The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to a Soldier, November (?) 1866
Date: November (?), 1866
Whitman Archive ID: med.00317
Source: Location of original letter manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 1:298. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang, Vanessa Steinroetter, and Alyssa Olson
We have a new Attorney-General.1 One of the first things he did was to promote me. Sensible man, wasn't he? May the Lord reward him. . . .
I enclose you a little picture. You shall have a better one, dear son. The picture in shirt sleeves was taken in 1854.2 You would not know it was me now, but it was taken from real life and was first-rate then.
Notes:
1. See Whitman's letter
from April (?) 1865.
Henry Stanbery
(1803–1881) was appointed Attorney General on July 23, 1866, and
served until March 12, 1868, when he resigned to serve as President
Johnson's chief counsel in the impeachment proceedings. When, at the
conclusion of the trial, Johnson renominated Stanbery, the Senate refused to
confirm him. Failing eyesight—to which Whitman referred in letters
from November 13,
1866,
and November 20,
1866,—forced
Stanbery to retire from legal practice in 1878. Speaking to Horace Traubel
in 1888, Whitman affirmed his fondness for Stanbery (With
Walt Whitman in Camden [Boston: Small, Maynard & Company,
1906–1996], 3:156). [back]
2. The frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. [back]