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Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse

About This Item

  • Title: Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1860
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • 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 the 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  • Editorial note: Based on the handwriting, Edward Grier dates this manuscript to the 1850s (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts [New York: New York University Press, 1984], 1:12).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.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Isaac Joseph Stephen Jesse." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00703.xml (TEI)

Key

Textual Feature Appearance
Overwritten brown with strikethrough
Added inline purple with double underline
Uncertain gray with wavy underline
Supplied from another source turquoise with brackets
Metamark green with triple underline
Long deletion gray background with top and bottom border
  [begin leaf 1 recto]
  • Isaac v
  • Joseph v
  • Stephen v &
  • Jesse v (my grandfather)
sons of Nehemiah Whitman
  • Phebe
  • [no handwritten text supplied here]
daughters Hannah Brush, daughter of Tredwell Brush, & [no handwritten text supplied here] 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.

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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