Walt Whitman Requests a First-Hand Account of Lincoln’s Assassination to Use in His Lectures on Lincoln

“Shall count on getting the extracts from your Journal about Mr Lincon’s murder & funeral soon as you can conveniently send them.”

Poet Walt Whitman greatly admired Abraham Lincoln. Whitman related that the two men would pass each other on the street in Washington during the Civil War and tip their hats to each other. Whitman was deeply affected by Lincoln’s assassination, writing several poems as elegies. Shortly after Lincoln was killed in April 1865, Whitman wrote the first of his Lincoln poems, “Hush’d Be the Camps Today”. In the following months, he wrote two more: his famous “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”. Both appeared in his collection “Sequel to Drum-Taps” later that year. The poems – particularly “O Captain!” – were well received, and popular both upon publication and in the following years. In 1871, his fourth poem on Lincoln, “This Dust Was Once the Man”, was published, and the four were grouped together as the “President Lincoln’s Burial Hymn” cluster. In 1881, the poems were republished in the “Memories of President Lincoln” cluster of Leaves of Grass.

Whitman saw himself as an interpreter of Lincoln. He gave a series of lectures on Lincoln, and was always looking for new material to shed light on the man for whom he had such admiration and affection.

Alfred Janson Bloor was an architect and a poet who had worked for Frederick Law Olmstead in 1859-1860, at the time Olmstead was designing Central Park. He took exception to Whitman’s contemptuous characterization of actors in his 1879 lecture on the Death of Lincoln, and wrote to Whitman to let him know, also telling him of a first-hand account of the night of Lincoln’s murder from Clara Harris [daughter of Senator Ira Harris], who had attended the play with the Lincolns on that evening. Whitman quoted Bloor’s defense of actors in a piece for the New York Tribune on May 24, 1879. Whitman also wrote Bloor on that date. The Whitman Archives states “The location of the original manuscript is unknown,” but it has been discovered and we present it now.

Autograph letter signed, New York, May 24, 1879, to Alfred Janson Bloor, regarding his letter to the Tribune quoting Bloor’s defense of actors, and requesting Bloor’s account of Lincoln’s death as heard through Clara Harris. “My dear Mr Bloor, I have returned the two pamphlets – which I suppose you have rec’d. In a letter in the Tribune of to-day I have printed (as I some time since notified you) – what you said – (well said) – about actors. I remain here till latter part of next week – then to Camden, New Jersey, which is my permanent p o address. Shall count on getting the extracts from your Journal about Mr Lincon’s murder & funeral soon as you can conveniently send them. Walt Whitman.”

Bloor would send Whitman his description of Miss Clara Harris’s account of Ford’s Theater the night of Lincoln’s assassination on June 7, and excerpts from his journals two days later. In the account given to Bloor the Friday following the assassination, Harris describes a jovial Lincoln, laughing and jesting during the carriage ride to the theater, and in their box, the smell of gunpowder, her fiancée Henry Rathbone’s injury trying to stop Booth from fleeing, as well as the deep, genuine grief of Mrs. Lincoln. Whitman himself had based his Lincoln lectures largely on the first-hand account of his friend Peter Doyle, who had been in the balcony on the night of the murder, so Bloor’s and Harris’s contribution must have been of great interest. Bloor confirmed sending what Whitman requested, writing that he had sent “a copy of the selections you made from my journal, and also an account of the information Miss Harris…”

This is our first letter of Whitman relating to Lincoln.