Lincoln and Whitman Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  PREFACE

  part one - DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS

  1 - SPRINGFIELD, 1857

  2 - NEW YORK, 1861

  part two - THE WAR OF THE REBELLION

  3 - THE FEDERAL CITY, NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1863

  4 - FEBRUARY 1863

  5 - THE SOLDIER’S MISSIONARY

  6 - THE LOOKING GLASS

  7 - HALLOWEEN

  part three - DRUM-TAPS

  8 - THE GREAT CHASE

  9 - WILDERNESS

  10 - WHY LINCOLN LAUGHED

  11 - SPRING, 1865

  12 - WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D

  part four - EPILOGUE: NEW YORK, 1887

  13 - MADISON SQUARE THEATRE: NEW YORK, APRIL 14, 1887

  SOURCES AND NOTES

  MAP AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN

  Copyright Page

  For Neil Olson

  PRAISE FOR Lincoln and Whitman

  “A revealing character study.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America’s greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Daniel Mark Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he re-creates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways.”

  —David S. Reynolds,

  author of Walt Whitman’s America and Beneath the American Renaissance

  “Epstein presents a compelling affinity of ideas.”

  —Newsday

  “Epstein offers a revealing character study of Whitman and a penetrating analysis of his wartime poetry. . . . [He] expertly paints the worlds in which Whitman moved, from Pfaff ’s saloon, where the poet enjoyed the bohemian camaraderie of the New York literati, to the military hospitals in Washington where he tended wounded soldiers.”

  —The Ann Arbor News

  “Powerful and evocative.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Epstein has yoked Lincoln and Whitman in a detailed narrative sure to please the vast audience both men justly command. The book is a fine combination of biography, history, and literary criticism, with several quirky excursions into the mysteries of the two men’s lives and loves.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “An illuminating, elegant book. The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime. Both Lincoln and Whitman—together with the long-vanished culture in which they lived—come vividly, sometimes startlingly, alive in Daniel Mark Epstein’s luminous prose.”

  —Harold Holzer,

  author of The Lincoln Image

  “Cuts back and forth as compellingly as a good novel between evocative accounts of each man. The book places its two subjects in a uniquely sharp perspective.”

  —The Burlington Free Press

  “Epstein memorably evokes the look and feel of Washington during the Civil War, the eerily adjacent lives there of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and the frantic events that issued in the murder of our greatest president and the writing of our greatest poem, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’ Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror.”

  —Kenneth Silverman,

  author ofLightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse

  PREFACE

  Two visionaries, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, dominated the American scene from 1855 until 1865 in their respective fields of politics and literature. Their works, unique but analogous, have continued to affect our lives and thoughts, down to the present generation.

  Therefore, any influence of the one genius upon the other and the slightest personal encounters between them have been subjects of intense scholarly and public interest since October 1865, when Whitman published his elegy for the President, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In 1875 Whitman brought out his Memoranda During the War, which included his detailed recollections of Lincoln. And in February 1876, in the New York Sun, Whitman published an account of the assassination in Ford’s Theatre, which he expanded into a lecture incorporating his personal memories of Lincoln. Whitman’s delivery of that speech a dozen times between 1879 and 1890 forged an unbreakable link between the President and the poet in the public mind. This book reexamines the actual connection.

  The present narrative begins in a dusty law office in 1857, where Lincoln was first heard reading aloud from Leaves of Grass, and it ends in a “jewel box” theater in 1887, where Whitman delivered his Lincoln lecture to an audience that included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and General and Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman. But the story has deeper roots in the political turmoil of the 1850s.

  During this decade when Abraham Lincoln became a power in national politics, and Walt Whitman was changing the medium of poetry by writing and publishing Leaves of Grass, America was rushing toward civil war with a momentum horrifying to those who were aware that war was inevitable, and unsettling to others who believed that the calamity might be avoided. There was hardly a facet of civil or political life that was not affected by the controversy over slavery. The failure to ban slavery from the territories inspired Whitman to write and publish his first free-verse poem, “Blood Money,” in 1850. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fictional critique of the “peculiar institution.” It sold three million copies, and abolition became an unavoidable topic of conversation.

  In those days, most people agreed that a transcontinental railroad would be the nation’s best investment, since the frontier had reached the west coast. But whether the track would be laid along a northern or a southern route was a hotly debated question, in which the rivalry between the slaveholders and the free-soilers insinuated itself. The railroad would give economic advantage to the section it crossed, and it would decisively influence the politics of the yet unformed West. In 1853 the Pierce administration showed its intention to route the railroad south, from New Orleans to San Diego, by purchasing from Mexico a strip of land along the Gila River (the Gadsden Purchase). Northerners favoring a route from Chicago or St. Louis to San Francisco would have to act swiftly and forcefully. If the northern route was chosen, a long stretch of track needed to pass through the Great Plains—Indian country west of the Missouri River—which had not yet been received into the Union. Whether slavery would be legal in the territories depended entirely upon congressional legislation.

  In the thick of this fateful controversy toiled a highly ambitious, leonine, charismatic orator from Illinois, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, the forty-year-old presidential hopeful had shaped policy in the West. It was Douglas’s contribution to the Great Compromise of 1850 that the territorial governments of Utah and New Mexico were given the power to decide the slavery question for themselves, by voting on it. Thus to the vexed question of slavery’s future came the concept of “popular sovereignty.” This idea was loathsome to patriots like Abraham Lincoln, who believed the Founding Fathers and the Constitution itself were fundamentally opposed to the spread of slavery.

  Douglas had his dreams and ambitions, and he also held railroad investments. As an Illinois Democrat, he was expected to advance the St. Louis and Chicago interests in the northern route. This required an organization of the Nebraska Territory, wh
ich Douglas contrived to accomplish by a bill introduced on January 4, 1854. Trusting that what worked for Utah and New Mexico would suit the Great Plains, Douglas put together a bill that provided that Nebraska (and Kansas) would be accepted into the Union with or without slavery, as its constitution, yet to be written, might allow.

  No one has ever quite understood why Douglas—who was in many ways a worthy statesman, and by no means an advocate or apologist for slavery—took the spectacularly bold position he did in early 1854, abandoning the slavery question to the legislatures of unformed states. This is not the place to repeat Douglas’s arguments, famously dashed by Lincoln. The Senator’s actions may be attributed to political expedience: by allowing slaveholders the hope of taking their slaves west, he briefly gained popularity among Southern Democrats and support for the northern railroad route. Yet there is a more illuminating determinant, one that casts increasing light as Lincoln emerges from obscurity to oppose the Little Giant. Douglas lacked a guiding moral principle, a sense of vision. This put him at a severe disadvantage in debate against the political visionary who would topple him, Abraham Lincoln.

  The drafted bill was illegal, as it violated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which outlawed slavery north of the 36°30′ latitude. When colleagues pointed this out, Douglas irrationally explained that a careless clerk had left out the section of the bill referring questions concerning slavery to the territory’s residents, i.e., to “popular sovereignty.” Southern lawmakers complained that as long as the Missouri Compromise held sway the residents could not vote for slavery even if they wanted it, so Douglas obligingly added two amendments to the bill. First, the 36°30′ provision of the Missouri Compromise was to be repealed. Second, the area was to be split into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, the southernmost of which, Kansas, seemed favored to become a slave state.

  Abolitionists and liberal Yankees were enraged. Lincoln later said, “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” Prominent liberal senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Salmon Portland Chase of Ohio tried to rally the public against the outrageous bill by issuing the exposé “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” on January 24, before the legislation was passed. It decried “a gross violation of a sacred pledge . . . a criminal betrayal of precious rights.” These protesters were no match for the ferocious Douglas, the Southern Democrats, and the charming President Franklin Pierce. Although Douglas was burned in effigy from Maine to Wisconsin, and some women in Ohio solemnly awarded this latter-day Judas thirty pieces of silver, the bill became law, and American politics were changed forever. The simmer of abolitionism came to a boil. The Whig Party (to which Lincoln had belonged) lost its vestiges of relevance and soon vanished. The Democratic Party cracked wide open, sundered by the slavery dispute. Editor Horace Greeley called for the formation of a new antislavery party in his New-York Tribune on June 15. And that autumn, the fledgling party he called “Republican” won seats in the U.S. Congress and captured the legislatures of seven Northern states.

  The concentration of Republicans in the industrial North, united by the single cause of free soil, hastened the slide of the Democratic Party into the agrarian culture of the South. The party system became sectionalized.

  Popular sovereignty, which Stephen Douglas argued was the obvious solution to the devilish question, allowing settlers to decide for or against slavery—in the American way—by voting, turned out to be a ticking bomb.

  William Seward of New York rose up in the Senate in righteous defiance. “Come on then, Gentlemen of the slave States; since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” Fellow New Yorker Walt Whitman greatly admired Seward for his defense of freedom.

  The competition rapidly escalated from a war of words and ballots to one of guns and swords. By 1855 there were two governments in Kansas, one proslavery, the other Free State. In May 1856 the proslavery government sent a gang to cannonade the free-soil town of Lawrence, Kansas. The men wrecked the presses of the Herald of Freedom, burned down the Free State Hotel, and looted some shops. A few days later, fifty-six-year-old John Brown, with his four sons and two other men, set out to avenge the “sack of Lawrence.” Believing himself to be an instrument of God’s wrath, the abolitionist led his band against a proslavery settlement on Pottawatomie Creek. They broke into three cabins, hacked five men to pieces with broadswords, and stole their horses.

  Sentiments in the nation’s capital ran so high that congressmen began carrying pistols. On May 19 and 20, 1856, Charles Sumner delivered his speech on “the Crime against Kansas,” a blistering indictment that not only censured the legislation that had led to “Bleeding Kansas” but took aim at Douglas and Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. The sharp-tongued Sumner ridiculed Butler for his affection for his “mistress . . . the harlot slavery”; in those bitter times this was taken as a slur against the Southern gentleman’s character. Two days later, as Senator Sumner sat alone, working at his desk after hours in the Senate chamber, a congressman from South Carolina, Butler’s nephew Preston Brooks, approached Sumner and rebuked him for his insults against Butler. Not satisfied with the conversation, Brooks cracked Sumner’s skull with a gutta-percha cane. As Sumner turned and raised his arms in defense Brooks continued to rain blows upon his victim’s head and spine until the weapon broke into pieces. His passion spent, Brooks turned and left Sumner lying in his own blood, nearly dead on the floor of the great hall.

  Charles Sumner, the most powerful voice against slavery in Washington, was so critically wounded that he could not return to his seat until 1859. His empty desk in the Senate became a symbol of the conflict that words could not mediate. Civil war had broken out in Kansas, and there was internecine combat between Northern and Southern lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

  This, then, is the America in which Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass and Abraham Lincoln sought his voice in the tumultuous discourse that was reshaping party politics. This is the troubled decade in which our story begins.

  part one

  DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS

  1

  SPRINGFIELD, 1857

  Abraham Lincoln’s law partner William “Billy” Herndon, thirty-nine, loved the birds and wildflowers of the prairie, pretty women, and corn liquor. He also had an immoderate passion for new books, and for the transcendental philosophizing of pastor Theodore Parker and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. By his own accounting he had spent four thousand dollars on his collection of poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres—a fortune in those days, when a good wood-frame house in Springfield, Illinois, cost half as much. Journalist George Alfred Townsend called Herndon’s library the finest in the West.

  Herndon’s narrow, earnest-looking face was fringed with whiskers in the Scots manner, and his eyes were close-set, intense. His favorite philosopher-poet was Emerson. Herndon so admired the Sage of Concord that he purchased Emerson’s books by the carton and gave them away to friends and strangers with the zeal of an evangelist. A backwoods philosopher, Herndon even solicited Emerson’s endorsement for his tract “Some Hints on the Mind,” in which he claimed to have discovered the mind’s fundamental principle, “if not its law.”

  So when Emerson espoused a new book of poetry, calling it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” Herndon wasted no time in locating a copy, which could be found on the shelves of R. Blanchard’s, Booksellers, in Chicago, where he frequently traveled on business.

  Having held the olive-green book, its cover blind-stamped with leaves and berries; having regarded with a twinge of envy the salutation “I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R W Emerson,” gold-stamped on the spine, the bibliophile-lawyer plunked down his golden dollar for the second edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. And knowing the storm the book had caused in more sophisticated circles, Herndon b
rought the brickbat-shaped volume to the office he shared with Lincoln and set it in clear view on the table, where anyone might pick up the book and thumb through it. Leaves of Grass was exactly the length of a man’s hand. He laid it down on the baize-covered table with the complacence of an anarchist waiting for a bomb to explode.

  The Lincoln-Herndon law office was on the second floor of a brick building on the west side of Springfield’s main square, across from the courthouse. Visitors mounted a flight of stairs and passed down a dark hallway to a medium-sized room in the rear of the building. The upper half of the door had a pane of beveled glass, with a curtain hanging from a wire, on brass rings. Lincoln would unlock the door, open it, and draw the curtain as he closed the door behind him. Two dusty windows overlooked the alley.

  Herndon’s biographer David Donald describes the office as “a center of political activity, of gossip and friendly banter, and of such remote problems as the merits of Walt Whitman’s poetry.”

  The office was untidy and cobwebbed. Once, after Lincoln had come home from Congress with the customary dole of seeds to distribute to farmers, John Littlefield, a law student, discovered while sweeping that some of the stray wheat seeds had sprouted in the cracks between the floorboards. A long pine table that divided the room, and met with a shorter table to make a T, was scored by the jackknives of absent-minded clerks and clients. In one corner stood a secretary desk, its many pigeonholes and drawers stuffed with letters and memoranda, its besieged surface sustaining a spattered earthenware inkwell and a few gold pens. Bookcases rose between the tall windows. A spidery black stain blotted one wall, at the height of a man’s head, where an ink bottle had exploded—the memento, according to Lincoln, of a disagreement between law students over a point of jurisprudence that would not yield to cold logic.

  Papers were strewn everywhere, as if by a prairie wind: on the table, on the floor, on the five scattered cane-bottomed chairs and the ragged sofa where the senior partner of the firm liked to stretch out his full length, his head on the arm of the sofa. His legs were too long to fit the settee, so Lincoln would rest his feet on the raveling cane seat of a chair. There he reclined every morning, after arriving at nine, clean-shaven. And he would read, aloud. He read newspapers and books, always aloud, much to the annoyance of his partner, who found the high, tuneful voice, with its chuckling interludes and asides, a distraction from the warrants and writs and invoices. Herndon once asked Lincoln why he had to read aloud, and the forty-eight-year-old ex-Congressman explained: “Two senses catch the idea: first I see what I read; second I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.” Lincoln—not boasting—said that his mind was like steel: the gray matter was difficult to scratch, but once engraved on it, information was nearly impossible to efface. According to Herndon, Lincoln did not read many books, but whatever he did read he absorbed completely.