Love Letters in Someone Else’s Hand

A Poetry Tale about Walt Whitman, told by Hello Doggo.

In December eighteen sixty-two, Walt Whitman’s family opened the New York Herald and found a list of the wounded from Fredericksburg. On it: First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore.

Close enough. Walt’s brother George was a lieutenant in that regiment.

Walt set off south the same day. Changing trains in Philadelphia, he had his money stolen by a pickpocket. Not a promising start.

He found George alive, with a cut on the cheek from a shell fragment. He also found, outside a field hospital, a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms and hands. A full load, he wrote, for a one-horse cart.

He stayed. For years, he walked the hospital wards of Washington with sweets, paper and stamps. And for men who couldn’t write, he wrote. Including, he said, love letters, very tender ones.

Hardly any survive. Then, in twenty sixteen, a volunteer sorting pension files at the National Archives found one. A private called Robert Jabo, dying of tuberculosis, writing to his wife through Whitman’s hand. He’d been discharged, he told her, but wasn’t well enough to come home.

And on the back: “Written by Walt Whitman, a friend.”

Jabo died within the year. His widow seems to have sent that letter in with her pension claim, which is why it was sitting in a government file.

It may be the most useful thing Walt Whitman ever wrote.