Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to an Editor, 26 (?) December 1864

Date: December 26(?), 1864

Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00195

Source: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 1:244. 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, Kathryn Kruger, Vanessa Steinroetter, and Alyssa Olson



Sir: whether it agrees with your own opinion or not I hope you will open your columns to this communication of mine, seeking to stir up the government to a general exchange of prisoners.1 I hope also you may feel to say a word about it editorially—if you could call attention to it.

As I have sent similar communications this afternoon to one or two other papers, I would particularly solicit that you find room for it in tomorrow's issue.


Notes:

1. This is the draft of a letter written to the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle or the New York Times to accompany a communication entitled "The Prisoners," which was to appear on December 27, 1864 (reprinted by Charles I. Glicksberg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933], 178–180). Whitman assailed the Secretary of War and General Butler for their attitudes toward the exchange of prisoners. [back]


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