Here the Whitman Archive offers the first comprehensive edition of Whitman's correspondence—the letters written by him and to him throughout his life. After more than a decade of effort, and with the long-standing and generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, nearly all of the work of editing the two-way correspondence was completed in 2023. However, we continue to look for additional letters and we welcome notifications from users who know of previously unlocated letters.
This section of the Archive offers users transcriptions and page images of approximately 3,000 documents (all of them letters) Whitman produced while working as a clerk in the Attorney General’s office, 1865–1873. An additional 400 documents will be made available as time allows. These documents include letters in the hand of another clerk for which Whitman has provided short marginal annotations, apparently for indexing purposes, as well as summaries of legal cases and office notes in Whitman's hand, such as the "Memorandum of Examination of Nott & Co's Claim—with order," from February 1869. We would like to provide annotations for all of the scribal documents and possibly enrich the encoding of them, though it is not yet clear when we will have the time and resources to reach these goals.
This section of the Archive provides transcriptions and images, when available, of letters that Whitman wrote on behalf of soldiers during the Civil War.