Lincoln and Leaves of Grass*

            No part of Lincoln’s life has suffered more in history from false coloring and belittling sensationalism than that of the earlier years he lived in Springfield; and especially is this true in respect to his mental and literary activities of that period. While I knew Lincoln in office life then.every new book that appeared on the table had his attention, and was taken up by him on entering to glance through more or less thoroughly. I can say the same of the books in Bateman’s office adjoining the law office, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, then just published, I recall as one of the few new books of poetry that interested him, and which, after reading aloud a dozen or more pages in his amusing way, he took home with him.  He brought it back the next morning, laying it on Bateman’s table and remarking in a grim way that he “had barely saved it from being purified in fire by the women.”

Readers of this day hardly comprehend the shock Whitman’s first book gave the public.  Lincoln, from the first, appreciated Whitman’s peculiar poetic genius, but he lamented his rude, coarse naturalness.  It may be worth while to relate the office scene when Lincoln first read Whitman’s poetry.  It was exceptional for Lincoln to read alond in the office anything but a newspaper extract.  Only books that had a peculiar and unusual charm for him in their ideas, or form of expression, tempted him to read aloud while in the office—and this only when the office family were alone present.  It was quite usual and expected by us at such times, when he would become absorbed in reading some favorite author, as Burns’s poems, or one of Shake-speare’s plays, for him to begin reading aloud, if some choice character or principle had appealed to him, and he would then continue on to the end of the act, and sometimes to the end of the play or poem.

When Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was first published it was placed on the office table by Herndon.  It had been read by several of us and, one day, discussions hot and extreme had sprung up between office students and Mr. Herndon concerning its poetic merit, in which Dr. Bateman engaged with us, having entered from his adjoining office.  Later, quite a surprise occurred when we found that the Whitman poetry and our discussions had been engaging Lincoln’s silent attention.  After the rest of us had finished our criticism of some peculiar verses and of Whitman in general, as well as of each other’s literary taste and morals in particular, and had resumed our usual duties or had departed, Lincoln, who during the criticisms had been apparently in the unapproachable depths of one of his glum moods of meditative silence—referred to elsewhere—took up Leaves of Grass for his first reading of it.  After half an hour or more devoted to it he turned back to the first pages, and to our general surprise, began to read aloud.  Other office work was discontinued by us while he read with sympathetic emphasis verse after verse. His rendering revealed a charm of new life in Whitman’s versification.  Save for a few comments on some broad allusions that Lincoln suggested could have been veiled, or left out, he commended the new poet’s verses for their virility, freshness, unconventional sentiments and unique forms of expression, and claimed that Whitman gave promise of a new school of poetry.

At his request, the book was left by Herndon on the office table. Time and again when Lincoln came in, or was leaving, he would pick it up as if to glance at it for only a moment, but instead he would often settle down in a chair and never stop without reading aloud such verses or pages as he fancied.  His estimate of the poetry differed from any brought out in the office discussions.  He foretold correctly the place the future would assign to Whitman’s poems, and that Leaves of Grass would be followed by other and greater work.  A few years later, immediately following the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination, Whitman wrote the immortal elegy, “O Captain! My Captain!” which became the nation’s—aye, the world’s—funeral dirge of our First American.  When I first read this requiem its thrilling lines revived in my memory that quiet afternoon in the Springfield law office, and Lincoln’s first reading and comments on Leaves of Grass.  That scene was so vividly recalled then as to become more firmly fixed in my memory than any other of the incidents at the Lincoln and Herndon office, and this is my apology for giving space for rehearsing it so fully here.

Henry B. Rankin.

*From Personals Recollections of Abraham Lincoln.  By Henry B. Rankin.  New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.