Washington

For society at the turn of the decade Whitman had, as usual, his separate groups of friends, in one group stage drivers and in another literary, publishing, and theatrical people. For years Whitman had paid cheering visits to prisoners and had made regular visits to sick stage drivers. Almost imperceptibly, his role of visitor of the sick merged into his Civil War services as hospital attendant. Just before Christmas 1862, Whitman went to Washington to find his brother George, who had been reported wounded. The injury was slight, but Whitman stayed on with his brother in camp. Returning to Washington, he rented a small room, found a job as copyist in the paymaster's office, and began visiting Brooklyn soldiers in the hospitals. His informality, gentleness, resourcefulness, and lack of preachiness enabled him to serve as benevolent father to the soldiers, and they returned his extraordinary sympathy and love; his friends became accustomed to seeing recovered soldiers stop him in the street to hug and kiss him. Whitman's role of wound dresser was heroic, and it eventually undercut his buoyant physical health.

Whitman wrote a series of war poems during the Civil War designed to trace his own varying attitudes toward the conflict, from his early near-mindless jingoism to something quite rare in American poetry up to that time- a dedication to simple realism. Whitman later wrote a section in Specimen Days called "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books," but it was the Drum-Taps collection (1865) that incorporated the real war into a book of poetry. After Lincoln's assassination Whitman delayed the new volume until it could include in a "sequel" version of "When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloom'd," his masterpiece of the 1860s. Even as Drum-Taps was being published, Whitman was revising a copy of the Boston edition of Leaves of Grass at his desk in the Department of the Interior. The new Secretary read the annotated copy and abruptly fired Whitman for the book's sexual frankness. The consequences might have been minor, because Whitman's friend William O'Connor quickly found him another government position. The incident, however, turned O'Connor from a devoted friend into a disciple who quickly began writing a book (with Whitman's help in supplying information and documents) called The Good Gray Poet (1866). It was a piece of pure hagiography, in which Whitman was identified with Jesus. O'Connor's book, coming out simultaneously with Drum-Taps, polarized opinion, with negative immediate effects, but in the long run it strengthened Whitman's determination not to yield to censorship or to apologize for his earlier poems.

During his years in Washington, Whitman met and developed a strong emotional attachment to a young streetcar driver named Peter Doyle.

Click here to see a photograph of Whitman with Peter Doyle (1865).

Click here to see a letter written by Whitman to Peter Doyle (July 30-August 2, 1870).

a time of slow, faltering growth in reputation, ended early in 1873, when he suffered a paralytic stroke. His mother died a few months later, and Whitman joined his brother George's household in Camden, New Jersey, where he became dependent on occasional publication in newspapers and magazines for income while preparing successive editions of Leaves of Grass.

Mickle Street, where Whitman lived in Camden, New Jersey.