Complete Prose Works
unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness
tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy
hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don't
do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous,
fragmentary book ever printed.
Note:
[1] The pages from 1 to 15 are nearly verbatim an off-hand letter of
mine in January, 1882, to an insisting friend. Following, I give some
gloomy experiences. The war of attempted secession has, of course, been
the distinguishing event of my time. I commenced at the close of 1862,
and continued steadily through '63, '64 and '65, to visit the sick
and wounded of the army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and
around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books
for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and
circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these, I brief'd
cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bed-side, and
not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Some were scratch'd down from
narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending
somebody amid those scenes. I have dozens of such little note-books
left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full
of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey
to the reader the associations that attach to these soil'd and creas'd
livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to
carry in the pocket, and fasten'd with a pin. I leave them just as I
threw them by after the war, blotch'd here and there with more than one
blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom
amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting
ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim
copies of those lurid and blood-smuch'd little notebooks.
Very different are most of the memoranda that follow. Some time after
the war ended I had a paralytic stroke, which prostrated me for several
years. In 1876 I began to get over the worst of it. From this date,
portions of several seasons, especially summers, I spent at a secluded
haunt down in Camden county, New Jersey--Timber creek, quite a little
river (it enters from the great Delaware, twelve miles away)--with
primitive solitudes, winding stream, recluse and woody banks,
sweet-feeding springs, and all the charms that birds, grass,
wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, &c., can
bring. Through these times, and on these spots, the diary from page 76
onward was mostly written.
The COLLECT afterwards gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces
I can now lay hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all
together like fish in a net.
I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that
eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all Nature,
authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen interiors,
personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of
the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen'd, wondrous
time. But the book is probably without any definite purpose that can be
told in a statement.
ANSWER TO AN INSISTING FRIEND
You ask for items, details of my early life--of genealogy and
parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its far-back
Netherlands stock on the maternal side--of the region where I was
born and raised, and my mother and father before me, and theirs before
them--with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times I lived
there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these details
mainly as the go-befores and embryons of "Leaves of Grass." Very good;
you shall have at least some specimens of them all. I have often thought
of the meaning of such things--that one can only encompass and complete
matters of that kind by 'exploring behind, perhaps very far behind,
themselves directly, and so into their genesis, antecedents, and
cumulative stages. Then as luck would have it, I lately whiled away the
tedium of a week's half-sickness and confinement, by collating these
very items for another (yet unfulfilled, probably abandon'd,) purpose;
and if you will be satisfied with them, authentic in date-occurrence and
fact simply, and told my own way, garrulous-like, here they are. I shall
not hesitate to make extracts, for I catch at anything to save labor;
but those will be the best versions of what I want to convey.
GENEALOGY--VAN VELSOR AND WHITMAN
The later years of the last century found the Van Velsor family, my
mother's side, living on their own farm at Cold Spring, Long Island, New
York State, near the eastern edge of Queen's county, about a mile from
the harbor.[2] My father's side--probably the fifth generation from the
first English arrivals in New England--were at the same time farmers
on their own land--(and a fine domain it was, 500 acres, all good soil,
gently sloping east and south, about one-tenth woods, plenty of grand
old trees,) two or three miles off, at West Hills, Suffolk county. The
Whitman name in the Eastern States, and so branch and South, starts
undoubtedly from one John Whitman, born 1602, in Old England, where he
grew up, married, and his eldest son was born in 1629. He came over in
the "True Love" in 1640 to America, and lived in Weymouth, Mass., which
place became the mother-hive of the New-Englanders of the name; he died
in 1692. His brother, Rev. Zechariah Whitman, also came over in the
"True Love," either at that time or soon after, and lived at Milford,
Conn. A son of this Zechariah, named Joseph, migrated to Huntington,
Long Island, and permanently settled there. Savage's "Genealogical
Dictionary" (vol. iv, p. 524) gets the Whitman family establish'd at
Huntington, per this Joseph, before 1664. It is quite certain that from
that beginning, and from Joseph, the West Hill Whitmans, and all others
in Suffolk county, have since radiated, myself among the number. John
and Zechariah both went to England and back again divers times; they
had large families, and several of their children were born in the old
country. We hear of the father of John and Zechariah, Abijah Whitman,
who goes over into the 1500's, but we know little about him, except that
he also was for some time in America.
These old pedigree-reminiscences come up to me vividly from a visit I
made not long since (in my 63d year) to West Hills, and to the burial
grounds of my ancestry, both sides. I extract from notes of that visit,
written there and then:
Note:
[2] Long Island was settled first on the west end by the Dutch from
Holland, then on the east end by the English--the dividing line of the
two nationalities being a little west of Huntington where my father's
folks lived, and where I was born.
THE OLD WHITMAN AND VAN VELSOR CEMETERIES
_July 29, 1881_.--After more than forty years' absence, (except a brief
visit, to take my father there once more, two years before he died,)
went down Long Island on a week' s jaunt to the place where I was born,
thirty miles from New York city. Rode around the old familiar spots,
viewing and pondering and dwelling long upon them, every-thing coming
back to me. Went to the old Whitman homestead on the upland and took a
view eastward, inclining south, over the broad and beautiful farm lands
of my grandfather (1780,) and my father. There was the new house (1810,)
the big oak a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old; there
the well, the sloping kitchen-garden, and a little way off even the
well-kept remains of the dwelling of my great-grandfather (1750-'60)
still standing, with its mighty timbers and low ceilings. Near by, a
stately grove of tall, vigorous black-walnuts, beautiful, Apollo-like,
the sons or grandsons, no doubt, of black-walnuts during or before 1776.
On the other side of the road spread the famous apple orchard, over
twenty acres, the trees planted by hands long mouldering in the grave
(my uncle Jesse's,) but quite many of them evidently capable of throwing
out their annual blossoms and fruit yet.
I now write these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a century
since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations.
Fifty or more graves are quite plainly traceable, and as many more
decay'd out of all form--depress'd mounds, crumbled and broken stones,
cover'd with moss--the gray and sterile hill, the clumps of chestnuts
outside, the silence, just varied by the soughing wind. There is
always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any of these ancient
graveyards of which Long Island has so many; so what must this one have
been to me? My whole family history, with its succession of links,
from the first settlement down to date, told here--three centuries
concentrate on this sterile acre.
The next day, July 30, I devoted to the maternal locality, and if
possible was still more penetrated and impress'd. I write this paragraph
on the burial hul of the Van Velsors, near Cold Spring, the most
significant depository of the dead that could be imagin'd, without the
slightest help from art, but far ahead of it, soil sterile, a mostly
bare plateau-flat of half an acre, the top of a hill, brush and well
grown trees and dense woods bordering all around, very primi-tive,
secluded, no visitors, no road (you cannot drive here, you have to bring
the dead on foot, and follow on foot.) Two or three-score graves quite
plain; as many more almost rubb'd out. My grandfather Cornelius and my
grandmother Amy (Naomi) and numerous relatives nearer or remoter, on
my mother's side, lie buried here. The scene as I stood or sat, the
delicate and wild odor of the woods, a slightly drizzling rain, the
emotional atmosphere of the place, and the inferr'd reminiscences, were
fitting accompaniments.
THE MATERNAL HOMESTEAD
I went down from this ancient grave place eighty or ninety rods to the
site of the Van Velsor homestead, where my mother was born (1795,)
and where every spot had been familiar to me as a child and youth
(1825-'40.) Then stood there a long rambling, dark-gray, shingle-sided
house, with sheds, pens, a great barn, and much open road-space. Now of
all those not a vestige left; all had been pull'd down, erased, and the
plough and harrow pass'd over foundations, road-spaces and everything,
for many summers; fenced in at present, and grain and clover growing
like any other fine fields. Only a big hole from the cellar, with some
little heaps of broken stone, green with grass and weeds, identified
the place. Even the copious old brook and spring seem'd to have mostly
dwindled away. The whole scene, with what it arous'd, memories of
my young days there half a century ago, the vast kitchen and ample
fireplace and the sitting-room adjoining, the plain furniture, the
meals, the house full of merry people, my grandmother Amy's sweet old
face in its Quaker cap, my grandfather "the Major," jovial, red, stout,
with sonorous voice and characteristic physiognomy, with the actual
sights themselves, made the most pronounc'd half-day's experience of my
whole jaunt.
For there with all those wooded, hilly, healthy surroundings, my dearest
mother, Louisa Van Velsor, grew up--(her mother, Amy Williams, of the
Friends' or Quakers' denomination--the Williams family, seven sisters
and one brother--the father and brother sailors, both of whom met their
deaths at sea.) The Van Velsor people were noted for fine horses, which
the men bred and train'd from blooded stock. My mother, as a young
woman, was a daily and daring rider. As to the head of the family
himself, the old race of the Netherlands, so deeply grafted on Manhattan
island and in Kings and Queens counties, never yielded a more mark'd and