Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Sumner’s clothing, like his manners, reflected his familiarity with the European capitals, and especially London. In contrast to the black frock coats worn by other public men, Sumner sported light tweeds made to order in London, and English gaiters. Noah Brooks recalled that “his appearance in his seat in the Senate chamber was studiously dignified” and that “he once told me that he never allowed himself, even in the privacy of his own chamber, to fall into a position which he would not take in his chair in the Senate.” He practiced his speeches before a pier-glass mirror in his sumptuous apartment at Thirteenth and F Streets.

  His appearance was splendid, his vanity transparent. Sumner took pride in his long and shapely hands, especially their whiteness; in the Senate he would lean back in his chair, his head slightly inclined over his broad chest, and study his hands as they rested upon his crossed knees. He wore gloves to protect them, sometimes throughout entire sessions. Henry Adams said that Sumner’s mind by 1863 “had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.” It was Adams’s gentlest way of calling Sumner a narcissist.

  To his man-of-the-world air, during this particular month, was added a dreamy languor, as Sumner was taking belladonna for angina and a stomach ailment. He was so weak he did not leave his rooms except to go to the Capitol, where, he said, he was “obliged to lie down” on a divan against the gilded rear wall of the Senate. Supine, the Senator found new gestures to express his dignity, resting on an elbow while completing a period, waving his hand feebly, royally, to answer a roll call.

  It was probably there, on that divan, that the Senator opened the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson concerning Walt Whitman. Certainly he was lounging there when a page boy told him that the poet himself was waiting outside, in the Senate Reception Room.

  Whitman sat under the stained-glass skylight for hours. Anybody could page a U.S. senator. And it was the custom for the senator to respond—but only at his leisure. So Walt Whitman waited. He studied the tessellated floor beneath his boots—the braids, lozenges, and mandalas of marble as colorful and ornate as a Persian carpet—and looked up at the Brumidi frescoes. And the show delighted him for a long time until he reflected: “These days, the state our country is in, and especially filled as I am from top to toe, of late with scenes and thoughts of the hospitals (America seems to me now, though only in her youth, but brought already here feeble, bandaged, and bloody in hospital ) . . . all the poppy-show goddesses and all the pretty blue & gold in which the interior Capitol is got up, seem to me out of place beyond any thing I could tell . . .” He had more than enough time to study the frescoes of the vaulted cavern, a domed box, twenty-two feet square and twenty-two feet high. Everything was gilded: the four arches inlaid with cinquefoils, the arched doors and the arabesque metal-work of the wall panels, the eagles over the girandoles, and the acanthus and tobacco leaves of the chandelier hanging from a fresco of cherubs at the bull’s-eye of the dome.

  Seven dark-paneled wooden settees with claw-and-ball arms and feet were arranged against the walls. A small library table of the same style stood at the open end of the room where the page boys picked up messages to carry in to the senators.

  This is where petitioners came to file suit: lobbyists, journalists, army widows demanding pensions, mothers begging that their sons—accused of desertion or sleeping on guard duty—be saved from hanging. And there were many office seekers. He watched people come and go, men and women dressed in black and a few women in colored dresses, capes, and shawls, who sat and rose gracefully, arranging their crinolines. Now and then a senator would appear, behind his page, and everyone would look up, hoping it was his or her senator. The long-awaited eminence would stand for a few minutes listening or talking quietly with his constituent. A shake of the hand, a bow, and the senator was gone, the petition denied, forwarded, granted, or—most commonly— tabled until a more “propitious” time. There was sighing and indignation, some smiling and strained laughter, and occasionally tears. More than anything there was the waiting, so the room was heavy with anxiety, dread, and boredom, which sooner or later took its toll on hope.

  If the “poppy-show goddesses and all the pretty blue & gold” seemed out of place to Whitman, he too may have felt out of place under the curious glances of the well-dressed citizens around him. Since returning from his battlefield adventures in Falmouth, he had managed to get his linen scrubbed. But he had not yet assembled a new wardrobe. The photograph Mathew Brady took of him then shows the poet wearing a brown single-breasted jacket of heavy wool with a small collar that buttoned high. Whitman’s black bow tie is knotted low, carelessly overlapping the lapels, defying its duty to close the white shirt collar; as always, his throat below the beard is bare. His trousers were a coarse woolen weave. For this occasion the poet would dress as well as he could, but he probably saw no need to look any different than he had for his last publicity photograph. He wore his wide-brimmed hat of soft felt in all weathers. (“I cock my hat as I please indoors or out.”) So now one might well ask whether Walt Whitman did, or did not, remove his slouch hat when Senator Charles Sumner finally appeared before him in the Senate Reception Room.

  Sumner towered above everyone, approaching with a distinctive bearing more sinuous than erect. He wore a brown tweed frock coat, a gray waistcoat, and lavender-colored trousers. His black tie was knotted in a perfect bow, beneath his square chin. He did not need to be told who Walt Whitman was, but with that smile that was “half bright, half full of sadness” walked up to the poet as he rose from the settee, and shook his hand.

  Whitman looked into Sumner’s eyes, the pupils dilated with belladonna. The next thing he would have noticed, after taking in the Senator’s extraordinary distinction of person and attire, was the pallor of those hands. Washingtonians had come to speak of other pale things, such as snow and milk, as being “white as Sumner’s hands.”

  The Senator, for his part, took in the roughly dressed, hirsute poet. The phrase “marked eccentricities” from Emerson’s letter must have leapt to mind. Here was a case that required the utmost care, diplomacy, and discretion. Charles Sumner was the most ostentatiously literary man in Congress. He knew five languages and used them all in his orations. His best friends were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and historian Henry Adams. Sumner and Whitman had many friends and acquaintances in common—not the least of whom was Emerson. They both knew the mercurial Horace Greeley. They knew Whitman’s admirer William Dean Howells and Howells’s charming friend John Hay. These names and many others would provide a conversational bridge between the poet and the statesman.

  If Whitman clumsily mentioned the mysterious Count Adam Gurowski, an ardent Whitman fan who was a frequent guest at the O’Connor-Whitman dinner table, Sumner would change the subject. He had known Gurowski since 1851, when they vacationed in Newport, and had welcomed the exiled Pole to Washington. Then the Senator got him a job as a translator in the State Department so, it was rumored, Gurowski could spy on Secretary Seward, Sumner’s enemy. But lately the hotheaded Pole had turned upon his benefactor, criticizing Sumner in his published diaries, calling him an intriguer and a coward. In the same book Gurowski called Whitman “the incarnation of a genuine American original genius.” So these men could never agree about the one-eyed Count, or his scandalous memoir.

  About Ralph Waldo Emerson, their friend, there could be no disagreement. He was wise and noble and kind, the greatest American writer, present company excluded. (Sumner’s Recent Speeches and Addresses had been published in 1856.) Emerson had paid Whitman compliments in a letter, and the amiable Senator would not hesitate to repeat them. Whitman was flattered, but not more so than he was proud. He talked of his work in the hospitals, of the bravery of the young soldiers who lay wounded and dying in the wards. He told Sumner how much they appreciated his little gifts of fruit, tobacco, and postage stamps. Impressed, Sumner promised he would send someone to the Post Office next door and get Whitman some franke
d envelopes for the soldiers.

  But this was not the reason Whitman had come to Washington or why he had sat cooling his heels for hours in the frescoed Reception Room. There was the matter of an office, a government position that would make the most of “a man of his talents and dispositions.” This was a very troublesome thing, and as accustomed as Sumner was to approaching the subject, he addressed it now wearily, and slowly.

  “Everything here,” said Sumner, “moves as part of a great machine . . .” It was impossible for him to do what Whitman wanted; it was of some importance to appear as if he had tried. “You must consign yourself to the fate of the rest . . .”

  Accepting the “fate of the rest” never came easy for Walt Whitman. But that year he would learn this and other important lessons as he pursued his government office. The Senator promised Whitman he would do what he could, but the process had to begin with the support of the poet’s home-state legislators. Sumner said he would speak to Senator King of New York presently, and prepare King for a visit from Walt Whitman in, say, two weeks, when there might be better prospects for him. Sumner was getting tired. He stood up, and shook Whitman’s hand, acknowledging the poet’s thanks; bid him good day; and returned to the Senate Chamber to lie down.

  So this was the way things worked in the Federal City. Whitman would attend to his soldiers in the hospitals until it came time to go back to the bedizened vault of the Senate Reception Room. There he would wait for a page to lead Senator Preston King from the high, gilded hall of the legislators.

  If Sumner had planned to send the poet on a wild-goose chase he could not have chosen a more useless bird than Preston King. Fat Preston King was moribund and, at the moment, nearly powerless. His figure was an emblem of gluttony and greed. The lame-duck Senator was fond of food and the lobbyists who picked up the checks, a connoisseur of good wine and the seven-course dinners at the Willard: leg of mutton, fricandeau of veal, pheasants, wood-cocks, sweetbreads with peas, cherry pie, blancmange. Within a month the fifty-seven-year-old legislator would give up his seat in the Senate. After a troubled tenure as collector of the Port of New York—a position that had corrupted better men—in 1865 he would end his life by tying a bag of bullets around his neck and leaping from a ferryboat in New York Harbor.

  Whitman knew nothing of King’s problems. On February 11, 1863, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Senator Preston King came lumbering into the Reception Room, harried, squinting, his narrow porcine eyes looking for this Walt Whitman who had stirred him from his cushioned seat in the Senate chamber.

  The poet stood up and addressed him, man to man. Mr. Sumner had spoken to Whitman about Senator King. Had not Mr. Sumner also mentioned to Senator King Whitman’s desire for an office in one of the departments?

  “He did not know me,” Whitman confided to his diary.

  King eyed with amusement Whitman’s shabby jacket, loose bow tie, broad-brimmed felt hat, and unclipped beard, and said: “Why, how can I do this thing, or any thing for you—how do I know but you are a secessionist—you look for all the world like an old Southern planter—a regular Carolina or Virginia planter.” The remark had a kind of theatricality calculated to evoke laughter in onlookers too polite to have giggled at the poet’s appearance before being given permission by the distinguished lawmaker.

  Whitman stood his ground. “I treated him with just as much hauteur as he did me with bluntness.” In other words, the poet kept his hat on. At first King could not recall that Sumner had spoken to him about Whitman, but as Whitman persisted, holding him with his eye, King “at last had a vague recollection of something.”

  Whitman later wrote to his brother Jeff: “Charles Sumner had not prepared the way for me, as I supposed, or rather, not so strongly as I supposed.” So the next day, February 12, Whitman was back in his spot on the settee, studying the innumerable ornaments of the gilded vault, waiting for Senator Sumner to answer his page and to explain the curious behavior of Preston King. Charles Sumner then “talked and acted as though he had life in him, and would exert himself to any reasonable extent for me to get something.” By now Whitman may have gotten the drift that the “something” he might get was not really what he hoped for. Sumner would speak to Preston King once more; Whitman was to return tomorrow and page the New York Senator a second time.

  On the morning of Friday the thirteenth, Preston King, his bulk fairly bursting from his black frock coat, approached Whitman in the familiar setting, with robust good humor, and bearing “a sort of general letter, endorsing me from New York,” Whitman wrote; “one letter is addressed to Secretary Chase, and another to Gen. Meigs [quartermaster general].” Now he had two letters for Salmon Chase, who hated his poetry.

  “I like fat old Preston King, very much—he is fat as a hogshead, with great hanging chops . . .” Whitman appreciated that “King was blunt, decisive and manly . . . My impression of King was good, I think Sumner is a sort of gelding—no good.” The poet’s instincts about Sumner were narrow but keen: although there is no evidence that the Senator was homosexual, his marriage in 1866 to the beautiful Alice Hooper dissolved quickly because, it was widely rumored, the bridegroom was impotent. Alice herself was the ultimate source of the rumor. The fact that Charles Sumner was a superb statesman and Preston King little more than a shrewd politician was beyond the poet’s comprehension.

  “It is very amusing to hunt for an office—so the thing seems to me just now—even if one don’t get it,” Whitman wrote to his brother good-naturedly, with evident humor about himself. He told Jeff: “I have not presented my letters to either Seward or Chase—I thought I would get my forces all in a body, and make one concentrated dash, if possible with the personal introduction of some big bug . . .” Jeff Whitman provided a letter from his friend Moses Lane commending Walt to E. D. Webster, a minor clerk in Seward’s office. Walt welcomed this with the enigmatic comment, “I do not so much look for an appointment from Mr. Seward as his backing me from the State of New York.” So what if the poet got his “forces all in a body”—Senator Sumner; Senator King; Secretary of State Seward, who hated Sumner and Chase— where did he mean to go to make his “one concentrated dash”?

  On Friday, February 20, 1863, Whitman tried Sumner for the last time. He inquired: “If I don’t succeed for the present—don’t get anything till the 4th of March [the close of the Thirty-seventh Congress], may I count on your then giving me a boost?”

  And Senator Sumner said: “Yes, I will—if I can.”

  That is the last recorded communication between the poet and his most powerful advocate. And it would be Walt Whitman’s last stab at job seeking for a long while. He had learned an important lesson about the Federal City: that the political game in Washington was both larger and smaller than he had believed. His daily walks might be the closest he would come to the White House.

  But if Whitman had no luck, Lincoln’s situation was even worse. That same Friday, a week after the White House gala for Tom Thumb, the clouds were full of snow. It was the anniversary of Willie Lincoln’s death, and the President and his wife were in mourning. Lincoln has been called “the loneliest man in Washington,” and his loneliness during this season had much to do with Mary Todd Lincoln’s inconsolable grief over the death of her child Willie. Mary’s mental illness, which progressed rapidly in her early forties, after Lincoln was elected President, has eclipsed the radiance she had in her youth as a wife and mother. Abraham, whom she always called “Father,” was the love of her life. She had been witty, energetic, and far prettier and better educated than any woman Lincoln had ever hoped to marry. They had been passionately in love (he had fought a duel to defend her honor), and her passion, physical as well as spiritual, was bound up in her belief in his destiny. She thought he would be President long before anyone else did. This sense of his destiny expressed itself in a variety of ways: her concern about his clothing and manners, her fretting about his diet and health, as well as her fierce defense against his enemies, real and imagined. He
would not have missed her so much these days if she had not been such a comforting presence in his life before her descent into madness.

  Although etiquette required only six months of first-degree mourning, for a year after Willie’s death Mary wore black dresses and flounces. She chose a black crape bonnet with a long veil, so rigid that when she went out she could not turn her head, as if grief had so transfixed her that she could not see to either side of it. According to one witness, when she went to church, the New York Avenue Presbyterian, in her immense dark veil, “one could scarcely tell she was there.”

  Indeed, Mary Lincoln was not all there. She had retreated into the twilight of the spirit world for solace, attending séances in Georgetown with and without her husband. She invited several eminent mediums home. According to many accounts, there were no fewer than three and as many as eight séances held in the Red Room of the White House, in which the spirits conveyed word from Willie as well as opinions on affairs of state for the President’s benefit.

  Mary told her friend Charles Sumner, “a very slight veil separates us from the loved and lost and to me there is comfort in the thought that though unseen by us they are very near.” Mary and the Senator shared many confidences. Sumner stood proudly among Mary’s male favorites, as one about whom there was never a whiff of scandal. Unlike other men who held her hand in the charged darkness of séance parlors, the Senator would not take advantage of Mary’s emotional vulnerabilities.

  Sumner, however, may have abused his privileges in the White House in other ways. He had come between Abraham and Mary by converting her to his point of view that it was time to emancipate the slaves. Lincoln had freed only the slaves in the rebel states, fearing that general emancipation would alienate the Border States, which were essential to winning the war. Preservation of the Union remained more important to the President than abolition. The decree of January 1 even exempted many parishes of Louisiana (including New Orleans), much of Virginia, and all of West Virginia. Lincoln wanted a gradual emancipation that the states would initiate. His stance defied Sumner’s abolitionism and the radicalism dominating the Republican Party, which was forcing Lincoln into political isolation. Not even his marriage was free of the dispute, now that Sumner had converted Mary. She drew closer to her Negro seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, a woman in her thirties who had known the cruelties of slavery firsthand. Keckley also had turned to mediums for comfort when her only son was killed in the war. Now the President slept in one bedroom with his little boy, Tad, while Mary, in a new bed of mahogany and rose-wood carvings, slept in another room, with her ghosts.