Whitman returned to Washington on January 23 and immediately assumed his new duties as clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Reflecting perhaps the low priority that the government now placed on its relations with Native Americans, the bureau was housed in a dusty basement in the northeast corner of the U.S. Patent Office at 7th and G streets. Exactly two years earlier, Whitman had first visited the Patent Office when it was serving as an ad hoc military hospital. Then he had found it ‘‘a strange, solemn and . . . fascinating sight,’’ with rows of sick and wounded soldiers lying incongruously between glass display cases ‘‘crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive.’’ Now the soldiers were gone; they had been replaced by painted delegations of Plains Indians, buckskin-wearing braves who had come east to parley with Indian Commissioner William P. Dole over the latest broken treaty or nonarriving annuity. Whitman, styling himself somewhat grandly ‘‘the poet-chief,’’ occasionally interrupted his duties to reassure his fellow chiefs that ‘‘we are really all the same man and brethren together . . . however different our places, and dress and language.’’ The Indians responded with vague smiles.1
Most of his duties were less Olympian in scope. ‘‘All I have hitherto employed myself about,’’ he reported to Jeff, ‘‘has been making copies of reports & Bids, &c for the office to send up to the Congressional Committee on Indian Affairs.’’ He was taking it easy, he reassured his always fretful younger brother: ‘‘The rule is to come at 9 and go at 4—but I don’t come at 9, and only stay till 4 when I want, as at present to finish a letter for the mail.’’ Still, after only six days on the job, Whitman had already received his first paycheck. O’Connor had been right—the job was a plum.2
Taking a room in the home of an obliging Southern woman named Grayson whose husband and son were off serving in the Confederate Army, the poet resumed his visits to the hospitals. With the stalemate continuing at Petersburg and no major battles being fought between the two armies elsewhere in Virginia, there were fewer casualties arriving from the front; as of December 17, 1864, a total of 9,265 patients remained in seventeen hospitals in the capital. Whitman was determined to go slow—or so he told Jeff on January 30. ‘‘I spent yesterday afternoon in Armory Square Hospital,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and had a real good time, and the boys had too. Jeff you need not be afraid about my overdoing the matter. I shall go regularly enough, but I shall be on my guard against trouble.’’3
A week later, however, Whitman advised his friend Abby Price that he was spending most of his Sundays at the hospitals, as well as ‘‘a few hours from time to time, & occasionally in the evening’’ during the week. It was about the same schedule he had always maintained, although now he was perhaps less willing to commit himself emotionally to the men. ‘‘It seemed as if a fellow had to be cautious,’’ he told Horace Traubel years later, ‘‘not break his nerves down by a too insistent habit: by devotion, days and nights of unutterable anxiety: sitting there by some poor devil destined to go: always in the presence of death.’’ Still, old habits were hard to break, and ‘‘what the government didn’t get from me in the office it got from me in the hospitals. If there is any balance in that matter I don’t imagine it’s on my side.’’4
Through it all Walt was distracted by continued worries over George’s well-being. In late January the Union and Confederate governments resumed prisoner exchanges after the Rebels agreed to count black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war, and a few days later Jeff urged Walt to get his friend John Swinton, managing editor of the New York Times, to use his influence with General Grant to secure George’s release. Swinton was agreeable, although he pointed out that under the new exchange policy ‘‘your brother will be at once exchanged in the general mode.’’ Whitman, however, was not so sure. When the first batch of prisoners began arriving by boat at Annapolis from Danville, Virginia, and Salisbury, North Carolina (George’s two known places of detention), George was nowhere to be seen. Nearly frantic, Whitman twice went to see General Hitchcock—whom he had savaged in print a few weeks earlier—demanding to know why George was not among those released. Hitchcock, who either had not seen the poet’s December 27 letter in the Times or else was remarkably tolerant of criticism, agreed to issue a special memorandum for George’s release; he summoned an aide to handle the request.5
In a fever of uncertainty, Whitman confided to his diary that ‘‘these four days have put me through all the changes of hope and dismay about getting George exchanged.’’ Nor was his state of mind notably improved when he went down to Annapolis to see for himself the condition of the arriving prisoners. ‘‘Can those be men—those little livid brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs?’’ he marvelled; ‘‘are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them, quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips (often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth). Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth.’’6
Finally, after weeks of suspense, Walt learned a little anticlimactically that George had indeed been released on February 22 and had been in Annapolis at the same time that Walt was there. The confusion over his release stemmed from the fact that George had been transferred from Danville to Libby Prison in Richmond three days before he was due to be exchanged. George immediately sent word to Mrs. Whitman in Brooklyn, writing with uncharacteristic but understandable high spirits, ‘‘I arrived here from the Hotel de Libby, and if ever a poor devil was glad to get in a Christian Country it was me.’’7
Even then, Walt was the last to hear. Mrs. Whitman, apparently assuming that Walt would see George’s name in the long list of exchanged prisoners published in the New York Times on February 28, neglected to send him word of his brother’s return for another week. Then, in her usual morose, uninflected way, she reported: ‘‘George has come home came this morning he looks quite thin and shows his prison life but feels pretty well considering what he suffered he was very sick at one time i think it was in january with lung fever he was six weeks in the hospital so bad that the doctor thought he would die.’’8
The day Whitman learned of his brother’s release, March 4, 1865, was also the date of Lincoln’s second inauguration. Whitman caught sight of the president at various times throughout the day, although he apparently did not attend the inauguration itself. That morning he was sitting in the visitors’ gallery in the House of Representatives when a freak thunderstorm startled the sleepy members, who had been up all night concluding the current legislative session. ‘‘The slumberers awaked with fear,’’ Whitman reported with some relish; ‘‘some started for the doors, some look’d up with blanch’d cheeks and lips to the roof, and little pages began to cry. . . . [T]he storm raged on, beating, dashing, and with loud noises at times. But the House went ahead with its business . . . as calmly and with as much deliberation as at any time in its career. Perhaps the shock did it good.’’9
About noon Whitman went outside—the weather had cleared—to watch the final preparations for a giant pre-inauguration parade, complete with festooned floats and marching troops. He was surprised to see the president come riding alone down Pennsylvania Avenue in his carriage, en route to Capitol Hill to sign some last-minute bills. Unaware of the political motive, Whitman thought Lincoln was simply coming early to his inauguration to avoid ‘‘marching in line with the absurd procession, the muslin temple of liberty and pasteboard monitor.’’ At three o’clock, Whitman again saw Lincoln riding down the street; he looked ‘‘very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows.’’ By the president’s side sat his eleven-year-old son, Tad.10
That night Whitman went to the White House and joined the large crush of people clamoring to see the president. The crowd swept Walt along through the Blue Room and the East Room as the Marine Band sawed away at various airs, until at length he caught sight of Lincoln and the First Lady working the receiving line. ‘‘I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white gloves and a claw-hammer coat,’’ he reported, ‘‘looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.’’ As always, Whitman did not impose on the president but remained discreetly in the background. He had no way of knowing that this was the last time he would ever see Lincoln.11
The streets of Washington thronged with soldiers as the fifth and final spring of the war began. Whitman, passing restlessly from Patent Office to hospital to Burroughs’s red-brick home near the Capitol, saw it all. ‘‘This city, its suburbs, the capitol, the front of the White House, the places of amusement, the Avenue, and all the main streets, swarm with soldiers . . . more than ever before,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Some are out from the hospitals, some from the neighboring camps, &c. One source or another, they pour plenteously, and make, I should say, the mark’d feature in the human movement and costume-appearance of our national city. Their blue pants and overcoats are everywhere.’’12
The steady erosion of Southern morale was evident in the number of Confederate deserters who were flocking to the city in ever growing numbers. Walt, with his special affinity for Southerners, mingled freely with the deserters, most of whom were poorly clothed and worse fed. ‘‘I saw a large procession of young men from the rebel army, (deserters they are call’d, but the usual meaning of the word does not apply to them,) passing along the Avenue today,’’ he wrote. ‘‘There were nearly 200 of them, coming up yesterday by boat from James River. I stood and watch’d them as they pass’d along in a slow, tired, worn sort of way. There was a curiously large proportion of light-hair’d, blonde, light gray-eyed young men among them. Their costumes had a dirty-stain’d uniformity; most had been originally gray; some of them had articles of our uniform, pants on one, vest or coat on another . . . As I stood quite close to them, several good looking enough youths, (but O what a tale of misery their appearance told,) nodded or just spoke to me, without doubt divining pity and fatherliness out of my face, for my heart was full enough of it.’’13
Two young brothers from North Carolina, aged seventeen and twenty-five, told him that they were on their way to Missouri; Whitman advised them to seek work on a Northern farm instead. They had been conscripted into the Confederacy along with their four other brothers, three of whom had since died in the war. Now they were down to their last six dollars, which they had raised by selling their tobacco to Union soldiers on the boat ride to Washington; Whitman gave them each ‘‘a trifle’’ to tide them over. He also met a Tennessee boy named John Wormley who had served in the 9th Alabama Regiment. The youth was an orphan who ‘‘had the look of one for a long time on a short allowance—said very little—chew’d tobacco at a fearful rate, spitting in proportion—large clear dark-brown eyes, very fine—didn’t know what to make of me.’’ Putting aside his misgivings, Wormley told the poet that he wanted some clean underwear and ‘‘a chance to wash himself well.’’ Perhaps Whitman took him home; at any rate, ‘‘I had the very great pleasure of helping him to accomplish all those wholesome designs.’’14
The hospitals, too, were full of Confederates. Whitman spent many long hours attending the sick Rebels, most of whom were suffering from scurvy and diarrhea. ‘‘Pass’d this afternoon among a collection of unusually bad cases, wounded and sick Secession soldiers, left upon our hands,’’ he confided to his diary. ‘‘I spent the previous Sunday afternoon there also. At that time two were dying. Two others have died during the week. Several of them are partly deranged. . . . Poor boys, they all needed to be cheer’d up.’’ Like their Northern counterparts, they asked him mainly for postage stamps, paper, and tobacco; one called him over and asked in a whisper what religious denomination he was (the man himself was a Catholic). As usual Whitman finessed the question. ‘‘I gave him something to read, and sat down by him for a few minutes. Moved around with a word for each. They were hardly any of them personally attractive cases, and no visitors come here.’’15
A middle-aged Mississippi soldier emaciated by diarrhea caught Whitman’s eye ‘‘as he lay with his eyes turn’d up, looking like death. His weakness was so extreme that it took a minute or so . . . for him to talk with anything like consecutive meaning; yet he was evidently a man of good intelligence and education. As I said anything, he would lie a moment perfectly still, then, with closed eyes, answer in a low, very slow voice, quite correct and sensible, but in a way and tone that wrung my heart.’’ Gently, Whitman asked him if he had sent home a letter since arriving in Washington. The man could not remember—everything lately seemed like a dream. ‘‘Two or three great tears silently flow’d out from the eyes, and roll’d down his temples,’’ Whitman recalled, ‘‘he was doubtless unused to be spoken to as I was speaking to him. Sickness, imprisonment, exhaustion, &c., had conquer’d the body, yet the mind held mastery still, and call’d even wandering remembrance back.’’ Whitman wrote letters for two other young Confederates, Thomas J. Byrd of Russell County, Alabama, and John W. Morgan of Brunswick County, North Carolina. Morgan, ‘‘a gentle, affectionate boy . . . wish’d me to put in the letter for his mother to kiss his little brother and sister for him.’’ Whitman personally dropped off the letters at the post office the next morning.16
Despite the all too familiar scenes of suffering, Whitman felt a new easefulness in the air, symbolized by the brightly looming Venus. The evening star, he said, ‘‘seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans. Five or six nights since, it hung close by the moon, then a little past its first quarter. The star was wonderful, the moon like a young mother. The sky, dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west suffused the soul.’’ A change had come over Whitman as well. Simply put, he had met someone.17
The young man’s name was Peter Doyle—Pete the Great, he styled himself—and he and Whitman met sometime in the winter of 1865. For the next five years the two would be inseparable. Like most of Whitman’s romantic attachments, his relationship with the twenty-one-year-old Doyle began simply and offhandedly. One stormy night the poet was returning from a visit to Burroughs. He had thrown a blanket around his shoulders to ward off the cold, and he clambered aboard a Washington and Georgetown Railroad horsecar for the forty-five-minute ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to his room at 468 M Street. It was late, he was the only passenger, and the young, red-haired conductor immediately noticed his solitary fare—‘‘he seemed like an old sea-captain.’’ Years later Doyle described his first meeting with Whitman as almost an irresistible urge. ‘‘We felt [drawn] to each other at once,’’ he recalled. ‘‘He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him. Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood.’’ Whitman did not get off at his stop but rode all the way back to the Capitol with Doyle, and ‘‘from that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.’’18
Friends quickly noticed the change in Whitman. ‘‘A change had come upon him,’’ noted William O’Connor. ‘‘The rosy color had died from his face in a clear splendor, and his form, regnant and masculine, was clothed with inspiration, as with a dazzling aureole.’’ Whitman happily explained the difference: ‘‘Love, love, love! That includes all. There is nothing in the world but that—nothing in all the world. Better than all is love. Love is better than all.’’ John Burroughs saw Whitman and Doyle riding side by side at the front of the streetcar and immediately formed an impression that ‘‘the young conductor [was] evidently his intimate friend.’’ Washington physician William Tindall, who also liked to ride on the front platform of the car, remembered sharing rides with the two. ‘‘During the rides with them in which I participated, their conversation, so far as I can remember, consisted of less than fifty words,’’ he recalled. ‘‘It was the most taciturn mutual admiration society I ever attended; perhaps because the young Apollo was generally as uninformed as he was handsome, and Whitman’s intellectual altitude was too far beyond his understanding to be reached by his apprehension or expressed in his vocabulary. The fellowship was a typical manifestation of the unconscious deference which mediocrity pays to genius, and of the restfulness which genius sometimes finds in the companionship of an opposite type of mentality.’’19
Like so many of the rootless young men in Washington that spring, Doyle was a Confederate deserter—although in his case he had been in the capital for two years by then. A native of Limerick, Ireland, he had immigrated to America with his parents in 1852, settling first in Alexandria, Virginia. His father, Peter Doyle, Sr., was a blacksmith, and the family relocated to Richmond a few years before the Civil War. Young Doyle enlisted in the Richmond Fayette Artillery (named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette) on April 25, 1861, eight days after Virginia voted to secede from the Union. It was his first tenuous connection to Whitman, who cherished his own childhood memory of being lifted out of the crowd by Lafayette during the Frenchman’s 1825 visit to Brooklyn.20
Doyle was one of 108 enlisted men in the company, and one of ten Irish nationals. The men, serving four six-pounder cannons, two ten-pounder Parrot guns and one twelve-pounder howitzer, saw a good of action during Union general George McClellan’s Peninsula campaign in the spring of 1862, fighting at Yorktown, Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Gaines’ Mill, Frayser’s Farm, and Malvern Hill. Forty-eight members of the company were killed, wounded, missing, or hospitalized during the campaign. Two months later the company was transferred to the division of Major General Lafayette McLaws and subsequently fought at South Mountain, Harpers Ferry, and Antietam during Lee’s ill-advised invasion of Maryland. At the latter battle Doyle was wounded and sent to a hospital in Richmond to recuperate. While there he formally petitioned the Confederate secretary of war to be released from his military duties, on the somewhat dubious grounds that he planned to return to Ireland ‘‘as soon as an opportunity will afford his doing so.’’ Doyle was granted the discharge on November 7, 1862.21
Instead of returning to Ireland, which he never intended to do in the first place, Doyle hung around Richmond for several months before being arrested for desertion in March 1863 and ordered to return to his company. It is unclear whether the arrest was a simple clerical error or part of an official crackdown on foreign-born residents illegally claiming exemption from Confederate service, but at any rate Doyle did not report to his old unit. Instead, he was arrested by Union authorities while attempting to cross Federal lines at Petersburg, where he had gone to receive further medical treatment, and on April 18 he was confined in the Old Capitol Prison at Washington. While he languished there his relatives appealed to the British foreign minister, Lord Lyons, in Doyle’s behalf, and Secretary of State William Henry Seward personally looked into the case and found somewhat charitably that Doyle was one of several ‘‘poor Irishmen who fled from Richmond to avoid starvation.’’ On May 11 Doyle was released from prison after taking an oath—in his case no doubt superfluous—not to rejoin the Confederacy, and he began working as a smith’s helper at the Washington Navy Yard. He was moonlighting as a streetcar conductor when he first met Walt Whitman.22
Sunny, good-natured Peter Doyle was a welcome change from the tight-lipped, suffering soldiers in the hospitals, and Whitman took to him immediately. The pair rode up and down Pennsylvania Avenue on Doyle’s streetcar, went for long walks in the woods outside the city, and prowled the waterfront in Alexandria. At night, after Doyle was through with his run, they would retire to the bar at the Union Hotel, which had reverted to its prewar status as a popular watering hole after serving for two years as a hospital. ‘‘It was our practice to go to a hotel on Washington Avenue after I was done with my car,’’ Doyle recollected. ‘‘Like as not I would go to sleep—lay my head on my hands on the table. Walt would sit there, wait, watch, keep me undisturbed—would wake me up when the hour of closing came.’’23
Years later, autographing a copy of his book Specimen Days for Doyle, Whitman remembered warmly their days together: ‘‘Pete do you remember—(of course you do—I do well)—those great long jovial walks we had . . . out of Washington City—often moonlight nights, ‘way to ‘Good Hope’; or, Sundays, up and down the Potomac shores, one side or the other, sometimes ten miles at a stretch? Or when you work’d on the horse-cars, and I waited for you, coming home late together—or resting chatting at the Market, corner 7th Street and the Avenue, and eating those nice musk or watermelons?’’24
Pete did remember, telling Horace Traubel thirty years later that he and Whitman ‘‘were awful close together. In the afternoon I would go up to the Treasury building and wait for him to get through if he was busy, then we’d stroll out together, often without any plan, going where we happened to get. . . . We took great walks together—off towards or to Alexandria, often. We went plodding along the road, Walt always whistling or singing. We would talk of ordinary matters. He would recite poetry, especially Shakespeare—he would hum airs or shout in the woods. He was always active, happy, cheerful, good-natured. . . . We would tackle the farmers who came into town, buy a water-melon, sit down on the cellar door of Bacon’s grocery, Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue, halve it and eat it. People would go by and laugh. Walt would only smile and say, ‘They can have the laugh—we have the melon.’ ’’25
In mid-March 1865 Whitman left Doyle behind and went home to Brooklyn on furlough from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He intended to use his visit to reunite with George, who was still recuperating from his harrowing imprisonment, and also to arrange for the publication, at long last, of Drum-Taps. George was in ‘‘fair condition,’’ Walt reported to the O’Connors, but ‘‘his legs are affected—it seems to me it is rheumatism, following the fever he had.’’ George was also exhibiting all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘‘He goes to bed quite sleepy & falls to sleep,’’ Walt noted, ‘‘but then soon wakes, & frequently little or no sleep that night—he most always leaves the bed, & comes downstairs, & passes the night on the sofa.’’26
Perhaps to buoy his brother’s spirits, Whitman wrote a long, complimentary account of George’s war experience for the Brooklyn Daily Union. Published on March 16, 1865, under the heading, ‘‘Return of a Brooklyn Veteran,’’ the piece celebrated George’s service from his first battle at Roanoke, North Carolina, in February 1862 to his capture at Poplar Grove Church in September 1864, after which ‘‘he had now to endure that worst part of a soldier’s experience of life—if that can be called life, which is worse than death—in one after another of the Confederate States military prisons; a series of many weary months of starvation, humiliation, and every pressure on body and spirit, of which the world knows too well.’’ If George was suffering from survivor’s guilt, it is no wonder: of all the regiment’s officers who began the war, Walt said, ‘‘not a single one remains; and not a dozen out over a thousand of the rank and file. Most of his comrades have fallen by death.’’ George’s own return, said his brother, was nothing short of a miracle.27
While Whitman was home in Brooklyn, the war in Virginia played out its hand. On the first day of April Major General Phil Sheridan’s dismounted cavalry, supported by Gouverneur K. Warren’s 5th Corps infantry, overwhelmed the Confederate right at Five Forks, capturing more than five thousand prisoners and paving the way for an all-out assault on Petersburg the next morning. As Grant’s emboldened soldiers poured over the Rebel trenches, sending Lee and his surviving forces fleeing westward in a desperate attempt to escape to North Carolina and link up with General Joseph E. Johnston’s equally harried army, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet caught the last train leaving the Confederate capital. Two days later Abraham Lincoln, guarded by a skeleton crew of ten rifle-bearing Union sailors, sailed into Richmond aboard a humble barge and walked the streets in quiet triumph. ‘‘Thank God I have lived to see this,’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.’’28
Five days later Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and the war for all intents and purposes was over. Surprisingly, Whitman did not take special note of the war’s end, although he did allow to O’Connor that ‘‘the grand culminations of last week’’ had impressed him with a renewed sense of national destiny. Off in Brooklyn, he missed the nine hundred-gun salute that rang out in Washington following the fall of Richmond and the five hundred-gun salute that signaled Lee’s surrender a week later and smashed windows all over Lafayette Square. Nor did he take part in—or at any rate memorialize in writing—theraucous celebration that emptied the stores and houses in New York and sent the brokers on Wall Street falling into each other’s arms on the confetti-strewn floor of the Stock Exchange. Perhaps, like George, he was simply worn out by the war; more likely he was preoccupied with his ongoing efforts to shepherd Drum-Taps into final printed form.29
On April 1, the same day that Phil Sheridan was driving the last nail into the coffin of George Pickett’s military reputation at Five Forks, Whitman signed a contract with New York printer Peter Eckler to produce five hundred copies of Drum-Taps. He had already drafted an advertising flyer for the volume listing forty-seven new poems and promising a revised edition of Leaves of Grass sometime in the near future. Drum-Taps, he told O’Connor with authorial pride, was ‘‘in my opinion superior to Leaves of Grass—certainly more perfect as a work of art.’’ The ordinary reader, he said, might think the poems ‘‘let loose with wildest abandon, [but] the true artist can see it is yet under control.’’ The new poems, he felt, delivered on his ambition ‘‘to express in a poem (& in the way I like, which is not at all by directly stating it) the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope, the shiftings, masses, & the whirl & deafening din . . . the unprecedented anguish of wounded & suffering, the beautiful young men, in wholesale death & agony, everything sometimes as if in blood color, & dripping blood. The book is therefore unprecedentedly sad, (as these days are, are they not?)—but it also has the blast of the trumpet, & the drum pounds & whirrs in it, & then an undertone of sweetest comradeship & human love, threading its steady thread inside the chaos, & heard at every lull & interstice thereof . . . clear notes of faith & triumph.’’30
The triumph, if not the faith, was short lived. Whitman had wheedled from Otto an extra two weeks of furlough, and he was home with his mother on Portland Avenue when the early editions of the day’s newspapers landed on their doorstep on the morning of April 15, 1865. Almost simultaneously church bells began tolling all across the city—Abraham Lincoln was dead. The Whitmans, like millions of other Americans, received the news in stunned silence. ‘‘Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterwards,’’ Whitman recalled, ‘‘but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass’d them silently to each other.’’31
Back in Washington Peter Doyle had been among those in attendance at Ford’s Theatre that fatal night and had seen the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, jump down from the presidential box, catch his foot on the red-white-and-blue bunting, and crash heavily to the stage. Doyle had not been able to make out what Booth shouted—‘‘Sic semper tyrannis!’’—over the general hubbub, but he had lingered in the theater in a sort of daze until a furious Union soldier accosted him with the warning, ‘‘Get out of here! we’re going to burn this damned building down!’’ ‘‘If that is so I’ll get out,’’ Doyle responded sensibly.32
Years later, preparing an account of the assassination for a series of lectures on Lincoln, Whitman drew freely from Doyle’s eyewitness account of the tragedy. He also drew on a lengthy, if vicarious, association of his own with the celebrated first family of American drama. He had long admired John Wilkes Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, whose acting genius, Whitman said, ‘‘was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression.’’ The elder Booth, a certified madman, appealed to Whitman as an intuitive artist who dared to break the formalized tradition of stage acting that Americans had inherited secondhand from the British. ‘‘He stood out ‘himself alone’ in many respects beyond any of his kind on record,’’ Whitman wrote of Booth, ‘‘and with effects and ways that broke through all rules and all traditions’’—which is to say, he acted the same way that Whitman wrote. The son too had scattered moments of inspiration but failed to match his father’s towering genius. Often considered the handsomest man in America, John Wilkes Booth shared Whitman’s taste in Shakespeare—each man’s favorite play was Richard III—and the actor used a line from the play to advertise his performances, ‘‘I am myself alone,’’ which might well have served as a four-word synopsis of Leaves of Grass.33
With his lifelong love of theatrics, Whitman found the assassination fascinating on a number of levels. Not only was the president himself ‘‘the leading actor in the greatest and stormiest drama known to real history’s stage,’’ but his ebony-eyed assassin had become in life what he had been only fitfully in his art, a romantic villain of Shakespearean proportions: ‘‘And so the figure, Booth, the murderer, dress’d in plain black broadcloth, bare-headed, with a full head of glossy, raven hair, and his eyes like some mad animal’s flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness, holds aloft in one hand a large knife . . . turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words, Sic semper tyrannis—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace across to the back of the stage, and disappears.’’34
The sense of Lincoln’s murder as a dramatic set piece came later; at the time Whitman was as shocked and depressed as everyone else. He rose from his untouched breakfast that afternoon and caught the Brooklyn ferry into Manhattan, where he walked up and down a nearly deserted Broadway in a dripping rainstorm past shuttered storefronts draped in mourning. Thousands of sodden American flags, which the day before had flown in triumph from porches and rooftops, had been lowered to half-mast, and the boats crossing the East River trailed behind them long black pennants. Everywhere Whitman sensed a ‘‘strange mixture of horror, fury, tenderness, & a stirring of wonder.’’ Nature herself, in pathetic fallacy, mirrored the mood of the populace, showing ‘‘long broad black clouds like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction.’’35
The next day Whitman began putting Lincoln’s death into perspective. The dead president, he noted, ‘‘leaves for America’s history and biography . . . not only its most dramatic reminiscence—he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality. . . . The tragic splendor of his death, purging, illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will remain and will grow brighter through time, while history lives, and love of country lives. By many has this Union been help’d; but if one name, one man, must be pick’d out, he, most of all, is the conservator of it, to the future. He was assassinated—but the Union is not assassinated. . . . [T]he Nation is immortal.’’36
Following the murderous events of Good Friday, Walt remained in New York for another week, probably to watch over George, whom he had persuaded with some difficulty—George was being ‘‘sulky’’ again—to ask for an extension of his medical furlough. Then, too, Walt was unsure what to do about Drum-Taps in the wake of the assassination. He dashed off a short, rather uninspired poem, ‘‘Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,’’ which he took to the printer’s on April 19 for insertion into the book. But it was a poor stopgap, as even Whitman must have sensed, for after giving Bradstreet’s Bindery another twenty dollars on April 21 in partial payment, he apparently decided to shelve the book until he could complete a more suitable tribute to the president. The next day he returned to Washington, thus managing to miss not only the public funeral service at the White House and the ceremonial lying in state at the Capitol rotunda on April 19 but also the passage of the president’s funeral train through New York City on April 24. Henceforth, Walt would do his mourning alone.
The weather in Washington was almost insupportably beautiful. Venus still loomed brightly over the capital, and the soft, cloying scent of lilacs filled the air. ‘‘The season being advanced, there were many lilacs in full bloom,’’ Whitman noted. ‘‘By one of those caprices that enter and give tinge to events without being at all a part of them, I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never fails.’’ The national press, in its nonstop coverage of Lincoln’s funeral cortege back to Springfield, Illinois, also made much of the fact that great sprays of lilac covered the president’s coffin as it sat side-by-side with the exhumed coffin of his favorite son, Willie, who had died in the White House of typhoid fever three years earlier. In Whitman’s mind the ubiquitous flower became inextricably linked with Lincoln’s death.37
There were other, less celebrated deaths that spring. Despite the end of the shooting war, the hospitals were more crowded than ever, with the sick outnumbering the wounded two-to-one. On May 1, at Armory Square, Whitman witnessed the death of Corporal Frank H. Irwin of the 93rd Pennsylvania Infantry. Irwin had been wounded in the left knee in a skirmish near Fort Fisher, Virginia, on March 25. Two weeks later his leg was amputated. At first the young man seemed to be doing well. Then, in the usual, depressing way of so many cases, Irwin suddenly sickened and died of pyemia. His death occasioned one of the last, and most poignant, of Whitman’s wartime letters of condolence.
‘‘Frank,’’ he wrote to Mrs. Irwin, ‘‘was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in the afternoons and sitting by him, and soothing him, and he liked to have me—liked to put his arm out and lay his hand on my knee—would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of—said, ‘I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.’ At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem’d to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word or thought or idea escaped him. It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his senses was not half as good as Frank’s delirium.
‘‘He was perfectly willing to die—he had become very weak and had suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpass’d. And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. . . . I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worthwhile, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him. I am merely a friend visiting the Hospitals to cheer the wounded and sick.’’38
Another dead young man, another stranger loved and lost—it put Whitman in mind of all ‘‘the unknown dead . . . the unrecorded, the heroes so sweet & tender . . . the unreturned, the sons of the mothers.’’ His own mother’s son had returned from the war more or less in one piece, and now George had rejoined his regiment as it camped outside of Washington preparatory to the Grand Review of the victorious Union armies through the capital on May 23 and 24. Once again, and for the last time, Washington was awash in troops. ‘‘The city is full of soldiers, running around loose,’’ Whitman reported. ‘‘Officerseverywhere, of all grades. All have the weather-beaten look of practical service. It is a sight I never tire of. . . . You see them swarming like bees everywhere.’’39
Upwards of two hundred thousand soldiers in the Armies of the Potomac and the Tennessee had gathered to march triumphantly past their new commander in chief, Andrew Johnson, and a packed reviewing stand of generals, politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, socialites, family members, and assorted hangers-on. The parade route stretched the length of Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the presidential box betweeen 15th and 17th streets. Across the street in Lafayette Square three other stands were reserved for less exalted dignitaries, including one that was specially set aside for wounded soldiers from the various hospitals.
The Army of the Potomac, having doggedly protected the capital and striven with Robert E. Lee and his legion of accomplished man-killers for four long and grueling years, opened the review on May 23. Major General George Gordon Meade, its vinegary commander, led the way, followed by a seven-mile-long procession of the Cavalry Corps. George Armstrong Custer, at the head of the 3rd Division, stole the show, galloping bareheaded past the reviewing stand, his long blond hair streaming behind him, atop a suspiciously ‘‘runaway’’ horse. The 51st New York, with the newly promoted Major George Whitman back in its ranks, marched in a place of honor alongside the rest of the 9th Corps. Behind each infantry brigade came six mule-drawn army ambulances, their bloodstained stretchers strapped to their sides in graphic, if mute, recognition of the human cost underlying the triumph being celebrated that day.40
The next day belonged to Major General William Sherman and his western army. The ever touchy Sherman, his nerves further exacerbated by the recent controversy surrounding his supposedly too generous surrender terms to General Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army in North Carolina, worried aloud that his ‘‘tatterdemalion’’ troops would make a poor showing after the spit-and-polish grandeur of Meade’s Potomac veterans. He needn’t have worried. The tanned and rangy westerners stole the show, marching along with easy grace behind bullet-shredded banners bearing the names of their already legendary battles: Shiloh, Stones River, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Peachtree Creek. A particular highlight was the antic performance of the regimental bummers who accompanied each unit with a squawking menagerie of chickens, ducks, pigs, and cows ‘‘borrowed’’ from local farms in shameless emulation of their less fraternal borrowings from Georgia civilians a few months before.41
Whitman, as usual, was in the forefront of the crowd. For once, mere words almost failed him; the Grand Review, he told his mother, ‘‘was too much & too impressive to be described.’’ Nevertheless he tried, recalling for her the ‘‘solid rank of soldiers, 20 or 25 abreast, just marching steadily all day long for two days without intermission, one regiment after another, real war-worn soldiers, that have been marching & fighting for years . . . mostly all good-looking hardy young men . . . all sunburnt—nearly every one with some old tatter all in shreds (that had been a costly and beautiful flag).’’ Apparently he had taken a position near the presidential reviewing stand, since he reported seeing Johnson, Grant, Meade, Stanton and ‘‘lots of other celebrated government officers & generals’’ during the review. But the poet of the people did not forget his roots—‘‘the rank & file was the greatest sight of all.’’ Walt also caught a glimpse of George as he marched by, but did not have a chance to speak to him.42
In all, some 342 infantry regiments, 27 cavalry regiments, and 44 artillery batteries, together with assorted engineers, signal corpsmen, ambulance drivers, provost marshals, and black civilian pioneers, tramped past the reviewing stands in a remarkable show of military might. Such an army, marveled the Prussian ambassador to Washington, could whip the world. Indeed, it was a testament to the individual fighting prowess and sheer Rebel cussedness of their Confederate opponents that it had taken these proud Union soldiers four long years to whip the South. But whip it they had, and soon they would be going home, demobilized from an army that, as Sherman told his troops in parting, had ‘‘done all that men could do’’ to ensure that ‘‘our Government stands vindicated before the world.’’43
With its formal sense of closure, the Grand Review appealed to Whitman on an artistic as well as a patriotic level. He quickly wrote two new poems commemorating the event, ‘‘How Solemn as One by One’’ and ‘‘Spirit Whose Work Is Done,’’ each of which was subtitled, ‘‘Washington City, 1865.’’ The poems, although not truly companion pieces, show similar signs of the conflicting emotions that whipsawed their author at the end of the war. The first reveals the intense psychic connection that Whitman felt to the men in the ranks as he watched them file past:
How solemn the thought of my whispering soul to each in the ranks, and to you,
I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul,
O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,
Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,
Nor the bayonet stab O friend.44
Bullets and bayonets may not have killed the souls of the men, but the poet had seen enough suffering in the hospitals to know what the war could do to a person’s psyche. Mindful perhaps of his brother’s difficult readjustment to civilian life after his months in a Rebel prison, Whitman invoked the ‘‘spirit of dreadful hours’’ that still flitted ‘‘like a tireless phantom’’ above the ranks of the returning veterans. As the soldiers passed on, leaving him to watch them receding into the distance, Whitman offered himself as a sort of surrogate sacrifice to the malign gods of war:
Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day,
Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close,
Leave me your pulses of rage—bequeath them to me—fill me with currents convulsive,
Let them scorch and blister out of my chants when you are gone,
Let them identify you to the future in these songs.45
By assuming the spirit of the ‘‘war now closed,’’ the poet also assumed the responsibility of perpetuating its hideous truths, even if talking of those ‘‘dreadful hours’’ might ‘‘scorch and blister’’ his own mouth. Whitman soon undertook to speak of, and for, the martyred president as well. In the quickening heat of early summer, walking the woods with Peter Doyle, John Burroughs, or Thomas Proctor, a fellow New Yorker who kept a room in the same Tenth Street boardinghouse where Lincoln had been carried from Ford’s Theatre to die, the poet rehearsed the lines of a slowly forming elegy. As he had done throughout his career, he took his cues from nature, trusting in the common forms of earth for his inspiration. In Venus, the western star, he found the physical objectification of Lincoln the man of the West. The heart-shaped leaves of the lilac bush, so prominent that spring when Lincoln died, symbolized the love the poet felt for the fallen president. And in the quicksilver song of the hermit thrush, a solitary singer whose lonely ways Whitman had learned firsthand from Burroughs, he began to make out the subtle notes of a murmuring chant that was at once sorrowful, ecstatic, consoling, and welcoming: the high holy song of death.
All summer long he worked on the poem, which he planned to include in a short sequel to Drum-Taps that he could append to the unbound sheets already stored at the printer’s. The poem’s title was also its first line: ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’’ It came together slowly but easily in the unforced rhythms of the natural world, a threnody not just for Abraham Lincoln but for all the bruised and broken young men who over the past four years had given their lives to the Union cause. It was also, in a way, an elegy for the poet himself. Like Lincoln, Whitman too had come a long way from that distant afternoon in February 1861 when he first had seen the president-elect emerge from his carriage at the Astor House. Together they had suffered through ‘‘the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,’’ a heartbreaking civil war that filled the hospitals of the capital with the ruined bodies of beautiful young soldiers. In the end the war had claimed Lincoln as well, on Easter eve, and it had also taken away a fundamental part of the poet himself, the part that believed in the blissful love of comrades as a working model for the American republic. That republic, he had come to understand, had been purchased with the dearest coin of the realm: the very lifeblood of its sons.46
The poem was saturated with death. It found its voice in the song of the thrush, ‘‘song of the bleeding throat/Death’s outlet song of life,’’ which carried from the swamp down the winding way that the president’s funeral procession followed on its journey home:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.47
The humble gift, like the poet’s heart, was given not just to the president, but to all the dead young men whose hands he had held during the past three years as they waited so calmly and courageously for death:
(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring
. . .
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)48
Even in the midst of returning spring, at a time when the soldiers were marching home to resume—as well as they could—their former lives, the poet cannot escape ‘‘death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.’’ He has seen too much to be content, as he previously was content in Leaves of Grass, with the joyous cataloging of life in all its variegated forms. Instead, he must wait in ‘‘the hiding receiving night’’ to hear once more the ‘‘carol of death’’:
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.49
In the bird’s song the poet relives the many deaths he has witnessed personally and the battle scenes he has known vicariously:
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war.50
Ultimately, however, it is not the dead he is seeing, in all their familiar agony, but a new vision of peace and calm:
I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not.51
And it is this reassuring vision that enables the poet at last to let go of his grief, to ‘‘unloos[e] the hold of my comrades’ hands’’ and leave the death-haunted woods forever, taking with him only his ‘‘retrievements out of the night,’’ the memories of the dead soldiers and their dead commander, ‘‘the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.’’52
‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’’ was a triumph, the last great poem of Whitman’s career, and it was with a sense of proud accomplishment that he sent it off to New York for inclusion in Drum-Taps, which was finally released with a twenty-four-page insert, ‘‘Sequel to Drum-Taps,’’ in October 1865. The book now totaled seventy-one poems, tracing the war as Whitman had seen it, from the first brief flush of patriotic optimism on the streets of New York, through the strangely solemn soldiers’ camps in Virginia, to the pain-wracked hospitals of the faithful but sorrowing ‘‘Wound-Dresser’’ in Washington. It had indeed been, as one poem put it, ‘‘A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.’’ Now the war was over, and all that remained for the poet to do was to whisper at last the ‘‘word over all, beautiful as the sky’’—reconciliation. The man who had known ‘‘many a soldier’s kiss . . . on these bearded lips,’’ had one kiss left to bestow:
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.53
With the publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman closed the book, so to speak, on his Civil War career, although, faithful to the end, he continued visiting Harewood, the last remaining wartime hospital, until it closed in April 1866. By then he had been sacked from his job in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by an overzealous new secretary of the interior, James Harlan, for allegedly setting a poor example—morally, physically, and politically—for the other clerks. His sudden firing was scarcely more than an inconvenience to Whitman (his friend J. Hubley Ashton found him another job, in the attorney general’s office, within a day), but it occasioned an impassioned defense by his self-appointed champion, William O’Connor. The Good Gray Poet, a forty-six-page panegyric to Whitman’s selfless Civil War service, came out in January 1866, and although it did not create quite the sense of public outrage that its author intended at the time, it did serve to fix in place a favorable image of Whitman that endures unchanged to the present day.
With its catchy title and fervid, overheated prose, O’Connor’s pamphlet was the opening shot in a decades-long battle by Whitman’s supporters to enshrine the poet in the pantheon of spotless American heroes. Saluting Whitman as ‘‘one of the greatest of the sons of men,’’ O’Connor painted a highly subjective portrait of his friend. Ignoring the fact that Harlan had fired a number of other Indian Bureau employees at the same time that he fired Whitman, including Commissioner James Dole, O’Connor portrayed the firing as a ‘‘peculiar wrong’’ committed against Whitman alone. In O’Connor’s imaginative retelling, Harlan becomes Whitman’s Pontius Pilate, cruelly delivering the poet into the hands of those who would judge him ‘‘a brute, a scallawag, and a criminal.’’ Against these harsh judgments O’Connor set his own view: ‘‘For solid nobleness of character, for native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a courtesy which is the very passion of thoughtful kindness and forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect and manly honor for woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life, and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civilities of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whitman deserves to be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this continent.’’54
The Good Gray Poet—particularly its title—defined Whitman for an entire generation of American readers. In a larger sense, however, Whitman did not need O’Connor’s special pleading to cement his place in the history of the war or the affections of the soldiers he encountered during its course. The soldiers themselves, those who survived, kept his memory evergreen within them. They were his truest legacy. In letter after letter they addressed him variously as ‘‘dear friend,’’ ‘‘dear comrade,’’ ‘‘kind uncle,’’ ‘‘dear brother,’’ ‘‘dear father,’’ ‘‘esteemed friend,’’ or simply ‘‘dear Walt.’’ They wrote to tell him the progress of their lives—their wives and children, their successes and failures, their travels and travails, their health, their politics, their dreams. But mostly they wrote to tell him their love. One-legged Lewy Brown, embarked on his own fifty-year career with the paymaster’s division of the Treasury Department, spoke for them all when he told Whitman: ‘‘There is many a soldier now that never thinks of you but with emotions of the greatest gratitude & I know that the soldiers that you have bin so kind to have a great big warm place in their heart for you. I never think of you but it makes my heart glad to think that I have bin permitted to know one so good.’’55
Whitman received dozens of such letters in the decades following the Civil War. The letters he probably treasured most were those from soldiers he had not known so intimately as he knew Lewy Brown, but who nevertheless still remembered him fondly and had taken steps to ensure that others would remember him as well. ‘‘You stated in your [letter] that you hoped that I had not forgotten you,’’ William H. Millis wrote to Whitman on January 12, 1865, from Ward M of Armory Square Hospital, where he was recovering from a bullet wound to the chest. ‘‘I never will forget you so long as life should last. . . . May god bless you forever I cant find words to tell you the love their is in me for you. I hope you & I may live to meet again on this earth if not I hope will shall meet in the world where there is no more parting.’’ Ten years later Millis wrote again, this time from his home in Dover, Delaware: ‘‘Again I take the time & privilege of droping a few lines to tell you that we have not forgotten you & want to hear from you. We have had a son borned since we heard from you & We call him Walter Whitman Millis in honer to you for Love for you.’’56
A series of letters also arrived from Benton H. Wilson, a Syracuse, New York, piano maker who, like Millis, had met Whitman while confined to Armory Square Hospital. Wilson, a former color-bearer for the 185th New York, wanted to tell Whitman about ‘‘our Baby Walt.’’ At regular intervals during the baby’s first three years Wilson kept the poet up-to-date with his namesake’s modest but steady progress. ‘‘My little baby Walt is well & Bright as a dollar,’’ he reported proudly in October 1868. Other letters described the child variously as ‘‘a fine boy . . . full of fun & rather quick tempered . . . quite a big Boy . . . full of mischief, he can walk all around the house & yard & talk very little.’’ By December 1869, his father said, little Walt was ‘‘just getting interesting he runs all around and is beginning to talk quite plainly.’’ Wilson offered to send Whitman a photograph of the child ‘‘& then you can judge for yourself. I wish you could see him.’’57
Whitman never did make it up to Syracuse for a visit, but one likes to imagine that somehow, if only in his mind’s eye, he did catch a glimpse of towheaded little Walt Whitman Wilson, happily playing in his father’s backyard, as far away from ‘‘war’s hell-scenes’’ as it was possible to get. He had seen such a child many years before—the child was him—and perhaps for one last time he saw him again:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories . . .
. . .
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.58
Now the child had many names—Oscar and Stewart, Erastus and Frank, Johnny and Thomas and Frederick and Lorenzo and Charles. They were all there with him, at the end of his life, as he had been there with them at the end of theirs, a great mothering sort of man, a bearded stranger hovering near, at peace in a country that was once more at peace with itself.