ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE, Washington.
Dec. 29, 1866.
My dear Mr. Wood,1
I write to solicit from you $2, for helping my soldier boys to some festivities these holiday & New Year times.
Yours
Walt Whitman
Notes
- 1. Apparently George Wood
(1799–1870), who went to the Treasury Department as a clerk in 1822 and
held various posts in that bureau until his death. He was the author of several
satirical works, Peter Schlemihl in America
(Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848) and The Gates Wide Open;
or, Scenes in Another World (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1858; rev. ed.
1870); see National Cyclopaedia of American Biography.
Undoubtedly he became acquainted with Whitman through William and Ellen
O'Connor. Ellen mentions a Mr. Wood in her letter of July 5, 1864, (Charles E. Feinberg Collection). See also Wood's
letter to Whitman of January 15, 1863 and
Whitman's July 17, 1863 letter to Wood. [back]