So the horseguards whispered to one another—word passed through the ranks—ever vigilant. Whitman’s personal magnetism is well documented; it won him such friends as the astute naturalist John Burroughs, who had seen nothing like the poet in all of nature. Burroughs described him at this time, “his large benevolent look . . . of infinite good nature and contentment, and the curious blending of youth and age in his expression; also the transparent skin which allows the summery, motherly nature to shine through, and rich mellow voice, indicative of deep human sympathies and affinities . . .” It was the benevolent look that had so much healing power in the hospitals. But there was something else in Whitman’s gaze that the naturalist could not quite describe, a look “as in that of the mother of many children.” The beauty and expressiveness of Whitman’s eyes seemed to Burroughs uncanny. “It is as if the Earth looked at me—dumb, yearning, relentless, immodest, inhuman. If the impersonal elements and forces were concentrated in an eye, that would be it . . . not piercing, but absorbing and devouring—the pupil expanded, the lid slightly drooping, and eye set and fixed.” Like a mirror of the cosmos.
Now as the lonely President passed, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, worrying over Lee’s army and whether or not they were moving into Pennsylvania, and when, exactly, he would remove General Hooker from command and replace him with General Meade; as the sad President passed with the weight of the nation on his shoulders, the fate of several hundred thousand men, their fearful wives and mothers, and the grief of a hundred thousand more who dressed in mourning, Walt Whitman fixed him with that “benevolent look . . . of infinite good nature,” that look of a mother or Mother Earth, a gaze that merged “deep human sympathy” with an “impersonal and elemental force.”
At some point, that week or the next, the President looked back at Whitman, met his gaze and acknowledged it, with a nod of his head or a slight wave of his hand. That eye-to-eye contact began to form a bond, as order formed out of chaos. Lincoln would not, of course, have stopped the barouche if it had been an archangel who blessed him in passing; yet neither Lincoln nor any of the Light Guard ever displayed concern about Whitman’s persistent attention, no matter how near he came to hail the President. The poet had become a welcome and comforting fixture on the road to Lincoln’s lonely summer retreat.
This gentle communion became central to Whitman’s routine that summer. After his nap and bath in the late afternoon, the poet took his supper. Then he dressed in his cleanest clothing, packed up his haversack, and went to see the President. Whitman recalled how he would “pass a word with” Lincoln sometimes, as he rode by. The Commander-in-Chief probably needed the love and comfort the poet delivered in his slow gaze, needed this as much as any feverish soldier in Armory Square Hospital. And the sight of Lincoln’s transparent goodness inspired Whitman. The soldier’s missionary would bear that memory with him as a rapture or charm into the infernal regions of the sick wards.
Lincoln’s infamous melancholia lifted during those last days of June, on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg. His leadership grew bold, as he replaced the timid Hooker with General Meade, and parried the Ohio Democratic Convention’s challenges concerning his exiling the Copperhead Vallandigham. As Lee’s Army of Virginia swept through Maryland, panic was selling newspapers from Washington to Boston. HARRISBURG IN IMMINENT DANGER, blared one headline, and PITTSBURGH TO BE INVADED, SACKED AND BURNED, said another, but Lincoln remained in high spirits.
John Hay, back in Washington, arranged the newspapers on Lincoln’s desk. What did those editors know? Although the President was not sure exactly where the Rebels were, somehow he felt optimistic that Lee’s invasion of the North would present the most favorable opportunity yet to surround and crush the Confederate army.
Lincoln had grown frighteningly gaunt. “I am growing as thin as a shad,” he quipped, “yea worse—as thin as a shadder.” Hay was pleased to find that the President had recovered his sense of humor. When they learned that one Captain James Cutts Jr. had been caught peering through a keyhole and over a transom at a woman undressing, Lincoln commented, “He should be elevated to the peerage for it, with the title of Count Peeper.”
During ponderous hours in the cipher room in the War Department telegraph office, Lincoln sat in his shirtsleeves with his feet propped up on Major Thomas Eckert’s writing table next to the iron safe, telling stories. He loved the tale of the congressman who had been watching the Battle of Bull Run from a hill as if the war were some sporting event, how the congressman outran the pack, his legs a blur as he led the race back to the capital when the Union soldiers retreated.
“I never knew but one fellow could run like that,” said Abraham Lincoln.
He was a young man out of Illinois who had been sparking a girl much against the wishes of her father. In fact, the old man took such a dislike to him that he threatened to shoot him if he ever caught him on the premises again. One evening the young man learned that the girl’s father had gone to the city, and he ventured out to the house. He was sitting in the parlor with his arm around the girl’s waist and then he suddenly spied the old man coming around the corner of the house with a shotgun. Leaping through the window into the garden, he started down the path at the top of his speed like greased lightning. Just then a jackrabbit jumped up in the path in front of him. In about two leaps the boy overtook the rabbit. Giving it a kick that sent it high in the air, he yelled, Git out of the road, gosh dern you, and let somebody run that knows how!
News of Lee’s position was slow in coming to the men in the cipher room. Lincoln ran his fingers through his hair. He advised the dour Montgomery Meigs (the same quartermaster general who ignored Senator King’s letter recommending Walt Whitman for a job) to read the humorous writings of Orpheus C. Kerr. This was the pen name (punning on the crush of office-seekers in Washington) of Robert Henry Newell, a columnist for the New York Mercury.“Any one who has not read them must be a heathen,” Lincoln said to no one in particular, gazing about the small, square room. At a desk on the adjacent wall to the President’s right sat the cipher operator waiting in vain for information, staring at the open fireplace opposite. In the center of the room at a rectangular table sat Meigs, impassive. Welles or Stanton would drift in one of the doors across from where Lincoln was holding forth, take a seat for a while, and finding there was no news, would wander off again.
“The most interesting natural curiosity here, next to Secretary Welles’ beard,” wrote Orpheus C. Kerr from Washington, “is the office of the Secretary of the Interior. Covered with spider-webs, and clothed in the dust of ages, sit the Secretary and his clerks, like so many respectable mummies in a neglected pyramid.”
Then there was the Kerr story about the two Quakers in the railway coach. One says to the other: “I think Jefferson Davis will succeed.” And “Why does thee think so?” asks the second. “Because Jefferson is a praying man,” he replies. “And so is Abraham a praying man,” says the second Quaker. “Yes,” says the first, “but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”
The reservoir of Lincoln’s good humor would be nearly drained in the days to come. Mary returned from Philadelphia. At ten o’clock on the morning of July 2, she was riding from the cottage into town. Near the Mount Pleasant Hospital the carriage driver’s seat became detached from its springs, throwing the man to the ground. A saboteur had loosened the bolts. While the horses were in full gallop, Mary leapt from the runaway barouche, sustaining a blow to the back of her head, which bled profusely. Surgeons from the nearby hospital promptly treated her, then took her to the White House.
Lincoln wired his son Robert not to worry, that the injury was not serious. But the wound became infected, and she lay for weeks in a state of confusion, from which, some believe, she never wholly recovered. The attack intended for Lincoln had wounded his wife.
That same morning the silence in the telegraph office was broken by the staccato of General Meade’s wire dispatches from Gettysburg. The armies had met there, by
fateful coincidence, the day before, and now toiled in the largest battle ever fought in America. Eighty-eight thousand Federals and seventy-five thousand Rebels marched against one another armed with cannon, pistols, rifles, swords, and bayonets. Meade had told his officers: “Corps and other commanders are authorized to order the instant death of any soldier who fails in his duty at this hour.”
“The balls were whizzing so thick,” said a Texan, “that it looked like a man could hold out a hat and catch it full.” Soldiers five feet apart fired rifles into each other’s faces, hacked away with saber strokes. Men went down on their hands and knees spinning like tops in the cyclone of gunfire, swallowing blood—soldiers legless, armless, headless.
A private from Massachusetts recalled the sound of the battle: “The hoarse and indistinguishable orders of commanding officers, the screaming and bursting of shells, cannister and shrapnel as they tore through the struggling masses of humanity, the death screams of wounded animals, the groans of their human companions, wounded and dying and trampled underfoot by hurrying batteries, riderless horses and the moving lines of battle . . . —a perfect hell on earth, never, perhaps to be equaled, certainly not to be surpassed, nor ever to be forgotten in a man’s lifetime.”
Many books have been written about this ferocious battle, with its dramatic reversals of fortune. On the third day the valiant Rebels—charging precipitously—were overwhelmed by Meade’s greater force. Confederate Brigadier General Josiah Gorgas wrote in his diary: “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success; to-day absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.” By nightfall on July 3 there were more than seven thousand dead on both sides, and fifty thousand casualties.
Robert E. Lee said, “It was all my fault,” and retreated. He had lost a third of his army.
Far away, on July 4, the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at 10:00 A.M. The same hour, Lincoln issued a triumphant press release: “News from the Army of the Potomac, up to 10. P.M. of the 3rd is such as to cover that Army with the highest honor.”
The President knew that the tide had turned. But his euphoria was short-lived. It never occurred to him that Meade would not press his advantage and annihilate Lee’s army as it fled. Meade had greater numbers and reinforcements at the ready. A downpour flooded the Potomac, making it impossible to ford; for days the Army of Virginia lay trapped between the Federals and the swollen river, yet Meade did nothing, while the flood drained. For reasons understood only by the commanders in the field—whose advice Meade sought—the Union army rested while the Rebels escaped.
Lincoln could not contain his disappointment or his wrath. He told his son Robert: “If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.” He wrote to Meade of “the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape . . . He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”
In the bedroom down the hall, his wife lay delirious from the infected wound in her head.
Whitman wrote to his mother: “One’s heart grows sick of war, after all, when you see what it really is—every once in a while I feel so horrified & disgusted—it seems to me like a great slaughterhouse & the men mutually butchering each other . . .” Perhaps this was the sentiment that paralyzed Meade’s generals. “Then I feel how impossible it appears, again, to retire from this contest, until we have carried our points.” He felt it “cruel to be tossed from pillar to post” in these conflicting emotions.
“It is curious—when I am present at the most appalling things, deaths, operations, sickening wounds (perhaps full of maggots), I do not fail, although my sympathies are very much excited, but keep singularly cool—but often, hours afterward, perhaps when I am home, or out walking alone, I feel sick & actually tremble when I recall the thing & have it in my mind again before me.”
One evening Whitman went with the O’Connors to visit the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing. Channing found the usually calm poet in a state of extreme agitation, pacing restlessly and wringing his hands.
“I say stop this war, this horrible massacre of men!” Whitman exclaimed.
“You are sick,” the minister said. “The daily contact with these poor maimed and suffering men has made you sick; don’t you see that the war cannot be stopped now? Some issue must be made and met.”
Whitman was not alone in his disillusionment. In the Midwest, white mobs attacked conscript officers in protest against Lincoln’s “war for Negro freedom.” In mid-July came the incendiary draft riots in Manhattan. A crowd of workingmen, mostly Irish-Americans, set fire to the draft office. Then they went on a rampage, looting saloons and seizing rifles from an armory on the way to the Negro ghetto where they burned Negroes and hung them from lampposts, killing hundreds. They torched an orphanage. It took the police force, militia, naval forces, a company from West Point, and a detachment of soldiers from Gettysburg to restore order.
In Washington the general feeling was that New York should be cannonaded and the rioters all hung in a body. The President was ill over it, could not even bring himself to convene his cabinet on the sixteenth. “None of us were in the right frame of mind for deliberation,” said the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, “—he [Lincoln] was not.” Whitman, weary of the war, feared the draft, feared that his brother Jeff might end up in uniform, and did not lack sympathy with the rioters. “I remain silent, partly amused, partly scornful, or occasionally put a dry remark, which only adds fuel to the flame—I do not feel it in my heart to abuse the poor people, or call for rope or bullets for them, but that is all the talk here, even in the hospitals.”
The poet was ailing in several ways. He was lonely and home-sick. William and Nellie O’Connor had moved out of the house on L Street that summer, and Whitman was spending entire days and nights at Armory Square in flight from solitude. He had cut his hand while assisting a surgeon in July and the hand had become infected. The wound was slow to heal and he wore a bandage on it until early August. He went to bed feeling weak and dizzy, and woke in the morning drenched with sweat.
“I see so much of butcher sights, so much sickness and suffering,” he wrote his mother, “I must get away a while I believe for self-preservation.”
The weather that summer was insufferable, the temperature rising to 104 degrees. The newspapers daily reported men, women, and horses dropping in the streets from sunstroke. Whitman carried an umbrella and a fan in the daytime—“quite a Japanee,” he remarked.
Only late at night did the poet take any pleasure in retracing the dusty length of Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. At the beginning of August the moon was full; the moonlight on the white pilasters and balustrades bestowed upon Lincoln’s dwelling-place a rare splendor, to Whitman a true glory. He described “the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows . . . the brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the façade, columns and portico, & c.—everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft.—the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon—the pure and gorgeous front, in the trees, under the night-lights, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion.”
He neared the clover and fleur-de-lys ironwork of the open northeast gates of the portico. A sentry armed with a carbine sat on a stone post in front of a great gate-pier. The gas lanterns atop the gate-piers shone upon that soldier and his fellow sentries pacing there in their blue coats, “stopping you not at all,” Whitman observed, “but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move.”
“I see the President almost every day,” Whitman wrote on Wednesday, August 12, “as I happen to live where he passes to and from his lodgings out of town.”
/> That morning found Whitman on his watch, at Vermont Avenue near L Street, as he heard the cavalry rattling in from the north and saw the horseguards with their naked sabers held upright over their shoulders. Lincoln himself was on horseback this morning, on a large easygoing gray horse, “dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty; wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, & c, as the commonest man.” At his left rode a lieutenant, with yellow shoulder-straps; and following behind rode the Ohio detail, two by two, horseguards in yellow-striped jackets, at a slow trot, their sabers and bridles clanking.
“I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes . . . always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression.”
It seemed that no one’s sorrow escaped the President’s notice. The sight of the ragged, starving “contrabands” tugged at his heart. On Monday he had met with Frederick Douglass, the lecturer, author, and suffragist, a freed slave. On Tuesday a one-legged colored man had stopped Lincoln on the street, begging for help. It was 94 degrees in the shade. Lincoln hurriedly wrote a check out of his personal account at Riggs & Co.: “Pay to colored man, with one leg or bearer Five . . . Dollars $5/00. A. Lincoln.” That was a day consumed with cabinet meetings and tedious arguments with New York Governor Horatio Seymour over the draft. This morning, Wednesday, he would be settling a dispute between General Grant and the disgraced Major General John McClernand, whom Grant had dismissed from his command. The same day he must find time to write Stanton on behalf of a Mrs. Baird. The widow had three sons in uniform, one of them under arrest for desertion, who should have been pardoned under a recent dispensation. Lincoln wanted the Secretary of War to return the boy to duty. “I think too, he should have his pay for duty actually performed. Loss of pay falls hard upon poor families.”
Lincoln and Whitman Page 16
