Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  From this hub radiated countless patrons, philanthropists, portrait artists, supernumeraries, cranks, imitators, and the merely curious, wanting a brush with fame. Some idea of the climate in Camden was expressed by Traubel in conversation with the poet: “I don’t worship the ground you tread on or kiss the hem of your garment . . . . But I think I know how you are bound to be regarded in the future . . .” Others showed less restraint. The journalist and ex-Harvard-divinity-student William Sloan Kennedy wrote to Burroughs in 1880: “As a man and friend I think Whitman as near perfect as it is possible to be. I think him the equal, and in many respects the superior of the much misunderstood Jesus . . .”

  For such a phenomenon to spring up, and flourish, several conditions usually obtain. First, the hero’s achievements must inspire the adoration of a number of susceptible persons. Second, the hero, if alive, must desire and foster that devotion. Whitman did so. Preferring private to public charity, when a Massachusetts Congressman introduced a bill that would have granted the poet $125 monthly as a pension for his hospital work, Whitman squelched the movement, announcing, incredibly, “I do not deserve it.” His devotees became more devoted than ever. Third, the hero must promise the faithful salvation in the glow of his not-too-available presence, and reward or punish followers by indulgence and excommunication, creating a hierarchy of intimates.

  Finally, the hero must have secrets—at the core of his charisma dwells a sacred mystery, personal, artistic, or religious. If the mystery has an erotic component, so much the better, and if the hero or heroine is a person of extraordinary beauty, better still.

  “The full beauty of his face and head did not appear till he was past sixty,” wrote Burroughs. After that, the naturalist insisted, there was no comparable specimen to be found under heaven: the high arching brows, the straight nose, the heavy-lidded gray eyes, the symmetrical head, the soft, long white beard. “Time depleted him in just the right way—softened his beard and took away the too florid look . . . The expression was full of pathos, but it was as grand as that of a god.” Dr. Bucke wrote: “No description can give any idea of the extraordinary physical attractiveness of the man.”

  As for his secrets: there was the lasting mystery of Leaves of Grass, a masterpiece with no evident antecedents, a work of genius that defied conventional analysis. There was also the riddle of Whitman’s sexuality, endlessly intriguing. Finally there loomed the abiding question of his mystical, and his real, connection with Abraham Lincoln. This last was of the greatest interest to the American public. It was the Lincoln connection that the New York crowd had been invited to witness and celebrate on April 14, 1887, in the Madison Square Theatre.

  The theater’s manager, A. M. Palmer, who had provided Whitman with train tickets back in 1863, had recovered from his youthful embarrassments as “the collector de facto” of the Port of New York after confessing to accepting bribes. After years of doing penance as an obscure drudge in the Mercantile Library, he was launched on an illustrious career as a producer, an occupation less vulnerable to the moral sensitivities of the public. He had grown long sideburns—dundrearies—and was as handsome as ever. For three years now, he had been the sole manager and proprietor of the successful Madison Square Theatre. Once again, at the bidding of John Hay and other friends of Whitman, Palmer was pleased to help the poet, leasing his auditorium during an idle afternoon, upon generous terms, for Whitman’s Lincoln lecture.

  The Madison Square Theatre was fit for the greatest diva’s vanity. Of all the “jewel box” theaters of the Gilded Age, this small, lofty playhouse on West Twenty-fourth Street near Fifth Avenue was the nonpareil. Here dramatist Steele MacKaye had invented an “elevator stage,” two stages one atop the other switched through a counterweighted system of ropes and pulleys. The basket-handle proscenium arch was so high that the orchestra sat in its own pillared balcony up there, above the stage.

  The house seated 688 on a steep slope from the low dress circle to the horseshoe of the two upper galleries, so no one sat more than ninety feet from the footlights, and most of the audience seemed to be right “on top” of the actors.

  And it glittered like the inside of a Fabergé egg. The walls gilded in arabesque patterns, the scrolled brackets, the double columns framing the stage, the fanlight over the orchestra box were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, as were the coffered ceiling, the circular stained-glass skylight, and the drop curtain embroidered with trees and flowers. The boxes to the right and left of the stage were like little bronzed, gem-studded turrets, with cut-glass chandeliers glowing deep within.

  On the stage of this resplendent theater, the Good Gray Poet was slated to address the most distinguished audience that would ever hear him, and a subject the years were backlighting with an eerie mystique—the passion and cult of Abraham Lincoln.

  Whitman had arrived at the Westminster Hotel the night before. He had traveled on a 4:30 P.M. train out of Camden via Trenton and Jersey City, convoyed by patron Robert Pearsall Smith and accompanied by his companion William Duckett. Smith, a glass manufacturer from Philadelphia, had collaborated with New York jeweler John Johnston and other Whitman friends in arranging the lecture. It was Smith who had booked the rooms at the Westminster, a stately hotel on the northwest corner of East Sixteenth Street and Irving Place, four blocks south of Gramercy Park. Though past its prime, the hotel had a literary tradition; Smith made sure that Whitman got the same rooms, all “en suite,” with private door and staircase, which Charles Dickens had occupied in 1842. The newspapers linked the names, and this guaranteed the lead notice in the “Personal Intelligence” column of the New York Times, which announced the illustrious visitors to the city each day.

  That morning, while Duckett was helping Whitman with the ritual of his ablutions in the Westminster Hotel, the painful limbering of his body on a day when much would be expected of it, another ritual was unfolding far off, near Springfield, Illinois. The body of Abraham Lincoln was being exhumed and reburied, whether for the seventh or the eighth time no one is quite certain. The body could not seem to stay put; or rather, people would not let it rest.

  Sometime between 1876 and 1878, grave-robbers had broken into the monument at Oak Ridge where the President had been entombed, and nearly succeeded in snatching away Lincoln’s remains. They meant to hold the body for ransom, and might have carried it off if an undercover agent of the Secret Service had not infiltrated the gang. For reasons of security, John C. Power, the custodian of the burial site, was evasive about the dates and details.

  The plot was foiled, but it struck fear into the heart of John Stuart, head of the Lincoln National Monument Association. He ordered custodian Power to remove the body from its crypt and hide it somewhere else, in the catacomb beneath Memorial Hall. Marble-worker Adam Johnson and his assistants lifted Lincoln’s five-hundred-pound casket from the sarcophagus, and Johnson cemented the lid back in place. That night Johnson, Power, and three members of the Lincoln National Monument Association carried the coffin around an obelisk, through the hall, and into the labyrinth. Unable to bury the coffin without attracting attention, they covered it over with old boards, in the darkness. There it lay for years while pilgrims to the cemetery wept over the empty sarcophagus above.

  But word got out that Lincoln’s body was not where it was supposed to be. John Power still doubted that the coffin would be safe in its proper sarcophagus, yet he feared the scandal that would erupt if Lincoln were to be found where he had been unceremoniously stowed—under the lumber pile. The custodian confided in two distinguished friends, Major Gustavus Dana and General Jasper Reece. Recognizing the weight of their responsibility, and the sheer physical challenge of burying the heavy coffin secretly, these gentlemen called upon six others to form the brotherhood of the Lincoln Guard of Honor. The nine men had badges designed for their lapels and swore a blood oath of silence. Wielding shovels and pickaxes, by lantern light they buried Lincoln deep in the earth at the far end of the labyrinth.

  Mary Lincol
n had died in 1882, ending a sad and tortuous odyssey that had led her in and out of poverty and disgrace; in and out of Bellevue Hospital for the insane, in Batavia, Illinois, where her son Robert had had her committed. Tad had died of TB in 1871 at age eighteen. She had no one left but the heartless Robert, who, until the day she died, Mary believed was after her money. Someone, of course, would have had to inform Robert where his father’s body had been hidden; then Robert insisted that the custodians remove his mother there too, in equal secrecy.

  So now, for five years, the visitors to Oak Ridge’s Lincoln Memorial had been paying their respects to two vacant crypts, although rumors of subterfuge persisted. In the spring of 1887, the Lincoln National Monument Association decided that the time had come to provide a burglarproof new tomb deep in the center of the floor of the North Hall. On the morning of April 14, according to the New York Times, “the members of the Guard of Honor and the Lincoln Monument Association, including many men who knew Mr. Lincoln . . . saw masons hew away the stones over the hidden grave. The two coffins were brought out and that of Mr. Lincoln opened.”

  No more rattling omnibuses for Walt Whitman. This afternoon Robert Pearsall Smith would see to it that the poet and his young companion rode uptown in a carriage.

  From the porte cochere of the Westminster Hotel they glided west on East Sixteenth Street through blooming Union Square, then followed Broadway seven blocks north toward Madison Square and Twenty-fourth Street, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue converged. How the city had changed since the Pfaffians held their revels on lower Broadway, and as Manhattan grew northward and skyward! On the right at Nineteenth Street they passed W. & J. Sloane, where colorful Persian rugs hung in the wide showcases, then on the left Lord & Taylor, displaying sleek, bustled gowns and spring bonnets. Whitman admired the cast-iron palaces of the Ladies’ Mile shopping district, the slender columns of the tall buildings. Brooks Brothers was coming up, at the corner of Twenty-second. Maybe he would make enough money from the lecture to buy new shirts.

  The light summer suits in shopwindows seemed out of place to the travelers on this unseasonably chilly afternoon. The thermometer at Hudnut’s Pharmacy, 218 Broadway, stood at 48 degrees, and though the breeze was at their backs, out of the south, it would get no warmer.

  William Duckett had a toothache. He wore a bowler hat that made his long face look longer, and a swallowtail coat whose sleeves his arms had outgrown, so that his pale hands dangled. He tenderly stroked his jaw, looking up at the buildings in wonder. As the reinsman turned the horses left onto Twenty-fourth Street around the grand Corinthian portico of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the poet held the binding of papers from which he would read his lecture on Lincoln.

  The lecture notes had become a palimpsest of scribbled paragraphs, pages clipped and edited from Memoranda During the War, and newsprint clippings, all pasted up, curiously, upon the leaves of a little book called The Bride of Gettysburg, a narrative poem by J. D. Hylton published in 1878. That was the year that John Burroughs and Richard Watson Gilder first proposed “a benefit be got up for you in N.Y. and that you be asked to lecture on Lincoln.”

  Whitman had glued the end papers of The Bride together, and also pasted yellow glazed paper over the covers. In the back of his makeshift book were several poems he might choose to recite after the lecture, including his “O Captain! My Captain!,” Anacreon’s “The Midnight Visitor,” and Robert Burns’s “John Anderson, My Jo.” The speech itself Whitman had first delivered in Steck Hall on Fourteenth Street, on April 14, 1879. Since then he had given the same address, with slight variations, in Association Hall, Philadelphia (1880); the St. Botolphe Club in Boston (1881); the Pythian Club in Elkton, Maryland; Morgan Hall, Camden; Chestnut Street Opera House, Philadelphia; and a church in Haddonfield, New Jersey, all in 1886; and he had delivered it for the eighth time just a week and a half earlier for the Unitarian Society in Camden. The speech was always a success, and in major cities it seldom failed to reap columns of publicity in the newspapers. On this afternoon, the occasion of the ninth lecture on Lincoln, as Whitman approached the grand brick theater with its high arched doors, its Victorian cornice braced with ogee moldings, he had every reason to be confident.

  Major James B. Pond, promoter of “Concerts, Lecturers, and All Description of Musical, Lyceum and Literary Entertainments,” as his letterhead stated, had been engaged to ballyhoo the event and sell tickets. But as might have been expected, the winning and influential John Hay stood at the epicenter of this distinguished sociodrama. It was Hay who would deliver the audience that mattered.

  Mark Twain was staying next door to the theater, in his suite at the white marble Fifth Avenue Hotel. He was slowly recovering from the glasses of Château d’Yquem Sauternes that had flowed at the all-night gala after the hundredth dazzling performance of Augustine Daly’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. At fifty-one Twain was much in demand at events like this one (a landmark in American theater history), where his name and wit added distinction—the press followed him. He was a sturdy man with a thick neck, trim wavy hair going gray at the temples, and a brown, down-turned mustache. In those days the author did not affect white outfits; in public he wore a dark three-piece suit and a straight black bow tie.

  The marathon celebration started just after midnight, and did not break up until 5:00 A.M. Mark Twain ate terrapin and pâté de foie gras in the company of the glamorous thespians, and guests who included painter Elihu Vedder; the great actor Wilson Barrett, Whitman’s friend, now playing Hamlet at the Star Theatre; and General and Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman. Daly gave General Sherman the place of honor and made him toastmaster. When the time came for speech making, the soldier who had destroyed much of Georgia spoke with surprising eloquence and wit about the arts in general and Shakespeare in particular. Twain could add little to the warrior’s remarks.

  Daly had produced two of Twain’s plays, and Twain was hopeful the director would stage another. Twain drawled: “I have been counting the roses on the table—9,000 roses. This is the hardest theatre in New York to get into, and I’m glad I’ve got so far in at last.”

  He would have no difficulty getting a good seat in the Madison Square Theatre, although it was much smaller than Daly’s on Broadway. With all of Major Pond’s exertions, about half the seats had been sold—not a bad advance for an afternoon lecture. The size of the audience did not matter so much as its character, to which the author of The Prince and the Pauper and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had agreed to lend a share of prestige. Important friends—John Hay, William Dean Howells, and Richard Watson Gilder, among others—would be expecting him.

  Twain’s feelings about Whitman were complex. Shakespeare aside, poetry bewildered him. Often these days he was hearing his name linked with Whitman’s, as a species of indigenous genius, which may not have pleased him. Also, Twain had followed Whitman’s lead in the art of self-promotion, which may have led to uneasiness on the younger man’s part, the desire to avoid guilt by association. Yet he never refused to contribute to Whitman’s welfare—when money was needed for the carriage, for instance, or when mutual friends solicited funds to keep food on the poet’s table. “What we want to do is to make the splendid old soul comfortable,” he would tell the Boston Herald on May 24, 1887. Perhaps the stories of Whitman’s work in the hospitals moved Twain; maybe he admired some of Whitman’s verses. We will never know, because Mark Twain strictly refrained from comment upon Leaves of Grass or judgments of Whitman’s literary stature.

  As Twain joined the crowd passing under the filigreed marquee, it became clear that this lecture on Lincoln was a literary occasion of unique importance. William Dean Howells thought so.

  There was no American writer Twain admired and loved more than Howells. Howells corrected Twain’s manuscripts, favorably reviewed most of his novels, and more than any other person saw to it that Twain was taken seriously as an artist rather than regarded as a travel writer or joker. In turn, Twain praised Howells as one of the
finest writers in the language. As friends of twenty years’ standing they had shared many joys and sorrows. Now here was Howells, flush with the success of The Rise of Silas Lapham and Indian Summer, tearing tickets in the archway of the theater lobby—having been pressed into service as a gate man for Walt Whitman.

  As Twain entered the theater, he joined the other patrons in their wonder at the beauty of Tiffany’s muted colors and ornate design. It made Daly’s very fine theater look like a barn. John Hay greeted him warmly, grateful for his attendance. Twain had known Hay since 1871, when Hay was an editorial writer for the New-York Tribune, and they had become intimate friends. Hay helped Twain get a novel published in 1880. Nobody but Lincoln had ever made Hay laugh like Twain: one Sunday afternoon in Hay’s house the two men fell to laughing so hysterically that Mrs. Hay, a devout Presbyterian, frowned upon them for desecrating the Sabbath.

  Since his years in the White House, Hay had held diplomatic posts in Paris, Vienna, and Madrid and served as assistant secretary of state under Rutherford B. Hayes. But he was known foremost as the author of Pike County Ballads and Castilian Days. For the past two years he had been living in Washington, D.C., again, working with an ailing John Nicolay on the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History; some of the volumes were already in print. The last volume would be published in 1890.

  Hay was pleased to see how many celebrities had made the scene: the popular fiction writer Frank (“The Lady or the Tiger?”) Stockton and his wife; the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the eminent art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer; the clergy-men-writers Henry Van Dyke, author of the controversial The Reality of Religion, Edward Eggleston, author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and Moncure Conway. Alongside Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, there was the czar of New York literary society, Edmund C. Stedman, poet, critic, and anthologist, sitting with his family in a private box on the far side of the stage. Five-year-old Laura Stedman, the poet’s granddaughter, was excited about the part she had been asked to play at the end of the afternoon’s program.