Beschreibung:

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, President ]. WHITMAN, WALT. Autograph manuscript signed ("Walt Whitman" on a prelimary page), of a lecture "The Death of Abraham Lincoln," containing approximately 1500 words in Whitman's hand, with numerous deletions and extensive revisions by the author, n.p. "Written Feb. 1879" 17 pages, 4to, 224 x 176 mm. (8 7/8 x 6 7/8 in.) and smaller, written on rectos only in a dark ink on pages and irregular slips and pages, some incorporating short clippings from contemporary newspapers, all carefully assembled (probably by Whitman) and laid down on large 4to sheets, bound with double engraved portrait of Whitman and Lincoln, the former signed "Walt Whitman June 9 '86," in half calf gilt, rubbed. WHITMAN'S LECTURE ON "THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN" During the 1870s, Whitman was in modest demand as a lecturer on the Lyceum circuit, and his lecture "The Death of Lincoln" was first delivered, under the sponsorship of Major Ponds, on 14 April 1879 (the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of Lincoln) at the Madison Square Theatre, in New York, and was repeated in Philadelphia in 1880 and in Boston the year after. (A printed ticket to the first lecture accompanies the manuscript). Whitman's rambling, poetic reminiscence opens with an impressionistic description of America on the brink of the Civil War: "Though by no means proposing to resume the Secession War tonight, I would briefly remind you, my friends, of the public moral conditions preceding that contest..." He describes the Union and Confederacy in poetic terms, alluding to "the hot passions of the South," the North's qualities of "inertia, incredulity and conscious power -- the incendiarianism of the Abolitionists - the rascality of the politicians, unparallelled in any land, any age..." (specifically referring to the terms of Presidents Fillmore and Buchanan). "Who, I say, can ever paint those years? Who, those peace campaigns preceding & more lurid and terrible than any war? In the midst of all this excitement and chaos, hovering on the edge at first...and destined to play a leading part, appears a strange and awkward figure [Lincoln]." Whitman witnessed Lincoln's arrival in New York in February 1861, en route to his inauguration. When the President-elect alighted from his coach at the Astor House, Whitman writes, "from the top of an omnibus...I had a...capital view of it all...& especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look, his gait..." Then came the war: the hot sweat & sunstroke as on the way to Gettysburgh in '63 -- the night battles in the woods as under Hooker at Chancellorsville (a strange episode) -- the camps in winter -- the military prisons -- the Hospitals -- (alas! alas! the Hospitals.)..." (Whitman knew the hospitals and wounded soldiers from personal experience.) The tragedy of Lincoln's murder, he speculates, is not just that "from '61 to '65, the future destinies of the Union, and maybe of human progress, swaying like a ship in a storm, were so strangely balanced and ballasted by that quaint, tall figure, looming through the tempest....[he] stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark'd and enduring than any yet given by any one man -- (more even than Washington's)..." It is strange, he concludes, "that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so lastingly condense a Nationality," but "the dramatic deaths of every Nationality are its most important inheritance..." Years hence, historians and dramatists, he writes, "seeking to identify...by far the greatest revolutionary step in the history of the United States...the absolute extirpation and erasure of Slavery -- those historians will seek in vain for any point to serve more thoroughly their purpose, than Abraham Lincoln's death..."