A Whitman Chronology

Biographical Notes on Significant Persons

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON SIGNIFICANT PERSONS Parents Walter Whitman Sr. (1789-1855) was of English descent. His forebears had large landholdings in Huntington Township on Long Island, New York. His father was Jesse Whitman , and his mother was Hannah Brush. He was a carpenter and house builder in the Huntington area and in Brooklyn and built the house in which Walt was born. He held strong opinions tending toward radical democracy and was friend and admirer of such freethinkers as Thomas Paine, Frances Wright, and the liberal Quaker Elias Hicks. In 1816 he married Louisa Van Velsor. His death in 1855 came within weeks of the publication of the first edition of Leaves ifGrass. Louisa Van Velsor (1795-1873) was ofDutch and Welsh descent . Her parents were Cornelius Van Velsor and Naomi (Amy) Williams of Cold Spring, Long Island, New York. The Van Velsors had a farm where they raised horses. One ofher ancestors was the sailor whose death became the family legend told in Whitman's "Old Salt Kassabone." Her letters to Walt reveal a strong personality and a deep bond between them. Whitman considered her death to have been the great tragedy of his life. Siblings Jesse (1818-1870) was a laborer for a time but suffered from a degenerative mental condition, which caused him to be institutionalized in 1864. Mary Elizabeth (1821-1899) married Ansel Van Nostrand on 2 January 1840. They moved to Greenport, Long Island, where Whitman visited frequently. Hannah Louisa (1823-1899) married an artist, Charles L. Heyde, on 16 March 1852, and they moved to Vermont. Andrew Jackson (1827-1863) was for a short time in the Union Army. He and his wife, Nancy, had two children. He died of a throat ailment while Whitman was in Washington , D.C. George Washington (1829-1901) was in the Union Army. He was wounded at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and later was a prisoner ofwar. He married Louisa Orr Haslam on 14April 1871, and they moved to Camden, New Jersey. They had one child, Walter Orr, who died in infancy. Thomas Jefferson (Jeff) (1833-1890) was an engmeer with the St. Louis, Missouri, water system. He married Martha Emma Mitchell (Mattie), and they had two daughters , Mannahatta (Hattie) (1860-1886) and Jessie Louisa (1863-1957). As a teenager he went with Walt to New Orleans , where they worked for a short time on a newspaper. Edward (Ed or Eddie) (1835-1892), who had mental and physical disabilities, lived with his mother. After her death he lived with family members, then was boarded out. Late in life he was institutionalized. Literary Executors Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902) was a Canadian physician and alienist (psychiatrist) who supervised an asylum in London, Ontario. He was also a mystic who found in Whitman's poetry the highest form of what he termed "cosmic consciousness." The author of Walt Whitman (1863), he was Whitman's first biographer. Thomas B. Harned (1851-?) was a Camden, New Jersey, attorney and the brother-in-law of Horace Traubel. A great admirer of Whitman's work, he and his wife were frequent hosts to the poet. Horace L. Traubel (1858-1919) was a teenager when he met Whitman in Camden, New Jersey. He was later a Socialist writer. His chief claim to fame is the record he kept of conversations with Whitman from 1888 to the poet's [xviii] BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES death, With Walt Whitman in Camden. Traubel was a primary source for the memorial volume In Re Walt Whitman, published in 1892 by the three literary executors. Friends John Burroughs (1837-1921) was a naturalist and author who met Whitman in Washington, D.c., in 1863. He published Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person (1867) and Walt Whitman, a Study (1896). Peter Doyle (1843-1907) was an Irish immigrant, Confederate soldier, streetcar conductor, and railroad worker who became an intimate friend of Whitman's in 1865. The two were close for at least eight years. Anne B. Gilchrist (1828-1885) was the widow of Alexander Gilchrist, the English biographer of William Blake, and friend of many of England's outstanding literary persons . She came to the United States in 1876 to meet Whitman after having published "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (1870). Dr. John Johnston (?-1927) was one of the leaders of the group of Whitman admirers in Bolton, England. He visited Whitman in Camden in 1890 and later...