(_His opinion of President Lincoln_)
[The original letter dated Washington, March 19, 1863, is owned in New
York and is of exceptional interest, as written to two intimate
friends and revealing Whitman at his very best. He says it is the
longest he has ever written, and that he is “writing at night, while
taking care of the child of a friend who had gone to see Matilda Heron
in _Medea_.”]
* * * After describing his life in Washington, among the soldiers, he
refers thus to President Lincoln:
“Congress does not seize hard upon me ... much gab, great fear of public
opinion; plenty of low business talent, but no masterful man in Congress
(probably best so)—I THINK WELL OF THE PRESIDENT. He has a face like a
Hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its
strange mouth, its deep cut criss-cross lines, and its doughnut
complexion. My notion is, too, that underneath his outside smutched
manner, and stories from third-class country bar rooms (it is his
humor), Mr. Lincoln keeps a fountain of first class practical telling
wisdom. I do not dwell on the supposed failures of his government; he
has shown I sometimes think an almost supernatural tact in keeping the
ship afloat at all, with head steady, not only not going down and now
certain not to, but with proud and resolute spirit, and flag flying in
sight of the world, menacing and high as ever. I say never yet Captain,
never ruler, had such a perplexing dangerous task as his the past two
years. I more and more rely upon his idiomatic western genius, careless
of court dress or of court decorums....”
(_His hospital experiences are very interesting._)
“... These Hospitals, so different from all others—these thousands, and
ten and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded ...
operated on, pallid with diarrhoea, languishing, dying with fever,
pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer
insights ... showing our humanity ... tried by terrible fearful tests,
probed deepest, the living souls, the body’s tragedies, bursting the
petty bonds of art. To these, what are your dreams and poems, even the
oldest and the tearfullest? Not old Greek mighty ones, where man
contends with fate (and always yields)—not Virgil showing Dante on and
on among the agonized and damned, approach what here I see and take a
part in. For here I see, not at intervals but quite always, how certain
man, our American man—how he holds himself cool and unquestioned master
above all pains and bloody mutilations.... This, then, what frightened
us all so long! Why it is put to flight with ignominy—a mere stuffed
scarecrow of the fields. O death where is thy sting? O grave where is
thy victory?...”