Memories of President Lincoln

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Amid the huzzahs, the flapping pennants, and the roars from the floor at the Republican National Convention in New York City last week, it was hard to imagine a moment, or even a split-second, of stillness. Yet an eerie and quite improbable silence greeted Abraham Lincoln when he arrived in the city on February 19, 1861, from Springfield en route to his inauguration in Washington. Walt Whitman was there among the “vast and silent crowds” in their thousands, and it was the “sulky, unbroken silence, such as certainly never before characterized so great a New York crowd” that most impressed him on that day.


Curious, I checked on Whitman’s facts in “The New York Chronology,” compiled by James Trager (Harper Resource, 933 pages, $34.95), which confirms every detail of his account, except for the silence. (For a vivid, almost day-by-day compendium of New York City lore, from 1524 to 2002, the “Chronology” is the one indispensable book every delegate should have packed in his bags.) That day provided Whitman his first glimpse of Lincoln. In a lecture delivered almost 20 years later, he noted that “a tall figure stepp’d out of the centre of these barouches, paus’d leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel – then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan” the assembled multitude. That stretch stuck in Whitman’s memory, for he mentions it twice. The contrast between the relaxed and amiable demeanor of the President-elect and the tense and anxious muteness of the spectators – “I have no doubt,” he adds, that “many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pock et there” – seems to have crystallized both his image of Lincoln and of the future president’s relations with his constituents.


Whitman had long since invested Lincoln with a mystical aura, and his recollections were no doubt colored by this. By 1879,when he delivered “Death of Abraham Lincoln” as a lecture in New York City, Lincoln had become for Whitman “the Redeemer President of These States,” our “first great Martyr-Chief,” a holy presence, set apart and elected by destiny. The silence that haloed Lincoln on Broadway that winter day prefigured his apotheosis four years later – an apotheosis that, for Whitman at least, had nothing to do with divinization but was quintessentially and profoundly democratic. In commenting on Lincoln’s assassination, Whitman remarked that “a long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the secession period comes to a head, and is gather’d in one brief flash of lightning-illumination.” Whitman invokes the “historic Muse” and the “tragic Muse” as presiding simultaneously over this “climax-moment on the stage of universal Time.” Yet his understanding of Lincoln’s assassination is far from tragic, and consciously so.


Though Whitman was to encounter Lincoln frequently during the Civil War, when the poet worked tirelessly tending wounded soldiers, and though he was to describe these incidents in several reports, he seems never to have spoken with the embattled president. Perhaps some uncharacteristic sense of modesty restrained him; in a report from 1863, he noted Lincoln’s “dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression,” and we feel the awed affection in the glimpse. More likely, though, it was Whitman’s sense of a sacred destiny – which Lincoln, with “his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face,” improbably embodied – that held Whitman’s natural impulsiveness in check.


Whitman’s deepest expression of feeling for Lincoln, at once bold and shyly diffident, occurs in his elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” written not long after the assassination on April 14, 1865. This magnificent poem remains perhaps the strangest tribute ever composed by a great poet to a fallen leader. Whitman mourns Lincoln from the depths of his soul, but he couches his death in the most grandly affirmative accents imaginable. This is a poem of immense promise, as opposed to mere shallow optimism or false consolation. As such, it befits for our eternally promissory nation.


Affirmation, to be sure, was Whitman’s natural element; he splashed and surged and cavorted there, sometimes absurdly, more often sublimely. It would have been utterly out of character for him to treat Lincoln’s death – or death itself – in any other manner than the affirmative. Already, in “Song of Myself,” he had written “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” But in the case of Lincoln, the challenge was thornier, for the murdered president incarnated the American soul and that soul’s future destiny. In “Lilacs,” Whitman hymned death itself as the “dark mother always gliding near with soft feet” and he asked: “Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? / Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all.” The sprig of lilac, emblem of “everreturning spring,” which Whitman symbolically places on Lincoln’s coffin as it makes its way “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,” prefigures the promise implicit in death, the promise of recurrence and return. The “trinity sure” of the poem – lilac sprig and western star and the “shy and hidden bird,” the poet himself – throbs with this insistent promise.


Death is the great democratizer, and Whitman deploys his elegy for Lincoln so that it encompasses all the fallen of the Civil War:



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,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not


In Biblical terms, Lincoln may be, like Christ, the “first-born among the dead,” but he is neither lost nor alone; he has become, with them, part of the ever-returning promise. We know how bitterly Whitman lamented the dead soldiers he tended. In describing his experiences he exclaimed, “the dead, the dead, the dead – our dead – or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me).” Lincoln’s death was not ultimately tragic, for it sealed the Union with unbreakable “cement.” Whitman spelled this out: “The final use of a heroic-eminent life – especially of a heroic-eminent death – is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give, often at many removes, but unerringly, age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind.”


Amid the buzz and chatter of the modern campaign, perhaps some small and hallowed space can yet be found for what Whitman so beautifully called “retrievements out of the night,” the silent underlying promise of all our forebears, whatever their party or persuasion, on the American earth.


The New York Sun

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