Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  The President now conceded that “all knew” that slavery had been “the cause of the war,” and he brooded over the ensuing ironies of war between the states. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.”

  Below Lincoln on the platform was the black suffragist Frederick Douglass, who called the speech “a sacred effort.” Above the President stood the actor John Wilkes Booth. He had gotten an inauguration-stand ticket from Miss Lucy Hale, who lived with her father, Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, in the National Hotel, where Booth stayed. He was secretly engaged to the girl.

  Less than five minutes later Lincoln would conclude his speech with these generous words: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

  Whitman described the effect the President’s wise speech appeared to have upon the weather: “a forenoon like whirling demons, dark with slanting rain, full of rage; and then the afternoon, so calm, so bathed with flooding splendor from heaven’s most excellent sun, with atmosphere of sweetness; so clear it showed the stars, long, long before they were due.” Others praised the speech. Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote to his father, minister to England: “This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of this war . . . Not a prince or minister in all Europe could have risen to such an equality with the occasion.”

  Six months after Salmon Chase’s ignominious departure from the cabinet, Lincoln had rehabilitated him by naming him chief justice of the Supreme Court. Now the man who had worked hardest to undo Lincoln was swearing him in as President. Who can imagine what emotions surged in Chase’s breast? Lincoln kissed the Bible amid deafening applause and cheers and a salvo of artillery. Later Lincoln said to Brooks, “Did you notice that sun-burst? It made my heart jump.”

  As members of the crowd went their ways Whitman hung back so he could get a good view of the President returning to the White House in his barouche. It was a little after three o’clock. Whitman said that Lincoln looked very tired: “The lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face.” Yet underneath the furrows the poet was moved to recognize “all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness and canny shrewdness.”

  Whitman felt as he had on those summer evenings in 1863 when the President waved from his carriage, and on that Halloween when he had seen Lincoln in the White House: “I never see that man without feeling he is one to become personally attached to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native Western even rudest forms of manliness.”

  Tad, and Senator Lafayette Foster of Connecticut, returned with Lincoln. Around their carriage rode the marshal on horseback, in an orange-colored scarf, and his thirteen aides, all wearing yellow gloves and bearing blue batons with gilt tips. All wore dark civilian clothes. Following the President came Senator Anthony and Mrs. Lincoln in her carriage, Robert Lincoln in his, and the foreign ministers in two more. Then came the civic procession, on foot, not so much a parade as a victory dance, with cheers and shouting.

  That afternoon, returning to his room to bathe and to change his muddy clothing, Whitman received the longed-for news of his brother George’s release from the Danville prison. He had been exchanged on February 22 and had notified his mother immediately. Thinking Walt would have seen George’s name in the list of exchanged prisoners in the newspapers, Mrs. Whitman waited a week before writing to him in Washington: “George has come home came this morning he looks quite thin and shows his prison life but feels pretty well considering what he suffered he was very sick at one time i think it was in January with lung fever he was six weeks in the hospital so bad that the doctor thought he would die.”

  There was a good deal for Whitman to celebrate on that beautiful evening in March as he strolled down Thirteenth Street in his fine black frock coat, linen shirt, and black tie, turning west on New York Avenue, sidestepping puddles, passing the Treasury on the way to the White House. It promised to be a pleasant part of his day’s work of journalism, attending the President’s eight o’clock levee. But the event would get few words in his dispatch. “I ought to mention the President’s closing Levee . . . Never before was such a compact jam in front of the White House, all the grounds filled, and away out to the spacious sidewalks.” That is all he wrote to the Times, although he observed far more that evening. Swept along with the crowd, he passed through the columns under the portico, “surged along the passage-ways, the Blue and other rooms, and through the great East room.” There the President stood, flanked by Ward Hill Lamon and Tad. “Crowds of country people, some very funny,” Whitman wrote. He said the room was “upholstered like a stage parlor,” which did not go unnoticed by the rustics, who were ripping away little pieces of the carpet and draperies for souvenirs. In a corner, the Marine Band was diligently playing.

  “I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white kid gloves, and a claw-hammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.”

  The reception was unusually large, and Lincoln is supposed to have shaken hands with nearly six thousand persons. As far as we know Walt Whitman did not shake Lincoln’s hand, although from only a few feet away he watched the President intently. Perhaps the poet did not wish to add to the President’s duty; perhaps Whitman imagined a more favorable occasion, in the future, for them to become acquainted.

  He would not be seeing Lincoln at the inaugural ball on Monday night, either, although it would be held in the great Doric edifice where Whitman now worked, the Patent Office building. His reasons for forgoing the festivities he makes clear in his Times dispatch: “I could not help thinking of the scene of those rooms, where the music will sound and the dancers feet presently tread— what a different scene they presented to my view a while since . . .

  “Tonight, beautiful women, perfumes, the violin’s sweetness, the polka and the waltz; but then, the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of old, wounds and blood, and many a mother’s son amid strangers, passing away untended there, (for the crowd of the badly hurt was great, and much for nurse to do, and much for Surgeon.)”

  When he finished his copy work at the Office of Indian Affairs, in the basement, at about five o’clock, Whitman climbed the marble steps to the great central hall, the “Salle des Beaux Arts,” to view the preparations for the ball. The huge room—264 feet long, 62 feet wide, with arched ceilings 30 feet in height—was itself dazzling. Nowhere else but in Paris and Munich was there such artful polychromy—the cornices, ceilings, and compartments all painted with combinations of red and yellow, and red intermingled harmoniously with blue and green. The enormous pillars stood out in bold relief, colored a brilliant ultramarine. Light from hundreds of gas jets lent the tones an additional richness.

  The dining table was set up in the west wing, which was the same size as the room just described. This board took up the entire length of the hall but for 20 feet at either end reserved for the pantries and steam tables. The chef had prepared supper for five thousand. The centerpiece was an exact model of the Capitol, and the culinary adornments included pyramid confections of coconut, chocolate, nougat, macaroon, croquant, and caramel with fancy cream candy. The bill of fare listed sixty-six items, including four different beef dishes; others of veal, pheasant, quail, and venison; and thirty desserts, among them charlotte russe, blancmange, maraschino
ice cream, crème napolitane, and crème du Chateaubriand.

  Whitman reminded his readers how different these same rooms appeared to him, “a while since, filled with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war.” He cautioned:

  “Think not of such grim things, gloved ladies, as you bow to your partners, and the figures of the dance this night are loudly called, or you may drop on the floor, that has known what this one knew, but two short winters since.” The poet means, of course, that the ballroom floor remembers the human blood shed upon it, in case the dancers should forget. This bitter warning appeared in the New York Times, days after the ball. Whitman deleted it from the reprint of the article in his book Memoranda During the War (1875).

  For weeks after the inauguration Lincoln was ill. He was thirtyfive pounds underweight and so weak he sometimes permitted his driver to help him out of his barouche. While journalists reported that the President suffered from the flu, he had no symptoms other than weight loss, fatigue, and a chill in his hands and feet. He would prop his damp stockinged feet on a hassock so near the hearth they would steam.

  Surgeon General Joseph Barnes suspected that Lincoln was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Poor Mr. Lincoln,” Mary Todd told Elizabeth Keckley, “he’s looking so broken-hearted, so completely worn out. I fear he will not get through the next four years.” To Noah Brooks, Lincoln admitted, “nothing touches the tired spot.”

  On Tuesday, March 14, the President was so weak he could not rise from the bed. Mrs. Lincoln, called from her bedroom, summoned the family physician, Dr. Robert K. Stone, who, after a thorough examination, concluded that the case was one of “complete exhaustion.” That day the cabinet met in Lincoln’s bedroom.

  The next morning, though still shaky, Lincoln returned to his office for a full day’s work. This included receiving the credentials of the Austrian ambassador and interviewing a delegation from Louisiana about the restructuring of the state’s government. That night, in the company of Mrs. Lincoln, Senator Ira Harris, and Harris’s daughter Clara, the President attended Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute at Grover’s Theatre.

  And sometime that day or the next, Lincoln had to find time to write a speech of some length and great wit to be delivered on Friday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. The occasion was the presentation of a Confederate flag—captured by the 140th Indiana Regiment at Fort Anderson, North Carolina—to Indiana’s governor, Oliver Morton. The platform for the ceremony was the balcony over the portico of the National Hotel on the north side of Sixth and Pennsylvania.

  The National, a red-brick, five-story hotel with ten parlors and fifty-eight rooms, was the traditional gathering place for Southern leaders and sympathizers. John Wilkes Booth now occupied room 231 on the second floor rear, overlooking the livery stables on C Street. This weekend, the newspapers announced, “the celebrated young American Tragedian has kindly volunteered his valuable services” in a benefit performance as Pescara in The Apostate at Ford’s Theatre. Booth was taking every opportunity to act in Washington, where he could be near the President. Sherman’s successes in South Carolina and Sheridan’s thrashing of Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley meant that time was running out for the Confederacy. Gold had fallen to $163 an ounce—a sure harbinger of peace. The South was so near collapse that any conspiracy to abduct or assassinate the President would soon be pointless.

  So, that Friday, Booth had scheduled a midnight meeting of all six of his conspirators, engaging a private dining room at Gautier’s Restaurant two blocks from the National.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon Whitman left his office and walked down Seventh Street toward the National Hotel to hear the President. Saloons near the teeming Center Market, and at Brown’s Hotel on the corner of Pennsylvania, were full of Irishmen and others in green toasting St. Patrick, singing “Tara’s Harp” and the Irish national hymn. As Whitman neared the telegraph office at the corner of Sixth Street, the mounted police, expecting the President, were holding up traffic around the hotel. Lincoln drew up in his carriage, and as he limped toward the portico the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” Loud and prolonged cheers welcomed the President as he entered the National with Governor Morton, Colonel W. T. Dennis, and four officers of the nineteenth Indiana Regiment who had been held in Rebel prisons for twenty months.

  The cheering reached its crescendo as the party appeared on the balcony. When the applause dwindled, the Colonel was first to speak. He read a letter on behalf of other officers of the Nineteenth Indiana, expressing their honor in “presenting to your Excellency a rebel garrison flag.” Then the large flag, of the finest bunting, was hung from the balustrade: two blue bars crossed from corner to corner upon a red ground; fifteen stars clustered upon the bars.

  The display of the magnificent flag drew another round of applause. The Governor thanked the people, then expressed his gratitude to the soldiers for their gallantry. He congratulated one and all on “the speedy end of the rebellion.” He said, “I have seen dark hours, but my faith in the success of the cause has never been depressed.”

  Governor Morton then introduced the President, “whose purity and patriotism was confessed by all, even the most violent agitators.” There was hearty applause from almost everyone but the skulking John Wilkes Booth, who had gone from scheming to kidnap Lincoln to wanting to shoot him. Whitman was gratified to hear Lincoln prophetically praised:

  His Administration will be recognized as the most important epoch of history. It struck the death blow to slavery [applause] and built up the Republic with a power it had never before possessed. If he had done nothing more than put his name to the emancipation proclamation, that act alone would have made his name immortal. [Applause.]”

  Lincoln then stepped to the front of the balcony. As cheering reached a climax and then died away, Whitman looked at the President through the budding branches of the sapling elm trees that grew from the sidewalk spaces between the streetlamps. The President was ill—emaciated and pale. Yet now, on this afternoon in early spring, he would draw himself up to his full height and summon that radiant smile that had disarmed the rustic crowds during the debates with Douglas in 1858 and captivated New York’s intelligentsia at Cooper Union in 1860. This was a joyous occasion. In this address, his next to last major public speech, Lincoln would charm and entertain the crowd with his indomitable humor.

  The subject was serious: a recent proposal by the Confederates to enlist Negroes in their army—offering freedom to every slave agreeing to fight. The idea infuriated Lincoln. On St. Patrick’s Day he decided to break his silence on the subject, and make it a laughingstock.

  At least four newspaper accounts of the speech have survived. The one below, from the Washington Star, appears to be the most accurate, in capturing Lincoln’s wording as well as the audience’s response.

  “It will be but a very few words that I shall undertake to say. I was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and live in Illinois [laughter], and I now am here where it is my business to be, to care equally for the good people of all the states.” Lincoln expressed his pleasure that the Indiana soldiers had triumphed, but he was not disposed “to make a distinction between the states, for all have done equally well.” For this consideration he received another round of applause.

  Approaching his theme, Lincoln allowed there was hardly an aspect of the war upon which he had not made his views public. And yet, “There is one: the recent attempt of our erring brethren, as they are sometimes called, [laughter] to employ the negro to fight for them . . . that was their business and not mine; and if I had a wish upon the subject, I had not the power to introduce it or make it effective.”

  The shadows lengthened; a light breeze unfurled the Stars and Stripes that flew from an upright pole at the peak of the hotel’s cornice, above Lincoln’s head. Whitman recalled: “His face was lighted up: it seemed removed, beyond, disembodied.” The crowd listened in suspense, spellbound.

  “The great question with them was, whether the neg
ro, being put into the army, will fight for them.” Now it was the orator’s understanding of the mordant humor ingrained in the question that furrowed his brow and curled the corner of his mouth. He would play upon the irony to perfection. “I do not know, and therefore cannot decide.”

  The shrugging protest brought peals of laughter from Pennsylvania Avenue.

  They ought to know better than we, and do know. I have in my lifetime heard many arguments why the negro ought to be a slave; but if they fight for those who would keep them in slavery it will be a better argument than any I have yet heard. [Laughter and applause.]

  He who will fight for that ought to be a slave. [Applause.] They have concluded, at last, to take one out of four of the slaves and put him in the army; and that one out of four, who will fight to keep the others in slavery, ought to be a slave himself, unless he is killed in a fight. [Applause.]

  While I have often said that all men ought to be free, yet I would allow those colored persons to be slaves who want to be; and next to them those white men who agree in favor of making other people slaves. [Applause.] I’m in favor of giving an opportunity to such white men to try it on for themselves.

  Walt Whitman, surrounded by this cheering, laughing crowd, admired Lincoln’s folksy employment of the ancient rhetorical trick, the reductio ad absurdum.

  “I will say one thing with regard to the negro being employed to fight for them that I do know,” Lincoln continued, wryly. “I know he cannot fight and stay home and make bread too. [Laughter and applause.] And as one is about as important as the other to them, I don’t care which they do. [Renewed applause.]”

  On second thought, the President admitted: “I am rather in favor of having them try them as soldiers. [Applause.] They lack one vote of doing that [in the Confederate Congress] and I wish I could send my vote over the river, so that I might cast it in favor of allowing the negro to fight. But they cannot fight and work both.