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LX Walt Whitman as Civil Servant
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Walt Whitman's services as a Federal clerk are treated briefly by all his biographers, and his dismissal from the Office of Indian Affairs is one of the best-known incidents in the poet's life. Yet no systematic canvass of the records in the National Archives, particularly in respect to Whitman's longer employment in the Department of Justice, has been published. In consequence a crop of errors has sprung up among the poet's biographers. For example, Harrison S. Morris's reminiscent Walt Whitman (Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 65, states that “in 1864 Walt had secured a clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department”; other biographers state or imply that Whitman's tenure began in February 1865, whereas the records cited hereafter show that his appointment and salary began as of January 1, 1865, although he did not set to work until several weeks later. Clara Barrus's generally admirable Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (Boston and New York, 1931), p. 25, incorrectly states that Whitman “was removed from his post in the Department of the Interior on June 10, 1865.” The dates of the poet's promotions, from the lowest (first class) to higher ranks of clerkship, are not stated with accuracy in any biography; and his movements during these Washington years are not always carefully described. Bliss Perry, for instance, in writing of Whitman's visit to Dartmouth College in June 1872 for the delivery of his Commencement Poem, says that “by the first of July he was back in Washington”—whereas one of the documents printed below shows that he was lingering in Brooklyn, and applying for extension of leave on grounds of illness, as late as July 9. The clerical duties he performed during these eight years after the Civil War, while of minor import in Whitman's life as an artist—the life that created “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and “Passage to India”—did furnish him a livelihood and the convenience of a bachelor's study after hours, with stationery, free heat, the gas for his “astral lamp,” and the right to order books for the Office library. They may thus repay a brief review.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943
References
page 1094 note 1 For example, H. B. Binns, A life of Walt Whitman (London, 1905), p. 210; G. R. Carpenter, Walt Whitman (New York, 1909), p. 106; Floyd Stovall, Walt Whitman (American Writers Series, 1934), p. lxii. John Bailey, Walt Whitman (London, 1926), p. 38, incorrectly says, respecting the year 1864, “By December he was back in Washington, where, soon after, he obtained a clerkship in the Indian Bureau.” It will be noted that Whitman applied for this post in absentia.
page 1094 note 2 Walt Whitman (Boston and New York, 1906), p. 210. Emory Holloway, Whitman, an interpretation in narratine (New York and London, 1926), p. 275, through what is probably a typographical error gives the date of his Tufts College Commencement Poem, “Song of the Universal,” as 1872 instead of 1874.
page 1095 note 3 Perry, op. cit., p. 148, and Charles I. Glicksberg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1933), pp. 95, 131, et passim. In his first two weeks of employment the poet earned $27 from Hapgood (letter to Jeff Whitman, Jan. 16, 1863, in Holloway, “Some new Whitman letters,” American Mercury, xvi [Feb. 1929], 185). “Paying the Bounties,” a sketch in Specimen Days describing payment of the troops by “Major H.,” “behind a small mountain of greenbacks,” recalls these times.
page 1095 note 4 Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (New York, 1915), ii, 401. The state of Whitman's health and his activities at this time are mirrored in two letters in the Aldis Collection at Yale: the poet to Charles W. Eldridge from Brooklyn, July 9 and Oct. 8,1864.
page 1095 note 5 Perry, op. cit., p. 150.
page 1095 note 6 Traubel, op. cit., iii, 470–471. The official copies will be found in the National Archives, in the Letter Book cited below.
page 1096 note 7 Records of the Department of the Interior, Appointments Division, Letter Book: Sept. 15, 1861 to Aug. 2, 1865.
page 1096 note 8 Perry, op. cit., pp. 152–154. Whitman's desk was in the basement of the Patent Office (letter to his mother, May 25, 1865, in Holloway, “Some new Whitman letters,” loc. cit., p. 187).
page 1097 note 9 Traubel, op. cit., iii, 471.
page 1097 note 10 Harlan's order of June 30 for “Walter Whitman's” dismissal, printed by numerous biographers, is found in the Letter Book cited above. J. T. Trowbridge, “Reminiscences of Walt Whitman,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 89 (Feb. 1902), p. 171, errs in assuming that Harlan had been appointed by President Andrew Johnson. He was of course an appointee of Lincoln; cf. Whitman, “A glint inside of Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet appointments,” Complete Writings, ed. Bucke, Harned, and Traubel (New York and London, 1902), vi, 219.
page 1098 note 11 Office of the Attorney General, Disbursing Clerk, Cash Book, p. 45.
page 1098 note 12 Glicksberg, op. cit., p. 108. Whitman's sketch of Confederate pardon-seekers, labeled “Attorney General's Office, Washington, Aug. 22, 1865” (Complete Writings, vi, 217–219), is a reminiscence of this month.
page 1098 note 13 Barrus, op. cit., p. 43. “I expect to return about 12th Sept.,” the poet writes from 279 East 55th Street, New York, on Aug. 25, 1866, to “Andy,” after describing his long walks up Broadway, his sailing on the river, and his daily stint of three to four hours reading proof (MS, Aldis Collection, Yale). Traubel, iii, 475, prints Whitman's application for his next year's autumn vacation, from Sept. 9 to Oct. 12, 1867.
page 1098 note 14 T. B. Harned, Letters written by Walt Whitman to his mother (New York and London, 1902), pp. 15, 16, 30–31. His statement regarding his new rank and salary is confirmed by the Order Book, 1860–70, Attorney General's Office, under date of Nov. 13, 1866.
page 1098 note 15 Letter of March 16, 1867, in Harned, p. 42.
page 1099 note 16 Lyman E. Munson, “Pioneer life in Montana,” Historical Society of Montana: Contributions, v (1904), 200 n. et seq. The charges against him seem to have grown out of a local feud between the Democratic legislature and the Republican judiciary (“Biographical sketch of Hezekiah L. Hosmer,” ibid., iii [1900], 297). No copy of the charges against Munson exists today in Department of Justice records, although the Register of Letters Received indicates that Munson wrote on Feb. 19, 1868 to the Attorney General asking for a copy, and that Cavanaugh preferred his charges on April 4, 1868. Whatever the truth or falsity of these charges, Munson's case never came to trial. Department of Justice records show his request for a leave of absence until Nov. 1, 1868 as granted in a letter to him on Sept. 21, signed by Whitman's friend the Chief Clerk, M. F. Pleasants; also that Munson resigned from the bench on Oct. 31. The back of the last sheet of Whitman's abstract is docketed: “Dec. 5, 1868 Reed. of the Attorney General all of the papers relating to charges agst Judge L. E. Munson—James M. Cavanaugh.” So, after Munson's resignation, the charges apparently were dropped and these papers withdrawn from the official files. The Judge's son, Major Edward L. Munson, states that his father “resigned his official position and returned to New Haven for family reasons” (ibid., vii, 201). The Judge resumed private practice of the law in New Haven, and in old age wrote grandiose rhetoric about his share in the epic of Montana (e.g., the peroration of his “Pioneer life on the American frontier,” Connecticut Magazine, xi [1907], 102).
page 1100 note 17 The collection of the late Wm. F. Gable, American Art Association, New York City, March 10 and 11, 1924, No. 1113.
page 1100 note 18 In preparing this survey I am indebted to the help of Dr. P. M. Hamer, Chief of the Division of Reference in the National Archives, and his staff.
page 1101 note 19 Ashton's words, as found in Barrus, op. cit., p. 29.
page 1101 note 20 Rollo G. Silver, “Seven letters of Walt Whitman,” American Literature, vii (1935), 80; and Glicksberg, op. cit., p. 112.
page 1101 note 21 Harned, op. cit., p. 61.
page 1101 note 22 R. M. Bucke ed., Calamus (Boston, 1897), pp. 35 to 51, for Whitman's letters to Doyle during his excursion. One of Doyle's to Whitman, Sept. 27, 1868, is directed to the poet at 331 East 55th Street, New York (MS., Pierpont Morgan Library).
page 1101 note 23 Harned, op. cit., p. 69.
page 1102 note 24 Glicksberg, op. cit., p. 115.
page 1102 note 25 Calamus, pp. 53–59.
page 1102 note 26 The phrase is quoted from a letter of Whitman's mother to Miss Helen Price (Morgan Library MS., a. Glicksberg, p. 118 n.).
page 1102 note 27 Calamus, pp. 61–79.
page 1102 note 28 Prose Works (McKay, Philadelphia, n. d.), p. 210.
page 1103 note 29 W. B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant: Politician (New York, 1935), p. 210; and Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish (New York, 1936), p. 367.
page 1103 note 30 Calamus, pp. 81–86.
page 1104 note 31 Glicksberg, op. cit., p. 102.
page 1104 note 32 Ibid., p. 103. See also Whitman to his brother Jeff, Jan. 26, 1872, in Rollo G. Silver, “Thirty-one letters of Walt Whitman,” American Literature, viii (1937), 420. The permanent order of transfer was not issued until March 10, 1873, when Whitman had already served for a year and had been stricken with paralysis (see order in Traubel, iii, 475). An apparently unpublished holograph MS of Whitman in the Van Sinderen Collection at Yale, entitled “Washington as a central winter residence” (written evidently for the newspapers, but of unknown fate respecting its appearance), belongs on internal evidence to the interval between Williams's appointment and Whitman's onset of paralysis. Praising the fine cosmopolitan milieu of the Capital, it lists among the local notables Attorney General Williams, Burroughs, O'Connor, Charles Sumner, Ben Butler, and Walt Whitman.
page 1105 note 33 Whitman's letters to Doyle afford a good check upon these movements. A passage in “Personal Notes,” q. Bucke, Calamus, p. 4, regarding “a two months' trip through the New England States,” implies that his entire vacation was spent upon this trip; but the poet's letters (e.g., Calamus, pp. 87–98, and Barrus, op. cit., p. 73) show that it lasted only about ten days.
page 1105 note 34 Cf. Specimen Days, “An Interregnum Paragraph,” stating “In February '73 I was stricken down by paralysis,” and similar quotations from Whitman in Bucke's Walt Whitman, p. 45, and Holloway's Whitman, p. 265 (the latter however giving editorially the correct date). Whitman's minor illness during the latter half of 1864, noted above, in retrospect may have seemed to him the beginning of his later troubles. At any rate, in Whitman's old age the years between the War and his paralysis were omitted by a kind of syncope in his memory; thus in a fragmentary autobiography dated May, 1890, now in the Van Sinderen Collection, we read: “His intense and continued personal occupation day and night, for over two years following [1862], in nursing the army wounded and sick, northern and southern alike, resulted in a severe prostration and paralysis at the end of the Contest, which he has suffered under since ...” Conclusive of the exact date of his actual stroke is Whitman's letter to his mother from Washington, Jan. 26, 1873: “I have had a slight stroke of paralysis ... occurred Thursday night last” (In re Walt Whitman, Philadelphia, 1893, p. 73).
page 1106 note 35 Ibid., pp. 84 ff. The Van Sinderen Collection contains fifteen letters from the poet to his mother, the majority printed by Traubel, In re Wall Whitman, beginning “two or three” days after his stroke and running to May 16, 1873. During the remainder of January and the first few days in February he wrote her reassuring bulletins almost daily. On Feb. 2 he notes cheerfully that “they have sent over & paid me my January pay,” out of which he remits the customary $20 to her. By Feb. 17 he reports that he is able to walk downstairs and into the street. On March 29 he writes her from the office, confessing his inability to work but hoping “to make a commencement next Monday,” i.e., the day after tomorrow; he adds a postscript to show that he does return to the office on Monday, but feels only “middling.” Once more from his desk, on office stationery, he writes April 16 to tell her that he has been discussing cases of paralysis with his fellow-clerks. On April 30 he has a cold, and abstains from going to the office. In the last letter, May 16, he remarks that it is now his custom to visit the office around noon: “Then I hitch over to the office, & stay there for a couple of hours—then I hitch out & get in the cars & take quite a long ride ...”
page 1106 note 36 Letters in Barrus, op. cit., pp. 83–84. In the complete text of his letter to John and Ursula Burroughs, June 29, 1873, found in the Van Sinderen Collection but somewhat condensed by Barrus, Whitman writes: “Mother died here on the 23d of May. I stood it better than I would have expected—I returned to Washington about nine days afterwards—but I was very restless & dissatisfied there—staid about a couple of weeks—obtained two months leave of absence.” He is now back in Camden.
page 1107 note 37 Ibid., p. 85. Despite his optimism on paper, it must have grown increasingly clear to Whitman that he could never again take up his clerical work; on October 10 of this year Whitman told a correspondent, probably Eldridge, that “the least exertion confuses my head, & overcomes me” (Silver, “Thirty-one letters of Walt Whitman,” American Literature, viii, 424).
page 1108 note 38 Op. cit., iii, 476. General Records, Attorney General's Files, contain a memorandum from the Solicitor, Major Bluford Wilson, to the Attorney General, June 30, 1874, à propos of the ordered reduction in staff: “I have to say, upon consideration of the matter, that Mr. Walt Whitman is the clerk of this class who can be discharged with least detriment to the public service.” The original of Whitman's letter of dismissal from Williams, June 30, 1874, as kept among his papers, is now in the Van Sinderen Collection at Yale.
page 1108 note 39 Williams to Bristow in Executive and Congressional Letter Book “B,” Sept. 23,1872, to Sept. 17, 1874, Attorney General's Files; Williams to Whitman, in Letter Book “K,” June 26, 1873, to Aug. 12, 1875, in the same file.
page 1109 note 40 Shortly after the onset of his paralysis, in making his will on May 16, 1873, Whitman stated that he then had $950 in one savings bank and $550 in another (Barrus, op. cit., p. 82).