Thanks, my dear friend, for y'r good letter2 (enclosing $25) wh' has safely reach'd me—I am pretty well at present—got out yesterday for a three hours drive to the bay shore, & linger'd there in the fine weather & sun for an hour—Have kind attention & all I need—I enclose you some little slips of my stuff already published—Believe me, Stedman, (tho' strange perversions & falsifications sometimes get in newspapers) y'r steady, square & true approbater & friend3—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote
"Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served
as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862.
In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office
until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The
next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems
and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest
Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster,
1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).