LX Walt Whitman as Civil Servant

Walt Whitman's services as a Federal clerk are treated briefly by all his biographers, and his dismissal from the Office of Indian Affairs is one of the best-known incidents in the poet's life. Yet no systematic canvass of the records in the National Archives, particularly in respect to Whitman's longer employment in the Department of Justice, has been published. In consequence a crop of errors has sprung up among the poet's biographers. For example, Harrison S. Morris's reminiscent Walt Whitman (Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 65, states that “in 1864 Walt had secured a clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department”; other biographers state or imply that Whitman's tenure began in February 1865, whereas the records cited hereafter show that his appointment and salary began as of January 1, 1865, although he did not set to work until several weeks later. Clara Barrus's generally admirable Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (Boston and New York, 1931), p. 25, incorrectly states that Whitman “was removed from his post in the Department of the Interior on June 10, 1865.” The dates of the poet's promotions, from the lowest (first class) to higher ranks of clerkship, are not stated with accuracy in any biography; and his movements during these Washington years are not always carefully described. Bliss Perry, for instance, in writing of Whitman's visit to Dartmouth College in June 1872 for the delivery of his Commencement Poem, says that “by the first of July he was back in Washington”—whereas one of the documents printed below shows that he was lingering in Brooklyn, and applying for extension of leave on grounds of illness, as late as July 9. The clerical duties he performed during these eight years after the Civil War, while of minor import in Whitman's life as an artist—the life that created “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” and “Passage to India”—did furnish him a livelihood and the convenience of a bachelor's study after hours, with stationery, free heat, the gas for his “astral lamp,” and the right to order books for the Office library. They may thus repay a brief review.