Published Works
Manuscripts
Biography & Correspondence
Criticism
Resources
Pictures & Sound
About the Archive
Correspondence
Letter from Thomas Jefferson Whitman to Walt Whitman, 8 January 1864
Brooklyn,
Jan 8th 1864
Dear Walt,
The enclosed $5 is from Mr James P. Kirkwood 1 and is the money spoken of in my letter from Copake. 2 The other $1 is from John D. Martin. 3
I mailed you some 3 or 4 Unions 4 to-day directed to the care of major Hapgood 5 as usual
At home everything is going along abt as usual, all abt the same.
A few days ago there came to the house for you the proof sheets of a small book which the author (no name given) wants you to read and give an opinion on the Circular you find within. The stuff itself is disgusting, the whole of it going to prove that the nigger is better than the white which the fool says over and over again 6 —do you want it sent on to you.
affectionately Jeff.
About the Text
The text presented here is derived from Dennis Berthold and Kenneth Price, eds., Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1984). For a detailed description of discrepancies between this electronic edition and the print source, see our statement of editorial policy .
The manuscript of this letter, dated January 8, 1864, is held in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839-1919, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
For more information on the letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman, see Dennis Berthold and Kenneth Price's introduction to the print edition.
Notes
1. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson Whitman to Walt Whitman, 16 April 1860. (Back)
2. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson Whitman to Walt Whitman, 28 December 1863. (Back)
3. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson Whitman to Walt Whitman, 10 February 1863. (Back)
4. Copies of the Brooklyn Daily Union . (Back)
5. Major Lyman S. Hapgood, the paymaster of the army volunteers, employed WW as a copyist from December 1862 to January 1865. Charles W. Eldridge, co-publisher of the 1860 Leaves of Grass and later a clerk in Hapgood's office, helped the poet gain this employment (Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman: The Correspondence [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1961-77], Vol. I, p. 11 and p. 162, n. 83). (Back)
6. No record indicates the poet read this book, but he probably would not have been sympathetic with its thesis. WW also rejected arguments for white superiority: he marked an article on "The Slavonians and Eastern Europe," North British Review , American edition, 11 (August 1849), 283, which argued that there are "three varieties of human beings" and that "up to the present moment, the destinies of the species appear to have been carried forward almost exclusively by its Caucasian variety." The poet responded in the margin: "? yes of late centuries, but how about those 5, or 10, or twenty thousand years ago?" (Trent Collection, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University). (Back)
Whitman Archive ID
loc.00431