Walter Whitman, Esq., Washington.
Dear Evangelist: The inclosed note1 may interest you, and therefore I2 send it. I wrote to Mr. Emerson to get him to interest some of his friends (he has several rich ones who give away large sums to various good causes) in your Christian Commission Agency. I trust that the result will be what I hoped.
Yours Very Truly,
James Redpath.
Remember me to Mr. and Mrs. O'C.3 and Mr. Eldredge.4
Notes
- 1. The enclosed note by Emerson reads:
Concord, 23d February, 1863. My Dear Sir : On my return, a few days since,
from a long Western journey, I found your note respecting Mr. Whitman. The bad
feature of the affair to me is that it requires prompt action, which I cannot
use. I go to-day to Montreal to be gone a week, and I have found quite
tyrannical necessities at home for my attention. Not to do nothing I have just
written a note to Mr. F. N. Knapp at Washington, who, I am told, ought to know
what you tell me, and may know how to employ Mr. Whitman's beneficial agency in
some official way in the hospitals.
As soon as I return home, I shall make
some trial whether I can find any direct friends and abettors for him and his
beneficiaries, the soldiers. I hear gladly all that you say of him.
Respectfully, Mr. Redpath.
R. W. Emerson. [back]
- 2. James Redpath
(1833–1891) was the author of The Public Life of Capt.
John Brown (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), a correspondent for the
New York Tribune during the war, the originator of
the "Lyceum" lectures, and editor of the North American
Review in 1886. He met Whitman in Boston in 1860 (Thomas Biggs Harned
Collection of Walt Whitman, The Library of Congress, Notebook #90) and remained
an enthusiastic admirer; see Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman
in Camden, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914),
3:459–461. He concluded his first letter to Whitman on June 25, 1860: "I love you, Walt! A conquering
Brigade will ere long march to the music of your barbaric jawp."
See also Charles F. Horner, The Life of James Redpath and the
Development of the Modern Lyceum (New York: Barse & Hopkins,
1926). [back]
- 3. For a time Whitman lived
with William D. and Ellen M. O'Connor, who, with Charles W. Eldridge and later
John Burroughs, were to be his close associates during the early Washington
years. William D. O'Connor (1832–1889) was the author of Harrington, an abolition novel published by Thayer & Eldridge in
1860. He had been an assistant editor of the Saturday Evening
Post before he went to Washington. O'Connor was an intelligent man who
deserved something better than the various governmental clerical posts he was to
hold until his death. The humdrum of clerkship, however, was relieved by the
presence of Whitman whom he was to love and venerate—and defend with a
single-minded fanaticism and an outpouring of vituperation and eulogy that have
seldom been equaled, most notably in his pamphlet, "The Good Gray Poet." He was
the first, and in many ways the most important, of the adulators who divided
people arbitrarily into two categories: those who were for and those who were
against Walt Whitman. The poet praised O'Connor in the preface to a posthumous
collection of his tales: "He was a born sample here in the 19th century of the
flower and symbol of olden time first-class knighthood. Thrice blessed be his
memory!" (Complete Prose Works [New York, D. Appleton,
1910] pp. 513). For more on Whitman's relationship with the O'Connors see O'Connor, William Douglas [1832–1889]. Of the O'Connors, Thomas
Jefferson Whitman wrote on June 13, 1863: "I am
real glad, my dear Walt, that you are among such good people. I hope it will be
in the power of some of our family to return their kindness some day. I'm sure
twould be done with a heartfelt gratitude. Tis pleasant, too, to think, that
there are still people of that kind left." [back]
- 4. Charles W. Eldridge was one
of the owners of Thayer and Eldridge, a Boston publishing firm responsible for
the third edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1860).
For more on Whitman's relationship with Thayer and Eldridge see Thayer, William Wilde (1829–1896) and Charles W. Eldridge
(1837–1903). [back]