Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Lincoln wrote to his wife on June 16: “It is a matter of choice with yourself whether you come home. There is no reason why you should not, that did not exist when you went away.” The letter suggests the residue of a recent quarrel, and not much affection on either side.

  Without his wife and little boy, and without John Hay’s cheerful presence, Lincoln spent his days consumed with military decisions and the tedious defense of his suspending the writ of habeas corpus. He slept fitfully, tormented by nightmares. Once he dreamed that Tad killed himself with a cap pistol. Several times he dreamed of his own murder, but he would not allow more security guards. The President had no idea how many deadly conspirators watched him. But one of his friends was obsessed with it.

  Marshal Ward Hill Lamon could be found late at night in the smoky gentlemen’s saloon of the Willard Hotel across from the White House, drinking a glass of old rye whiskey. This giant walrus of a man wore a dark swallowtail coat over a yellow double-breasted vest buttoned tightly over his paunch, a white neckcloth, and a ruffled silk shirt. He also wore, as suited the occasion, two revolvers, a bowie knife, and brass knuckles.

  Lincoln and Lamon had been friends since the 1850s, when they were law partners on the Eighth Circuit in Illinois. After the election, Lamon came along to protect the President-elect on his journey to the capital. Allan Pinkerton, a detective working for the railroad, uncovered a plot to murder Lincoln in pro-Confederate Baltimore. When this was confirmed by the Secretary of State and General Winfield Scott, Mary Lincoln begged Lamon not to leave her husband’s side. Armed with two pistols, two derringers, and two knives, Lamon accompanied Lincoln as he surreptitiously entered Washington at dawn.

  Lincoln made Lamon marshal for the city of Washington and chief of protocol at White House events. At public receptions Lamon introduced visitors to the President—from this vantage point he could spot any suspicious characters as they came through the door.

  Lamon’s style was equal parts riverboat gambler, troubadour, and Wild Bill Hickok lawman of the Wild West. Thirty-five years of age, the bull-necked self-appointed “bodyguard” of the President played Falstaff to Lincoln’s Prince Hal. Lincoln admired Lamon’s baritone, his wit, and his brute strength, which he had seen in action. “Hereafter,” the President warned him, “when you have occasion to strike a man, don’t hit him with your fist; strike him with a club or crowbar or something that won’t kill him.” The marshal was larger than life in several ways, including his concern about the President’s safety. Lincoln told him: “I think, for a man of accredited courage, you are the most panicky person I ever knew; you can see more dangers to me than all the other friends I have. You are all the time exercized about someone taking my life . . .”

  Lamon was nearly as tall as the President. His sagging jowels and great girth bespoke gargantuan appetites, and his long, black, pomaded hair and beard were groomed to affect a studious nonchalance. He was renowned for the quantity of pure rye whiskey he could put away while still managing to repeat the romantic tongue-twister “She stood at the gate welcoming him in.” He was also known for his rich singing voice. “Sing me a little song,” Lincoln would beg, and Lamon would pick up his banjo and strike up one of the President’s favorites, such as “Camptown Races” or “The Blue-Tail Fly.”

  But tonight Lamon was in no mood for singing. He was in the mood for drinking. When his eyes were not on the President, the marshal was troubled, and the more he worried the more he drank. It was Lamon’s job to do the worrying. Spies and assassins lurked all around—in the bushes, in high windows, in theaters, in the Willard saloon—and Lincoln would never know the number of plots his guardian “Hill” had discovered and undone.

  Lincoln, who was philosophically opposed to bodyguards and hated military surveillance, made the watchman’s duty very difficult. His carelessness in coming and going at all hours, unescorted, to the telegraph office, or riding horseback on a lonely road three miles to the Soldiers’ Home, where he spent summer nights, was the despair of his friends and staff. Such behavior passed beyond courage; it seemed foolhardy, tempting fate.

  General-in-Chief Scott ordered Colonel Charles Stone to keep an eye on the President, with an effort not to attract attention. They did not consult Lincoln about this, knowing his “almost morbid dislike of guards and escorts,” and Scott felt it was inadvisable “that it should appear that the President of the United States was, for his personal safety, obliged to surround himself with armed guards.” The first time Lincoln noticed armed troopers on horseback at the gates of the White House, he protested. “It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, an emperor.” He sent them away. “Why put up the bars when the fence is down all around? If they kill me, the next man will be just as bad for them; and in a country like this, where our habits are simple, and must be, assassination is always possible, and will come if they are determined upon it.” What some considered the President’s bravery, his nonchalance about his safety, others called rashness.

  One day Congressman Cornelius Cole walked into Lincoln’s office, unchecked, unannounced. When he lectured the President about the danger of such accessibility, Lincoln was unmoved. At last he said, “When I first came here, I made up my mind I would not be dying all the while.” He was thinking perhaps of the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The valiant never taste of death but once.” Or he might have been recalling the calm verses of Walt Whitman,

  Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never

  cease—they are the burial lines.

  He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall

  surely be buried.

  Lincoln took time to explain to Cole: “I have observed that one man’s life is as dear to him as another’s and he could not expect to take my life without losing his own. Besides, if anyone wanted to, he could shoot me from some window as I ride by daily to the Soldiers’ Home.”

  This was exactly the possibility that drove the marshal to drink, now that it was late June and Abraham Lincoln was sleeping, or tossing or turning, or lying in his own blood for all Lamon knew, in the summer residence on a hill to the north overlooking the city. Sometimes nobody could find him. The summer before, while Lincoln was riding on horseback alone on the toll road to the Soldiers’ Home, at eleven at night, a would-be assassin shot a hole through the President’s stovepipe hat. Lincoln made a funny story out of it, which Lamon did not think was a bit funny. Because the Lincolns could not be persuaded to give up the cool, salubrious air of the Soldiers’ Home in the summer, they were forced to accept a cavalry escort between the White House and the fourteen-room Victorian “cottage” overlooking Washington. But when his wife and Tad were away, Lincoln would not bother with the barouche and the horseguards; he often rode out by himself on “Old Abe,” his favorite horse.

  Only one man in the city made Lincoln uneasy, and that man was Walt Whitman’s old friend from Pfaff ’s rathskeller, the Polish Count Adam Gurowski. More than once the President had told Lamon: “So far as my personal safety is concerned, Gurowski is the only man who has given me a serious thought of a personal nature. From the known disposition of this man, he is dangerous wherever he may be. I have sometimes thought he might try to take my life. It would be just like him to do such a thing.”

  As the Count appeared to Lincoln at receptions or on the street, the burly fellow, with his large round head, his bulging brow, stubbly beard, and blue-tinted spectacles, cut a sinister figure. He wore the dark glasses to protect his good eye—he had ruined the other by falling on his jackknife as a child—and to spare others the sight of the mutilation. Gurowski, fifty-eight, balding, wore a long black cape and a bell-shaped hat, like a spy in a cartoon. He did not so much walk the streets around the White House as march, with an aristocratic air, like a foreign army of one.

  Gurowski’s operatic appearance and his baroque politics were like nothing L
incoln had ever seen in Illinois or Indiana. The urbane Charles Sumner had known the Count for many years, although they had recently had a falling out. In Cambridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Edward Everett had welcomed the Count’s cosmopolitan point of view, his offbeat perspective on American culture, and his understanding of European history. As a Polish revolutionary, he had played an active role in that history. Now a Boston publisher was bringing out his diaries, in which he described wartime Washington, offering his opinions on everything from military matters to cabinet appointments. Whitman considered him a man of “great keenness,” and a “splendid intellect.”

  In his diaries Gurowski attacked Sumner, Seward, and Lincoln himself. (For instance, the entry for November 5, 1862, reads: “Lincoln-Seward politically slaughtered the Republican Party, and with it the country’s honor. The future looks dark and terrible. Dishonor on all sides.”) Then he wrote the President rambling letters of advice whose tone was hysterical and imperious. Having fled the political chaos of Eastern Europe, the Pole was doomed to witness an unparalleled tragedy in his adoptive country. In print, and on street corners to passersby, Gurowski denounced the President as “a beast,” Seward as “a clever charlatan.” He could not conceal his contempt for the President even in his presence. At best he was condescending, showing disgust at Lincoln’s jokes and tales. Sometimes Lincoln felt a palpable threat in the Count’s cyclopean stare.

  There were more serious concerns. Gurowski carried a pistol, and he had been seen brandishing it out of the folds of his cape upon little provocation. Under surveillance by the constabulary since the first inauguration, Gurowski had a record that included the following charges: When words failed him in an argument with reporter Adams Hill in the Tribune office, he drew his gun on Hill, threatening to blow out his brains. Gurowski put away the weapon, but thereafter was barred from the office. One autumn he was riding a horse-drawn streetcar and he ordered the driver to make an unscheduled stop. When the streetcar passed the corner where the Pole had wished to alight, Gurowski pulled out his revolver and commanded the driver to stop the vehicle. Somebody yelled for the police. They arrested Gurowski and led him before the magistrate, who fined him twenty dollars.

  Perhaps the most bizarre scene, which Whitman evidently witnessed, occurred one summer. The poet and his radical friend were watching some firemen dousing a burning building with hand-pumps and hoses. Something about their dawdling, or ineptitude, irritated the Count. Out came the pistol, which he waved at the firefighters as an incentive to pursue their duty with more vigor. A patrolman arrested him, and this time he was locked in the station house for a while before facing the judge who fined him. Years later, when questioned about the event, Whitman said, “That fire incident . . . looks worse than it was,” a curious comment, suggesting either that the crew needed lashing, or that his friend meant no harm in pointing a gun at them, as if the firearm had been no more than a conductor’s baton.

  So Lincoln had positive evidence of the Count’s violence to add to the troubling tone of his writings. On June 5 Gurowski wrote: “I often meet Mr. Lincoln in the streets. Poor man! He looks exhausted, care-worn, spiritless, extinct. I pity him! Mr. Lincoln’s looks are those of a man whose nights are sleepless, and whose days are comfortless. That is the price for a greatness to which he is not equal. Yet Mr. Lincoln, they say, wishes to be reelected!”

  The night of his first election Lincoln had lounged in his bedroom, opposite a bureau with a swinging mirror above it. “And looking in that glass,” he recalled, “I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images . . . one of the faces was a little paler—say five shades— than the other.” It gave him a pang, he told Noah Brooks, and when he told Mary about the ghost in the mirror it frightened her: she said this was a sign that he would be elected to a second term but would not live to finish it. Now, Lincoln mused, if he were to be reelected, it might be over the dead body of Adam Gurowski.

  Gurowski subsisted as a houseguest of Fanny Eames, whose husband Charles was counsel for the Department of the Navy. Fanny presided over one of the most brilliant salons in the capital, “a sort of focal point in Washington society, where one meets . . . the brains of society—politicians, diplomats, authors and artists,” wrote John Nicolay, who with John Hay liked to visit the house on the northwest corner of Fourteenth and H, between eight and eleven on Sunday evenings. Hay wrote in his diary, “saw Count Gurowski come into the parlor & go growling out because I was there.” Charles Sumner, a frequent visitor, had the same effect then on Gurowski. But the Count and Fanny Eames were devoted to each other. She was patient with his rages and nursed him in his illnesses.

  This gadfly was under more and more constant surveillance as the war dragged on and as his criticism of the administration grew more vehement. Hill Lamon appointed his younger brother Robert to aid him as deputy marshal. Between them, and their detectives, the city police, the adjutant general, and two companies of cavalry and infantry lately assigned to protect the President, they made sure that neither Gurowski nor any of his bohemian associates escaped notice. The Lamon brothers would not have overlooked the ménage at Fourteenth and L Streets where Gurowski sometimes went to dine with the radical abolitionist William O’Connor and his friend Walt Whitman, the infamous author of Leaves of Grass, whose politics no one quite understood.

  Readers of the Washington Star on June 22 knew that the President was taking up his residence that very day at the Soldiers’ Home. Anyone—whether he be a patriot, a newsman, or an aspiring assassin—with the slightest interest in seeing the Chief Executive, on horseback or riding in his barouche, might observe Lincoln traveling along an unvarying route to and from the White House.

  The carriage, with new rubber on its wheels, drawn by two horses, picked up the President from the north portico. As they drove through the gate and out the semicircular drive, the Light Guard of cavalry from Ohio fell in behind them. The carriage rattled and the horseguards’ sabers clattered. They passed the two-story house of the State Department at the corner of New York Avenue, across from the Paymaster’s Office where Whitman worked. They turned north on Fourteenth Street, under the Eameses’ windows, and drove for five blocks past L Street, where Whitman lived with the O’Connors, just south of the circle where the party would pick up Vermont Avenue, which took them north to the toll road and out of town.

  The brawny, shaggy-looking fellow in the light gray summer coat with huge pockets, haversack slung over his shoulder, leaning on an umbrella, obviously had more than a casual interest in looking upon his President. Lincoln’s schedule was not wholly predictable, although he generally left the mansion before suppertime and returned in the morning after breakfast. Yet this distinctively accoutred graybeard always managed to appear, somewhere in the neighborhood of Fourteenth and L Streets, near the curb, in full view of the President. He would wave and bow in the most courteous, friendly manner. His luminous gray eyes, which resembled Lincoln’s, shone with a delight that verged upon adoration. The viewer did not look like other men. He was peculiarly intense.

  Sergeant Smith Stimmel of the horseguards, like all of the Ohio detail, had been instructed to be vigilant, to look from the tops of buildings on either side of the street to the windows shaded with striped awnings. He was to take note of any men or women who appeared regularly in the President’s line of sight. Such idlers might be up to no good. Zealotry of any sort was threatening: the man who worships from afar on a Monday may want to murder his idol on a Friday.

  If Lincoln, Sergeant Stimmel, and Stimmel’s fellow horseguards took no notice of this particular “fanatic” when the company rode out along Fourteenth Street on Monday, June 22, 1863, they certainly had sized him up by Monday evening, June 29.

  The next day Whitman wrote to his mother: “Mr. Lincoln passes here (14th St) every evening on his way out—I saw him last evening about ½ past 6, he was in his barouche . . . I had a good view of the P
resident last evening—he looks more careworn than usual—his face with deep-cut lines, seams, & his complexion gray, though very dark skin, a curious looking man, very sad.”

  The poet said to a lady standing near him, “Who can see that man without losing all wish to be sharp upon him personally? Who can say he has not a good soul?”

  She did not wish to argue, but was nevertheless “vindictive on the course of the administration,” complaining that it lacked nerve.

  Whitman observed that the carriage was shabby and the horses looked like what his Broadway drivers called “old plugs.”

  “The President dresses in plain black clothes, cylinder hat.” The day before, Whitman had seen him stop alone at Stanton’s house on K Street, without the cavalry escort, and Lincoln “sat in his carriage while Stanton came out & had a fifteen minute interview with him . . . —& then wheeled around, & slowly trotted around the corner and up Fourteenth st.” By this time the horseguards were in hot pursuit.

  “I really think it would be safer for him just now to stop at the White House,” Whitman judged, meaning he should stay in the safety of the mansion and not risk the commute to the Soldiers’ Home. This was exactly Marshal Lamon’s opinion during that awful, hot summer, when the stench from the mud, carcasses, and sewage in the canal grew pestilential, and Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln saw more and more of each other.

  Whitman became a President-watcher, loitering at the corner of L Street, or sauntering down Fourteenth Street at twilight, toward the block of newspaper offices across from the Willard, on his way to Armory Square. His hopes and efforts often met with success. And one could not be a President-watcher in those days without being watched in turn by the President and his guard. Who is that jolly-looking old duffer with the baggy pants stuffed into his boots, the shaggy one with the haversack and the bulging pockets? There he is again, right about where we left him yesterday. The poet, Walt Whitman, Gurowski’s friend, studying the President.