Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  1

  A SIGHT in the day-break grey and dim,

  As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,

  As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital-tent,

  Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended

  lying,

  Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

  Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

  2

  Curious, I halt, and silent stand;

  Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first, just

  lift the blanket:

  Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d hair,

  and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

  Who are you my dear comrade?

  3

  Then to the second I step—And who are you, my child and darling?

  Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?

  Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of

  beautiful yellow-white ivory:

  Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the

  face of the Christ himself;

  Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.

  Whitman claimed that the experience of war had made him a great poet. “This is the very centre, circumference, of my whole career . . . but for this I never would have had Leaves of Grass.” Many readers disagree, and so did Trowbridge, for all his admiration of these “fine, effective, patriotic and pathetic chants.” Of course he would not tell his friend then and there, but he “did not find in them anything comparable with the greatly moving passages in the earlier Leaves.” The tone was more literary, with lapses into conventional poetic diction.

  1

  Come up from the fields, father, here’s a letter from our Pete;

  And come to the front door, mother—here’s a letter from thy dear son.

  2

  Lo, ’tis autumn,

  Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

  Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages . . .

  We may find fault with Drum-Taps—the diction of individual lines, their sentimentality, or the overall quality of the poems—yet there is no doubt that these poems, and the poems in Sequel to Drum-Taps (which Whitman completed soon after Lincoln’s death), represent the apotheosis of Whitman’s role as the bard of democracy in our American drama. He felt that every poem he had published before the war was a prophecy of the tragic conflict as well as the inevitable triumph of the Union. In the end the poet came to believe that Drum-Taps (with its sequel) was the narrative climax of the completed opera of Leaves of Grass. And now, whatever one’s opinion of the relative merits of this or that cluster of poems, it is difficult to dispute him.

  4

  Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,

  Straight and swift to my wounded I go,

  Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in;

  Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground;

  Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof ’d hospital;

  To the long rows of cots, up and down, each side, I return;

  To each and all, one after another, I draw near—not one do I miss;

  An attendent follows, holding a tray—he carries a refuse pail,

  Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d

  again.

  5

  I onward go, I stop,

  With hinged knees and steady hand, to dress wounds;

  I am firm with each—the pangs are sharp, yet unavoidable;

  One turns to me his appealing eyes—(poor boy! I never knew you,

  Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that

  would save you.)

  6

  On, on I go—(open doors of time! open hospital doors!)

  The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away;)

  The neck of the cavalry-man, with bullet through and through, I examine;

  Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard;

  (Come, sweet death! be persuaded, O beautiful death!

  In mercy come quickly.)

  7

  From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,

  I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood;

  Back on his pillow the soldier bends, with curv’d neck, and side-falling head;

  His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,

  And has not yet looked on it.

  8

  I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep;

  But a day or two more—for see the frame all wasted and sinking,

  And the yellow-blue countenance see.

  9

  I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,

  Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,

  While the attendant stands behind aside me, holding the tray and pail.

  10

  I am faithful, I do not give out;

  The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,

  These and more I dress with impassive hand—(yet deep in my breast

  a fire, a burning flame.)

  —from “The Dresser”

  Whitman may have written his greatest poems before the war. But war was in the air in the 1850s, as Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, Seward, John Brown, and Robert E. Lee all knew. With the poet’s gift for prophecy and transcending the quotidian, Whitman had published the first edition of Leaves of Grass knowing it was part of a larger vision. “Song of Myself ” not only belonged to the future, it had been called into being by poems that were yet to be written. No poem in Whitman’s book was self-generating or self-sustaining— all were interlinked, directed toward an end that lay beyond the war, a new bible that would comprehend the fiery crucible and the triumph of the democratic ideal. It was meant to heal the nation.

  “I thought no man more than Whitman merited recognition and assistance from the government,” John Trowbridge recalled. He asked his friend if he would accept a job in one of the departments. Whitman said he thought it unlikely he would ever get an appointment. But then he mentioned in an offhand way that he still had a letter that Emerson had written to Salmon Chase on his behalf. Intrigued, Trowbridge asked if he could see it.

  Later Trowbridge asked if he might hold on to the Emerson letter until such a moment as seemed proper to show it to the Secretary of the Treasury, “and with such furthering words as I could summon in so good a cause.” Whitman remained skeptical. A government worker had once told him that upon seeing Leaves of Grass on his center table, Chase had said, “How is it possible you can have this nasty book here?” The poet insisted that if Trowbridge’s venture failed, he wanted the precious Emerson letter returned to him.

  There is something suspicious about this passage of Trowbridge’s affectionate “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” published forty years later. The Tuesday they breakfasted together was the opening day of the Thirty-eighth Congress, when Lincoln delivered his annual message to the House and Senate. The President praised the Treasury’s performance and the enacting of the national banking law, its crowning achievement. Chase was polishing the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, which would fill the front pages of the newspapers, and he was the subject of lavish editorial praise. He could not have been more proud than he was on December 10, busier, or more convinced of his chance to win the Republican nomination for president.

  That Thursday morning, after breakfast, John Trowbridge followed the Secretary into his book-lined private office in the mansion. After some pleasant conversation, Trowbridge said: “I’m about to overstep a rule I laid down for myself on entering this house.”

  “What rule?” Chase’s handsome features were distorted by a single flaw: his
right eyelid drooped involuntarily, giving him a sinister look.

  “Never to repay your hospitality by asking you any official favor.”

  Salmon Chase replied that he was happy to do for his friends the sort of things he was constantly asked to do for strangers. So Trowbridge laid Whitman’s case before him, especially praising the poet’s patriotic work in the hospitals. Then he showed his host Emerson’s letter. Chase’s eyes widened as he read the page. He was an avid autograph collector.

  Having listened politely to Trowbridge’s plea on Whitman’s behalf, Chase responded with characteristic gravity, his deep voice marred by a lisp. “I am placed in a very embarrassing position. It would give me great pleasure to grant this request, out of my regard for Mr. Emerson.” Then he went on to say that Leaves of Grass had made the author notorious; Chase was given to understand that Whitman was a rowdy—that he had even described himself as “one of the roughs.”

  Trowbridge said, “He is as quiet a gentleman in his manner and conversation as any guest who enters your door.”

  Nevertheless, Secretary Chase concluded, “his writings have given him a bad repute, and I should not know what sort of place to give such a man.” The candidate for the presidency was taking no chances; if he could not fill a position with a partisan, he surely wasn’t going to fill it with a poet of ill fame. If Trowbridge did not know this, and know of Whitman’s devotion to Lincoln, he had no business calling himself Whitman’s friend, or Chase’s biographer.

  Trowbridge offered to spare all three of them further embarrassment by withdrawing the Emerson letter; but Chase glanced again greedily at the Sage of Concord’s signature and concluded, “I have nothing of Emerson’s in his handwriting, and I shall be glad to keep this.”

  What could Whitman’s friend have done? After all, the letter had been addressed to Salmon Chase.

  Walt Whitman was an obsessive collector, too, which may be one of the reasons why he never had parted with Emerson’s introductions to Seward or Chase. So when Trowbridge showed up at Whitman’s lodging on Friday morning, abashed, the poet was scarcely disappointed that Chase had rejected his suit, but he “showed his amused disgust” when his friend explained how the letter had been pocketed by the Secretary.

  Knowing that the Treasury had been accused of corruption, Whitman quipped, “He is right in preserving his saints from contamination by a man like me!” Trowbridge defended Chase, saying his employer could not be blamed for taking a writer at his word when he described himself as “rowdyish,” “disorderly,” and worse. He quoted Whitman his own line, “I cock my hat as I please, indoors and out,” and Whitman laughed. He said, “It’s about what I expected.”

  So one must wonder exactly what John Trowbridge’s agenda had been on December 8, when he took the Emerson letter across the street from the tenement to the mansion. What feelings of remorse the writer must have suppressed when, forty years later, he apologized. “I should probably have had no difficulty in securing the appointment if I had withheld Emerson’s letter, and called my friend simply Mr. Whitman, without mentioning Leaves of Grass.” This is absurd. The novelist had tangled himself in his own web, covering an old lie with a new one. Trowbridge knew perfectly well he could not get Walt Whitman a position in Chase’s department, but he certainly had delighted his new employer with the present of the Emerson autograph—briefly. Unknown to Trowbridge, Chase’s conscience troubled him, and he surrendered the famous letter to the Treasury files.

  To give some idea of the amount of money that was changing hands to get Chase nominated: Jay Cooke paid $2,000, a fortune in Civil War dollars, to a bookseller in Boston to act as agent for a single transaction—to place a chapter of Trowbridge’s campaign biography of Chase in the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly. (The President’s monthly salary in 1863 was $2,022.34.) It is not known how much Chase’s backers were paying Trowbridge for his writing. By December 22 Chase had agreed to release $640,000 of Treasury funds for the use of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, which became the main source of money to finance the Chase-for-president movement; then the railroad men joined Kansas Senator Pomeroy and newsman Whitelaw Reid on the committee.

  Although Salmon Chase had no sense of humor, his effort to appear uninterested in the presidency while pursuing the office with fanatic ambition and acrobatic exertions seemed comical to Lincoln and Hay—until it became a genuine challenge. Only Chase had the stature and the progressive credentials to consolidate the radical wing of the Republican Party, and abolitionists like Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley had long been out of patience with Lincoln’s moderate leadership. Chase was a real threat. On January 18, 1864, the Secretary wrote to a major supporter in Ohio: “At the instance of many who think that the public interest would be promoted by my election in the chief magistry, a committee, composed of prominent Senators and Representatives and citizens, has been organized here for taking measures to promote that object.” Chase hastened to add that all his protests had failed to discourage the venture, and “under these circumstances, I desire the support of Ohio.” He had made it public that he was available.

  Mary Lincoln’s feelings about Chase anticipated a chorus of Lincoln’s friends who cried that the traitor ought to be drummed out of the cabinet. The President, fully aware that Salmon Chase was the most formidable opponent against him for the nomination, seemed unperturbed by his politicking, or by charges that Chase had been filling department posts with men who would get him elected. As long as the Secretary performed his duties competently—and he did—Lincoln said he had no intention of replacing him.

  By late summer Lincoln had all but given up hope of a second term. But, by one of those perverse tricks of history that must have tormented Chase until the day he died, he was not the man to dash Lincoln’s hopes. Chase appears to have been undone by his own immoderate ambition, which infected the men he trusted to promote him, in surprising ways.

  Lincoln, with his uncanny political instincts, may have sensed that Chase or his men would overdo things. When he found himself bewildered about how to handle a problem, Lincoln’s style was to sit back and wait it out. So he waited for Chase to blunder. In all fairness, it was not Chase who blundered—it was his “committee.” The Chase-for-president committee might have been an inspiration for the Keystone Cops or the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. As the dignified candidate looked on in horror, they sank his promising campaign in only six weeks, eight full months in advance of the election.

  Chase’s publicists began by sending out an anonymous pamphlet, “The Next Presidential Election,” a diatribe against Lincoln and all those who were trying to secure his nomination for a second term. This “vascillation [sic] and indecisiveness of the President . . . the feebleness of his will” and his “want of intellectual grasp . . . has been the real cause why our well-appointed armies have not succeeded in the destruction of the rebellion.” Ward Hill Lamon first saw this “most scurrilous and abusive pamphlet” on February 6. It drew a little support for Chase in the religious press and the more radical dailies. But the tone of the circular was so vehement it attracted far more attention among Lincoln’s supporters than Chase’s. When it appeared in Ohio under the frank of Senator Sherman, one correspondent wrote that the document was so dastardly that “it will brand with infamy your character as a statesman and your honor as a gentleman.”

  Certainly the Chase committee’s circular was insolent and ill timed; moreover, the authors had underestimated Lincoln’s political organization and grassroots support in states they had targeted. Oblivious, in mid-February the publicists circulated a second anti-Lincoln pamphlet announcing that the reelection of Abraham Lincoln was “practically impossible” and would damage “the cause of human liberty and the dignity and honor of the nation.” This time the manifesto was signed by Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy. And he boldly announced that Salmon Chase possessed “more of the qualities needed in a President during the next four years, than are combined in any other available candidate.” />
  The infamous “Pomeroy Circular,” widely published, galvanized support for the incumbent President, and it embarrassed Secretary Chase, who claimed that he had no knowledge of the tract before it was printed, and that he was a reluctant candidate who had been ill used by his admirers. A cabinet member, he now appeared a traitor to the man who had appointed him.

  Chase offered his resignation. Lincoln, after letting him flounder for a week, calmly responded that he did “not perceive occasion for a change” in the Treasury. He chose not to accept the resignation, knowing what lay in store for his shamed adversary.

  On February 24, the Ohio State Republican convention urged Lincoln’s nomination; three days later Lincoln’s friend Congressman Francis P. Blair Jr. attacked Chase on the floor of the House, blaming him for widespread corruption in the Treasury Department. And referring to the Pomeroy Circular, Blair expressed surprise “that a man having the instincts of a gentleman should remain in the cabinet after the disclosure of such an intrigue . . . every hour he remains sinks him deeper in the contempt of every honorable mind.”

  Humiliated, Chase withdrew his candidacy on March 5, 1864. He explained that his home state, Ohio, preferred another candidate. Chase had ended his run for the presidency, although almost no one believed it.

  9

  WILDERNESS

  January’s bitter cold gave way in February to a southern wind and two weeks of mild weather that thawed the earth and began to dry the roads, promising an early spring.

  Sometime during that winter of 1863–1864, according to William O’Connor’s brief biography The Good Gray Poet (1865), Walt Whitman was taking a stroll along the rutted road in front of the White House. “Slow of movement,” a friend had described him, “inclined to walk with a lounging gait which somebody has likened to an elephantine roll . . . head massive, complexion floridtawny.” His white hair and the wrinkles in his brow made him look older than his forty-five years.