Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

Early’s troops retreated, but General Wright did not pursue them. So the President had one more military fiasco to add to his political humiliations. Only laughter could relieve him. As groups of Radical Republicans were meeting in Boston, Cincinnati, and New York to discuss replacing Lincoln, he joked:

  It reminds me of an old acquaintaince, who, having a son of a scientific turn, bought him a microscope. The boy went around, experimenting with his glass upon everything that came his way. One day, at the dinner table, his father took up a piece of cheese. “Don’t eat that, father,” said the boy; “it is full of wrigglers.”

  “My son,” replied the old gentleman, taking at the same time, a huge bite, “let ’em wriggle; I can stand it if they can.”

  New York moderate Thurlow Weed believed that Lincoln’s insistence on making the abolition of slavery a condition for any peace negotiations was extreme. “As things stand now Mr. Lincoln’s re-election is an impossibility. The people are wild for Peace.” Even Weed had begun flirting with the Democrats, who were willing to give up the cause of abolition to preserve the Union.

  A week before the Democratic Convention, Henry Raymond, chairman of the executive committee of Lincoln’s party, warned him: “The tide is setting strongly against us.”

  Not the least of Lincoln’s liabilities was his wife, shuttling to and from New York on shopping sprees and secret, quixotic missions to garner political support from the likes of Thurlow Weed and the hostile newspaperman James Gordon Bennett, meanwhile renegotiating her bills with the Broadway merchants. A two-thousand-dollar lace shawl. Two diamond-and-pearl bracelets. Commissioner of public buildings Benjamin French knew of “rumors that Democrats are getting up something in which they intend to show up Madame Lincoln.” This would not be difficult. She had run up personal debts of twenty-seven thousand dollars. Mary was more concerned about the coming election than was her husband, upon separate grounds: “If he is elected,” she told Elizabeth Keckley, “I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs, but if he is defeated, then the bills will be sent to him.”

  On August 23, as the cabinet members arrived for their meeting at the long table under the glass-globe chandelier, Lincoln presented the men with a folded paper, its edges pasted so that the contents could not be read. He asked each man in turn—Stanton, Welles, Usher, Fessenden, and so on—to write his name across the back of the paper. When all had signed, Lincoln closed the endorsed document in his desk drawer. He would say no more about it until after the election. He had written:

  Executive Mansion

  Washington, August 23, 1864

  This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as will save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.

  He meant that if General George McClellan won on a platform that permitted slavery, the peculiar institution would continue to divide the nation as it had all along. Did Lincoln intend to cooperate with McClellan by not cooperating with him? We will never know. No sooner had the President filed this curious document (now in the Library of Congress) than the tide began to turn in his favor.

  It was the Democrats’ turn to show their hand. On August 30 in Chicago they nominated Lincoln’s old nemesis, General McClellan, on a “peace platform,” a condemnation of the war and a plea for peace that would prove an albatross for the candidate. The public soon called it “the Chicago Surrender.” The humor of McClellan’s predicament did not escape Lincoln or his Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, who said, “there is fatuity in nominating a general and a warrior in time of war on a peace platform.” Folly was no Republican monopoly. It was far easier to attack an incumbent President in wartime than to unseat him.

  While admitting that he sought a second term in part from “personal vanity, or ambition,” Lincoln explained that he had higher motives: “God knows I do not want the labor and responsibility of the office for another four years. But I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years Administration endorsed.” Far more was at issue than his pride; democracy itself was at stake. If Americans voted for the Union, for Lincoln, they would be working “for the best interests of their country and the world, not only for the present, but for all future ages.”

  A White House visitor asked Lincoln how it felt to be president. He laughed. “You have heard about the man tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail? A man in the crowd asked how he liked it, and his reply was that if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, he would much rather walk.”

  Lincoln may have laughed because he acknowledged the whimsical, freakish workings of Fortune. As if fate had designed to cancel the Democrats’ claim that the war was a lost cause, on September 4 Sherman wired the President, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Lincoln called the victory a gift from God and declared Sunday, September 4, a national day of thanksgiving. He directed that hundred-gun salutes should be fired in every major city. Success on the battlefield was one benefit the electorate never questioned, and this candidate would not neglect the opportunity for good press. Great Atlanta, the railroad center and freight entrepôt, the chief seat of power in the deep South, was now under Federal control.

  Saturday night, a week later, Walt Whitman sat with friends “of the Fred Gray association” drinking beer in a dive on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They had started in the larger saloons and gradually worked their way down to this “crowded, low, most degraded place . . . one of those places where the air is full of the scent of thievery, druggies, foul play, & prostitution gangrened.”

  A poor bleary-eyed girl brought their beer to the table. Whitman noticed that she was wearing a McClellan campaign medal on her breast.

  “Barmaid,” he called to her. Pointing out the medal he asked, “Are the other girls here for McClellan too?”

  “Yes, every one of them, and they won’t tolerate a girl in the place who is not. And the fellows are too,” she added proudly.

  Whitman counted. “There must have been twenty girls, sad, sad, ruins . . .” This was the city where the draft rioters had burned down a Negro orphanage. Working-class women, and their men, had yet to warm to Lincoln. Whitman observed: “I should think nine tenths, of all classes, are Copperheads here, I never heard before such things as I hear now whenever I go out— then it seems tame & indeed unreal here, life as carried on & as I come in contact with it & receive its influences.”

  “I go out regularly,” he wrote to O’Connor, “sometimes out on the bay, or to Coney Island, & occasionally a tour through New York Life, as of old”—the circuit of beer halls and low taverns such as the one infested with Copperheads. One would think that New York and Brooklyn had not heard the hundred-gun salutes celebrating the fall of Atlanta; New Yorkers were still under the influence of Greeley’s anti-Lincoln publications and the wrath of the Radicals. They were still seething over the draft, putting their faith in handsome George McClellan and his “peace platform.” Meanwhile, Greeley, Weed, Sumner, and even “Bluff ” Ben Wade, who had stirred such opposition, had begun to beat the drum for Lincoln, in the wake of Union victories.

  The poet’s health had recovered, but for “a lingering suspicion of weakness now and then.” He had begun visiting the sick in Brooklyn City Hospital; in leisure hours he went out horseback riding and fishing. Drum-Taps, his book of war poems, had failed to find a publisher. He resolved to publish the poems himself, when he could find the funds, just as he had brought out Leaves of Grass.

  It was a strange time for a Lincolnite to be in New York. Until now the poet had been uncertain of his plans, although he wrote to Nellie O’Connor, “I think it quite possible I shall be in Washington again this winter.” That Saturday night, drinking lager in the nest of Copperheads, he seems to have made up his mind to return to the Federal City, drawn by the same affinity that had led him there in t
he first place.

  Victory followed upon victory in the Shenandoah Valley, where Grant had ordered Major General Philip Sheridan to destroy Jubal Early’s Rebel army. Grant told General Sheridan to pillage the region “so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” In late September Sheridan triumphed at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill, finally crushing Early’s army in mid-October.

  Now Republicans of every stripe—Radical, Moderate, and Conservative—hit the campaign trail in support of the Union Party, if not Lincoln himself, trumpeting the valor of Sherman and Sheridan, and attacking McClellan’s peace-at-any-price platform. Even Salmon Chase joined the canvass. The Radical John Frémont dropped out, having cut a deal with Lincoln to withdraw if the hated Conservative Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General, was dropped from the cabinet.

  Near Election Day, on the night of October 21, 1864, a crowd gathered outside the White House. A torchlight parade, with rockets and Roman candles, brightened the sky. In an upper window under the portico Lincoln stood, smiling, with eleven-year-old Tad at his side. The people serenaded the President and his son, and then called loudly for a speech.

  “I was promised not to be called upon for a speech tonight,” Lincoln responded, “nor do I propose to make one. But, as we have been hearing some very good news for a day or two, I propose that you give three cheers for Sheridan.”

  The crowd noisily obliged. There was warm respect for Sheridan, a small wonder in the Union army, an American Napoleon, a bandy-legged cavalry officer who stood five feet five inches tall.

  “While we are at it,” the President continued, with a twinkle in his eye, “we may as well consider how fortunate it was for the Secesh [Secessionists] that Sheridan was a very little man. If he had been a large man, there is no knowing what he would have done with them.” This brought peals of laughter and applause.

  Lincoln was too wise to be confident he would win the coming election. But he had grounds for optimism.

  Election night was warm and rainy. As Lincoln sat in the cipher room with John Hay, Thomas Eckert (chief of the telegraph office), Gideon Welles, and others, the dispatches soon quelled the last of his doubts. He sent Mary word of the triumphant early returns.

  “She is more anxious than I,” Lincoln said.

  It was a landslide. Toward midnight Eckert ordered out for a pan of fried oysters, and coffee. “The President went awkwardly and hospitably to work shovelling out the fried oysters. He was most agreeable and genial all the evening in fact,” Hay recalled. Hay and Lincoln went home.

  At 2:30 A.M. a band serenaded the President at the White House, and he “answered from the window with rather unusual dignity and effect.”

  “I am thankful to God for this approval of the people. But while deeply grateful for this mark of their confidence in me, if I know my heart, my gratitude is free from any taint of personal triumph. I do not impugn the motives of any one opposed to me. It is no pleasure for me to triumph over any one; but I give thanks to the Almighty for this evidence of the people’s resolution to stand by free government and the rights of humanity.”

  When Hay and Lincoln came upstairs, Ward Hill Lamon was waiting for them. He refused Hay’s offer of a bed, but accepted a glass of whiskey and some blankets. When Lincoln closed the door to his bedroom, Lamon rolled himself up in his cloak and the blankets and lay down there with his arsenal of bowie knives and pistols around him. Thus he passed the night, Hay recalled, “in that attitude of touching and dumb fidelity,” certain that the President was in more danger now than ever.

  11

  SPRING, 1865

  It was a season rich in promises and startling reversals of fortune, as changeable as the Maryland weather. Returning to Washington in the bitter cold and dusk of late winter, Whitman had been pleased by his prospects: a job in the Department of the Interior; new lodgings on higher ground, a mile north of the fetid canal; and his health restored. At the same time he was haunted by the fate of his brothers. At last, sadly, he had committed Jesse to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum. And Captain George Whitman, captured by Rebels at Poplar Grove Church, Virginia, had languished in a Petersburg camp for four months, a prisoner of war.

  Whitman’s new job, as a copyist in the Office of Indian Affairs, came to him by way of his old friend William O’Connor, now head of the Light House Board, and Assistant Attorney General J. Hubley Ashton, whose office was directly beneath O’Connor’s in the Treasury building. Ashton, highly placed in Lincoln’s administration, had long been a friend and admirer of the poet and his work. For a year or more O’Connor had been lobbying to find Whitman a comfortable job in the government. That he was at last successful, with Ashton’s help (Ashton petitioned William Otto, of the Interior, on Whitman’s behalf ), bespeaks no change in Whitman’s qualifications but rather a subtle shift in the political climate after Lincoln’s reelection. Lincoln, overwhelmed by office seekers, each of whom he felt “darted at him, and with thumb and finger carried off a portion of his vitality,” decided to change as few functionaries as possible. “To remove a man is very easy, but when I make a go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.” Now that men like the Assistant Attorney General and the Assistant Secretary of the Interior were more secure in their own positions, they were less fearful of taking on cases like Walt Whitman’s.

  The job was a plum, as O’Connor had described it, “an easy berth, a regular income [twelve hundred dollars per annum] . . . leaving you time to attend to the soldiers, to your poems, & c.” Whitman’s desk was in the basement of the Patent Office, a room in the northeast corner, across the street from Gardner’s Gallery, and Shepherd & Riley’s Bookstore, where the poet liked to browse. He wrote to his brother Jeff: “It is easy enough—I take things very easy—the rule is to come at 9 and go at 4—but I don’t come at 9, and only stay until 4 when I want . . . I am treated with great courtesy . . .” In this same letter he says, “I feel quite well, perhaps not as completely so as I used to, but I think I shall get so this spring . . .”

  He had directed much of his energy toward getting George out of prison. In a dispatch to the New York Times, Whitman attacked the administration’s “cold-blooded policy” concerning the exchange of prisoners, while grandiloquently absolving Lincoln of responsibility. “Under the President (whose humane, conscientious, and fatherly heart I have abiding faith in) the control of exchange has remained with the Secretary of War [Stanton], and also with Major-General Butler.” Stanton’s logic was unassailable to anyone not himself a prisoner, the kin of a prisoner, or a moralist. To wit: “It is not for the benefit of the Government of the United States that the power of the Secessionists should be repleted by some fifty thousand men in good condition [Confederate POWs] now in our hands, besides getting relieved of the support of nearly the same number of wrecks and ruins, of no advantage to us, now in theirs.” George was among those “wrecks and ruins,” but Lincoln, ruled by logic rather than sentiment, would not cross his Secretary of War. Whitman begged his friend John Swinton, editor of the New York Times, to write to General Grant requesting “one of the special exchanges . . . in favor of my brother George,” pleading “the deep distress of my mother whose health is getting affected, & of my sister—& thinking it worth the trial myself.” Swinton wrote to Grant, and the slow wheels of a prisoner exchange began to turn.

  In the meantime Whitman made himself at home. He liked his new room at 468 M Street, second door west of Twelfth, very near the house he had shared with the O’Connors when he first arrived in Washington. There was an open-air market nearby where the carts would arrive laden with fruits, vegetables, and flowers. He had a good big bed, an iron stove, and a pile of firewood in his room. He was particularly pleased with his landlady, Mrs. Edward Grayson, her Southern sympathies notwithstanding—her husband and son were both fighting in Confederate gray. She was “very obliging, starts my fire for me at 5 o’clock every afternoon, & lig
hts the gas, even, & then turns it down to be ready for me when I come home.”

  He spent evenings and weekends in Armory Square Hospital, but he assured his brother Jeff he “need not be afraid about my overdoing the matter. I shall go regularly enough, but shall be on my guard against trouble.” Whitman meant to defend himself against disease as well as emotional involvement with the soldiers, a devotion that had cost him “days and nights of unutterable anxiety: sitting there by some poor devil destined to go: always in the presence of death.”

  Spring struggled fitfully against a winter as cold and cruel as any in memory, and the violent changes in weather mirrored Whitman’s moods of hope and despair about George’s release. “Such caprices, abruptest alternations of frowns and beauty, I never knew.”

  Whitman wondered if the heat and cold, the rain and snow, “and what underlies them all,” were not somehow influenced by the passions of humankind, “strain’d stronger than usual, and on a larger scale than usual.” He was not the first to observe that for two years there had been remarkable expressions “of the subtle world of the air above us and around us. There, since this War . . . strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absence of it . . . After every great battle, a great storm.”

  Now there came evenings of supreme beauty, when Venus shone large and bright in the Western sky, hanging close to the moon in its first quarter. “The sky, dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the unsurpassable miracle of that great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west, suffused the soul.” Out of the silence Whitman heard the clear, slow notes of a bugle sounding taps in one of the military hospitals.

  On such evenings the poet liked to stroll with the crowds up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the lighted rotunda of the Capitol. He stood for a long while gazing up at the illuminated slits in the dome. (“It comforts me somehow.”) Then he would mount the steps, look in upon the members hard at work in the Hall of Representatives, and wander through long frescoed corridors beneath the Senate. This old habit now afforded him more satisfaction than ever. In a few days Lincoln would stand on the East Portico, take the oath of office, and deliver his Second Inaugural Address.