Sumner of Massachusetts. Dapper Charles Sumner was a frequent guest of the Lincolns, and along with Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Chase he was one of the most influential men in Washington. Perhaps only Secretary of War Stanton stood in as powerful a relation to the President.

  Emerson was enormously generous toward Whitman. Upon receiving Leaves of Grass, the Sage of Concord wrote Whitman a private letter, saying: “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Emerson forgave Whitman for all his eccentricities, his megalomania and vulgarity, his occasional condescension; he even forgave the poet for using, without permission, that private letter of praise in public advertisements, though its use infuriated the philosopher, who was slow to anger. He forgave Whitman everything because he understood his genius.

  Now Whitman asked Emerson to write three letters on his behalf, to send one directly to Senator Sumner, and to enclose the others in envelopes addressed to Seward and Chase and post them to the poet to use at his own discretion. Whitman must have picked Sumner, Seward, and Chase because of their proximity to Lincoln—they were otherwise an unpromising combination. Sumner and Seward were mortal enemies, Chase and Seward disliked each other intensely, and Chase (Whitman had heard) considered Leaves of Grass “a nasty book.” Yet Whitman was convinced that Emerson’s letters to these three politicians would gain him a job.

  “It is pretty certain that, armed in that way, I shall conquer my object,” he wrote to Emerson.

  Only Whitman, and perhaps Emerson, ever knew exactly what that “object” was. Once again Emerson proved his devotion by granting Whitman’s peculiar request, roughly along the lines Whitman had set forth. Innocent of practical politics and office seeking, and in a state of manic excitement after his military adventure in Virginia, Whitman must have seemed to his wise friend to be possessed by delusions of grandeur. The poet likely imagined himself in the role he had assumed in Leaves of Grass, the bard of democracy, advisor to statesmen.

  To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no account,

  That only holds men together which is living principles, as the hold of

  the limbs of the body, or the fibres of plants.

  Of all races and eras, These States, with veins full of poetical stuff,

  most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,

  Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

  His country needed him, his government needed him; and surely the higher his office among what Senator Fessenden called this “shambling, half-and-half set of incapables,” the more Whitman might contribute. He might, given the right audience, help to put an end to this bloodbath. It seemed not wholly unfeasible, in the close world of Washington politics, that the poet might get the President’s attention.

  Emerson was familiar with Whitman’s hypomania, his boundless ego, and his occasional delusions, which were never harmful to anyone but himself. He discarded Whitman’s “form of letter” (no copy of which has survived to indicate the office-seeker’s true intention) and then wrote him letters that, while observing the spirit of that intention, did not so far satisfy Whitman that he ever thanked Emerson for his trouble. Emerson wrote frankly to Chase and Seward:

  Permit me to say that he [Whitman] is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying, large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends; entirely patriotic & benevolent in his theory, tastes, & practice. If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they yet show extraordinary power, & are more deeply American, democratic, & in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet . . . A man of his talents & dispositions will quickly make himself useful, and, if the Government has work that he can do, I think it may easily find, that it has called to its side more valuable aid than it bargained for.

  He enclosed the two letters in an envelope with a covering note to Whitman advising: “If you wish to live in that least attractive (to me) of cities, I must think you can easily do so. Perhaps better in the journalism than in the Departments.” He posted the packet on January 12, and Whitman received it on the seventeenth. Emerson had done what Whitman asked, recommending him on literary rather than political grounds, knowing, as the naïve poet did not, that even he, Emerson, the most revered writer of his age, could never secure a government position on the basis of his literary achievement alone.

  The letters Emerson wrote for Whitman—at least the two to Chase and Seward he had read—were not exactly what Whitman desired. So for a long time he did not use either of them. Rather, he depended upon the letter of recommendation he had not seen, to Emerson’s friend Senator Sumner, to conquer his object.

  Sumner was the one man in the Capitol whose face and figure, whose “vestments,” in fact, approximated the grandeur Whitman was seeking. Charles Sumner worked in the North Wing, where Whitman was a stranger. Folks went to the halls and galleries of the House for diversion, for society, or to escape the cold and freezing rain of January, in rooms far from the chambers of the Senate. These rooms were private, hushed, particularly now that the Senate’s numbers were reduced by the Secession. One went to the Senate, if at all, on serious business, as Whitman was doing on a day in late January when he summoned the courage to call upon the illustrious Senator from Massachusetts. Of the dignitaries to whom Emerson had written on Whitman’s behalf, Sumner was the most likely to welcome him.

  The fifty-two-year-old bachelor looked like the hero of a
romance, with his wide-set eyes of deep blue, his square, dimpled chin, and his mane of wavy chestnut-colored hair streaked with silver. Chase’s daughter Janet Hoyt described his “strangely winning smile, half bright, half full of sadness.” He had an air about him that showed he was a man of the world. Paradoxically he could be childlike, pouting: his idealism blinded him to the practical motives of rivals, and even friends, such as Henry Adams. When Sumner finally recovered from the brutal caning he had received in 1856 from South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, he came to regard himself as a holy martyr to the cause of abolition. And indeed Brooks’s bludgeoning of the antislavery Yankee at his desk—after Sumner had sharply censured the proslavery senators—shocked America and presaged the War of the Rebellion.

  The strength of Sumner’s jaw and broad brow did not diminish the sensitivity of the voluptuous, downturned lips. Sumner was a man of fierce resolutions and scarcely concealed vulnerabilities, an affectionate friend with little sense of humor about himself, a disappointed idealist. Six feet three inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, he was one of the few people in Washington who could stand eye to eye with Lincoln. This he did frequently, in agreement or discord, in friendship and loyal opposition. Sumner was distraught over Lincoln’s delay in emancipating the slaves, and in letting them join the army. As an intimate friend of Mary Todd Lincoln, he enjoyed the freedom of the White House; as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Sumner maintained easier access to the President than did any other senator.