Whitman was present at the trial of certain of Brown’s abettors in the State House at Boston;[241] one of a group prepared to effect their rescue in the event of a miscarriage of justice. Lincoln, on the other hand, was of those who, in spite of their intense hatred of slavery, wholly disapproved the Raid. For him, John Brown was a maddened enthusiast, a mere assassin like Orsini.[242] His attempt to raise the slaves of Virginia in revolt against the whites was abhorrent to the Republican statesman whose knowledge of the South showed him the horrors of a negro rising. Regarding slavery as the irreconcilable and only dangerous foe of the Republic, Lincoln held that the Federal Government must restrain it within its actual bounds; and that the sentiment in favour of gradual emancipation advocated by Jefferson, the father of the Democratic party, should be encouraged in the States of the South. But it was the States themselves that held and must hold the fatal right of choice; it was for them, not for America, to liberate their slaves.
While the figure of Lincoln was thus becoming more and more visible to the nation, Whitman was fulfilling his own destiny in New York. He was born to be a leader of men; but a poet, a path-finder, a pioneer, not a politician or president. Whatever his noble ambition might urge, or his quick imagination prompt, he kept his feet to the path of his proper destiny.
He had a prodigiously wide circle of friends, gathered from every walk of life: journalists and literary men of all kinds; actors and actresses; doctors and an occasional minister of religion; political and public characters; the stage-drivers and the hands on the river-boats; farmers from the country; pilots and captains of the port; labourers, mechanics and artisans of every trade; loungers too, and many a member of that class which society has failed to assimilate and which it hunts from prison to asylum and poor-house; and he had acquaintances among another class of outcasts whose numbers were already an open menace to the life of the Western metropolis, the girls who sell themselves upon the streets.[243]
Many anecdotes are told of him during these years: how for instance he would steer the ferry-boats, till once he brought his vessel into imminent peril, and never thereafter would consent to handle the wheel; or how, during the illness of a comrade, he held his post, driving his stage in the winter weather while he lay in the wards of the hospital; or again, how he took Emerson to a favourite rendezvous of firemen and teamsters, his good friends, and to the astonishment of the kindly sage, proved himself manifestly one of them.
A doctor at the old New York Hospital,[244] a dark stone building surmounted by a cupola, and looking out over a grassy square through iron gates upon Pearl Street, often met him in the wards, where he came to visit one or other of his driver friends, and enjoyed the restful influence of his presence there or in the little house-doctor’s room. In those days, when Broadway was crammed with vehicles and with stages of all colours, much as is the Strand to-day, the proverbial American daring and recklessness gave ample opportunity for accidents. As to the drivers, they were generally country-bred farmers’ sons, fine fellows, wide-awake and thoroughly conversant with all that passed in the city from the earliest grey of dawn till midnight: and Whitman found some of his closest comrades in their ranks.
Sometimes a member of the hospital staff would go over with him to Pfaff’s German restaurant or Rathskeller on Broadway; a large dingy basement to which one descended from the street. Here, half under the pavement, were the tables, bar and oyster stall, whereat the Bohemians of New York were wont to gather, and in a yellow fog of tobacco-smoke denounce all things Bostonian. John Swinton, a friend of Alcott and of Whitman, belonged to the group,[245] and among those who drank Herr Pfaff’s lager-beer, and demolished his schwartz brod, Swiss cheese, and Frankfurter wurst, were many of the brilliant little band which at this time was making the New York Saturday Press a challenge to everything academic and respectable.
It was here that a young Bostonian, paying his first visit to the city in 1860,[246] found Whitman installed at the head of a long table, already a hero in that revolutionary young world. The Press was his champion, and his voice was not to be silenced. Mr. Howells, for it was he, had been amused and amazed at the ferociously profane Bohemianism of the worthy editor, who had lived in Paris, and now worshipped it in the person of Victor Hugo as much as he detested Longfellow and Boston.
Mr. Howells was astonished and deeply impressed by the extraordinary charm, gentleness and benignity of the man whom the Press was extolling as arch-anarch and rebel. Whitman’s eyes and voice made a frank and irresistible proffer of friendship, and he gave you his hand as though it were yours to keep. An atmosphere of unmistakable purity emanated from him in the midst of that thickness of smoke, that reek of beer and oysters and German cooking. He was clean as the sea is clean. He passed along the ordinary levels of life as one who lives among the mountains, and finds his home on Helicon or Olympus.
Ada Clare[247] (Mrs. Julia Macelhinney), by all accounts a charming and brilliant woman, was queen of this rebel circle, and especially a friend of Whitman’s. News of her tragic death from hydrophobia, caused by the bite of her pet dog, came as a terrible shock to all who had known her. He had other women friends, notably Mrs. “Abby” Price, of Brooklyn, and her two daughters.[248] The mother was an incurable lover of her kind, whose hospitality to the outcast survived all the frauds practised upon it.