GBF Regular Garrett Peck Talks Walt Whitman, Poetry & Lincoln’s Assassination

by Megan Wessell, A Bookish Affair

Walt Whitman is one of America’s most famous and most beloved poets. Known for poems that tackled the great topics of his day, his poems are still widely read today. Although Whitman is mostly known for his poetry, there was a lot more to the man, as Garrett Peck shows readers in his latest release, “Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet.” During the Civil War, Walt Whitman came to Washington to help take care of the many wounded soldiers that found themselves in the rudimentary field hospitals in the Nation’s Capital. Whitman spent time visiting with soldiers and caring for them. The book provides a fascinating look at a side of Whitman that few know about.

Q: You’ve written about many different topics, many set in Washington, D.C. What drew you to writing about Walt Whitman’s time in Washington?
Peck: I thought of the idea to cover Whitman’s decade in DC years ago — so far back that I can’t quite recall the exact genesis moment behind it all. But I kept working on it in a Word document, writing down ideas and keeping track of sources. By the time I published my 2014 book, “Capital Beer,” I knew that I’d tackle Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.. next. I wanted to time the book for the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre. Walt was visiting his mother in Brooklyn at the time and so missed the assassination, but his boyfriend Peter Doyle was in Ford’s and witnessed the tragedy as it unfolded. It was Pete who greatly informed Walt about the event, and Walt went on to write four Lincoln poems, a major Lincoln article and an annual Lincoln lecture, largely based on Pete’s eyewitness account.

Q: Walt Whitman is still a larger than life figure in American History. Why do you think that people are still so interested in him today?
Peck: There is a universality to Whitman’s poetry that connects him across time, language, country and culture. When he wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that what he did, future generations of people would also do, and that nothing could separate people across time. Human experience is a universal experience, and you see right away why he was so appealing. And then there was his hospital service during the Civil War, helping tens of thousands of sick and wounded soldiers. He was a remarkable humanitarian.

Q: What was your research process like for this book?
Peck: Whitman is fortunately a very well documented person, and much of his writings have been digitized. The Whitman Archive has most of his letters posted, as well as significant scholarly essays. I relied heavily on the poet’s own words in writing the book, especially his Civil War letters and newspaper articles, such as he wrote for the New York Times. I feel there is an immediacy to letters that is often lacking (or is often distorted) when people write biographies or autobiographies after the fact. Memory is a fragile thing. I also widely used the Library of Congress, which owns much of Whitman’s documentation and many of his Civil War-era photos. It’s a tremendous resource for anyone researching Whitman.

Q: I really liked that you included a lot of your own photography in the book. What was it like to be able to visit so many places where Whitman once walked?
Peck: We have so many wonderful places in Washington associated with Whitman. Sadly, none of them are the places he lived: every site was redeveloped. But fortunately we still have the Old Patent Office (the Smithsonian American Art Museum), where he volunteered and later worked. No other building is quite so associated with Walt as this one! When you stand in a place where you knew Walt once stood, you may recall a line from him: “What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores of hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not – distance avails not, and place avails not.” Walt left his mark, his imprint upon Washington that time hasn’t erased.

Q: And now for a fun question, if you could bring any three historical figures with you to a deserted island, who would you bring and why?
Peck: Abraham Lincoln is at the top of my list. I have such a huge respect for the president for steering the country through the Civil War, ending slavery and reuniting the Union. I’d want to bring along Eleanor Roosevelt, the activist first lady who did so much for so many. Another person to invite — assuming we’d have a “universal translator” from Medieval Italian to modern English — would be Filippo Brunelleschi, the brilliant architect who designed the cupola on Florence’s cathedral. And assuming this is a deserted island in the South Pacific, can it be wherever Amelia Earhart crash landed? Because I’ve love to find out what happened to her. As would, presumably, everybody.

Garrett Peck is a Washington-area historian, tour guide and author of six books. He leads history-oriented tours in the D.C. area, including the Walt Whitman Tour, the Alexandria Brewing Tour, the DC Brewing Tour, the Jazz History Tour, the Temperance Tour and many others. He was involved with the DC Craft Bartenders Guild in lobbying the DC City Council to have the Rickey declared Washington’s native cocktail in 2011. He researched and pinpointed the Washington Brewery site at Navy Yard, and is particularly proud that Green Hat Gin is named after a character he wrote about in “Prohibition in Washington, D.C.”: congressional bootlegger George Cassiday. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, delivered the Ruth Ann Overbeck Lecture and often speaks at historical societies, literary clubs and trade associations. This is Peck’s fifth time presenting at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, including the inaugural year in 2010.