Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America's Great Poet

by Garrett Peck, Martin G. Murray (Foreword by)

Overview

"An energetic study of the famed writer's time in the nation's capital and the loves of his life" (Washington Independent Review of Books).
 
Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to Washington at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Eventually, Whitman would serve as a volunteer "hospital missionary"—making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wounded soldiers in the next three years.
 
With the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman became poet laureate of the Civil War, aligning his legacy with that of Abraham Lincoln. He remained in Washington until 1873 as a federal clerk, engaging in a dazzling literary circle and fostering his longest romantic relationship, with Peter Doyle. This fascinating blend of biography and history details the definitive account of Walt Whitman's decade in the nation's capital.
 
Includes photos!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625854858
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	01/23/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	193
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Garrett Peck is an author, historian and tour guide. This is his sixth book. A native Californian and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and George Washington University, he lives in Arlington, Virginia. www.garrettpeck.com

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

WALT WHITMAN, AN AMERICAN

Walter Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, on Long Island, New York. He was the second of nine children to Walter Whitman Sr. and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman (eight children lived to see adulthood). The family had lived on Long Island for two centuries. Walt's parents moved the family to Brooklyn when he was a child.

The Whitmans were a working-class family. Walt Sr. was an artisan and construction worker who dabbled in real estate development. Louisa was a homemaker who wrestled with the daily life of feeding a small army of people and coping with the family's never-ending drama: one son would go insane, another died of tuberculosis (or, more likely, syphilis) and another was born mentally disabled. The Whitmans were Quakers, though they weren't religious. Walt was hardly a churchgoer.

Walt received a grade school education and then learned the printing trade as a teenager. He went on to become a journalist, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Freeman. After the Freeman folded in 1848, Whitman journeyed to New Orleans, where he witnessed the evils of slavery firsthand. In his career path, Walt learned not only how to write well but also how to print and typeset. This came in handy when he self-published his first volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass, as he was intimately involved in the printing of each page.

Walt was a large man, six feet tall and burly. He would steadily gain weight until he was on the cusp of two hundred pounds on the eve of the Civil War. His beard began graying in his twenties, and his hair soon followed. He looked prematurely aged, like a vigorous older man. Whitman never married. He was, to use a euphemism, a confirmed bachelor.

Despite his humble origins and lack of higher education, Walt was drawn to literature and was a voracious reader. He especially loved Shakespeare. Whitman came in touch with the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the leading American thinkers of the nineteenth century. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil," Whitman said. The transcendentalist Emerson was a mentor to a generation of poets and writers. Whitman first heard Emerson speak in 1842, but it would be more than a decade before Walt finally responded to the muse. It took him years to find his own voice. And find it he did.

While Henry David Thoreau, an Emerson disciple, abolitionist and author of Walden, worshipped nature, Whitman was unapologetically an urban creature, a Brooklynite who spent most of his life in cities, close to the bustle of factories, ports and railroads and always close to the "roughs" (as he called them), the working-class men toward whom he gravitated. Whitman's friend John Burroughs described him thus: "Fond of cities, he has gone persistently into all their haunts and by-places, not as a modern missionary and reformer, but as a student and lover of men, finding beneath all forms of vice and degradation the same old delicious, yearning creatures, after all."

Whitman rejected the conceit of dualism, popular since René Descartes in the seventeenth century, that the body was a cage for the soul or that the body was itself sinful while the soul was pure. Burroughs observed how Walt referred to the body in his poetry: "Nothing is more intoxicating, nothing more sacred than the Body; he often capitalizes the word, as is done with the name of the Deity." Walt struck many as a quiet slacker, but in fact, he was keenly ambitious. He wanted to be regarded as America's greatest poet. Responding to Emerson's call for a distinctly American voice in literature, Whitman set out to reinvent poetry.

Leaves of Grass

In July 1855, Whitman self-published his poetry book Leaves of Grass, which included his famous poem "Song of Myself." He printed eight hundred copies of the book, which initially had twelve poems. He would continually revise and add to the poetry collection throughout his life, publishing altogether seven editions of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's poetry was celebratory — and it was also erotic, which made him both controversial and popular in an era of Victorian prudery. Some considered Whitman's work obscene.

The author image that accompanied Leaves of Grass showed a casual Whitman wearing working-class clothing, the shirt open at the collar accentuating his copious chest hair. His left hand rested in his baggy pants pocket, his right hand assertively on his hip. His graying hair and beard were closely cropped, and a hat was jauntily perched on his head. The image listed the author's name but also showed off his ambition: "Walt Whitman, An American." This photo shows a man who was carefully crafting his image. He would cultivate that image — that of a vigorous working-class man, a mechanic, "one of the roughs, a Kosmos"— through the Civil War era.

Whitman's father died on July 11, 1855 — a week after Leaves of Grass was published. Walt's mother, Louisa, became the center of the family. Though Walt was the second-oldest child, he was far from able to support the family financially, but she never seemed to criticize her artistic son for being a dreamer. He was especially close to his mother, and Walt was her favorite child. Whitman loved his mother and put her on a pedestal. Most of Whitman's family ignored Leaves of Grass, other than his brother Jeff, who was Walt's closest brother.

Whitman had little formal education and was no college graduate; nor was he of the academy. Free of rules but not of democracy or equality, Whitman invented a free verse form of poetry. He ignored metering and rhyming and wrote in his own cadence and in the common tongue of the working class, often using the slang of the New York docks and streets. "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world," he wrote in "Song of Myself." He described language as having "its bases broad and low, close to the ground." He deliberately positioned himself as the antithesis of a man of letters, though he relished reading Shakespeare and going to the opera.

The "barbaric yawp" became so well known that it was also subject to ridicule. The gossipy Critic-Record teased in 1871: "Walt Whitman is yawping around Long Island with dyspepsia." Walt was fiercely egalitarian. He was a democratic poet who demanded equality of the sexes (though he would later have reservations about suffrage for both blacks and women). He didn't shirk from sexuality in his poetry. Yet the working-class men whom Whitman hung around probably had no idea that Whitman was a poet — nor would they likely have understood his poetry had they read it.

William Douglas O'Connor, Walt's most devout defender, characterized Whitman's poetry: "Here, in its grandest, freest use, is the English language, from its lowest compass to the top of the key; from the powerful, rank idiom of the streets and fields, to the last subtlety of academic speech — ample, various, telling, luxuriant, pictorial, final, conquering." Long before modern psychology, Whitman's poetry introduced an intense self-examination. "Song of Myself" opens: "I celebrate myself and sing myself." But who was the "I" of whom he wrote? Whitman often used the first person, but he didn't necessarily mean "I, Walt Whitman." The narrator often changed identities. His 1865 poem "The Wound-Dresser" uses the first person, yet Walt never served as a nurse, though he certainly witnessed hospital stewards and nurses change countless bandages.

Whitman could be full of obfuscations. His worldview was keenly informed by Emerson and transcendentalism, though he would deny it later in life. Literary critic Harold Bloom realized this: "The largest puzzle about the continuing reception of Whitman's poetry is the still prevalent notion that we ought to take him at his word, whether about his self (or selves) or about his art. No other poet insists so vehemently and so continuously that he will tell us all, and tell us all without artifice, and yet tells us so little, and so cunningly." Historian Clara Barrus put it even more succinctly: "One is struck with the poet's many-sidedness."

Knowing that Emerson might be interested in his distinctly American poetry, Whitman sent him a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Emerson wrote back an effusive letter. "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed," he gushed. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start." Whitman used this letter — without Emerson's permission — to promote the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856), which added twenty new poems. He even printed the phrase "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" in gold on the book's spine. It earned mixed reviews and generated controversy for the use of Emerson's letter.

"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," Whitman wrote in the essay that prefaced the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and he hoped he would be the national poet, an ambitious but naïve goal. Walt believed his poetry to be "the new American Bible."

Whitman had a knack for self-promotion. He published anonymous reviews to praise his poetry in the hope of widening his audience. He was constantly on the lookout for literary reviews — even if he had to write them himself. If there is a blemish to Whitman's character, it was this need to blow his own horn — often anonymously — for the sheer sake of drawing attention to his work. He was a trendsetter for self-promotion.

Along with Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman is considered America's greatest nineteenth-century poet. The reclusive Dickenson was repulsed by the very thought of publishing her work and remained out of the public's eye until after her death whereas Whitman craved attention and recognition. He wished to be regarded as America's poet, and by the end of his life, when he was infirm and wracked by poor health, he would be.

Quicksand Years

Whitman had tried his hand at two editions of poetry, but his writing wasn't a commercial success. He earned few royalties and couldn't support himself or his extended family. He returned to journalism, editing the Brooklyn Daily Times for two years (1857–59), and then that, too, petered out. He began a relationship with Fred Vaughan, a stage driver, an affair that inspired the homoerotic "Calamus" poems. He worked only occasionally, preferring the life of an idler, riding the omnibuses for free, picking up men, visiting injured stage drivers in the hospitals and drinking beer at Pfaff's with the fellow bohemians of his literary circle.

Author, critic and playwright William Dean Howells, later an editor at Atlantic Monthly, was introduced to Whitman at Pfaff's for the first time in 1860. Howells recalled the moment: "I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it to me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word." Whitman surprised him. "The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness." Likewise, novelist John Trowbridge, upon first meeting Whitman, remembered: "I found him the quietest of men."

Whitman was often quiet — except when the subject of his poetry came up. He loved when people discussed his art. He was a better listener than talker, a skill that would serve him well in hundreds of hospital visits during the Civil War. His personality was directed inward, though like many introverts he could be gregarious among intimate friends.

Then came unexpected news: the Boston publishing firm of William Wilde Thayer and Charles Eldridge approached Whitman about publishing his third edition of Leaves of Grass. Walt jumped at the chance, moving to Boston for several months in early 1860 to oversee the printing. It was an ambitious expansion, coming in at 456 pages, and included the sexually suggestive "Calamus" and "Enfans d'Adam" poems. Emerson visited Whitman in Boston and tried politely to get Whitman to remove some of the sex, but Walt wouldn't budge. The edition was met by a great deal of criticism, mostly stemming from the belief that its overt sexuality was inappropriate for women. Some called for his poems to be censored for their indecency. That said, the language was hardly pornographic.

It is difficult to fathom Whitman's sexuality. He wrote for posterity, always with an eye on his public image, and he never directly admitted his same-sex attractions. Yet it is also clear, despite some poetry that includes women's sexuality, that Whitman was gay. The vocabulary we have today didn't exist in his time. Whitman never had to "come out." There was little doubt of Whitman's sexual orientation with the "Calamus" poems in the third edition of Leaves of Grass. (Calamus is a phallic-shaped flower, and the poems in this section were erotic and highly suggestive of male-male encounters.) And his letters to Peter Doyle, Alonzo Bush and many others make it quite clear that Whitman was attracted to young, working-class men.

Many of the poems in the 1860 edition celebrated the Union. Whitman remained naïvely ambitious, believing that his poems would create cohesiveness between Americans and thus heal the sectional split that would lead to the Civil War. Some of his devotees considered him to be a prophet, though his poetry never did give rise to a religion. He was also naïve in hoping that his poetry would find a mass following. The problem — then as now — was that Americans really weren't poetry readers.

The third edition of Leaves of Grass sold well and went through several printings, but it wasn't widely absorbed. The country was splintered along sectional lines as abolitionism became a political force in the North and the South fiercely defended its "peculiar institution" of slavery. The pending crisis of the Civil War was just over the horizon. Whitman's poetic talk about national unity fell on deaf ears.

Whitman and the Civil War

Many scholars have thought of the 1860 to 1862 period, after he published the third edition of Leaves of Grass, as Whitman's "lost years." Whitman referred to this time as his "quicksand years." The public's appetite for novels and poetry was eclipsed by the need for daily news of the war. Whitman may have been depressed in the years after his latest publication failed to meet his ambitions or heal the nation. The pending crisis between the states was at hand.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860, the Southern states began seceding from the Union, starting with South Carolina. The economy spiraled downward in the crisis. Walt's publisher Thayer & Eldridge went out of business. Eldridge decamped for Washington to the U.S. Army Paymaster Office.

On February 19, 1861, Whitman first glimpsed Abraham Lincoln at Astor Place as Lincoln journeyed to Washington for the inauguration. By this point, seven Southern states had seceded, and more would follow. A large crowd gathered to see the president and watched him in utter silence. Walt recorded his impressions of the man: "The figure, the look, the gait, are distinctly impres'd upon me yet; the unusual and uncouth height, the dress of complete black, the stovepipe hat push'd back on the head, the dark-brown complexion, the seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, the black, bushy head of hair, the disproportionately long neck, and the hands held behind as he stood observing the people. All was comparative and ominous silence." New York City was no friend to Lincoln — it was a Democratic stronghold that didn't vote for the Republican president — but Whitman was already intrigued.

On April 12, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the opening salvo of the four-year Civil War. The Union garrison surrendered two days later. On April 15, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the insurrection. Virginia immediately began the process of secession, its voters ratifying the decision on May 23. The next day, the Union army crossed the Potomac River to secure Alexandria, Virginia, and the commanding hills above the port city in order to protect the nation's capital.

Walt was nearly forty-two when the Civil War broke out, too old to enlist. Given his pacifist tendencies, it is unthinkable that he would serve in the military. However, his younger brother George enlisted in the Thirteenth New York State Militia for three months and then in the Fifty-first New York Infantry Regiment. George served for the duration of the war, rising from private to colonel. Another brother, Jeff, started a family and began his career as a waterworks engineer. He paid $400 for a substitute in lieu of military service. Jeff became a key fundraiser for Walt's hospital visits.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C."
by .
Copyright © 2015 Garrett Peck.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword, by Martin G. Murray,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1. Walt Whitman, An American,
2. The City of Army Wagons,
3. The Wound-Dresser,
4. Nurses, Stewards & Surgeons,
5. The First Disciples,
6. Hospital Malaria,
7. Of a Youth Who Loves Me,
8. O Captain! My Captain!,
9. Drum-Taps,
10. Pleasantly Disappointed,
11. Democratic Vistas,
12. The Good Gray Poet,
Notes,
Bibliography,
About the Author,