Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  One block north of the Capitol, in a quaint red-brick house on an acre of ground, Whitman’s friend John Burroughs lived with his wife, Ursula. Burroughs had a broad forehead, a pointed black beard, and keen, kind eyes. Like several of Whitman’s friends, he worked in the Treasury building; but after hours he enjoyed hoeing his potatoes, tending his chickens, and looking after his cow Chlöe, who grazed on the common near the Capitol. The twenty-eight-year-old Burroughs idolized Whitman, who would serve as the subject of the naturalist’s first book, Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person (1867). Whitman was a regular guest for breakfast on Sundays, often testing Ursula’s patience by arriving so late she would have to reheat the food.

  Their mood in that generous household on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration is well expressed in Burroughs’s invitation to a friend: “We have a spare bed and would be delighted to have you come. Walt is here, Spring is here, the Bluebird and Robin are here. The Spirit says Come, the flesh says Come, Wife says Come, ‘Abe’ says Come, so Come!”

  The weather remained capricious. One night, after a visit with Burroughs on Capitol Hill, a storm blew out of the northwest. Whitman, who had to work the next day, threw a blanket around his shoulders and hurried down Delaware Avenue, past the Senate wing of the Capitol, to meet the Union Line horsecar on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The horses pulled a fifteen-foot-long omnibus, seven feet wide. It halted, and Whitman entered through the rear. He gave his nickel to the red-haired conductor and took a seat on one of the long benches that ran along the sides of the car, twenty vacant seats covered in silk and velvet lighted by a pink-glass-globe oil lamp that hung in the center.

  The conductor, twenty-one-year-old Peter Doyle, would never forget that night, or the impression Walt Whitman made upon him as he came in out of the rain: “We felt [drawn] to each other at once.”

  The storm was awful. Walt had this blanket—it was thrown round his shoulders—he seemed like an old sea-captain. He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him.

  Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood.

  When the horsecar reached its terminus in Georgetown, Whitman did not get out. He rode all the way back with his new comrade, to Doyle’s home near the Navy Yard in the Southwest section of the city.

  Like other lovers stunned by the phenomenon of love at first sight, the two men may have been sparing of words during that rainy night. But they had a great deal to talk about. Doyle reminded Whitman in many ways of Fred Vaughan, his lover in the 1850s, muse of his “Calamus” poems.

  One flitting glimpse, caught through an interstice,

  Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove,

  late of a winter night—And I unremarked seated in a corner;

  Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching,

  and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand;

  A long while, amid the noises of coming and going—of drinking

  and oath and smutty jest,

  There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,

  perhaps not a word.

  Like Vaughan, Doyle was Irish; he was baptized in Limerick City, in Ireland, on June 16, 1843. And like Vaughan, Doyle was, at the time he met Whitman, a transit worker, much younger than the poet.

  Peter George Doyle stood straight as a soldier, making the most of his five feet eight inches. He had a jaunty air about him, too much humor to be vain about his good looks—merry blue eyes wide-set above high cheekbones, a sharp nose and jutting chin, clean-shaven except for a fair, drooping mustache. He had grown up with his three brothers and a sister in Alexandria, Virginia, where the family immigrated in 1852. In 1858 they moved to Richmond, where Doyle’s father worked in an iron foundry.

  A week after Virginia left the Union, seventeen-year-old Peter joined the Richmond Fayette Artillery. During eighteen months of service the adolescent soldier survived a series of violent engagements, including the rear-guard Battle of Williamsburg and the Battle of Seven Pines. During the Penninsula Campaign, half of his company was lost. His tour of duty culminated on September 17, 1862, at Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle ever fought in America. Whitman’s brother George stood on the opposite side of the barricades from Private Doyle—they might have fired at each other.

  Doyle was badly wounded there. While recuperating in a Richmond hospital, the war-weary youth petitioned the Confederate Secretary of War for a discharge. Protesting that he was not a citizen of the Confederate States but a British national, he declared his intent to return to his native country at the first opportunity. The discharge was granted on November 7.

  As the Union Line horsecar passed the belfry of the Central Guard House at Ninth Street, Doyle recalled how in April 1863 he had ended up in prison by a series of mishaps that might have been comical if they had befallen somebody else. First, after leaving the hospital, he was arrested for desertion, as if he had not been discharged, and ordered to return to duty with his company, then stationed in Petersburg. He preferred not to rejoin his outfit. Instead, Doyle decided to quit the Confederate States. He crossed enemy lines, and was captured by Federal soldiers who took him to Washington, where he was charged with “entering & attempting to enter our lines, from the insurgent states, without a permit.”

  Confined to a squalid annex of the Old Capitol Prison near Duff Green Row, Doyle rattled his chains, insisting that he was a British subject in flight from the wreckage of Virginia. On Monday, April 20, 1863, Doyle’s name appeared in the Washington Star in the list of prisoners; the next day his sister-in-law Ellen Doyle visited him in his cell. The family must have petitioned the British consul. On May 2, Secretary Seward inquired after Doyle on behalf of the British minister Lord Lyons. Judge Levi Turner concluded that Doyle, and some other prisoners, were “poor Irishmen who fled from Richmond to avoid starvation.” On May 11, having taken an oath not to support the Rebellion, the nineteen-year-old fugitive was set free.

  He took a job as a smith at the Navy Yard, near the house in Southeast Washington where he lived with his brother Francis and his wife. He moonlighted as a horsecar conductor with the Washington & Georgetown Railroad Company. Peter Doyle was a survivor. His impish smile as it appears in photographs is the expression of a man who has suffered, endured, and arrived at a state of ironic merriment.

  His extended Catholic family in Washington was large and affectionate. Like Whitman, Doyle had assumed responsibility for his widowed mother and his younger siblings. Although he had only a rudimentary “Jesuit education,” Doyle loved the theater and opera and would soon become an enthusiastic audience for his new friend’s recitations of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Leaves of Grass.

  For the next eight years the two men were comrades, companions, lovers. Just as the poet Thomas Gray speculated that the country churchyard might contain “Some mute inglorious Milton,” so John Burroughs found in the trolley conductor “a mute inglorious Whitman.” And the two made up a whole, the tall, heavy-set poet and the slight, unlettered workingman who loved limericks. The men complemented—“completed”—each other. The playful, affectionate Rebel was so handsome that a Dr. William Tindall, observing him on the horsecar, called him “the young Apollo.” Watching Whitman and Doyle on the omnibus platform, Dr. Tindall called it “the most taciturn mutual admiration society I ever attended,” and remarked upon “the restfulness which genius sometimes finds in the companionship of an opposite type of mentality.”

  Doyle remembered, “It was our practice to go to a hotel on Washington Avenue after I was done with my car.” This was the Union Hotel, near the Georgetown terminus of the route, a four-story whitewashed inn and tavern with a little portico and a dormered roof, at the corner of Washington and Bridge Streets. Late at nig
ht they would call for beer and a light supper. “Like as not I would go to sleep—lay my head on my hands on the table. Walt would sit there, wait, watch, keep me undisturbed—would wake me when the hour of closing came.” Under the stars the lovers would cross the M Street bridge over Rock Creek, toward Whitman’s rooms, a fifteen-minute walk away.

  On Sundays they would sometimes take long hikes along the Potomac, all the way to Alexandria. They crossed the Navy Yard bridge, heading south along the Maryland side of the river, then took the ferry to Virginia. They would return via the Virginia banks, crossing Long Bridge onto “the Island,” the neighborhood bounded by the city canal and the Eastern Branch, where Peter lived with his family.

  On these outings, Doyle recalled, Whitman was “always whistling or singing. We would talk of ordinary matters. He would recite poetry, especially Shakespeare—he would hum airs or shout in the woods.”

  William O’Connor marked the transformation in his friend that spring, after he met the young Irishman. “A change had come upon him. The rosy color had died from his face in a clear splendor, and his form, regnant and masculine, was clothed with inspiration, as with a dazzling aureole . . .” Whitman explained to O’Connor what had made the difference: “Love, love, love! That includes all. There is nothing in the world but that—nothing in all the world. Better than all is love.”

  In love with Peter Doyle that spring and summer, Whitman would recover his full powers of creativity. During this period he would write what Algernon Swinburne called “the most sweet and sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world,” his elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

  It rained steadily for five days before Lincoln’s second inauguration, on March 4, 1865. On the main thoroughfares of Washington the mud measured from five inches on uptown streets to fifteen inches or more on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The night before the ceremony the torches of a firemen’s procession lit up the fog on Pennsylvania Avenue with a silvery haze. Over the Capitol dome the roof lights of the House and Senate in session crowned the cloudy skies with a radiant halo that could be seen for miles. That glow emblazoned the Stars and Stripes floating over the dome, bringing out every fold in the ensign in brilliant relief.

  Hundreds of strangers who had come to see the President sworn in wandered dazed, forlorn, with carpetbags and blanket-rolls strapped to their backs, and many found their way to the well-lighted and comfortably heated Capitol, thinking of spending the night there. Hotels were overbooked; the proprietors of the Willard and the National placed cots and mattresses in the parlors and halls.

  Restless with excitement, Walt Whitman must have been up all night on Friday the third; or perhaps Peter Doyle drove him up to the park in front of the Capitol on the first morning horsecar from the Navy Yard.

  At dawn Whitman was seated in the dim light of the Hall of Representatives, in the crowded gallery, scribbling in pencil in his homemade notebook, observing “the members nervous from long drawn duty, exhausted, some asleep, and many half-asleep.” The members debated appropriation bills, one for the army being the most hotly contested because so many legislators refused to pay any money to the Illinois Central Railroad. Mr. Robert Schenk of Ohio requested that the President repeal the regulation requiring colored persons to obtain passes before leaving the city. Then there was a brawl over whether civilians might still be tried by military tribunals.

  “The gas-light, mix’d with the dingy day-break produced an unearthly effect. The poor little sleepy, stumbling pages, the smell of the Hall . . . the strong hope that the War is approaching its close—the tantalizing dread lest the hope may be a false one . . . the grandeur of the Hall . . . all made a mark’d combination,” Whitman wrote.

  Suddenly there burst upon the dome a heavy gale of rain and wind out of the south. “It beat like a deluge on the heavy glass roof of the Hall, and the wind literally howled and roared.” The sleepers woke in pop-eyed fear, some bolted for the doors, some gaped at the roof, and some of the pages began to cry. But soon after the drowsing men awakened they recovered their composure and went on with their business, while the storm raged on. “Perhaps,” Whitman considered, surveying the motley Thirty-eighth Congress, “the shock did it good.”

  He reported on the inaugural events for the New York Times, whose editor John Swinton welcomed him as an “Occasional Correspondent.” Weather would be a dramatic aspect of the story. “The elements, all the meteorological influences, have run riot for weeks past,” the poet observed.

  Chief among those influences, at first, was the “Mud, (and such mud!) amid and upon which streaming crowds of citizens; lots of blue-dressed soldiers; any quantity of male and female Africans; horrid perpetual entanglements at the crossings, sometimes a dead lock; more mud, the wide street black, and several inches deep with it.” The Engineer Corps considered laying pontoons from the White House to the Capitol, but discovered the bottom was too soft to hold the anchors of the pontoons. Police ordered all those who could not swim to stay on the sidewalks. The Evening Star reported on March 4: “No one is believed to have been lost.” The muck particularly tested the mettle of the ladies, whose shawls were drenched, crinolines smashed, their silk and velvet, their antique lace and moiré skirts spattered and draggled with mud.

  In the early morning the poet observed “the wide Avenue, its vista very fine, down at one end closed by the Capitol, with milky bulging dome, and the Maternal Figure over all, (with the sword by her side and the sun glittering on her helmeted head;) at the other, the western end, the pillared front of the Treasury Building, looking south.” He watched as the grand vista filled with “the oceanic crowd, almost equal to Broadway,” as the procession of soldiers, bands, floats, and dignitaries left their various rendezvous spots on Seventeenth and Nineteenth Streets on the far side of the White House to begin their parade through the slough of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The President came first, in mid-morning, riding alone in his plain two-horse barouche, at a sharp trot. With the top folded down, the barouche looked like a black slipper. Whitman saw him going out well ahead of the parade, and thought Lincoln “wished to be on hand to sign bills, & c, or to get rid of marching in line with the muslin Temple of Liberty, and the pasteboard Monitor [the bands and floats].” In fact, Lincoln had a number of bills to sign before appearing in the Senate chamber before 11:45 to take his seat in time for the swearing in of Vice President Andrew Johnson. Mrs. Lincoln, in a white silk dress with a shoulder cape of point lace, sat next to Rhode Island Senator Henry Anthony in the diplomatic gallery.

  Outside, on the Avenue, tens of thousands of people stood on the sidewalk and on the balconies of houses and public buildings. The national flag in all sizes waved from windows, carriages, carts, and horse-harnesses. Whitman later wrote of the “clattering groups of cavalrymen out there on a gallop,” the firemen with their engines, and “a regiment of blacks in full uniform, with guns on their shoulders.” He was eager to correct any impression that the parade was orderly, military. No, said the poet, the different groups “were characterized by a charming looseness and independence.” From the thirteen marshal’s aides wearing cherry-colored scarves with white rosettes and yellow gauntlets to the National Union College Band; from floats and fifers to the sashay of the drunken Washington Press Corps, the various military officers, and the Masons and Odd Fellows bringing up the rear—this was more like a Mardi Gras jamboree than a Grand Review. “Each went up and down the Avenue in the way and at the time which seemed convenient, and was a law unto itself.”

  Just after midday the gray clouds began to stir and scud, for moments uncovering patches of blue. Whitman saw, directly overhead, “our heavenly neighbor Hesperus, the star of the West,” Venus. Trudging on toward the inaugural platform that stretched out from the east steps of the Capitol, the poet paused with the crowd to admire Venus until the leaden clouds covered the “star” again.

  As the President stepped out from behind the columns of the cro
wded portico, leading senators, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet members, “a tremendous shout, prolonged and loud, arose from the surging ocean of humanity around the Capitol building,” wrote journalist Noah Brooks, Lincoln’s friend. Trumpets played fanfares; flags waved over the sea of heads in the great plaza, and as far as the eye could see. As the tall, gaunt President advanced, and unfurled his address, printed in two columns upon a single sheet of paper, waves of applause swept through the crowd to its distant fringes.

  “A curious little white cloud,” Whitman noted, “the only one in that part of the sky, appeared like a hovering bird, right over him.” Brooks saw that the sun suddenly “burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor, and flooded the spectacle with glory and with light.” Many took it as an omen, and “prayed that so might the darkness which had obscured the past four years be now dissipated by the sun of prosperity.”

  Whitman did not comment on the 703-word speech, one of the shortest inaugural addresses in American history, notable that day more for its restraint than for its eloquence. If former Rebel Peter Doyle was at his side (the horsecars were sidetracked), Doyle would have been the more relieved that in Lincoln’s account of the war’s beginnings, the President did not blame either the North or the South outright for the tragedy.

  “All dreaded it—all sought to avert it . . . Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. (Long applause.) And the war came.”