Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860-1862

By Ted Genoways

Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years—locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, Walt Whitman and the Civil War reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books."

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2009.
Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have te

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520943087

Ted Genoways

Ted Genoways is the editor of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII and the series editor of the correspondence for the online Walt Whitman Archive. He is also the author of two volumes of poetry and the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

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THE FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Walt Whitman and the Civil War

Walt Whitman

and the Civil War

America’s Poet during the Lost Years

of 1860-1862

Ted Genoways

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2009 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Genoways, Ted.

Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s poet during the lost years of 1860-1862 / Ted Genoways.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-25906-5 (cloth: alk. paper)

i. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Political and social views. 2. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Knowledge—United States. 3. Poets, American—19th century—Biography. I. Title.

PS3232.G46 2009

811 ‘.3—dc22

[B] 2009003369

Manufactured in the United States of America

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 II 10 09

10 98765432 I

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION Quicksand Years

CHAPTER ONE The Red-Hot Fellows of Those Times

CHAPTER TWO The Representative Man of the North

CHAPTER THREE The Volcanic Upheaval of the Nation

CHAPTER FOUR War-Suggesting Trumpets, I Heard You

CHAPTER FIVE Dead and Divine, and Brother of Ali

Conclusion

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the steady support and constant encouragement of Ed Folsom. He has guided my work with patience, insight, and enthusiasm. No one could ask for a better mentor or friend. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Sherry Ceniza, my first professor of Whitman studies, for her own scholarship on the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and for directing me toward continuing my study with Ed. Thanks, too, to Jerome Loving and Kenneth M. Price for comments and suggestions during the editing stage of this manuscript; to Kathleen Dif- fley for her instruction and scholarship in Civil War periodicals; and to David Hamilton, Christopher Merrill, and John Erickson for their enthusiasm and support.

I am grateful to the libraries and archives that house the manuscripts from which I have quoted and to the Walt Whitman Archive (whitman- archive.unl.edu) for making many of those manuscripts available to me in electronic form. Special thanks to the Office of the President of the University of Virginia for supporting this research by granting me the hours to complete this work.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to express my thanks to my family: my parents; my wife, Mary Anne Andrei; and my son, Jack, who grew up with this project.

INTRODUCTION

Quicksand Years

Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,

Schemes, politics fail—all is shaken—all gives way.

Notebook draft, January 1863

The real war will never get in the books, Walt Whitman wrote in 1876.1 It is a statement that frequently has been misread as a critique of the printed page and its inability to encompass anything so large as the Civil War. But more than a decade after the guns had fallen silent at Appomattox, Whitman knew full well that the war was already the subject of countless books—just not what Whitman considered the real war. He rankled against the emerging national narrative that focused on the few great battles rather than the countless days spent by common soldiers in camp, on the march, in hospital wards, or in prison pens.² He felt that his own war-era prose writings had languished unpublished because he favored a narrative that highlighted not the official surface- courteousness of the Generals, but the two or three millions of American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in those armies.³

Whitman worried that, in the nation’s eagerness to make sense of the war, an unambiguous version of events had been written into history to the exclusion of what he called that many-threaded drama. That true version of the war would not focus merely on the bloody battles but would interweave political concerns, such as the dread of foreign interference, and the immense money expenditure, like a heavy-pouring constant rain, as well as the unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans. Collectively, he believed they formed an untold and unwritten history, one that defied epic sweep by its very fractiousness, but a history infinitely greater (like life’s) than the few scraps and distortions that are ever told or written.⁴

In Whitman’s estimation all historians—not merely the historians of the Civil War—tended to overlook the common man. Near the end of his life he told one of his literary executors, Thomas Harned, that he had something of a distaste for history: So much of it is cruel, so much of it is lie. I am waiting for the historians who will tell the truth about the people—about the nobility of the people: the essential soundness of the common man. … Think of the things in everyday life—we see them everywhere—that never are exploited in print. Nobody hunts them up— nobody puts them into a story.⁵ Despite this grim view, Whitman himself had been a participant in a powerful collective counternarrative of the war that had already been written, an impromptu and impressionistic narrative, jotted down … at the time and on the spot by the nation’s newspaper writers.

Many years after the war, Whitman still vividly remembered gathering with a crowd after midnight on April 13,1861, to hear the telegraphic dispatch from the New York Times announcing the outbreak of war. In the days and weeks following the first Battle of Bull Run he faithfully read the editorials of Horace Greeley because they restored the Union energies with determination five times magnified.⁶ On December 16, 1862, he recognized the misspelled name of his brother in the New York Herald among the lists of wounded at Fredericksburg. He saw a giant broadside tacked outside a Washington newspaper office proclaiming Glorious Victory for the Union Army! on the night of July 4, 1863— that Independence Day that both Vicksburg and Gettysburg were won.⁷ When news of Lincoln’s assassination reached New York on April 15, 1865, Whitman spent the morning with his mother passing the newspapers back and forth in silence, and in the afternoon ventured into the rain to join the crowds around the bulletin boards where the evening editions were posted.⁸

For Whitman, the real history of the war lay in these moods and moments, which were dramatized—and often created—by the daily stream of information and misinformation that drove the anxiety of the period.

It would take a century for these works to receive serious attention from historians and another generation for literary scholars to begin studying them. In Patriotic Gore, published for the war’s centennial in 1961, Edmund Wilson lamented, The period of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished.⁹ But Wilson believed that there was an unmatched flowering of effective and moving writing in genres usually classified outside literature:

The elaborate orations of Charles Sumner, modeled on Demosthenes and Cicero; Lincoln’s unique addresses, at once directives and elegies; John Brown’s letters from prison and final speech to the court; Grant’s hard and pellucid memoirs and John Mosby’s almost picaresque ones, together with the chronicles and apologetics of innumerable other officers of both the armies; the brilliant journal of Mary Chestnut, so much more imaginative and revealing than most of the fiction inspired by the war; the autobiographies of the Adams brothers … such documents dramatize the war as the poet or the fiction writer has never been able to do.¹⁰

Yet Wilson was unwilling to claim a literary status for these works—even those he went on to discuss in Patriotic Gore—for the very reason that they amounted to a fractured and often contradictory narrative. He compared the experience of piecing together these texts to reading Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons.¹¹

Wilson’s argument found still firmer footing in Daniel Aaron’s Unwritten War, published in 1973, at the end of the Vietnam era. Aaron argued that the Civil War had profoundly affected a number of important writers but had inspired a paucity of ‘epics’ and ‘masterpieces.’ 12 Referring to Whitman’s claim that the real war will never get in the books, Aaron argued that many aspects of the ‘real’ War can only be discovered in some of the published and unpublished memorabilia. A glance at this material shows how much of the War escaped even Whitman’s searching and sympathetic eye. Like Wilson before him, Aaron did not view these items of memorabilia as superior to the literature of the war, despite his claim that as yet no novel or poem has disclosed the common soldier so vividly as the historian Bell Wiley does in his collective portraits of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.¹³

Aaron wrote at perhaps the last moment in the American study of (war) literature in which New Critical and Romantic standards of beauty and truth were used to judge the greatness of a work. After Vietnam the unknowability of truth and the confusion and moral relativism of war become the primary subjects of American war narratives. Tim O’Brien’s seminal piece, How to Tell a True War Story, published in 1990, uses this confusion as its central conceit. The more the narrator insists on the truth of the story, the more invented it seems to become, until finally the narrator concedes that it is only through lying that any truth about war can be constructed: "In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. … And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.14

Such postmodern, post-Vietnam realizations of relative truths in the fog of war were part of a new critical paradigm. No longer did critics lament, as Aaron did, the impossibility of reproducing authentic sensations of war or disparage a work of literature for telling only part of the story.¹⁵ In this new era, the fragmented narrative became the dominant mode. Any work that seemed to present too coherent or too crafted a vision aroused suspicion. Operating within this new framework, a new wave of scholars has returned to previously ignored works and gleaned a wealth of material in the occasional and ephemeral pieces published during the Civil War.

The two finest examples of this scholarship are Kathleen Diffley’s Where My Heart Is Turning Ever and Alice Fahs’s The Imagined Civil War. Diffley debunks the myth of the unwritten war by studying more than three hundred stories published in popular magazines between 1861 and 1876. She not only demonstrates the extent of this body of work but also maps its significant trends. Her considerable broadening of the Civil War canon not only provides valuable context but also suggests other, untapped opportunities for study of the popular press, especially where poetry is concerned.

Subsequent studies have sought to apply Diffley’s sensibility to other aspects of periodical culture, but so far only Fahs has approached Diffley’s level of meticulousness.¹⁶ But whereas Diffley’s analysis delves deeply into a circumscribed body of texts, Fahs offers a sweeping panorama of the war’s popular literature, a category that includes not only the histories, novels, and poetry of the war but also humorous tales, songs, children’s stories, and various kinds of print ephemera. Most of this work was published by obscure authors about whom little is known, or it was published anonymously, pseudonymously, or with initials that provide tantalizing—but often insoluble—clues to authorship.¹⁷ Fahs uses this dearth of biographical information as an opportunity to study works and publications rather than focus on authors. As a result, The imagined Civil War is more coherent and insightful than Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, and, paradoxically, its comprehensiveness highlights the best writers of the war more effectively than does Wilson’s exultation of the few.

These books, taken collectively, also suggest a new methodology for writing traditional author biography. Where past scholars have relied almost exclusively on an author’s own view of himself or herself, this course of research opens the broader possibility of examining an author’s place within the cultural context of a particular moment. In the case of a writer like Whitman, it also presents the opportunity to investigate periods previously considered too sketchy to analyze, if not lost altogether.

Given Whitman’s proclivity for self-invention, perhaps it should come as no surprise that he distrusted biographers and historians. What lying things, travesties, most all so-called histories, biographies, autobiographies, are! Whitman told Horace Traubel in his late-life home in Camden. They make you sick—give you the bellyache! I suppose it can be said that the world still waits for its honest historian, biographer, autobiographer. Will he ever come? Traubel harbored the ambition of being Whitman’s Boswell and jovially offered, I’ll be the first! But Whitman responded with disgust. It would be a worthy ambition, he huffed. It would be revolutionary.¹⁸

Whitman’s disdain for biography seems to have originated shortly after the Civil War, when official histories of every general and politician were rushed into print. In late 1866 he first published the poem When I read the book, the biography famous, which he would later expand to read, in full:

When I read the book, the biography famous,

And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life?

And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?

(As if any man really knew aught of my life;

Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;

Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clews and indirections, I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

The poem contains Whitman’s fundamental argument: no man—not even Whitman himself—could know the story of his life. How could anyone write a book that could capture anything so elusive as a man?

Yet Whitman spent his later years with his first biographer, Richard Maurice Bucke, and then Horace Traubel, recalling and explicating the minutiae of his life, lending significance to the false starts and missteps, shaping his random days into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Be cause of his many failures of memory, Whitman has often been accused of lying or stretching the truth in the construction of this story; more often, however, he was simply selective, choosing his details as carefully as any writer would. Contemporary critics saw his poems as indiscriminate auction catalogues, but Whitman was, in fact, a master of elision in all phases of his life. He emphasized touchstone moments that mattered most to him, returning to them almost obsessively, while remaining frustratingly mum about vast passages of time.

For years he teased Traubel with the promise of revealing a major secret, but when Traubel chided him, You haven’t yet told me your great secret, Whitman replied, No, I haven’t, but I will: you must know it: some day the right day will come. But it never did, and Whitman died without revealing the secret. The result of such withholdings is a series of famed silences. Gaps in the record. Lost years.

The most famous of these gaps is the span of years from 1850 to 1855, the period in which Whitman transformed himself from a dilettante story writer to the prototypical working-class poet—transformed himself, in other words, from Walter to Walt.

Walter had been born into a humble family of Quakers on Long Island, and his social standing had allowed him to rise no further than fleeting stints as editor of various small-time newspapers. For the better part of the 1840s, he had fashioned himself a dandy, complete with cane and boutonniere, in a vain attempt to boost his status. But for the frontispiece of the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt changed all that. His broad hat tipped back, his beard thick and mottled, he stood defiantly, one hand crooked at his hip, the other thrust in his pocket. Most importantly, he was dressed in the clothes of the common man. No waistcoat or tie, he posed with his collar open, revealing a workingman’s undershirt.

The dramatic appearance in 1855 and the quickly ensuing issuance of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grasshowever, slipped into a second silence in 1857 that lasted until the final months of 1859. Whitman was editing the Brooklyn Daily Times for part of that time but, as Ezra Greenspan has noted, put so little of himself into the paper that it seemed almost as if it were edited by some other Walt Whitman.¹⁹ The tone of the editorials bears almost no resemblance to Whitman’s distinctive style; indeed, many scholars harbor doubts about his authorship—despite Whitman’s own claim to have edited the paper from 1857-1859.20

That silence was ended by the publication of the greatly expanded 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but after its release tradition holds that Whitman disappeared a third time for more than two years. Jerome Loving, in his recent biography Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself goes so far as to assign specific dates to this vanishing: "Whitman fairly disappears from all biographies between May 24, 1860, when he took the Shore Line Railroad back from Boston after seeing the third edition of Leaves of Grass through the press, to December 16,1862, when the Whitman household at 122 Portland Street, near Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, got its first indication that brother George had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg."²¹

Loving is hardly alone in his judgment. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price describe the years leading up to the Civil War as one of the haziest periods of Whitman’s life.²² Roy Morris Jr. described Whitman during these years as strangely abstracted, until the war showed up abruptly on the Whitmans’ own doorstep.²³ M. Jimmie Killingsworth has gone one step further, writing that Whitman seems to have worked at avoiding the reality of war.²⁴

Whitman left a dauntingly complete record of his war years in Washington, D.C. By providing more than enough material for a book in his 1863 and early 1864 prose writings as well as his 1865 publications of Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, Whitman has freed scholars from the necessity of investigating the interstices.

For example, Roy Morris Jr.’s Better Angel, which claims to be the first book-length study of Whitman’s Civil War period, instead focuses almost exclusively on Whitman in Washington during 1863 and parts of 1864 and 1865. Morris nods toward periodical history by mentioning Whitman’s numerous associations—friendships with Henry Clapp of the New York Leader in 1861 or William Swinton of the New York Times in 1863, for example—but he never considers how such friendships may have granted Whitman entrance to certain publications, much less how those editorial tastes or those readerships may have shaped his work. He also falls prey to a common desire to pinpoint a stable aesthetic and artistic vision, rather than recognize that Whitman’s penchant for reinvention was only accelerated by the dynamism of war. In an effort to present a simple narrative, Morris’s book, like so many studies before, grants only a few pages to Whitman’s activities in 1861 and 1862. Likewise, Mark Daniel Epstein, in Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, claims only to document Whitman’s years while he lived in Washington, but he freely includes New York passages—such as the printing of Drum-Taps—when the historical record is readily available.

A far better model for an account of Whitman during the war is Stanton Garner’s The Civil War World of Herman Melville, a kaleidoscopic study encompassing Melville’s life from the buildup to war to the beginnings of reconstruction. The encyclopedic range of the book is all the more remarkable when one considers that Melville left almost no direct record of his life during this time—no diary, fewer than two dozen letters, and almost no incoming correspondence. In order to sustain this work of more than 500 pages, Garner relies on a wealth of less conventional sources to recreate the world that shaped Melville’s war experience—asserting in his introduction, Thus if it is impossible to know much about the life of Herman Melville, it is possible to know a great deal about the world in which he lived.²⁵ This combination of archival sources, contemporary accounts from the popular press, military records, and Melville’s own poetry weaves together into a rich and surprisingly coherent portrait. The method is especially appropriate and effective, because Garner does such an effective job of linking his source material to Melville’s own works. Though Melville watched blockade ships being readied for duty in the