Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  “We must now see the bottom of the enemy’s resources . . . I am glad to see the end so near at hand. [Applause.] I have said now more than I intended to, and will, therefore, bid you good bye.”

  A burst of handclapping, cheers, and huzzas, and as the Marine Band tootled a spirited air the President waved and left the balcony. It was the last time Whitman would ever see him.

  In the hotel parlor Lincoln received the greetings of a few friends before leaving for the White House. Outside, the throng sent up three cheers for the flag, three for the President, and three for the Governor, and then dispersed. Whitman was carried along with the crowd up the Avenue past the Center Market, then over the Seventh Street Bridge to Armory Square Hospital. He would check up on his soldiers before meeting up with Peter Doyle to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Whitman had received a two-week leave of absence from work so that he could return to Brooklyn. His train would be leaving in the morning.

  That Saturday night John Wilkes Booth opened at Ford’s Theatre in one of his most famous roles, the obsessed villain Pescara in Irish playwright Richard Lalor Shiel’s melodrama The Apostate. Pescara, Governor of Granada, so hates the dark Moors that he mounts a genocidal attack upon them. Booth had gotten tickets for his coconspirators John Surratt, David Herold, Louis Weichmann, and George Atzerodt, in the President’s box, so they might become familiar with its access and defenses.

  Seated near the stage, Booth’s friends watched their illustrious leader as he strutted and rolled his eyes and dispatched one hapless Moor after another, crying, “What if I rush and with a blow strike life from out his heart?”

  That night and the next the conspirators drank brandy and champagne at Gautier’s, and at Taltavul’s Restaurant, which adjoined the theater. Booth, who had been a moderate drinker, was now consuming astonishing amounts of brandy, as much as a quart in two hours. The men heatedly contested the risky plan to “capture” Lincoln; by the end of the weekend it dawned upon Booth that he might have to go it alone. He realized that in the absence of several stouthearted collaborators he would have to give up his own life to take President Lincoln’s.

  Lincoln had shared with Congressman Cornelius Cole his confidence that “one man’s life is as dear to him as another’s, and he [an assassin] could not expect to take my life without losing his own.” Booth had become the unlikely fanatic, one ready to lose his own life if he could take the President down with him. That Sunday, as Booth swilled brandy three blocks away, Lincoln attended Gounod’s Faust at Grover’s Theatre. Later that night the President dreamed of his assassination.

  Whitman went to Brooklyn in late March on a two-week furlough to visit his brother George, who was convalescing from his prison ordeal. Walt stayed on an extra two weeks to oversee the production of his new book of poetry.

  Book publishing was slow during the war years, but even so the delays in Drum-Taps’s debut were extreme. Whitman’s patience was admirable. There are at least seventeen known references by Whitman and his friends in their general correspondence to the imminent appearance of Drum-Taps, beginning in May 1863, when one friend, E. M. Allen, wrote to John Burroughs, “He has a volume coming out soon called ‘Drum Taps.’ ” On November 17, 1863, Whitman wrote to Charles Eldridge, “I must bring out Drum Taps. I must be continually bringing out poems.” On March 2, 1864, Whitman wrote to his mother that he would soon be in New York to bring out Drum-Taps, and during that spring and summer he told his brother and Burroughs the same thing. In July, sick, bedridden, he told William O’Connor, “I intend to move heaven & earth to publish my ‘Drum Taps’ as soon as I am able to go around.”

  By 1865 Whitman had resolved to publish the book himself rather than wait any longer. While friends urged him to get the support of an established publisher such as G. W. Carlton in New York, Whitman told Nellie O’Connor, “I feel it is best for me to print my books myself.” Perhaps he feared rejection; certainly Whitman wanted the finest paper and binding, and type set to his own specifications, and he was willing to pay for these things out of his own pocket rather than relinquish control to a publisher.

  He thought these were the finest poems he had ever written. In a letter to William O’Connor at the beginning of 1865 he declared the book “superior to Leaves of Grass—certainly more perfect as a work of art, being adjusted in all its proportions & its passion having the indispensible merit that though to an ordinary reader let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see that it is yet under control.” He believed he had expressed the “large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope . . . the unprecedented anguish of wounded & suffering, the beautiful young men in wholesale death & agony, everything sometimes as if blood-color, & dripping blood. The book is therefore unprecedently sad . . . but it also has the blast of the trumpet . . . then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love . . . Truly also, it has clear notes of faith & triumph.”

  Regrettably, the success of Drum-Taps as a work of art is known only to a few people who have read the rare early editions of the volume. Whitman later dissolved the book and scattered most of its poems throughout the final editions of Leaves of Grass. What survives in his collected works under the subtitle “Drum-Taps” is a ghost of the book’s original living form.

  Whitman staunchly believed in these poems. By now he also knew he was the man to oversee their printing and distribution to the public, probably by subscription. The most likely reason the book had been delayed this long was for lack of funds. His salary of $100 a month now made it possible for the poet to make a down payment for stereotyping the verses. Although printers advised him that the cost of paper and printing would be much lower if he waited a few weeks, he couldn’t wait. On April Fools’ Day he signed a contract with Peter Eckler to stereotype five hundred copies of Drum-Taps for $254. He probably borrowed some of the money from John Burroughs.

  On that same day, Major General Philip Sheridan, leading the charge in the Appomattox campaign, succeeded in turning Robert E. Lee’s flank at the Battle of Five Forks. The Rebel army began a frantic retreat to the west. Sheridan, in hot pursuit with infantry and cavalry, closed off Lee’s escape route beyond Appomattox Courthouse. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled Richmond.

  Three days later, on April 4, Abraham Lincoln arrived near Richmond on the flagship USS Malvern, with his son Tad and his bodyguard William Crook. They walked to downtown Richmond, surrounded by black people shouting “Glory, glory!” Thousands of white citizens watched the entourage in sullen silence from the windows of those homes and shops that had survived the torches. Some bridges and warehouses were still ablaze, others smoking. When Lincoln reached the former Confederate executive mansion, now the Union military headquarters, he sat in Jefferson Davis’s chair, and the soldiers cheered.

  “Thank God I have lived to see this,” Lincoln said. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.”

  Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9. The Union rejoiced. Crowds and bands surrounded the White House, serenading the happy President and his family at all hours.

  In New York, Whitman labored over Drum-Taps. The foremost authority on the printing of this book, F. DeWolfe Miller, has written that the poet “had, we can be quite sure, hovered over the galley proofs at Eckler’s between April 1 and 15.”

  Back in Washington, on the evening of April 14, Whitman’s friend Peter Doyle hung up his conductor’s uniform and put on his best clothes: a double-breasted frock coat with satin edging on the lapels, and a white lace tie and matching pocket handkerchief. It had been a fine spring day, with clouds hiding the sun now and then. Lilacs scented the air, and the dogwood and Judas trees were blooming. In the afternoon the wind came up, and now there was a damp chill in the air. Doyle swung aboard the horsecar at the Navy Yard, enjoying his status as a passenger, on his way up to Ford’s Theatre.

  The President and his wife had gone out on a carriage ride late that afternoon. They ended
up at the Navy Yard, where Lincoln chatted with the sailors and boarded one of the ironclads that had been hit at Charleston harbor. Mary later recalled that he was “cheerful—almost joyous.” Maybe Doyle had seen the crowd gathered around Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, so near his home at 62 M Street South, and this prompted him to attend the comedy at Ford’s Theatre—knowing that the President would be there. The newspapers, especially the Evening Star, had interlarded the entertainment ads with the announcement: The President and his Lady will be at the Theatre this evening—as if to say that the theater was the place to be tonight.

  “I heard that the President and his wife would be present and made up my mind to go,” Doyle recalled. The sun set at 6:45. As the streetcar headed north on Eighth Street and then west on Pennsylvania Avenue, the lamplighters were at work with their ladders and wicks; the mist made halos around the lanterns. Although it was Good Friday, the last full day of Lent, the saloons were booming with revelers celebrating the peace. Alone that evening, Peter Doyle would celebrate victory just as Whitman might have done if he had been in town, by seeing, and applauding, the President in Ford’s Theatre.

  Doyle got off at Tenth Street near the Canterbury Music Hall, a corner theater that featured bawdy shows. As he walked up Tenth, the traffic thickened and slowed. Gilded carriages and coaches were parked on both sides of the street, their black reins-men at ease in the driver’s boxes. A wooden ramp ran the length of the theater to protect the ladies’ dresses from the mud. Gentlemen in woolen overcoats and shawled ladies with small fur muffs poured into the brick theater through the arched doorways. There was a queue at the box office. In the windows of the houses across the street, people had opened their curtains, hoping for a glimpse of the President.

  Peter Doyle gave his ticket to the usher, removed his hat, and mounted the stairs to the second gallery. He took a seat on a straight-backed chair on the left side of the theater, across from the State Box. He waited. At last the conductor tapped his baton and lifted it to begin the overture, and two black boys in scarlet breeches drew back the curtain. The President’s box, decked with silk flags festooning a painting of George Washington, was still empty at 8:15 when the actress Laura Keene made her entrance in My American Cousin. At 8:30 the patrons in the dress circle began to rise from their seats and clap, first a few and then all, craning their necks as the President led his party down the right side aisle and up to the State Box. Laura Keene stopped the action onstage to join in the ovation. Peter Doyle stood up with the rest of the audience to welcome the President and his wife, as the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” The clapping continued awhile after the band played its last notes, and the Lincolns settled in to enjoy the play.

  “There was nothing extraordinary in the performance,” Doyle remembered. “I saw everything on the stage and was in a good position to see the President’s box.” Lincoln sat in a rocking chair. Draperies partly concealed him from the curious crowd. At approximately 10:10 John Wilkes Booth stole into the State Box, put his derringer to the back of Lincoln’s head between his left ear and his spine, and pulled the trigger.

  “I heard the pistol shot,” Doyle recalled years later. A laugh line in the play muffled the little explosion, so he was not immediately sure what it meant. “I really knew nothing of what had occurred until Mrs. Lincoln leaned out of the box and cried, ‘The President is shot!’ I needn’t tell you what I felt then, or saw. It is all put down in Walt’s piece—that piece is exactly right.” (Doyle refers to Whitman’s amplified narrative in his famous speech on Lincoln.) “I saw Booth on the cushion of the box, saw him jump over, saw him catch his foot, which turned, saw him fall on the stage. He got up on his feet, cried out something which I could not hear for the hub-hub and disappeared.”

  There had been 1,675 people in the theater, not counting Booth, the first to depart. Doyle recalled: “I suppose I lingered almost the last person. A soldier came into the gallery, saw me still there, called to me: ‘Get out of here! We’re going to burn this damned building down!’ I said: ‘If that is so I’ll get out!’ ”

  Doyle, like everyone else, was in shock—disoriented by the sudden loss of the government’s conscience, its guiding principle embodied in a mortal. The nation spun, temporarily rudderless.

  12

  WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D

  Whitman wrote to William O’Connor that he was “mainly satisfied with Drum-Taps because it delivers my ambition of the task that has haunted me, namely, to express in a poem . . . the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope, the shiftings, masses, & the whirl & deafening din, (yet over all, as by invisible hand, a definite purport and idea) . . .” His satisfaction with Drum-Taps came to an abrupt and unseasonable end.

  Word of Lincoln’s death at 7:22 A.M. on April 15 arrived in New York with the morning newspapers. The tolling of church bells awakened many Brooklynites, including Whitman and his mother.

  “Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual,” he recalled, “but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass’d them silently to each other.”

  In late morning the sky darkened; by noon it was raining. Whitman walked out toward the docks, notebook and pencil in hand. “When a great event happens,” he jotted, “or the news [of] some signal solemn thing spreads out among the people, it is curious to go forth and wander awhile in the public ways.” All the shops were closed, “business public & private all suspended.” Along the crowded wharves the ships’ flags were at half-mast, and many spars were flying black pennants. Looking at the sky the poet saw long black clouds “like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction.”

  “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black . . . ,” he wrote in his notebook. And on people’s faces he noted a “strange mixture of horror, fury, tenderness, & a stirring wonder brewing.”

  At four in the afternoon he took the paddlewheel Fulton Ferry across the East River so he could walk up Broadway. “The scene was solemn & most eloquent—I had so often seen Broadway on great gala days . . . deck’d with rich colors jubilant show crowds, & the music of a hundred bands with marches & opera airs—or at night with processions bearing countless torches & transparencies & gas lanterns . . .”

  But now, “the stores were shut, & no business transacted, no pleasure vehicles, & hardly a cart—only the rumbling base of the heavy Broadway stages incessantly rolling.” The columns of some buildings had spiral windings of black and white crape. Groups gathered around bulletin boards, talking in hushed tones. The poet struggled to find words to describe the weather, “sulky, leaden, & dripping continually moist tears—” He noted that one fashionable art dealer, having closed his doors, exhibited in the plate glass window a lone picture frame, hauntingly empty. “In this death the tragedy of the last five years has risen to its climax—the blood of Abraham Lincoln has—” he wrote in his notebook. But then his pencil could not keep pace with his feelings.

  Whitman realized that the assassination was a watershed in American history and the nation’s consciousness. “Time & Land” had changed forever. Overnight the book that Whitman prized for its timeliness had become a dated relic. Even as printer Peter Eckler was pulling the first proofs of Drum-Taps, America had undergone its greatest trauma since the first Battle of Bull Run, Whitman believed, and the “invisible hand” that had given it a definite purport and idea was stilled forever. Whitman prophesied that “the tragic splendor of his death, purging, illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will remain and grow brighter through time,” and when future historians would seek an event to summon up “this turbulent nineteenth century of ours,” they would “seek in vain for any point to serve more thoroughly their purposes than Abraham Lincoln’s death.”

  This Saturday, stunned and gri
ef-stricken as he was, the poet realized that his book had fallen behind the action of the times: Drum-Taps must reckon with the death of the President.

  Hush’d be the camps to-day;

  And soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;

  And each, with musing soul retire, to celebrate,

  Our dear commander’s death . . .

  On Monday, April 17, the newspapers announced that Lincoln would be buried on Wednesday in the Congressional Cemetery. That day and the next, the poet was in New York writing the poem “Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day,” which bears the subcaption “A. L. Buried April 19, 1865.” Whitman ordered Peter Eckler to stop the press and insert the new poem on page 69 of the seventy-two-page book.

  No more for him life’s stormy conflicts;

  Nor victory, nor defeat—No more time’s dark events,

  Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

  But sing, poet, in our name;

  Sing of the love we bore him—because you,

  dweller in camps, know it truly.

  Sing, to the lowered coffin there;

  Sing, with shovel’d clods that fill the grave—a verse

  For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

  On such short notice this was the best the poet could do to bring his book up to date. The next day, it was announced that the funeral plans were changed: the chief obsequies would be held on the nineteenth in the capital. Then the funeral train would begin its sad twelve-day journey north, to Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, then west to Albany, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago en route to Springfield, where Lincoln would be interred in May.

  That week Whitman had agonizing decisions to make. He seems to have been bewildered by the events, and perplexed by the status of Drum-Taps. Should he withdraw the book and rewrite it to reflect the recent tragedy? Should he halt publication, or finish what he had begun? Would the public want the book in its present state? The binder’s cost would be eighteen cents per volume. All the money Whitman had been able to save or borrow was riding on the decision.