Caesar in the senate house. Napoleon perishing in the wild night storm at St. Helena. Socrates drinking the hemlock.
The final use of a heroic-eminent life—especially of a heroic-eminent death—is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give . . . age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than any thing in written constitution, or courts or armies—namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its sake . . .
A voice whispered in Laura’s ear that it is almost time. The old gentleman was speaking of lilacs, saying that the perfume of lilacs was forever associated in his mind with the thought of Lincoln’s death. Laura held the pyramidal clusters of fragrant purple lilacs, freshly clipped, overflowing the osier basket. She would carry them onstage when the old man had ceased talking. The basket with its braided wale handle and burden of blossoms was more than half the size of the girl.
The lovely voice maintained its steady rhythm, but now assumed the weight of finality and summation, as Whitman took his leave of Lincoln:
Dear to the Muse—thrice dear to Nationality—to the whole human race—precious to this Union—precious to Democracy—unspeakably and forever precious—their first great Martyr Chief.
The applause came, first in scattered bursts, then greater and greater waves. Someone in the balcony called for the poem as an encore, “O Captain! My Captain!” Now the poet’s voice started up again, but it seemed that he was not speaking so much as singing, mournfully.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies . . .
The voice faltered . . . now the poet was not singing so much as weeping. Tears flowed down his red cheeks and glistened on his beard, and it did not seem as if he could continue. Now it was time for Laura Stedman to make her entrance.
As the basket of lilacs appeared from the wings, with the child beaming behind it, the crowd broke into the loudest ovation of the day, drowning out the verses of Whitman’s well-known poem and the cracked voice that was too overcome with emotion to finish it. Laura moved into the spotlight.
“She walked to where he sat and held out her gift without a word,” recalled the reporter from the Times. The old man’s sadness had almost made her cry. “He stared, took them, and then took her. It was December frost and Maytime blossom at their prettiest contrast as the little pink cheeks shone against the snow-white beard, for the old man told his appreciation mutely by kissing her and kissing her again.”
Many in the audience were weeping, and the tears that were shed in that space the poet had hallowed with his words were as much for the fallen President as for the grieving poet. In that moment the men were united.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Abbreviations and Short Titles Employed in the Notes
BARTON, AL & WW: William E. Barton. Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
BROOKS, WASHINGTON: Noah Brooks. Washington in Lincoln’s Time. New York: Rinehart, 1958; reprint of 1895 edition.
CHRONOLOGY: Joann P. Krieg. A Whitman Chronology. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.
CORR: Whitman. The Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 5 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1961.
CW: Lincoln. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. 8 vols. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953.
DAY BY DAY: Earl Schenck Miers, ed. Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960.
GLICKSBERG, WHITMAN: Whitman. Walt Whitman and the Civil War. Ed. Charles I. Glicksberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933.
HAY, DIARY: Hay. Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay. Ed. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.
HERNDON, LINCOLN: William H. Herdon and Jesse W. Weik. Herndon’s Life of Lincoln. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983; reprint.
LV, 1856: Whitman. Leaves of Grass. New York: Fowler & Wells, 1856.
LV, 1860–1861: Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860–1861.
MEMORANDA: Whitman. Memoranda During the War. Camden, N.J.: 1875.
NUPM: Whitman. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Vol. 2, Washington. Ed. Edward F. Grier. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
NYT: The New York Times.
OATES, WMTN: Stephen B. Oates. With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
SANDBURG, LINCOLN: Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years. New York: Galahad Books, 1993; reprint.
SANDBURG, PRAIRIE YEARS: Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926.
SANDBURG, WAR YEARS: Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. 4 Vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
WWC: Horace Traubel. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vols. 1–3, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1961; Vol. 4, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953; Vols. 5–9, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964–1996.
Sources clearly cited in the text are not listed below. Block quotations are noted by first words; quotations within paragraphs are noted by final words, or first through last words with ellipses.
As of 1990, historian James M. McPherson estimated that there were more than fifty thousand books on the Civil War. The details of the War’s progress that I have included are so numerous, elementary, and well established, that—except in the case of newspaper accounts—I have not annotated them. I have reserved the limited space for citations on quotes and data less familiar to readers.
MAP AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I want to record my gratitude to my agent, Neil Olson, and my editor, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, for their faith in this project from its inception, and their encouragement and advice as the book evolved.
Next I would like to thank Dr. Alice Birney, the literary manuscript historian at the Library of Congress, for guiding me through the voluminous Whitman Collections there. Dr. Birney made it possible for me to view manuscripts and artifacts—including Whitman’s haversack— not currently on display.
I want to thank all the staff at the Library of Congress who helped me, in the Map Room and the Periodicals Collection, and especially librarians Fred W. Bauman Jr., Jeffrey M. Flannery, and Bruce Kirby in the Manuscript Division, for their assistance in locating documents and microfilm. In the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Gerald Wager, Head of Reference and Reader Services, and Clark Evans, Reference Specialist, saw to it that I got hands-on experience with the early editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Drum-Taps, and other books. Dr. John Sellers, Civil War Specialist of the Manuscript Division, helped answer many of my questions about Lincoln. Dr. Sellers also put me in touch with other scholars in the field.
Historian Michael Burlingame helped me to solve research problems, as did Tom Schwartz, the Illinois State Historian, and my friend Neil Grauer of Baltimore. Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates cautioned me about relying upon Ward Hill Lamon’s account of “Lincoln’s Dream,” and Whitman biographer Jerome Loving contributed insights about Whitman’s speaking voice and other matters. Author Eric Foner offered helpful advice concerning Stephen Douglas.
Sometimes it seemed that everywhere I went in this book, the historian David Herbert Donald had preceded me: his biographies of Herndon, Sumner, and Lincoln are invaluable works of scholarship. So
are Justin Kaplan’s biographies of Whitman and Twain, which I have cited often in my notes; I am especially grateful to Mr. Kaplan for his personal encouragement.
Thanks to Richard Moe, Civil War historian and president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, for his gracious hospitality in allowing a tour of the Soldiers’ Home, and to his assistant Sophie Lynn, for guiding the tour. Ms. Lynn also provided me with a map of Lincoln’s route from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home. I am also indebted to Richard Coates, Curator of the Treasury Building, for his personal guided tour of the building where Whitman and his friends worked. Mary Edwards made available to me the Treasury’s large photograph collection. I also want to thank architectural historian Laurie Ossman of the Maryland Historical Society for helping to arrange both of those tours.
At the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins University, librarians Nancy Darovanitch and Amy Kimball in Special Collections were helpful in arranging for me to use, and photocopy, the huge Robinson’s Atlas of the City of New York, and James Gillispie of the maps division provided the map of New York drawn by M. Dripps in 1866.
Jay Satterfield, Head of Reader Services, Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, diligently searched the Barton Collection there for William Herndon’s copy of Leaves of Grass. Determining that Herndon’s book was not in that collection was important. Betty K. Koed, Assistant Senate Historian, United States Senate, answered my questions about Whitman’s meetings with Charles Sumner and Preston King.
In writing this book I was fortunate in having two astute readers, Rosemary Knower and David Bergman, study the manuscript in early drafts and suggest numerous changes in style and structure. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for their insights into the persons and events in the book. And I am also grateful to Janet Fletcher for her meticulous fact-checking and copyediting and to Julia Cheiffetz for her kind editorial assistance.
I was born in Washington, D.C. Half a century ago I walked the streets that Whitman and Lincoln knew, when many of the blocks looked much as they did when these heroes were alive. My father, and his father before him, owned an amusement arcade and shooting gallery at 413 Ninth Street N.W., dead center of the action described in this book. I worked there in my youth, and I can still smell the gunpowder. To my father, and mother, and grandparents, I owe the sense of place.
DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as seven volumes of poetry. His verse has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other national publications. He lives in Baltimore.
ALSO BY DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN
POETRY
No Vacancies in Hell
The Follies
Young Men’s Gold
The Book of Fortune
Spirits
The Boy in the Well
The Traveler’s Calendar
PROSE
Star of Wonder
Love’s Compass
Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson
Nat King Cole
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems
of Edna St. Vincent Millay
PLAYS
Jenny and the Phoenix
The Midnight Visitor
The Leading Lady
TRANSLATION
The Trinummus of Plautus
The Bacchae of Euripides
2005 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Mark Epstein
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Epstein, Daniel Mark.
Lincoln and Whitman: parallel lives in Civil War Washington /
Daniel Mark Epstein.
p. cm.
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography.
3. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892. 4. Poets, American—Biography. 5. United
States—Politics and government—1857–1861. 6. United States—Politics and
government—1861–1865. 7. Political culture—United States—History—
19th century. 8. Political culture—Washington (D.C.)—History—19th century.
9. Washington (D.C.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Title.
E457.2.E67 2004
973.7’092’2—dc22
[B] 2003045141
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43140-0
v3.0
Lincoln and Whitman Page 31
