Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Mark Twain knew most of these men and women, and most knew one another. The poet Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century magazine, who had been publishing Twain’s stories since 1881, was there with his wife as well as his sister Jeannette and brother Joseph, coeditors of the journal of arts and culture the Critic. Richard Gilder had dined with Whitman, Stedman, Johnston, and Burroughs the night before at the Westminster, as Whitman noted in his diary.

  Here was the author of Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge, now editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, where Tom Sawyer Abroad would be serialized, and their young friend the incredibly successful Frances Hodgson (The Secret Garden) Burnett, who had recently had Little Lord Fauntleroy serialized in Dodge’s journal. The ladies, their hair tightly curled, frizzy-fringed, packed close to the head, wore high-necked velveteen day-dresses with bustles. Miss Burnett knew this theater well— one of her own plays, Esmeralda, had played here to packed houses for 350 nights. Twain had sent her an affectionately inscribed copy of The Prince and the Pauper.

  General Sherman and his wife shared a box with the Gilders. Andrew Carnegie, who considered Whitman the greatest poet in America, occupied his own box (for which he paid $350 to supplement the proceeds). The industrialist was making an unusual public appearance, harried as he was by questions about the stove molders’ strike that had moved from Chicago to Detroit and now threatened Pittsburgh. Mark Twain did not yet know Carnegie, who would play an important role in his financial affairs in the decade to come. Hay was close to Carnegie, and it is possible this was the afternoon that Twain first met the philanthropist. The stove molders’ strike was a lively topic of conversation in the dim, chilly theater stalls; so was yesterday’s lynching of John Thomas from the ceiling joist of a courtroom in Union City, Tennessee. Accused of raping a ten-year-old white girl, the black man was summarily judged guilty by three justices of the peace, whereupon the mob rushed the defendant with cries of “Hang him!,” threw a rope over the beam, noosed the doomed man, and lifted him high in the air.

  In the turret-shaped box to the left of the stage, John Burroughs, the naturalist who introduced Whitman to the hermit thrush, sat with the Boston Brahmins of literature, James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. Now that Emerson and Longfellow were dead, Lowell was America’s most respectable poet-critic, having succeeded Longfellow to the chair of modern languages at Harvard. He also had served as minister to Spain and England. His presence here with Norton, his Harvard colleague and coeditor of the North American Review, bestowed upon the event the benediction of the highest culture. Professor Norton recalled with satisfaction how he had been one of the first critics to praise Leaves of Grass in print, writing in Putnam’s, in 1855, “aside from America, there is no quarter of the universe where such a production could have had a genesis.”

  And somewhere in the scattered audience in the dress circle sat the Cuban exile poet and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, thirty-four-year-old José Martí, who soon would export the gospel of Whitman to South America.

  At four o’clock the bustling, chatty ticket-holders took their seats. The houselights dimmed, in anticipation of Walt Whitman’s entrance.

  Backstage smelled of gas jets, pomade, roses, and sawdust. The poet checked his image in the mirror. His trousers and waistcoast were made of dark gray wool; his sack coat was darker, almost black. He wore dove-gray hand-knitted stockings and low-cut shoes. Nowadays Whitman never wore a tie. His snow-white beard served for a neckcloth. The most outstanding feature of his outfit was his fancy linen shirt, which looked like it might have come from Oscar Wilde. The wide white collar was loose, the cuffs turned over the sleeves, revealing the edging of lace.

  William Duckett handed Whitman his cane, shaped like a shepherd’s crook and so weathered the varnish was worn away.

  The curtain rose upon the elaborate drawing room set from Palmer’s production of Jim, the Penman, with a few adjustments. A small table had been placed downstage center; to the audience’s left of it was an armchair, and to the left of that stood another chair, on the back of which hung a laurel wreath streaming ribbons of red, white, and blue. Wilson Barrett had sent it. He had an eight o’clock curtain for Hamlet, and after partying with Twain all night he could not possibly attend his friend’s lecture.

  In Philadelphia the orchestra had played a prelude—Franz von Suppé’s “The Poet’s Dream,” then a little serenade by Schubert; even in Camden, the week before, a contralto had sung a few popular tunes to settle folks into their seats. Now there was nothing to warm up the audience but their own sotto voce chatter. It was time to go on.

  Putting his arm through Duckett’s, and leaning on his cane, Whitman, blinking, slowly made his way into the illumination cast by fifty or more gas jets. Painfully he made his way to the table, sat down in the chair, and laid his cane on the floor. Duckett exited.

  “The audience gave him the greeting of friends to a friend,” said the New York Times, suggesting that the applause was warm rather than strident. Many called Walt by name from here and there in the triple-tiered hall. Smiling, he thanked them. “He fumbled a little as his hand sought his glasses and adjusted them.”

  Whitman began to read from “papers which he hardly touched, allowing himself to slowly improvise,” Stuart Merrill, a young poet, recalled. Jeannette Gilder, reporting for the Critic, wrote, “His voice is somewhat nasal in quality, but so high and clear that, without being raised above a conversational pitch, it was distinctly audible in all parts of the little theatre.” She compared his appearance, the ruddy cheeks and white hair, to that of the late William Cullen Bryant, who in his last years realized the conventional ideal of Father Time.

  Whitman began:

  How often since that dark and dripping Saturday, that chilly April day now twenty-two years agone, my heart has entertained the dream, the wish to give of Abraham Lincoln’s death its own special thought and memorial. Yet, now the sought-for opportunity offers, I find my notes incompetent, and the fitting tribute I dreamed of seems as unprepared as ever. As oft, however, as the rolling years bring back the hour, I would that it might be briefly dwelt upon. And it is for this, my friends, that I have called you together.

  What followed was fifty minutes of drama the Times called “impressive in the extreme,” as Whitman sat almost motionless at the table, using his voice and eyes to channel the spirit and presence of Lincoln into the jewel-like theater.

  I shall not easily forget the first time I ever saw Abraham Lincoln. It must have been about the eighteenth or nineteenth of February, 1861. It was rather a pleasant afternoon in New York City, as he arrived here from the West, to remain a few hours, and then pass on to Washington, to prepare for his inauguration. I saw him in Broadway, near the site of the present Post-Office. He came down, I think, from Canal Street, to stop at the Astor House . . . From the top of an omnibus, (driven up one side, close by, and blocked by the curbstone and the crowds) I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness, his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on his head, his dark complexion, seamed and wrinkled, yet canny-looking face, his black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind as he stood observing the people.

  In the audience, the painter Francis B. Carpenter was half lost in reverie. Privileged in 1864 with six months’ access to the White House to render the President’s portrait, he had grown to love Lincoln, but could not paint him convincingly. John Hay recalled John Nicolay’s observation that there were many photographs of Lincoln but no portrait of that face that could move through a dozen gradations of light and shade, line and contour, humor, sympathy, sadness, and fury—all in a matter of minutes. To these men who had known Lincoln intimately, Whitman’s voice recalled him more vividly than the photographs.

  As I sat on the top of my omnibus . . . the thought, dim and inchoate then, has since come out clear
enough, that four sorts of genius—four mighty and primal hands, will be needed to the complete limning of this man’s future portrait—the eyes and brains and fingertouch of Plutarch and Aeschylus and Michael Angelo, assisted by Rabelais.

  . . . Now the rapid succession of well-known events, (too well known—I believe, these days, we almost hate to hear them mentioned)—the national flag fired on at Sumter—the uprising of the North, in paroxysms of astonishment and rage—the chaos of divided councils—the call for troops— the first Bull Run—the stunning cast-down, shock, and dismay of the North . . . Four years of lurid, bleeding, murky, murderous war.

  Jeannette Gilder observed the “almost unbroken silence in which [the speech] was given.” There was hardly a soul in the audience who had not lost a friend or close relative in the conflict.

  “Even yet too near us,” Whitman speculated,

  its branches unformed yet, (but certain,) shooting too far into the future . . . A great literature will yet arise out of the era . . . for all future America—far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer’s siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere [sic].

  He was setting the stage for his own contribution to that literature.

  I must leave these speculations, and come to the theme I have assign’d and limited myself to. Of the actual murder of President Lincoln . . .

  Now Whitman became actor and playwright, confident in the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. There was every reason to believe him: Whitman had witnessed all but a few of the events he brought to life, and almost no one living knew which of the scenes he was describing secondhand.

  John Hay, John Burroughs, and a few others knew that this well-worn script depended upon artifice. All accepted this for what it was. The night Lincoln was shot, Whitman had not been in Ford’s Theatre, as his publicity claimed. But Peter Doyle had, and in order to bring his audience to the time and place, the poet would use Doyle’s eyewitness account, which now seemed Whitman’s own.

  At Oak Ridge Cemetery that afternoon the North Hall of the Lincoln Monument was closed to the public and the press. Inside, all those who had shared the secret of the tomb, the Lincoln Guard of Honor and eighteen persons who had known the President, stood by in silence as the plumber Leon P. Hopkins of Springfield chiseled an opening in the lead of the casket.

  The casket rested upon sawhorses. This was a specialty of the plumber’s, one that guaranteed him an odd immortality, hammering out the peephole in Lincoln’s coffin, and then soldering it shut again. This was the third time he had been called to the task in twenty-two years (and it would not be the last). Now he went about his work with a sure hand. The purpose of the ritual was to ascertain if Lincoln’s corpse was in the coffin where it belonged.

  When the plumber had put down his tools and lifted away an oblong piece of the casket above Lincoln’s head, the twenty-seven witnesses filed past to get a “last” look at the great man’s features. According to the New York Times reporter, who later interviewed members of the secret brotherhood, “the body was found to be in a remarkable state of preservation and easily recognizable.” As the headrest of the casket had collapsed, Lincoln’s head was slightly tilted back. Lincoln’s features, framed by the coarse black hair and perfectly trimmed beard, remained stunningly lifelike.

  What had made the face always interesting, if not beautiful, was the vivid play of light and shadow upon its spare Gothic architecture. If, in his final years, he had wasted away to a figure that looked like the spectre of death, now in death he had suffered the least diminution of mortality. Of course, there was the very peculiar matter of the President’s skin. As the funeral cortege had passed through Harrisburg and Lancaster, coal country, Lincoln’s face had turned, curiously, black. It would have been unseemly for the President to appear in the rotunda of New York’s City Hall as the silent interlocutor of a minstrel show. So the morticians had covered the President’s face with a paste of white chalk. Now this had dissolved, leaving the dark lineaments dusted with a faint white powder.

  “The deed hastens,” Whitman continued from his armchair in the opulent stage parlor. The Times noted, “as his words touched any part of the theatre, he would look up at it in a way that was better than any gesture and impressive in the extreme.”

  Whitman recalled Lincoln’s passion for the theater: “I have myself seen him there several times. I remember thinking how funny it was that he, in some respects, the leading actor in the stormiest drama known to history’s stage, should sit there and be so completely interested and absorbed in those imaginary doings.

  “On this occasion the theatre was crowded. There were many ladies in rich and gay costumes, officers in their uniforms, many well known citizens, young folks, the usual clusters of gaslights,” the poet recalled, as his eyes rested warmly on these similar characters and props before him, “the usual magnetism of so many people, cheerful and talkative, with perfumes and the music of violins and flutes in the air. And over all, and saturating all, that vast, vague, yet realistic wonder, victory, the Nation’s victory, the triumph of the Union, filling the air . . .

  “The President came betimes, and with his wife witnessed the play from the large stage boxes of the second tier . . . The acts and scenes of the piece, (‘Our American Cousin’) one of those singularly written compositions”—and Whitman waxed droll—“which have at least the merit of giving entire relief to an audience engaged in mental action or business excitements and cares during the day, as it makes not the slightest call on either the moral, emotional, pathetic, or spiritual nature—”

  Now they laughed—Twain, Hay, Palmer, and the dozens of literati—at the moment of comic relief before disaster would strike. All welcomed Whitman’s satire of the shallow comedy, which “had progressed through perhaps a couple of its acts, when in the midst of it came a scene not really or exactly to be described at all . . . a passing blur in which two ladies are informed by an impossible Yankee that he is not a man of fortune. The dramatic trio made their exit, leaving the stage clear for a moment. At this period came the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

  “Great as that was, with all its manifold train circling around it, and stretching into the future for many a century in the politics, history, and art of the New World, the main thing, the actual murder, transpired with the quiet and simplicity of any commonest occurrence—the bursting of a pod in the growth of vegetation, for instance.” The poet’s simile was surprising and adept. He spoke slowly, making every word tell.

  . . . Came the muffled sound of a pistol shot, which not one hundredth part of the audience heard at the time. There was a moment’s hush, a vague, startled thrill, and then, through the ornamented, draperied, starred and striped spaceway of the President’s box, a man raises himself . . . leaps below to the stage, a distance of perhaps 14 or 15 feet, falls out of position, catching his boot heel in the drapery of the American flag, but quickly rises and recovers himself as if nothing had happened—Booth, the murderer, dressed in plain black broadcloth, bareheaded, with raven glossy hair and eyes, like some mad animal, flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain calmness, holds aloft a large knife. He walks along, not much back from the footlights, turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes . . . and launches out in a firm and steady voice these words: “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” [Thus always to tyrants.] Then he walks with pace neither slow nor rapid diagonally across the back of the stage and disappears.

  Twenty-three-year old Stuart Merrill, an aspiring poet listening that afternoon, was utterly transported. It was “as though the event had taken place the evening before,” he wrote. “Not a gesticulation, no raising of the voice. I was there; everything happened to me. His address was as gripping as the reports of the tragedies of Eschylus.”

  Walt Whitman continued:

  A moment’s hush—a scream—the cry of “Murder!” and Mrs. Lincoln leans out of the box with ashy cheeks and lips, and pointing to the
retreating figure cries: “He has killed the President.” There is a moment’s strange, incredulous suspense, and then—the deluge. The mixture of horror and uncertainty, a rising hum . . .

  Ford’s Theatre is in chaos. Women faint. People in flight break chairs and railings, trample one another.

  The screams and confused talk redouble, treble; two or three manage to pass up water from the stage to the President’s box; others try to clamber up . . .

  The President’s soldiers burst into the theater with fixed bayonets, ordering the hysterical crowd to clear out.

  Little Laura Stedman, being led from the theater box where she had been sitting with her grandfather, the distinguished poet Edmund C. Stedman, and their family, had butterflies in her stomach as she thought of her role in the play. Through a warren of passages down and underground and then up into the glow of gaslights that spilled over from the radiant stage set to the wings Laura made her way. She stood with the stage manager in a maze of curtains. She wore a white French coif, tied under the chin, and a dress of Quaker gray. While much of the old man’s story was comprehensible to a bright child, suddenly he had embarked upon ruminations and speculations, a passage where she could not follow him even if she had not been so nervous.

  The immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest to a nation—the imaginative and artistic senses—the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and to every age . . . Its sharp culmination, and as it were, solution of so many bloody and angry problems, illustrates those climax moments on the stage of universal Time, where the Historic Muse at one entrance, and the Tragic Muse at the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation . . .