Trowbridge and O'Connor: Unpublished Correspondence, with Special Reference to Walt Whitman

Abstract

T WO IMPORTANT early friends of Walt Whitman were William Douglas O'Connor (I832-I889)1 and John Townsend Trowbridge (i827-i9i6).2 Both were Bostonians, O'Connor by birth, although he spent most of his years in Philadelphia and Washington; Trowbridge by adoption, since he had come to Hub early in his writing career. Both, too, had met Whitman in Boston while he was working on his third (i86o) edition of Leaues of Grass, which Thayer and Eldridge were soon to publish. With gifts and encouragement both helped him carry on his work of mercy in the Washington hospitals. Like young John Burroughs, they were among the closest associates of Whitman in Washington, especially in the i86o's when Trowbridge was collecting material for his life of Salmon P. Chase,3 and O'Connor and Whitman were government employees. For a time Whitman stayed at the O'Connor home, where the three friends often engaged in lively disputes lasting to the early morning hours. Both subsequently became estranged from Whitman, O'Connor to return to the fold of idolaters after a ten-year (I872-I882) quarrel over Negro suffrage; Trowbridge always to remain at a judicial distance, repelled by the excesses of the Whitmaniacs. O'Connor was one of that considerable school of nineteenthcentury Irish American patriots and writers which has in no small