The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Richard J. Hinton to Walt Whitman, 26 September 1888
Date: September 26, 1888
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02319
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: The annotation, "Hinton," is in the hand of Horace Traubel.
Contributors to digital file: Jeannette Schollaert, Ian Faith, Caterina Bernardini, and Stephanie Blalock
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72 East 11th St. N.Y.,1
Sept 26. 1888.
My Dear Walt Whitman:
May I hope that you are better than the papers say? I keep you ever in mind as I saw you last at the Westminister2 nearly two years since.
Mrs Hinton desires me to send her warmest regards. Can you write me word or two in reply.
Always with loving Friendship yours
Richard J. Hinton
Your last published poem on Old Age3 is simply superb
Correspondent:
Richard Josiah Hinton
(1830–1901) was born in London and came to the U.S. in 1851. He trained as
a printer, and, like the radical abolitionist writer and publisher James
Redpath, went to Kansas and joined John Brown. In fact, but for an accident he
would have been with Brown at Harper's Ferry. A man mistaken for Hinton was
hanged. Together with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Hinton also planned the
jailbreak of John Brown's accomplices Albert Hazlett and Aaron Stevens in
Charlestown for the "Jayhawkers," a band of abolitionists who assisted slaves
through the Underground Railroad that included Silas S. Soule. With James
Redpath he was the author of Hand-book to Kansas Territory and
the Rocky Mountains' Gold Region (New York: J. H. Colton, 1859). Later
he wrote Rebel Invasion of Missouri and Kansas (Chicago:
Church & Goodman, 1865) and John Brown and His Men
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1894). Apparently Hinton had suggested
that Thayer & Eldridge print Leaves of Grass (see The New Voice, 16 [4 February 1899], 2). Hinton served in
the Union Army from 1861 to 1865, and saw Whitman while lying wounded in a
hospital, a scene which he described in the Cincinnati Commercial on August 26, 1871. After the war Hinton wrote for many
newspapers. He defended William O'Connor's The Good Gray
Poet in the Milwaukee Sentinel on February 9,
1866. Hinton's article in the Rochester Evening Express
on March 7, 1866, "Farms and Fortunes in England and America," included a
lengthy discussion of Whitman, with quotations from O'Connor and John Burroughs.
Obviously pleased, Whitman sent it to friends, including William Michael
Rossetti, who acknowledged it on April 12, 1868
(Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Saturday, August 11, 1888). See also Traubel, With
Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, September 28, 1888; William Sloane Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World (West Yarmouth, Massachusetts: The
Stonecroft Press, 1926), 19, 67, 110–111, 242; and the Boston Transcript, 21 December 1901.
Notes:
1. Whitman drew a line through this letter. [back]
2. Whitman and his companion William Duckett stayed at the Westminster Hotel when the poet gave his Lincoln lecture in New York's Madison Square Theatre on April 14, 1887. Hinton attended a reception for Whitman held at the hotel. [back]
3. Hinton is referring to Whitman's poem "Old Age's Lambent Peaks," which was published in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in September 1888. [back]