[358] Camb. Mod. Hist., 638.
CHAPTER XII
THE PROOF OF COMRADESHIP
Whitman’s residence in Washington and the nature of his occupation in the hospitals, through the years of the war, have rendered an outline of their history almost necessary. Of his manner of life during this period we have many notes and records, both in his own letters and memoranda and in the biographical accounts afterwards printed by his friends.
During the first five or six months after his arrival he took his meals and spent much of his spare time with Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor, who had recently settled in the city.[359] He boarded in the same house as they, about six blocks from the Treasury building, where O’Connor worked, and a mile from the Armory Square Hospital, where lay many of his own wounded friends.
William Douglas O’Connor was a strikingly handsome man of thirty years, full of spirit and eloquence.[360] He had previously been a Boston journalist, had married in that city a charming wife, and was the father of two children. He had lost his post there through his outspoken support of John Brown and the attack on Harper’s Ferry. While out of employment he had written his novel, Harrington, an eloquent story of the Abolitionist cause, which was published by Thayer & Eldridge. In 1861 he had obtained a comfortable clerkship in the Lighthouse Bureau under the new Lincoln administration.
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O’CONNOR