Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Such thoughts passed through his mind that morning as he rode down Vermont Avenue toward the White House. And there once again the smiling graybeard with the beautiful gray eyes stood by the curb, his face beaming goodwill and encouragement, waiting to bestow his benediction.

  “We have got so that we always exchange bows, and very cordial ones,” wrote Walt Whitman.

  7

  HALLOWEEN

  Autumn of 1863 was a cruel season for the Whitman family. Walt ’s brother Andrew, stricken with consumption, lay on his deathbed; their mother had severe rheumatism in her arms and legs so she could hardly take care of her retarded son Edward, or her older son Jesse, whose mental illness had taken a violent turn. Walt himself was exhausted, although he would not admit it. He had tested his courage in the hospitals, and the things he had seen and done there were undermining his health. He talked to his friend John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, about going home to vote in the November election, and to see what he might do for his family.

  In late October, Hay approached his New York acquaintance Albert Marshman Palmer to see if he could help Whitman. Palmer, with his lantern jaw, wide-set piercing eyes, and jutting chin, had inherited from his father, the Baptist preacher and poet Albert Gallatin Palmer, a rare combination of severity and vulnerability. A. M. Palmer, as he was called, had graduated from law school in 1860 but never practiced law. Well connected, Palmer pursued a mazy, unprincipled career in the New York government before his confessed peculations forced him into a second profession, as a theater manager.

  Palmer, like Hay, was twenty-five years of age. They had many things in common, including charm, precocity, and influence, both serving as private secretaries to powerful men. Palmer’s boss Hiram Barney, collector of the Port of New York, was the highest-paid public official in the country, making even more money than the President. Secretary of the Treasury Chase wanted to replace Lincoln as chief executive, and the customhouse was a key to political influence in New York, Secretary Seward ’s state. Control over that customhouse with its hundreds of jobs became a point of furious contention between the ambitious Chase and the loyal Seward.

  Salmon Chase had won the first round, in getting his Ohio friend Barney the post. But Barney faltered in the job. Now Seward ’s croney, Republican boss Thurlow Weed, had taken Barney’s secretary under his wing, and Palmer was adroitly gaining control of the customhouse patronage. People had begun to call him “the collector de facto.”

  Over drinks, the young men chatted in the Willard, where Palmer was staying during the last week in October. Hay had a favor to ask . . . the poet Walt Whitman wanted to go home to Brooklyn. Palmer may have feared the favor on the tip of Hay’s tongue involved the customhouse. For all of the secretary’s influence, he would not be able to get an office there for the notorious author of Leaves of Grass.

  Palmer was relieved to find it was a simpler matter: the poet was almost penniless, having spent all his money on treats for his soldiers. Election Day was coming. If Palmer could procure a round-trip train ticket to New York City for Whitman, Hay would get him a furlough to go home and vote.

  A simple matter. When you are “the collector de facto” of the Port of New York, train tickets are to be had for the asking.

  So, three days before Allhallows, John Hay “went down to Willards . . . & got from Palmer who is here a free ticket to New York and back for Walt . . . who is going to New York to electioneer and vote for the Union ticket,” Hay wrote in his diary on October 29. He told Whitman he would have the train tickets and the furlough ready for him if he would drop by the White House on Halloween, Saturday the thirty-first, a slow day in the President ’s office.

  Walt Whitman had gotten his hair cut and his beard trimmed. (“All my acquaintances are in anger & despair & go about wringing their hands.”) In a letter to his mother he joked that among his friends the recent battles in Charleston and Tennessee were “insignificant themes in comparison” to his hairstyle and his dignified new frock coat of black broadcloth. He also had bought a shirt of white linen. Perhaps it was to reassure a prospective landlady— on October 16 he moved to 456 Sixth Street, five blocks north of Armory Square. The landlady was old and feeble, and was taking care of her four-year-old granddaughter; she would have preferred her boarders to look like gentlemen. And certainly Whitman’s year in Washington had taught him that, outside of the sick wards, there were social circles that were inaccessible to a man who looked like a Southern planter or a buffalo hunter.

  On the northeast corner of Seventh and D Streets, just across the street from Whitman’s new dwelling, stood Shepherd & Riley’s Bookstore, where the poet bought paper, pencils, and books. A long awning surrounded the corner where the journals were racked and stacked outside. And up above the bookstore was Alexander Gardner’s Gallery, four windows across the front and two in the peaked loft between the twin chimneys, to light the subjects of his photographs. Gardner, a former associate of Mathew Brady, advertised the finest apparatus and “every arrangement has been adopted which could in any way facilitate the production of ‘Beautiful Pictures.’ ” Also, his ads explained, “the light has been constructed so as to obviate all heavy and unnatural shadows under the eyebrows and chin.” And Gardner was cheaper than Brady.

  Dressed in his new coat, Walt Whitman went to have his picture taken in Gardner’s Gallery. The artist posed him against a square pier, leaning with his elbow upon the capstone, his hand smoothing his elegant goatee. His white mustaches are slightly upturned as if he has been twirling them. The look in his gray eyes is serious but gentle. His throat is covered by a black neckcloth and—as if he were quite proud of his haircut—his hat is nowhere to be seen.

  For the first time in his life Walt Whitman looked fit to be introduced to the President. This meeting never had seemed more likely to the poet than on Halloween, 1863, when his friend and admirer John Hay invited him to the White House on official business. Having greeted the President many times, Whitman could not doubt that the Chief Executive would recognize his face if he saw him again up close. Whitman had published some pieces in the New York Times that autumn celebrating the Federal City; perhaps Hay had shown these to the President.

  “I fully believe in Lincoln,” the poet wrote to his sister on October 15. “Few know the rocks & quicksands he has to steer through.”

  Whitman’s direct route to the White House ran past the marble portico of the Patent Office and due west on F Street, past newpaper row, and by the Paymaster’s Office. The weather was unseasonably cold. To supply the fortifications around the city with fuel, great swaths of forest had been felled and 150 wagons engaged to haul the cordwood to the camps.

  On Ninth Street a six-hundred-pound wheel of New Jersey cheese aged slowly in the window of Barnes & Company, grocers, a wonder to the neighborhood. On Tenth Street a poster announced that John Wilkes Booth would appear on Monday at Ford’s Theatre as the villainous Richard III.

  Anything seemed possible. Halloween was gaining popularity in wartime—America was obsessed with the macabre, haunted by a crowd of the newly dead. A day without news of bloody battles seemed dull. Brady and Gardner were doing a brisk side business in selling grisly photographs of corpses on the battlefields. This morning’s Chronicle included a long and poetic essay on Halloween: “The wisest and gravest of men for this one October night forget their wisdom and calmness, and loyally believe in fairy-land, the midnight revelry of witches . . . All we have done in an evil way will be remembered and punished; and all good deeds will receive the reward that the kind dispensers [fairies] of happiness and hope have in their power to bestow.”

  Although fairies no longer ride through the air on cream-colored horses; and the demons and minions of the Evil One no longer scatter their curses and famines and disease, “the human heart is still the same, with its hopes and loves and fears.” The anonymous columnist concludes: “Our hills may not have the romance of the Highlands, nor has the Potomac the poetry of the Bonnie Doon. But on
hills and river let the fairies meet tonight, and we wish them joy in their revels under the waning moon.”

  One can only imagine the excitement Whitman felt on this day, after so many walks near “the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas.” For the first time he passed the sentries at the gate and advanced through the Ionic columns up the steps to the broad platform in front of the entrance. He entered the enormous vestibule, where Edward McManus, the doorkeeper, directed him to a flight of stairs on the left. Through an archway at the top of the stairs he found John Hay, at his work with the President’s mail in the anteroom.

  They greeted each other warmly, the distinguished author grateful for the favors Hay had done him, the handsome, boyish secretary with the soft brown eyes proud to be of service to the great poet. Yes, the President was in. They could hear his gentle voice and see his dark-clad, gaunt figure through the doorway. This was an unusually quiet day here. The President wrote a couple of requests to the Attorney General for pardons, authorized a few passes, and informed some congressmen-elect of the form of credentials required of them. Now Lincoln was taking the leisure to meet with a friend.

  Hay gave Whitman an envelope with the train tickets and the furlough as the poet watched and listened to the President a few steps away. Whitman “saw Mr. Lincoln standing, talking with a gentleman, apparently a dear friend,” he wrote that day. “—his face & manner have an expression & were inexpressibly sweet— one hand on his friends shoulder the other holding his hand.”

  Noting the poet’s rapt attention, Hay would not hurry him. Nor did the secretary dare to interrupt Lincoln during this intimate interview to inform him that here was Walt Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass. Whitman would not have ventured to ask it. If the President noticed Whitman there, dressed now in formal black, with his hair clipped and beard trimmed, like a lobbyist, maybe Lincoln would not have recognized him. No, it must suffice for the poet to identify with the dear friend whose hand the President held, his other hand on the visitor’s shoulder, while he gazed upon him with a look “inexpressibly sweet.”

  And of course there would be plenty of time in the future to meet the President. Whitman thanked Hay, bid him farewell, and left the mansion in a mood of wistful euphoria.

  On All Souls’ Day he wrote in his diary: “I love the President personally.”

  Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,

  Be not dishearten’d—affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet;

  Those who love each other shall become invincible—they shall yet

  make Columbia victorious.

  part three

  DRUM-TAPS

  8

  THE GREAT CHASE

  During the month when Whitman was on holiday in New York, the President infuriated his wife by attending the social event of the season without her. The wedding of Salmon Chase’s daughter Kate to Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island was a chief topic of conversation in Washington high society and the obsession of journalists, from the dignified Washington Intelligencer to the influential New York Times.

  Mary Lincoln had hated Kate Chase long before her engagement. Twenty-two-year-old Catherine Jane Chase had the social poise and natural beauty that made her a great asset to her ambitious father, in a town where Mary’s provincial habits and demeanor were a constant source of amusement. And now Kate was marrying one of the wealthiest men in America.

  The hostility began upon Lincoln’s inauguration, and it was triggered by Mary’s fierce partisan defense of her husband against all rivals. Salmon Chase wanted to be president as much as any man has ever desired that much-coveted office. He could never quite accept the fact that homely Abraham Lincoln, with his lack of executive experience, his poor schooling, low breeding, and rudimentary drawing-room manners, had won the prize, while he, Salmon Chase, had been passed over. He had gone to Dartmouth. He had served as a U.S. senator and then as governor of Ohio. His uncle was a bishop. With his bold, square features, handsome from any angle, and the dignified dome of his bald head, he looked like a President. He feared God and served the Church and the cause of abolition. Indeed, it had been his “radical” approach to freeing the slaves that had cost him his party’s nomination.

  Because the Secretary of the Treasury had been a widower for some time, Kate managed their three-story brick town house at Sixth and E Streets, acting as hostess at Chase’s frequent formal dinners and receptions. Father and daughter entertained graciously: breakfasts for congressmen and visiting lobbyists; sumptuous dinners honoring foreign ministers, bankers, generals, and senators, who enjoyed Chase ’s plentiful stock of wine, liquor, and cigars. Not the least of the attractions there was “pretty Kate,” as John Hay called her.

  Salmon Chase was six feet two inches tall, and broad-shouldered; his hyper-erect posture made him look even larger than he was. Lincoln once said of the proud Secretary, “Chase is about one and a half times bigger than any other man I ever knew.” Bald and clean-shaven, he also seemed frosty, remote; this was due in part to his nearsightedness. A contemporary quipped: “Mr. Chase is nearsighted and does not see men.” Kate did. And by all accounts she was the most brilliant woman in the city, strikingly beautiful, statuesque, and exceedingly clever. Her hair was chestnut-colored, with red-gold highlights, and her dark, wide-set eyes, with long lashes, sparkled with wit.

  The upper crust of Washington society had been invited to a lavish celebration, a wedding of power and beauty. Although Kate could hardly be improved by adornments, Sprague—heir to a textile fortune and former governor of Rhode Island—gave her a tiara of matched pearls and diamonds worth fifty thousand dollars as a wedding gift. On the evening of November 12, 1863, the bride in her white velvet gown, her veil encircled by the tiara, descended the stairs to meet her father in their living room. Sprague, a few inches shorter than Kate, waited there with the Bishop of Rhode Island, in his miter, cope, and cassock. The room was crowded. The President, cabinet members and their wives, senior military officers, family members, and a select group of legislators were thrilled to witness the marriage. The President ’s wife was not among them.

  We cannot know for certain that Mary Lincoln was personally jealous of Kate Chase Sprague. But she surely saw the extravaganza of this wedding party for what it was: a carefully choreographed political event. Mary wanted no part of it. As father and daughter approached the groom and the Bishop, the marine band played a march written for the bride by the popular composer Frederick Kroell (it is now called “The Kate Chase Wedding March”). The room wanted only bronze eagles and bunting to complete the picture.

  There is no greater evidence of Lincoln’s high-mindedness and political shrewdness than the way he handled his obstinate Secretary of the Treasury. Throughout his tenure the moody, humorless Chase caused the President nearly as much trouble as the rest of his cabinet combined. Lincoln needed Chase far more than Chase needed a place in the cabinet—particularly the Treasury. Chase would not have minded being Secretary of State, and so he resented Seward. At the outset he knew next to nothing about monetary policy or finance, and only arduous study enabled him to master the complex duties of his office. Lincoln needed this progressive Ohio Republican for balance in his administration; newly reelected to the Senate, Chase was an abolitionist and a Mid-westerner, and he could be relied upon not to placate the Rebels. Chase would have preferred remaining a senator, and he made this clear to Lincoln, who would not take no for an answer. The Secretary served virtually under protest. Knowing that Chase would not stop running for president even during a war, Lincoln had wanted him on board, in the cabinet, where it would be harder for him to stir up strife to serve his own agenda—support for the presidential nomination in 1864.

  Now 1864 was fast approaching, and the progressive wing of the Republican Party, including Horace Greeley, wanted Chase in the White House. A single term was customary, and no president since Jackson had served more than four years. Almost everyone agreed that Kate Sprague would make a sple
ndid first lady. The idea appalled Mary Lincoln, who was so deeply in debt that only the prospect of four more years of a presidential salary might bail her out. For his part, Lincoln felt that if he was not offered a second term during wartime it would amount to a verdict of failure on his first four years. Publicly he remained noncommittal, but he believed he was the best man to bring the war to conclusion and direct the Reconstruction.

  Lincoln was amused by what he called Chase ’s “voracious desire for office . . . from which I am not free myself,” and said the Secretary was like “a horsefly on the neck of a plowhorse.” But Chase was more than a nuisance. He spread stories of Lincoln’s military blunders and his naïveté about finance. He enlarged the myth that Lincoln was a pawn of Secretary of State Seward and big-money interests in New York. Chase challenged the President’s policies at every turn, while filling Treasury posts with sycophants who would electioneer on his behalf. When controversy arose over General Rosecrans’s crucial failure at Chickamauga, John Hay told Lincoln: “Chase will try to make capital out of this Rosecrans business.”

  The President chuckled and said: “I suppose he will, like the blue-bottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.”

  Hay noted in his diary that Lincoln “seems much amused at Chase’s mad hunt after the Presidency. He says it may win. He hopes the country will never do worse.”

  Soberly, Hay advised his boss that “he should not by making [endorsing] all of Chase’s appointments make himself particeps criminis [accomplice to the crime].” Hay cited Chase’s appointment of Homer Plantz as district attorney of Florida. “Plantz went down with but two ideas,” said Hay, “to steal money for himself and votes for Chase.” The President acted like it was just “a devilish good joke. He prefers letting Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than getting into a snarl with him by refusing what he asks,” Hay wrote. Lincoln chose his battles carefully.