Walt Whitman never met Lincoln, but he cherished him. Volunteering in Washington’s hospitals during the war, he often caught a glimpse of the president. “I see the President almost every day,” he wrote in 1863, “we have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.” “I think well of the President,” he confided another time. “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” In June, he wrote to his mother: “I had a good view of the President last evening—he looks more careworn even than usual—his face with deep cut lines, seams, & his complexion gray, through very dark skin, a curious looking man, very sad.” “Always to me,” he observed, “a deep latent sadness in the expression.”
Whitman praised Lincoln’s leadership: “He has shown, I sometimes think, an almost supernatural tact in keeping the ship afloat at all, with head steady, not only not going down, and now certain not to, but with proud and resolute spirit, and flag flying in sight of the world, menacing and as ever.” Another time he declared, “Mr. Lincoln has done as good as a human could do.” “I think better of him,” Whitman confessed, “than many do. He has conscience & homely shrewdness—conceals an enormous tenacity under his mild, gawky western manner.”
The poet was in New York on the night Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre. Some fifteen years later, he was still trying to make sense of the assassination:
The day, April 14, 1865, seems to have been a pleasant one throughout the whole land—the moral atmosphere pleasant too—the long storm, so dark, so fratricidal, full of blood and doubt and gloom, over and ended at last by the sun-rise of such an absolute National victory, and utter break-down of Secessionism—we almost doubted our own senses! Lee had capitulated beneath the apple-tree of Appomattox. The other armies, the flanges of the revolt, swiftly follow’d. And could it really be, then? Out of all the affairs of this world of woe and failure and disorder, was there really come the confirm’d, unerring sign of plan, like a shaft of pure light—of rightful rule—of God?
In the immediate aftermath, Whitman wrote poems about Lincoln’s death: “Hush’d Be the Camps Today,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain, My Captain.” But it was with prose that he kept returning to the war, with prose that he tried to divine its meaning.
The war, he believed, was “not a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity—perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become fused, homogenous, and lasting.”
For Whitman, the war vindicated American democracy: “The movements of the late secession war, and their results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends them, show that popular democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of enthusiasts.” “That our national democratic experiment, principle, and machinery, could triumphantly sustain such a shock,” he believed, “is by far the most signal proof yet of the stability of that experiment, Democracy, and of those principles, and that Constitution.” And that proof of democracy came “every bit as much from the south, as from the north. … I deliberately include all. Grand, common stock!” The “four years of lurid, bleeding, murky, murderous war” was volunteered for by “the People, of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea.”
He kept returning to the soldiers, to the rank and file, to those remarkable specimens of American vitality, courage, and youth. During the war, he regularly visited wounded men, first in New York and then in Washington at the Armory Square Hospital. “I have been almost daily calling as a missionary,” he wrote of his visits, “distributing now & then little sums of money—and regularly letter-paper and envelopes, oranges, tobacco, jellies, &c. &c.”
In 1882, he published Specimen Days, a discursive series of entries, part memoir and part diary, primarily about his days during the war. He kept trying to find words to convey the stories of the sick and wounded, of the battle scenes, but words kept proving inadequate to experience: “What history, I say, can ever give—for who can know—the mad, determin’d tussle of the armies.” “Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—whoe’er can write the story?”
But he continued writing until he could write no more, and then he tried to bid farewell:
AND so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others—to me the main interest I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides, and in those specimens amid the hospitals, and even the dead on the field. To me the points illustrating the latent personal character and eligibilities of these States, in the two or three millions of American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in those armies—and especially the one-third or one-fourth of their number, stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest—were of more significance even than the political interests involved. … Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too, the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch’d by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr’d to the cruelties on his surrender’d brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. … Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiæ of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862–’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.
In 1888, a friend of Whitman asked him, “Do you go back to those days?”
“I do not need to,” the poet responded. “I have never left them.”