CHAPTER ONE

New York Stagnation

An uncharacteristically quiet—some said sullen—crowd of thirty thousand New Yorkers clogged the streets around the ornate Astor House on the west side of Broadway on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 19, 1861. They were there to see, if not necessarily to cheer, the president-elect of the United States, then en route from his home in Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., to take up the reins of an increasingly fractious and runaway nation. Shortly before 4 P.M., a procession of horse-drawn carriages arrived at the front entrance of the hotel, which was located diagonally across the street from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. As Abraham Lincoln climbed out of his carriage, an uneasy silence filled the air. Given the circumstances, he must have felt a little like one of the Great Humbug’s prize exhibits.¹

New York as a whole was cool toward Lincoln. In the presidential election the past November, the city had given the Republican nominee a mere 35 percent of its votes. Since then, an increasingly emboldened Mayor Fernando Wood, himself a Tammany Hall Democrat, had begun recommending publicly that New York secede from the Union and transform itself into a new city-state, somewhat clumsily named Tri-Insula, with himself presumably serving as doge. Secession was on everyone’s minds just then. The day before Lincoln’s arrival, former U.S. senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had taken his own oath of office in Montgomery, Alabama, as president of the nascent Confederate States of America. Already, seven deep South states had seceded; more were expected to follow any day. Decades of worsening intersectional strife, culminating in the savage guerrilla war between pro- and antislavery supporters in ‘‘Bleeding Kansas’’ and John Brown’s abortive raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, had led to the formation of the Republican party and Lincoln’s bitterly divisive election with a scant minority of the popular vote. After years of self-righteous posturing, political demagoguing, and outright lying by Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters, the nation as a whole was looking straight down the barrel of a ruinous civil war.2

Marooned atop a stage in the massive traffic jam around the Astor House that afternoon was a forty-one-year-old Brooklynite as troubled in his way as the nation itself. Walt Whitman—former carpenter, former printer, former schoolteacher, former newspaper editor, former novelist, former political activist, and, as it sometimes seemed, former poet—was becalmed in his own ‘‘horrible sloughs.’’ Six years after his astonishing poetic debut, Leaves of Grass, had seemed to presage, as Ralph Waldo Emerson told him, ‘‘the beginning of a great career,’’ Whitman was locked in the grip of a spiraling depression. His low spirits were occasioned more or less equally by the loss of his job as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times, the mixed reception of his latest book of poetry, the ongoing burdens of his troubled and troublesome family, the bankruptcy of his Boston-based publishers, and the end of an unhappy love affair with a young man several years his junior. He was currently spending most of his days like today, riding alongside New York’s hard-bitten stagecoach drivers as they made their way through the city’s teeming streets. His nights were spent at Pfaff’s beer cellar in Greenwich Village, drinking, talking, and swapping barbs with the tavern’s self-styled bohemians. Far from being poised on the brink of a great career, Whitman increasingly felt stranded in a personal and professional dead end, caught in a vortex of ‘‘quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither.’’3

Whitman’s depression mirrored the mood of anxious Americans everywhere concerning the future—if any—of their imperiled republic. Always politically sensitive, he understood only too well the likely consequences of Lincoln’s election and the failure of political leaders on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line to resolve their differences peaceably. In a prescient passage in Leaves of Grass he had tried almost physically to hold the states together by force of will:

States!

Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?

By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Away!

I arrive, bringing these, beyond all the forces of courts and arms,

These! to hold you together as firmly as the earth itself is held together.4

Against the rising tide of sectionalism, Whitman urged ‘‘a new friendship’’ between the states, ‘‘indifferent of place’’ and woven together by an overarching affection. ‘‘Those who love each other,’’ he insisted, ‘‘shall be invincible.’’ Ironically, Abraham Lincoln, the one individual charged with holding the states together politically as Whitman had tried to do poetically, would say much the same thing at his upcoming inauguration. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman had promised that ‘‘affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom.’’ Lincoln, who in his own way was also a poet, would put it slightly differently in his first inaugural address. ‘‘We are not enemies, but friends,’’ he would say, directing his speech to the unhappy South. ‘‘We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’’⁵

Few individuals had heard those chords as long or as often as Whitman himself. From the time of his birth at West Hills, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, he had absorbed the American democratic experience in all its boisterous variety. His ancestors were English and Dutch immigrants, stolid farmers and canny horse traders who during the Revolutionary War had thrown in their lot with the patriots. His paternal grandmother had told him hair-raising stories of British atrocities during the military occupation of Long Island; his grand-uncle had been killed at the Battle of Brooklyn. As a boy, Whitman had found the washed-up bones of some of the twelve thousand American prisoners of war who had died in the rotting prison ships in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay; and years later, as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he had successfully led a public campaign to raise a monument to the borough’s martyred dead. As a child of six, he had been lifted into the arms of the Marquis de Lafayette during the old hero’s triumphant return to America. He had seen President Andrew Jackson parading down Fulton Street in a white beaver hat, and as an office boy he had personally delivered legal papers to the fallen dynast Aaron Burr. American history, particularly the revolution, lived vividly in his imagination, engendering an almost religious devotion to the Union. In his own household, three of his brothers were named after presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. His father was an acquaintance of Thomas Paine.6

Whitman’s intense love of country was reflected in his art. Leaves of Grass was not simply a book of poetry, it was a working manifesto for a new American religion based upon ‘‘the supremacy of Individuality’’—and Whitman himself was nothing if not an individual. His groundbreaking poetry, with its frank discussion of sex, bodily functions, and sweaty quotidian life, together with his carefully cultivated image as a rough-and-ready man of the people, openly challenged accepted norms of behavior. His ‘‘barbaric yawp’’ was a new kind of language, the lingua franca of the common man, transmitting its revolutionary message of self-liberation and personal worth to people across all strata of society. The all-including ‘‘I’’ of ‘‘Song of Myself,’’ the longest poem in Leaves of Grass and the first great poem in the American vernacular, was not simply ‘‘Walt Whitman, an American’’ but men and women everywhere, particularly those of his native country. ‘‘I celebrate myself and sing myself,’’ he said in the poem’s famous opening lines, ‘‘and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’’ He heard America singing, he said, in the humble voices of her workers, the unheralded farmers, sailors, storekeepers, and mechanics who quietly transacted the daily business of the republic. To their rough voices he lent his own:

Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,

Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring,

Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,

And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you.7

At the time of Lincoln’s New York visit, Whitman was contemplating a national tour of his own to broadcast his vision of a cohesive country, ‘‘strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness.’’ He was too late. The nation was indeed full of passion and pride, but by early 1861 it was far from friendly. Lincoln’s journey to the capital seemed more like a foray into enemy territory than a triumphant political victory march. A covey of bodyguards, including future Union generals John Pope, Edwin Sumner, and David Hunter and private detective Allan Pinkerton, shadowed the president-elect every step of the way. Armed guards patrolled each bridge and overpass, suspiciously eyeing the welcoming crowds, and spare locomotives were parked ahead of time in all of the cities that Lincoln was scheduled to visit, ready to spirit him away instantly at the first sign of trouble. Even with such extraordinary precautions, a bomb was discovered under Lincoln’s seat on his private train, and a sinister gang of toughs called the Blood Tubs was said to be plotting his immediate assassination. Whitman was not the only one who worried, when Lincoln stepped out of his carriage at the Astor House, that ‘‘many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there, ready, as soon as break and riot came.’’8

There was no riot that day in New York, merely an anticlimactic ‘‘dumb-show’’ in which Lincoln and the assembled crowd looked at each other with silent curiosity. Whitman, atop his stagecoach, had ‘‘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 push’d back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.’’ Whitman felt that it would take four different sorts of genius—Plutarch, Aeschylus, Michaelangelo, and Rabelais—to truly sketch Lincoln’s portrait. Somewhat surprisingly, he failed to realize that he had already taken the new president’s measure himself, six years earlier, in his unpublished essay, ‘‘The Eighteenth Presidency!’’.9

Written against the backdrop of the dispiriting 1856 presidential campaign between Democratic nominee James Buchanan, the American (Know-Nothing) party’s Millard Fillmore, and the Republican party’s first standard-bearer, John C. Frémont, ‘‘The Eighteenth Presidency!’’ was an impassioned appeal to the idealized workingmen and women of the nation. These open-hearted laborers Whitman contrasted favorably to the corrupt politicians then in power, the ‘‘limber-tongued lawyers, very fluent but empty, feeble old men, professional politicians, dandies, dyspeptics, and so forth,’’ who controlled the nation’s destiny. Their ranks included a dizzying array of malefactors: ‘‘robbers, pimps . . . malignants, conspirators, murderers . . . infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers . . . body-snatchers . . . monte-dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons, blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and the harlot’s money twisted together . . . the lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the earth.’’ At the head of the whole unsavory combination, Whitman charged, sat the president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, who ‘‘eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals.’’¹⁰

Against such a malodorous combination, the poet yearned for a ‘‘Redeemer President’’ who would come out of the West, ‘‘some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman . . . dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.’’ This was a remarkably accurate, if incomplete, description of Lincoln himself, written a good two years before Whitman or most of the nation had ever heard of him, and nearly five years before the poet first laid eyes on the president-elect in front of the Astor House. ‘‘I would certainly vote for that sort of man,’’ Whitman had promised, and four years later he did just that. It remained to be seen if the majority of the country, which had not voted for Lincoln, would react as favorably when he finally took office.11

The slashing poem ‘‘Respondez!’’, written the same year as ‘‘The Eighteenth Presidency!’’, offered little hope for optimism. In its almost hysterical linking of public and private corruption, the poem recalls the darkest passages in Timon of Athens, depicting a depraved, demoralized society led by ‘‘murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons.’’ The poem posits a nightmare world in which the worst people dominate the best, a godless society governed by ‘‘money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief.’’ Traditional roles are grotesquely reversed: judges trade places with criminals, jailers with prisoners, masters with slaves. The highest ideals of American life—freedom, democracy, and equality—are replaced by ‘‘management, caste, comparison.’’ Wholesome sexuality has become the province of ‘‘she-harlots and he-harlots.’’ All the cardinal virtues have been lost:

Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! every one who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!

Let none but infidels be countenanced!

Let the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above all!12

In their bitterness and cynicism, ‘‘The Eighteenth Presidency!’’ and ‘‘Respondez!’’ are light-years removed from the utopian expansionism of Leaves of Grass (even the exclamation points in the titles reveal a desperate stridency). Whitman himself, in the half-decade since their composition, had undergone a similar transformation. Gone was the gladsome, celebratory poet of the open road; he had been replaced by a detached, world-weary onlooker who had taken to spending much of his time indoors in a vaultlike tavern inhabited by some distinctly unquiet ghosts.

Whitman had begun going to Pfaff’s beer cellar, at 653 Broadway, in the summer of 1859, soon after he lost his job as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times. Pfaff’s had become the nightly meeting place for an ever-changing group of poets, artists, journalists, critics, actors, agents, and assorted hangers-on, united only by their artistic pretensions and their épater les bourgeois approach to life. Chief among them was Henry Clapp, the acid-tongued editor of the Saturday Press, a New York weekly whose literary prestige was exceeded only by its fiscal fragility. Clapp had been to Paris in the 1840s and witnessed the birth of la vie de bohème. He had returned to America determined to establish a New World beachhead for modish artistes. Pfaff’s, conveniently located just down the street from the New York Free Love League (which he also frequented), was Clapp’s chosen staging ground. The beer was cold, the sausages and potato pancakes were tasty, and the wine cellar was considered one of the finest in the city.13

With his short stature, high-pitched voice, grizzled beard, and ever-present pipe, Clapp looked a little like a down-on-his-luck leprechaun. A reporter for the New York Leader described him in appropriately continental terms as ‘‘a queer fellow—a character. He is a born Yankee; speaks French like a native; plays poker like a Western man; drinks like a fish, smokes like a Dutchman; is as full of dainty conceits as a Spanish or Italian poet, is as rough in his manners as a Russian or a Russian bear.’’ No one was safe from Clapp’s sharp tongue. Fellow editor Horace Greeley was ‘‘a self-made man that worships his creator.’’ William Dean Howells and Nathaniel Hawthorne were ‘‘a couple of shysters.’’ A certain local clergyman was ‘‘awaiting a vacancy in the Trinity.’’ Wall Street, with its howling and screeching traders, was ‘‘Caterwaul Street,’’ and the United States Treasury was said to be changing its motto from ‘‘In God We Trust’’ to ‘‘In Gold We Trust.’’ One of his favorite bits of advice was: ‘‘Never tell secrets to your relatives. Blood will tell.’’¹⁴

For all his sniping, Clapp had a generous side, and he was one of Whitman’s earliest and strongest supporters, at a time when the poet needed all the friends he could get. Years later, Whitman would tell his young disciple Horace Traubel: ‘‘I don’t know if you have ever realized . . . what it means to be a horror in the sight of the people about you: but there was a time when I felt it to the full—when the enemy—and nearly all were the enemy then—wanted for nothing better or more than simply, without remorse, to crush me, to brush me, without compunction or mercy . . . to do anything, everything, to rid themselves of me.’’15

Clapp was different. He recognized Whitman’s poetic genius—many did not—and he also saw the poet’s symbolic value as an avatar of the rising new bohemian. As the reigning ‘‘King of Bohemia,’’ Clapp enthusiastically welcomed Whitman into Pfaff’s inner circle; more important, he gave him a public forum for his work, however sporadic it would prove to be in the years preceding the Civil War. He published favorable—and sometimes unfavorable—reviews of Whitman’s work, free advertisements for Leaves of Grass, parodies written in the Whitman style, and snippets of what could only be called press agentry, such as the November 12, 1859, announcement that ‘‘whoever wishes to see a perfect likeness of Walter Whitman should go to Root’s Gallery, No. 363 Broadway.’’ It was with a deep sense of gratitude that Whitman told Traubel, late in life, that ‘‘Henry Clapp stepped out from the crowd of hooters—was my friend, a much needed ally at that time. . . . My own history could not be written with Henry left out. I mean it—that is not an extravagant statement.’’¹⁶

Clapp was the acknowledged ringleader at Pfaff’s, but he was far from alone in his subterranean kingdom. Sitting at the head of a long, low table strategically placed at the far end of the cellar, he presided over a raucous gathering of the city’s most outrageous, if not always most talented, literati. Among the regulars were Artemus Ward, the western comedian and friend of Mark Twain; future novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich; Irish-born short-story writer Fitz-James O’Brien; poet-humorist George Arnold; drama critic Edward G. P. Wilkins; drug addict-turned-author Fitz-Hugh Ludlow; New York Times journalist John Swinton; Polish expatriate Count Adam Gurowski; and travel writer and poet Bayard Taylor.

Adding immeasurably to the beauty and tumult of the surroundings were two remarkable women: Ada Clare and Adah Isaacs Menken. Clare, whose real name was Jane McElheney, was a Charleston, South Carolina, beauty who had relocated to New York as a girl of nineteen to become an actress. Her professional debut in The Hunchback was a disaster; critics found her arms too thin and her voice too shrill. Undismayed, she turned to poetry as her creative outlet, publishing a number of confessional lyrics on the subject of lost love. It was a topic she knew painfully well—her seduction and jilting by concert pianist Louis Gottschalk was a famous scandal, producing an out-of-wedlock child with whom she traveled openly, signing hotel guestbooks with a defiant flourish, ‘‘Miss Clare and Son.’’17

Sharing Clare’s bad luck with men was her fellow-Southerner Menken. The New Orleans–born Menken was the more successful actress, largely because of her well-rounded figure, which she showed to good effect in the Broadway melodrama Ma-zeppa, in which she wore flesh-colored tights and rode off into the sunset on the back of a ‘‘fiery steed.’’ But despite being widely acclaimed as ‘‘the most perfectly developed woman in the world,’’ Menken also had trouble holding onto men. She was married four times, and her second husband, heavyweight boxing champion John ‘‘the Benicia Boy’’ Heenan, publiclydisowned both her and their son, denying unchivalrously that he and Menken had ever been married in the first place.18

Despite, or perhaps because of, his comparative immunity to the two Ada(h)s’ potent sexual charms, Whitman got along well with the distaff bohemians. He encouraged their writing, listened sympathetically to their romantic travails, and in general acted the role of a literal Dutch uncle. Menken in turn fulsomely praised Whitman as a great philosopher, ‘‘centuries ahead of his contemporaries,’’ and predicted that one day he would have marble statues erected in his honor. ‘‘It is very curious that the girls have been my sturdiest defenders,’’ Whitman mused later. ‘‘Some would say they were girls little to my credit, but I disagree with them there.’’ After Clare’s grisly death from hydrophobia at the age of thirty-eight—she was bitten through the nose by her theatrical agent’s rabid lapdog—he went out of his way to mourn ‘‘poor, poor Ada Clare,’’ whose uncoventional lifestyle, he said, had been ‘‘gay, easy, sunny, free, loose, but not ungood.’’ As for Menken, he returned her good will by standing best man at her penultimate wedding.¹⁹

Whitman’s relations with the male bohemians were not always as smooth. Reflecting, perhaps, his depressed, disordered state, the usually good-natured poet quarreled openly, and at times physically, with the men at Pfaff’s. He derided the foppish drama critic Wilkins for being ‘‘sickish, dressy, Frenchy.’’ When Aldrich published a book of poems titled The Bells, Whitman told him cuttingly, ‘‘Yes, Tom, I like your tinkles: I like them very well.’’ William Winter earned his lasting enmity for characterizing Leaves of Grass as ‘‘odiferous.’’ Whitman, in turn, characterized Winter as ‘‘a dried up cadaverous schoolmaster,’’ and years later still remembered him hotly as ‘‘little Willy Winter, miserable cuss!’’ It was all part of the backbiting repartee common to literary gatherings everywhere—not even Whitman was immune from scorn. One night, he told Traubel, he was forced to listen helplessly while someone at the table gave a burlesque reading of Leaves of Grass, ‘‘the strokes bright, witty, unsparing.’’ According to the poet, he had been untroubled by the teasing—‘‘I was inclined to let them be amused.’’ He was decidedly not so inclined when, shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, would-be humorist George Arnold rose to his feet and proposed a mock toast: ‘‘Success to Southern arms!’’ Whitman, ever the patriot, jumped up and denounced the toast in loud, angry terms. The embarrassing scene ended with the two men scuffling briefly and Arnold giving Whitman’s beard a vigorous parting tug.20

In a poem fragment from the period, Whitman pointedly associates the underground tavern with a burial vault:

The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse

While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway

As the dead in their graves are underfoot hidden

And the living pass over them, recking not of them,

Laugh on laughers!

Drink on drinkers!

Bandy the jest!

Toss the theme from one to another!

. . .

The lights beam in the first vault—but the other is entirely dark.21

The poem was written on the back of some notes that Whitman had made on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Presbyterian church at Jamaica, Long Island. The Reverend James M. Macdonald, rededicating the church, had taken as his text the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes: ‘‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.’’ As generations go, the bohemians at Pfaff’s passed away more swiftly than most. Ned Wilkins, the group’s reigning Beau Brummell, died in 1861 of tuberculosis contracted, fittingly enough, in a damp garret. The brawny and brawling Irishman Fitz-James O’Brien, an early volunteer to the Union cause, died of tetanus on April 6, 1862, the result of a fatal bullet wound suffered in a twilight encounter with Confederate cavalry leader Turner Ashby on a disputed Virginia backroad. O’Brien and Aldrich had both applied for a position on Brigadier General Frederick Lander’s staff, prompting Clapp to comment drily that ‘‘Aldrich was shot in O’Brien’s shoulder.’’²²

Next to die was George Arnold, who passed away from paralysis in November 1865. Seven months later, Artemus Ward died of tuberculosis in England at the early age of thirty-three. Fitz-Hugh Ludlow died in Geneva in 1870; and Ada Clare met her horrific fate in 1874. In 1877 Edmund Stedman, another regular, found a list he had made in 1860 of a party at the tavern. Of the fourteen names on the list, nine were dead, including Clapp, who drank himself to death in April 1875. The New York Daily Graphic, in a caustic obituary headlined ‘‘A Bohemian’s Checkered Life,’’ postured disapprovingly: ‘‘There has rarely been a more pathetic picture than this poor old man presented, reduced to rags, consumed by a horrible thirst, and utterly without hope for this world or the next.’’23

However fractious and doom-laden the crowd at Pfaff’s proved to be, it nevertheless represented a welcome change from Whitman’s worrisome family life. Ever pressed for money, the family was forced to rent out the top part of its Brooklyn house and live in the basement—Whitman was spending an inordinate amount of time underground, just then. Besides Walt and his mother, Louisa, the crowd at 106 North Portland Avenue included Whitman’s crippled and retarded brother, Eddy, ‘‘a poor, stunted boy’’ prone to ‘‘infernal, damnable fits’’; older brother Jesse, an ex-sailor who had begun exhibiting the erractic behavior and violent mood swings of tertiary syphilis, contracted on shore from an Irish prostitute; young brother George, a comparatively normal if unimaginative carpenter; and Walt’s favorite brother, Jeff, along with Jeff’s wife, Mattie, and their baby daughter, Mannahatta. Nearby lived another brother, Andrew, a tubercular alcoholic, his slatternly wife, Nancy, and their two neglected sons, Jimmy and Georgy (a third son, Andrew, would be run over and killed a few years later while playing unwatched on a Brooklyn street). Married sister Hannah had moved to Vermont, but she still managed to keep the family in constant turmoil with her plaintive letters home describing her alleged mistreatment at the hands of her husband, landscape artist Charles Heyde.²⁴

Life in the Whitman household was an emotional roller-coaster. Mrs. Whitman suffered from a number of real or imagined physical complaints, which she never hesitated to share with Walt, her most sympathetic listener. The severely handicapped Eddy had the mind of a child but the appetite, quite literally, of a horse—he had to be watched at mealtimes, or else he would continue eating until he passed out. Jesse, between benders, would periodically threaten his mother, brothers, or sisters-in-law with a chair; at other times he would sit silently beside his infant niece, rocking her cradle back and forth for hours. Andrew and his wife stopped by frequently to cadge money and drop off their barely housebroken sons; George and Jeff argued; Mannahatta cried; and Hannah’s latest domestic crisis was loudly debated around the dinner table. Small wonder that Walt spent as little time as possible in the bosom of his family, or that he preferred the company of two-fisted stagecoach drivers or Greenwich Village aesthetes to his own importunate flesh and blood.25

More or less by default, Walt had become the family’s chief breadwinner, an unwelcome and uncongenial role that added immeasurably to the poet’s cup of woe. After losing his job as editor of the Daily Times—supposedly for writing editorials advocating the licensing of prostitutes and the rights of unmarried women to experiment with sex—Whitman earned a precarious six or seven dollars a week writing filler for other local newspapers. He also received occasional royalties on the sale of Leaves of Grass, a third edition of which appeared in 1860. Still, it was a pinched, penurious existence, and there is more than a trace of desperation in a note that he scribbled to himself at the time: ‘‘It is time now to stir first for Money enough to live and provide for M—to stir—first write stories, and get out of this Slough.’’ (M presumably was his mother.)26

But finances alone were not the only source of Whitman’s depression. Besides struggling with money matters, he was also struggling with his sexuality. He had always been attracted to young men—a recent biographer, David S. Reynolds, has even suggested that, as young Long Island schoolteacher, Whitman was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail after being accused of inappropriate relations with one of his students—and in late 1859 he unburdened himself of his romantic concerns in a painfully revealing cluster of poems entitled ‘‘Calamus,’’ after the phallic and upthrusting plant of the same name. The poems, he said, were ‘‘fit to be perused during the days of the approach of Death.’’ Like Shakespeare’s dark sonnets, they recount a middle-aged poet’s unrequited love for a beautiful young man:

For an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him,

But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth,

I dare not tell him it in words, not even in these songs.²⁷

In poem after poem Whitman confesses a deep sense of shame for his inmost desires:

Beneath this impassive face the hot fires of hell continually burn—within me the lurid smutch and the smoke;

Not a crime can be named but I have it in me waiting to break forth,

Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,

I walk with delinquents with passionate love.28

The poet’s misgivings seem to have been well-founded, as he ruefully recounts in ‘‘Hours Continuing Long,’’ where he declares himself ‘‘discouraged, distracted—for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me.’’ And in the same poem he wonders aloud:

Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him?

Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?²⁹

At length, Whitman poignantly declares, ‘‘I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d.’’ The lover in question may have been Fred Vaughan, a young Brooklyn cabbie who shared Whitman’s Classon Avenue home during the three-year period between 1856 and 1859 when Walt temporarily lived apart from his family. The two probably met at Pfaff’s, but they also frequented Whitman’s regular haunts along the ferry docks and lumberyards. The underlying cause of their breakup may have been Vaughan’s own conflicted sexuality. In recently unearthed letters, Vaughan frets continually about being dishonest to himself, his family, and his friends; and a dozen years after his parting with Whitman, he somewhat wonderingly finds himself possessed of a wife and four children. At any rate, Vaughan was neither the first nor the last young man whom Whitman would lose to marriage, and the relationship had been over for at least two years before Vaughan married in May 1862.30

Whoever the lost lover may have been, the ‘‘Calamus’’ poems display a constant longing for reconnection, and following the end of his painful affair Whitman began a compulsive quest for a new lover, or lovers, among the assorted stage drivers, ferryboat pilots, soldiers, sailors, firemen, wharf rats, runaways, drifters, and juvenile deliquents who comprised the flip side of his more rarefied friendships. His notebooks from the time contain multitudinous names and physical descriptions of the young men he encountered on his restless rounds. George Marler, a ‘‘candy butcher’’ from Ohio, was ‘‘a large-nosed tallish fellow’’; Mark Graynor, a plumber, was ‘‘young, 5 ft 7 in, black moustache’’; an ex-boxer named Philip was ‘‘tallish, black-eyed, brownish, sharp-faced, with a suspicion of squint in his eyes—reckless.’’ Nineteen-year-old David Wilson, a blacksmith, was taken home by Whitman to spend the night, as was Daniel Spencer, a ‘‘somewhat feminine’’ stage driver who ‘‘had never been in a fight—and did not drink at all.’’³¹

This is not to suggest that all—or perhaps any—of the young men became physically intimate with Whitman. But the sheer numbers and variety would seem to imply that, if nothing else, the poet was drifting aimlessly through what he termed a ‘‘city of orgies,’’ where strangers’ ‘‘frequent and swift flash of eyes [offer] me love.’’ This longing is made manifest in another poem, ‘‘To a Stranger’’:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

. . .

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.32

And in ‘‘What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?’’, the poet tosses a wistful glance at

. . . two simple men I saw to-day on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,

The one to remain hung on the other’s neck and passionately kiss’d him,

While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.³³

A Brooklyn ferryboat pilot named Thomas Gere left behind a vivid description of Whitman at the time. ‘‘He was quite six feet in height, with the frame of a gladiator, a flowing gray beard mingled with the hairs on his broad, slightly bared chest,’’ Gere recalled. ‘‘In his well-laundered, checked shirt-sleeves, with trousers frequently pushed into his boot-legs, his fine head covered with an immense slouched black or light felt hat.’’ Other ferry passengers, Gere told Whitman, surmised that he was a retired ship’s captain, an actor, an army officer, a clergyman, or a smuggler. One even whispered that Whitman was crazy, a suggestion that made the poet laugh until he cried. Another ferry pilot, John Y. Bauldsir, remembered Whitman colloquially as ‘‘a fine, strappin’ fellow, tall, broad-shouldered, and straight. He had a kind word for everybody and from everybody, for everybody liked him.’’34

Nowhere was this liking more evident than between Whitman and the ‘‘strange, quick-eyed, wondrous race’’ of stage drivers with whom he spent most of his daylight hours. The men who drove the clattering wooden omnibuses up and down Broadway were a distinctive, colorful lot; they sported names like Broadway Jack, Balky Bill, Yellow Joe, and Old Elephant. Most had come to Manhattan from the countryside, and their homespun ways and muscular, suntanned looks appealed to Whitman on various levels. He was never happier than when riding alongside the drivers on their daily rounds, swapping yarns and trading confidences in the brisk open air while the New York traffic swirled around them. These men, too, went into his notebooks. James Doyle had a ‘‘coarse pleasing smiling round face’’ with hardly any chin. George Wright was ‘‘tallish, thinnish, brunette,’’ with a ‘‘black moustache & oily, labial way of talking.’’ Glouscester, England, native Vincent Reynolds was ‘‘round, plump, red-haired’’; Barney Riley was a ‘‘stout, plump Irish boy.’’ Thomas Cummings, ‘‘aged about 34,’’ was ‘‘smallish sized, brown beard’’; and twenty-three-year-old James Sloan was a ‘‘plain, homely American.’’³⁵

Whitman rode with everyone—besides the company, it was also a good way to travel for free from the Brooklyn ferryboat terminus to Pfaff’s uptown—and in return he helped the drivers collect their fares, handle their horses, and pass the tedious, wearying hours. So closely associated was Whitman with the stage drivers of the time that the fastidious New England poet, James Russell Lowell, warned a foreign visitor against looking up the author of Leaves of Grass. ‘‘Whitman,’’ said Lowell, ‘‘is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of cab drivers.’’ Walt, of course, would have been delighted by the description.36

Like many physical occupations in nineteenth-century America, driving a New York stage was always dangerous and often deadly. Collisions with other stages, private coaches, brewery wagons, horseback riders, and unwary pedestrians could send drivers pitching headfirst under their rigs, to be trampled by their horses’ hooves or crushed beneath their wooden wheels. Roving gangs of street toughs with such fearsome and well-deserved names as the Plug Uglies, the Roach Guards, and the Dead Rabbits might yank them off their seats and beat them insensible at the slightest provocation. Violent altercations with other drivers were commonplace, and disputes were often settled with knives, rocks, whips, and guns. Nor were accidents and arguments the drivers’ only job-related perils. Exposure to the elements, as well as constantly breathing in the pungent mixture of dried horse manure, pig slop, rotting garbage, and human sewage running in the streets, weakened the drivers’ resistance to disease and left them susceptible to the various scourges of the time, particularly those affecting the respiratory tract.

Sick and injured drivers were taken routinely to Broadway Hospital, at the corner of Broadway and Pearl Street. With his habitual kindness and comradely concern, Whitman soon became a fixture at the drivers’ bedsides and a favorite of the hospital doctors and staff. In a series of articles in the New York Leader, he chronicled the men’s precarious medical conditions: ‘‘There they are, many pining and wasting week after week with painful and incurable diseases—burning fevers, racking rheumatism, erysipelas, palsy, consumption, pneumonia, and all the long list; many brought in from sudden accidents, resulting in amputation, often followed by death.’’ In 1861 alone, he wrote, the hospital had received 358 fever cases, 205 rheumatism cases, 95 typhoid cases, 62 bronchitis cases, 167 consumption cases, 131 measles cases, 79 delirium tremens cases, 49 pneumonia cases, 35 dysentery cases, 120 ulcer cases, 62 gunshot wounds, 261 fractured bones, 62 gunshot wounds, and 6 opium overdoses. Reflecting the daily perils of the working class, the hospital that year recorded 24 deaths from stabs or gunshot wounds, 82 from falls, 14 from railroad accidents, 22 from burns and scaldings, and 8 from being run over by stages or other vehicles. Life on the streets of New York, in the true Hobbesian sense, was often nasty, brutish, and short.37

In one article, Whitman made a tour of hospital wards. Each ward contained twenty-four beds along the walls, with a card posted above each one listing the patient, his disease, and the recommended treatment. ‘‘What a volume of meaning, what a tragic poem there is in every one of those sick wards,’’ Whitman wrote. Here he found stage driver Charles Green, who had been run over on Fourth Avenue. One of Green’s legs was broken, the other badly mashed, and he had been confined to the hospital for five weeks with his leg in a box. In the cot beside him was Frank Osborne, a young fireman who had been knocked down while running to a fire and suffered a broken collarbone and several fractured ribs. Another patient had gotten his hand caught in a steam engine, losing two fingers. In the next bed over lay a foundry worker who had been struck on the head by a hammer and was not expected to live. And in the corner bed was ‘‘poor James Watson . . . three weeks ago a picture of athletic manly health, size and good looks.’’ The twenty-six-year-old Watson had been thrown from a railroad car at Jersey City and suffered ‘‘a frightful wound’’ and a broken ankle. The surgeons had decided not to amputate the foot, and Watson had subsequently contracted a fatal fever. Another ward contained a young medical student who had broken his back while foolishly trying to perform a headstand on a wobbly table.38

Particularly upsetting to Whitman, the son of an alcoholic, were the delirium tremens sufferers. One ‘‘brown-faced, middle-aged Hercules of a fellow,’’ a sailor whose sinewy arms were covered with tattoos, had been on a week-long bust, drinking three-cent brandy. For fifty hours, the man told Whitman, ‘‘he had been attacked, covered, pulled at, buffeted, &c., by swarms of grinning monkeys and apes, who put him to every conceivable torture and annoyance. Then he had the company of a large, fierce, black dog, that amused itself by incessantly springing at him and biting him, first on one spot, and then another; and then crowds of infuriated men and women would chase him and belabor him with cudgels, and pull his hair.’’ Another man ‘‘labor[ed] under the idea that there was a beautiful, angelic lady floating up in the air, over his bed, reaching down to him a glass of liquor. He mounted on a table to take it, and the attendants had to pull him down.’’39

There was, in fact, a real-life counterpart to the rummy’s ‘‘angelic lady’’ at the hospital, and Whitman soon made her acquaintance. ‘‘There is a lady comes from time to time,’’ he reported in the Leader. ‘‘She brings illustrated and other papers, books of stories, little comforts in the way of eating and drinking, shirts, gowns, handkerchiefs, &c. I dare not mention her name, but she is beautiful. . . . She is clearly averse to the eclat of good works, and sometimes, to avoid show, sends her gifts by a servant.’’ Who the mysterious angel was, and how well Whitman knew her, is a matter of continuing speculation. She may have been the New York stage actress Ellen Grey, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty whom he had first seen perform at the Bowery Theatre in 1857 and whose photograph he kept tacked above his mantle as an old man, describing her to Horace Traubel as ‘‘an old sweetheart of mine.’’ Or she may have been the ever-venturesome Ada Clare, whose name, as Whitman biographer Jerome Loving has pointed out, closely echoes the nom de plume of a woman signing herself ‘‘Ellen Eyre’’ who wrote a mysterious letter to Whitman at the same time that his article appeared concerning the ‘‘benevolent lady’’ of the hospital.⁴⁰

The letter, hand-delivered to Whitman at Pfaff’s by the lady’s servant, is strongly suggestive. It seems to hint, however indirectly, that she and the poet had enjoyed some sort of sexual encounter. ‘‘My Dear Mr. Whitman,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I fear you took me last night for a female privateer. It is true that I was sailing under false colors—but the flag I assure you covered nothing piratical although I would joyfully have made your heart a captive.’’ She went on to confess ‘‘the fancy I had long nourished for you . . . the unknown mine of latent affection a man may have unconsciously inspired in a woman’s breast. . . . My social position enjoins precaution and mystery. . . . I preserve my incognito, yet mystery lends an ineffable charm to love and when a woman is bent upon the gratification of her inclinations she is pardonable if she still spreads the veil of decorum over her actions.’’41

Decorous or not, Miss Eyre was defiantly unrepentant about her actions. ‘‘I can see no vice in that generous sympathy with which we share our caprices with those who have inspired us with tenderness. I trust you will think well enough of me soon to renew the pleasure you afforded me last p.m. and I therefore write to remind you that there is a sensible head as well as a sympathetic heart, both of which would gladly evolve with warmth for your diversion and comfort. You have already my whereabouts and my hours. It shall only depend on you to make them yours and me the happiest of women.’’⁴²

There is no indication that Whitman ever took up Miss Eyre’s frankly sexual invitation. The only other mention of the fascinating episode comes in Whitman’s notebook citation for July 8, 1862: ‘‘Frank Sweezey (July 8, ’62) 5th Ave. Brown face, large features, black moustache (is the one I told the whole story to about Ellen Eyre)—talks very little.’’ By then, Whitman seemed more interested in the dark-complected Sweezey than the swashbuckling Miss Eyre.⁴³

At any rate, Whitman’s visits to the Broadway Hospital were less important for his possible romantic interludes than for the grounding experience they gave him in medicine. The hard-pressed doctors, no less than the patients, welcomed his regular bedside visits. The chief surgeon at the facility, Dr. D. B. St. John Roosa, recalled Whitman’s effect on him and the other members of his staff. ‘‘We young men were often very tired,’’ Roosa wrote, ‘‘for our labor was arduous, day and night, and Walt Whitman interested us, and his presence was always restful. He seemed to live above the ordinary affairs of life.’’44

The doctors gave Whitman the run of the hospital, and he happily poked around every nook and cranny with his customary childlike curiosity. The pathological museum, with its horrific collection of excised tumors, scrofulous limbs, gallstones, kidney stones, and assorted other bodily extrusions, held a certain morbid fascination. So, too, did the operations, some of which Whitman attended personally. He looked on with near-professional aplomb as doctors amputated one man’s foot: ‘‘The bones of the foot forward were all amputated, and then the flap of the heel brought around and left to make a cushion to walk upon.’’ He observed gallbladder surgery on a young fireman named James Kelly. ‘‘The patient was thoroughly chloroformed, and the operation, as near as I could judge, was admirably put through. The calculus (stone) extracted at last by Dr. Peters with a gentle but firm hand, holding a pair of nippers, seemed to be larger than the end joint of my thumb, and round as a cherry.’’ And he witnessed the curious case of a woman who somehow had dislocated her own jaw by ‘‘gaping.’’ The woman ‘‘was etherized; the jaw was then pressed in a proper manner, and put back in its connections, almost in an instant. The poor woman was then brought to, with as good a jaw as ever, and went away rejoicing.’’ Not everyone shared Whitman’s strong stomach. English novelist Anthony Trollope, who also visited the hospital at the time, fainted dead away during a tour of the wards.45

Occasionally, Whitman brought the off-duty doctors to Pfaff’s for late-afternoon sandwiches and beer. At that time of day the tavern’s bohemian clientele typically was off doing other things, and the two groups never interacted. Roosa, in fact, got the false impression that Whitman ‘‘had no intimate acquaintance with other literary New Yorkers of that time [and] was not generally considered a literary man.’’ Later, when the poet gave Roosa a copy of Leaves of Grass, the doctor had to confess ‘‘that I did not understand them then, any more than I understand the character of the man who wrote them.’’ Roosa often wondered what the ‘‘gentle and refined’’ Whitman saw in the burly stage drivers he visited at the hospital, although he freely admitted that ‘‘no one could see him sitting by the beside of a suffering stage driver without learning that he had a sincere and profound sympathy for this order of men.’’⁴⁶

The doctors would have felt more affinity for another group of Whitman’s friends, a loose gathering of young men about town dubbed the Fred Gray Association after the group’s leader, physician’s son Frederick Schiller Gray. Along with Gray and his brother, Nat, the group included another doctor’s son, Charles Chauncey, well-to-do athlete Charles Kingsley, and Hugo Fritsch, the son of an Austrian diplomat. With both these groups Whitman mingled freely and easily, but he went to some pains to keep them from meeting each other—a function perhaps of his homosexual closeting. And when, by chance, Boston novelist John Townsend Trowbridge encountered Whitman reading proofs at his publisher’s printing office ‘‘with a lank, unwholesome-looking lad at his elbow, listlessly watching him,’’ the poet immediately sent the boy away and explained with some embarrassment that ‘‘he is a friendless boy I found at my boarding place. I am trying to cheer him up and strengthen him with my magneticism.’’47

For all the breadth and variety of his friendships, Whitman was essentially a lonely man. He crowded his hours with superficial camaraderie, but there was always at his core a hesitancy, a reluctance to reach out emotionally to others. Even close friends such as the naturalist John Burroughs sensed a fundamental reticence behind his apparent bonhomie. ‘‘He seems always to have been a sort of visitor in life,’’ Burroughs noted perceptively. English admirer Edward Carpenter, calling on Whitman late in life, found in the poet a surprising ‘‘reserve and sadness . . . a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.’’ Whitman himself said as much, complaining to another friend, would-be biographer Richard Bucke: ‘‘I am by no means the benevolent, equable, happy creature you portray.’’ He had made that clear in Leaves of Grass:

Trippers and askers surround me,

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,

The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,

The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,

. . .

These come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.48

Whether by choice or by chance, Whitman was alone on the evening of April 12, 1861. He had been to the New York Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street to see a performance of Verdi’s opera A Masked Ball—Lincoln had attended the same opera two months earlier on his passage through the city. Walking down Broadway to catch the ferry home to Brooklyn, he suddenly heard ‘‘the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual.’’ Buying a newspaper, he crossed over to the streetlamps in front of the Metropolitan Hotel, where he and a gathering crowd listened silently while someone read aloud the dire news from South Carolina: Rebel forces had fired on Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun.⁴⁹

Whitman’s first reaction to the news was anger; he slammed his fist to the pavement as he walked away. Three days later, upon reflection, he characteristically sought to personalize the crisis: ‘‘I have this hour, this day, resolved to inaugurate for myself a pure, perfect, sweet, cleanblooded robust body by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk—and all fat meats, late suppers—a great body—a purged, cleansed, spiritualized, invigorated body.’’ He may have briefly considered enlisting in the Union Army—the note on nutrition followed by one day Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the rebellion—but if that was the case, he quickly got over the notion. His brother George had no such reservations; he enlisted immediately in the 13th New York State Militia and marched off to safeguard the nation’s capital, parading gaily down Broadway with his newfound comrades, ‘‘all provided,’’ Walt observed, ‘‘with pieces of rope, conspicuously tied to their musket barrels, with which to bring back each man a prisoner from the audacious South, to be led on a noose, on our men’s early and triumphant return!’’50

No one expected the war to last very long. A brief rattling of sabers, it was thought, would frighten the recalcitrant Confederates into surrendering, or else a quick, decisive clash of arms would show them the grievous error of their ways. The mayor of Brooklyn airily assured Whitman that ‘‘the Southern fire-eaters would . . . be at once so effectually squelch’d, we would never hear of secession again.’’ Soon Walt was informing George: ‘‘All of us here think the rebellion as good as broke—no matter if the war does continue for some months yet.’’ George felt the same way. ‘‘Mother you need not worry about me at all as I am not in want of anything and I dont believe we shal see any fighting at all,’’ he wrote from camp.⁵¹

Three days later, the Confederate Army surprised the Federal forces along Bull Run creek at Manassas, Virginia. The ensuing rout sent the inexperienced Union troops streaming back into Washington, humbled and humiliated. Whitman, 235 miles away in Brooklyn, imaginatively relived the battle’s final moments, when ‘‘the national forces . . . exploded in a panic and fled from the field. . . . Where are your banners and your bands of music and your ropes to bring back your prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing, and there isn’t a flag but clings ashamed and lank to its staff.’’ In Whitman’s retelling, drawn from various newspaper accounts, the demoralized mob of soldiers poured into the capital, mingling with an equally terrified crowd of ‘‘citizens, darkies, clerks . . . lookers-on, women in the windows.’’ Southern sympathizers laughed in their faces, while a few industrious Union supporters set up tables on the sidewalks and handed out bread and coffee to openly weeping soldiers. It was, said Whitman, ‘‘one bitter, bitter hour—perhaps proud America will never again know such an hour.’’⁵²

He was wrong there—the country would know many such hours, and worse, in the next four years. For the time being, he turned his hand to producing an unsubtle but effective recruiting poem, ‘‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’’:

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying;

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.⁵³

Whitman read his poem aloud to the languorous bohemians at Pfaff’s, and it was published more or less simultaneously in the Boston Evening Transcript, the New York Leader, and Harper’s Weekly. James Russell Lowell, no Whitman admirer, rejected three other poems for The Atlantic Monthly for the odd reason that ‘‘we could not possibly use [them] before their interest,—which is of the present—would have passed.’’ There was no chance of that. The war inexorably gained momentum as the year wore on, a ‘‘hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.’’ It was, Whitman wrote, a year that was fit not for

. . . some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,

But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder,

With a well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in the belt at your side.54

A second jingoistic poem, ‘‘First O Songs for a Prelude,’’ praises New Yorkers for their swift response to the crisis:

(O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!

O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)

How you sprang—how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand,

How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead,

How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers,)

How Manhattan drum-taps led.55

And later in the poem, Whitman exclaims:

War! an arm’d race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away;

War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm’d race is advancing to welcome it.⁵⁶

It is doubtful that Whitman fully realized—who did?—the terrible consequences of the rush to war. Years later, he would look back with chagrin on his naive patriotism:

Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,

But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,

To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.⁵⁷

Now when he went to the Broadway Hospital, it was filled with sick soldiers from the volunteer regiments passing through the city on their way to the front—the hospital received seventy-five cents a day for each soldier it treated. Their plangent expressions haunted Whitman: ‘‘I have many hours afterwards, in far different scenes, had the pale faces, the look of death, the appealing eyes, come curiously of a sudden, plainly before me.’’ Touched, he began spending his Sundays with the soldiers, two-thirds of whom suffered from measles, which in the first months of the war was both epidemic and deadly to the thousands of country-bred young men who had left home for the first time. Most of the soldiers had no relatives in New York, and Whitman took it upon himself to rally their spirits, ‘‘just to help cheer and change a little the monotony of their sickness and confinement—and indeed, just as much, too, for the melancholy entertainment and friendly interest and sympathy, I found aroused in myself toward and among the men.’’ It was good training for what was to come.58

In the autumn of 1861, George Whitman returned home, his initial enlistment over, and immediately joined the 51st New York Volunteers for another three years or the duration of the war. It was the beginning of a remarkable military odyssey that would take him on more than twenty thousand miles of marches, twenty-one battles, innumerable skirmishes, the inside of a Rebel prison, and a steady round of promotions from private to major. At home, brother Jesse took work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and even poor tubercular Andrew enlisted briefly in the Union Army. Jeff was temporarily exempted by dint of his marriage, and he later paid a draft bounty of four hundred dollars to stay that way. Meanwhile, Walt remained strangely abstracted, scratching out a series of potboiling articles on the flora and fauna of old-time Brooklyn and vacationing on Long Island with a laughing group of young men and women.

The war, however, would not go away, and Whitman continued his hospital visits and his weekend saunters to Fort Greene, where he collected firsthand accounts of the distant fighting. In late September 1862, he spent an evening at Pfaff’s with Fred Gray, who was serving on the staff of Brigadier General William F. Smith, and heard ‘‘a fearful account’’ of the just concluded Battle of Antietam. George Whitman had been there, too, and had taken part in the famous fighting around Burnside’s Bridge on September 17. ‘‘The way we showered the lead across that creek was noboddys buisness,’’ he wrote proudly. The day after the battle, the bloodiest single day in American history, Whitman heard from stage driver James Sloan that a mutual friend, William Giggee, had been killed at Antietam. ‘‘Arthur took him in his arms, and he died in about an hour and a half—Arthur buried him himself—he dug his grave.’’ The war was hitting close to home.59

In mid-December 1862, it showed up abruptly on the Whitmans’ own doorstep. From George’s letters, they knew him to be in camp near Fredericksburg, Virginia, where, he reported optimistically, ‘‘I hardly think there will be a fight.’’ George was a better soldier than prognosticator. Major General Ambrose Burnside, late of Antietam bridge-taking fame, had assumed command of the Union Army of the Potomac, and despite his own well-founded doubts about his suitability as a leader, he had been given to understand that President Lincoln expected quick, decisive results. The horribly mismanaged Battle of Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862, produced results all right, but they were not the sort that Lincoln expected. Thirteen thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded in a daylong frontal attack on entrenched Confederate positions on Marye’s Heights. Lengthy casualty lists began appearing in Northern newspapers. The Whitmans, like other families with men in the war, scanned the lists with mounting dread.60

Walt was home with his mother on the morning of December 16, when the New York Tribune carried another list of regimental casualties. Among those cited for the 51st New York was ‘‘First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore [sic], Company D.’’ There was no description of the type or severity of George’s wounds, but Walt had seen enough operations at Broadway Hospital to fear the worst. Hurriedly packing a few clothes, some notebooks, and fifty dollars in cash from Mrs. Whitman’s scanty nest egg, he left within the hour for Washington. Except as a visitor, he would never again return to Brooklyn. His ‘‘New York stagnation,’’ he told Ralph Waldo Emerson two weeks later, was over. The rest of his life, although he did not yet know it, had already begun.⁶¹