Walt Whitman's Lectures On Abraham Lincoln

The lecture centered on the assassination of Lincoln, but also covered years leading up to and during the American Civil War and often included readings of poems such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The deliveries were generally well received, and cemented Whitman's public image as an authority on Lincoln.

Whitman greatly admired Lincoln and was moved by his assassination in 1865 to write several poems in the President's memory. The idea of a lecture on the topic was first proposed by his friend John Burroughs in an 1878 letter. Whitman, who had long aspired to be a lecturer, first spoke on the death of Lincoln in New York City's Steck Hall on April 14 the following year. Over the next eleven years, he delivered the lecture at least ten, and possibly as many as twenty, more times.

Many deliveries of the lecture were part of a broader speaker series or fundraising events. A delivery of the lecture in 1887 at Madison Square Theatre is considered the most successful presentation. Whitman's biographer Justin Kaplan writes that this delivery and the reception that followed was the closest Whitman came to "social eminence on a large scale", as it was attended by many prominent members of American society. Whitman later described that lecture and reception as "the culminating hour" of his life, but at another time criticized it as "too much the New York Jamboree". He gave the lecture for the last time in Philadelphia in 1890, two years before his death.

 

 

Whitman (left) and Lincoln (right), c. 1854, when they were 35 and 45 years old, respectively

Walt Whitman established his reputation as a poet in the late 1850s to early 1860s after the 1855 release of Leaves of Grass. The brief volume was controversial, with critics particularly objecting to Whitman's blunt depictions of sexuality and what the University of Virginia Libraries has described as its "obvious homoerotic overtones". At the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he held a series of government jobs—first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also volunteered in army hospitals as a nurse.

Although they never met, Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln several times between 1861 and 1865. The first time was when Lincoln stopped in New York City in 1861 on his way to Washington. Whitman greatly admired the President, writing in October 1863, "I love the President personally," and later declaring that "Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else." Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, greatly moved Whitman and the nation. Shortly after Lincoln's death, hundreds of poems had already been written about it. The historian Stephen B. Oates argues that "never had the nation mourned so over a fallen leader".

Whitman himself wrote four poems in tribute to the President: "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and "This Dust Was Once the Man". In 1875 he published Memoranda During the War, which included a narrative of Lincoln's death, and the following year he published an article on Lincoln's death in The New York Sun. Though Whitman also considered writing a book on Lincoln, he never did.

Whitman and lectures

 

In the mid-19th century, public lectures in the United States became regarded as a platform for well-known Americans to reach large numbers of people. Because of this, the lecture became directly associated with celebrity and fame. By the 1870s, Whitman had long sought to be a lecturer, writing several lectures and delivering one as early as 1851, at the Brooklyn Art Union.

In a letter written on February 3, 1878, Whitman's friend John Burroughs suggested that he deliver a lecture on Lincoln's assassination. Burroughs wrote that the editor Richard Watson Gilder also supported the idea, and suggested delivery around the anniversary of the assassination, in April. On February 24, Whitman responded to Burroughs, agreeing to the proposal. The next month, Whitman began experiencing severe pain in his shoulder and was partially paralyzed; as a result, the lecture was postponed to May. On April 18, the physician Silas Weir Mitchell attributed this paralysis to a ruptured blood vessel in Whitman's brain, and in May Whitman gave up on plans for delivering the lecture that year. In March 1879, a group of Whitman's friends, including Gilder, Burroughs, and the jeweler John H. Johnston, began planning a lecture again. As part of the preparations for the first lecture, Whitman worked his New York Sun article into a format for reading aloud.

Between 1879 and 1890 Whitman gave a lecture on the assassination of Lincoln a number of times. Money made from these lectures constituted a major source of income for him in the last years of his life, before his death in 1892.

The first lecture was given in Steck Hall, New York City, on April 14, 1879. Whitman was unable to find further bookings for the rest of the year. He did not give another lecture until April 15, 1880, in Association Hall, Philadelphia. He revised the lecture's content slightly for the second reading; it would stay in largely the same form for every subsequent delivery. Whitman gave the lecture again in 1881. No records show him delivering it in the next five years, but he gave it at least four times in 1886, and several times in the four years after. Whitman's April 15, 1887, lecture at Madison Square Theatre is considered the most successful of the deliveries, largely because it was attended by many prominent societal figures. He gave the lecture at least two further times, including his last delivery in Philadelphia on April 14, 1890, just two years before his death. The text of the lecture was published in Whitman's Complete Prose Works. Whitman also sent a written copy of the lecture to his friend Thomas Donaldson in 1886. Donaldson, in turn, sent the lecture to the author Bram Stoker, who received it in 1894.

Whitman said that he gave the lecture a total of thirteen times, but later scholars give varying numbers—estimates range as high as twenty. Eleven individual deliveries have been identified:

 

The scholar Merrill D. Peterson describes Whitman as not an orator "either in manner or appearance". Contemporary observers also described Whitman as a poor speaker, saying that his voice would become higher than normal during deliveries and describing it as "unnatural-sounding". However, other sources describe him as speaking in a low voice.

The lecture combined clippings of previously written material, such as the article Whitman had published on Lincoln's death in the New York Sun, Memoranda During the War, The Bride of Gettysburg by John Dunbar Hilton, and some new content. In preparing for the lecture, Whitman also considered the story of Demodocus, a bard in Homer's Odyssey, who Whitman wrote "sings of the bloody war between the Greeks and Trojans".

According to the scholar Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, Whitman generally began by "downplaying his ability to handle the emotionally challenging task that lay before him". He then moved into describing the rise in tensions leading up to the 1860 presidential election and America during the Civil War era. Then he would describe Lincoln's death, the main focus of the lecture. Whitman described Ford's Theatre and the assassination in vivid detail, as if he had been there. He identified the assassination as a force that would "condense—a nationality," equating Lincoln's killing to a sacrifice which would "cement [...] the whole people."

Whitman brought a collection of fifteen poems with him to the lecture. He often read selections from the book at the lecture's conclusion. He frequently read his poem "O Captain! My Captain!", but the book contained five other poems from Leaves of Grass including "Proud Music of the Storm" and "To the Man-of-War-Bird". It also had clippings of the works of other poets such as "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, poems by William Collins, and a translation of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon's Ode XXXIII by Thomas Moore called "The Midnight Visitor". Whitman made his own alterations to the text of "The Midnight Visitor" that he read.

 

Deliveries of the lecture were popular and well received. Daniel Mark Epstein, in a biography of Whitman, wrote that his deliveries were always successful and usually attracted vast amounts of positive attention in local newspapers. The literary scholar Michael C. Cohen called Whitman's lecture his "most popular text" and Reynolds describes Whitman's deliveries as making him a household name. Conversely, in 1988 the professor Kerry C. Larson wrote that the "hackneyed" sentimentality of the lecture was indicative of a decline in his creativity.

Deliveries of the lecture were generally only attended by members of high society. According to Blake, they allowed those in attendance to "pay homage to both the president and the poet". He emphasizes how Whitman used the lecture to connect America's love for Lincoln with his own poetry, namely Leaves of Grass. Whitman's biographer Justin Kaplan wrote that Whitman's 1887 lecture in New York City and its aftermath marked the closest he came to "social eminence on a large scale".

Many audience members wrote positive accounts of hearing the lecture. José Martí, a Cuban journalist who was present at the 1887 lecture, wrote one such report that was spread across Latin America. He described the crowd as listening "in religious silence, for its sudden grace notes, vibrant tones, hymnlike progress, and Olympian familiarity seemed at times the whispering of the stars". The poet Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote that "[s]omething of Lincoln himself seemed to pass into this man who loved and studied him", and the poet Stuart Merrill said that Whitman's telling of the assassination convinced him that "I was there, [that] the very thing happened to me. And this recital was as gripping as the messengers' reports in Aeschylus."

Whitman also used the lecture to further perception of himself as a "public historian". Promotional materials for the lecture often falsely claimed that Whitman had known Lincoln well and had been in Ford's Theatre on the night of the assassination. An advertisement for his Elkton, Maryland, lecture in 1886 even said that Whitman had been in the room with Lincoln when he was shot. Whitman's lecture was intended to give the impression of presenting a factual account, with a tone that scholar Martin T. Buinicki writes is "pointedly historical". The English scholar Gregory Eiselein contrasts Whitman's depiction of Lincoln's death in his lecture with that in his poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", noting that "Lilacs" has a tone that Eiselein describes as "musical, ethereal, often abstract, [and] heavily symbolized." Blake describes Whitman's deliveries of his lecture and the respect they received from high society as representing a final "triumph" for Whitman, over the "slander and scorn" he had once experienced from the same group. Blake goes on to write that regularly delivering the lecture became "vital to [Whitman's] permanent achievement of [fame]."

• Cultural depictions of Abraham Lincoln