Good bye!
We are suddenly ordered away to the South-west. I1 will write you when we get settled!
Notes
- 1. John Frederick Schiller
Gray was a captain in the Twentieth New York Infantry and later held the same
rank in the Assistant Adjutant General's Volunteers. He became a major on
January 4, 1865, and resigned on December 6 of the same year; see Francis B.
Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United
States Army, 2 vols. (Washington D.C.: Government Publications Office,
1903). In 1862 he fought in the battle at Antietam, and at Charles Pfaff's beer
cellar located in lower Manhattan, he gave Whitman "a fearful account of the
battlefield at ½ past 9 the night following the engagement." (For discussion of
Whitman's activity at Pfaff's, see "The Bohemian Years.") In 1864, according to one of Whitman's
notebooks (Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of Walt Whitman, The Library of
Congress, Notebook #103), Gray was stationed at New Orleans. He graduated from
the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York in 1871, and briefly
practiced medicine with his father in New York. Whitman referred to him during
this period in a notebook (The Library of Congress, Notebook #109). Later he
practiced in Paris, Nice, and Geneva. He died of Bright's disease at St. Clair
Springs, Michigan, on April 18, 1891; obituaries appeared in the New York Herald and the New York
Tribune on August 19, 1891. [back]