Title: Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00703
Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:12). In the Walt Whitman Collection at Duke, this manuscript is bound with three other manuscript leaves and two newspaper clippings, also about members of Whitman's family. It is not clear, however, whether Whitman or a collector bound together the items, which are on different sizes and types of paper and were written at different times.
Contributors to digital file: Nicole Gray, Kevin McMullen, and Kenneth M. Price
sons of Nehemiah Whitman
daughters
Hannah Brush, daughter of Tredwell Brush, & Platt
Her parents died when she was quite young, and she went was adopted by her aunt Vashti Platt—This latter must have been mistress of quite an estate, for grandmother related that she has seen fourteen little niggers, belonging to the family, eating their supper at evening, ^all at once in the kitchen.
Tredwell Brush, her brother, died a young man, unmarried.