Walt Whitman's Long Island Friend: Elisa Seaman Leggett

Joann P. Krieg "Walt Whitman's Long Island Friend: Elisa Seaman Leggett" The Long Island Historical Journal, vol. 9, no. 2 (Spring 1997), 223-233.

As a Long Island resident with close ties to the Walt Whitman Birthplace, I am naturally alert, in my Whitman scholarship, to the discovery of Long Island connections. One such connection, encountered while researching Whitman's various editions of Leaves of Grass, comes from the pen of Whitman himself in the form of an advertisement he wrote for the 1872 edition. In it he refers to himself, in the third person, as "this chanter from Paumanok," and in a footnote explains the term Paumanok (offering alternative spellings of Paumanake or Paumanack) as "the aboriginal name of Long Island, New York." He describes the island as follows:

A peculiar region over a hundred miles long, shaped like a fish- plenty of sea-shore, sandy, stormy, uninviting, the horizon boundless, the air healthy, but too strong for invalids, the bays a wonderful resort for aquatic birds, the south-side meadows covered with salt hay, the soil of the island generally tough, but good for the locust-tree, the apple orchard, and the blackberry, and with numberless springs of the sweetest water in the world. Years ago among the bay-men-a strong wild race, now extinct, or rather entirely changed -a native of Long Island was called a Paumanacker, or Creole-Paumanacker. [1]

In the recently published final two volumes of Horace Traubel's meticulously kept record of the last years of Whitman's life, another link to the poet's Long Island past is revealed. Here we learn of a friendship that existed between Whitman and the Stony Brook painter, William Sidney Mount. To my knowledge, it is the first direct evidence of a friendship between these two important Long Islanders whose artistic visions, especially as they pertained to the expression of the vernacular in American life, were not dissimilar.

Referring to Mount as an "artist-character-ist, I call him," the seventy-two year old Whitman remembers: He lived away from the city at a place called Storey Creek [Stony Brook?] - lived with his parents. When he would come to the city, we usually went to the theatre together-the Park Theatre, usually - and if anything struck him there, any curious, beautiful character - a head, shoulders - he would whip some paper out of his pocket - he always carried it - and indicate by a few deft lines, which of course excited my wonder and admiration. Mount was in demand those days painted portraits, sold them. It was long, long ago. He long, long wandered out of my ken. [2]

Clearly Whitman never lost his appreciation of Long Island and its people, but evidence of his having maintained contact with individuals, other than family members, familiar to him in the days before he became the "chanter from Paumanok" is hard to find. All the more intriguing then, are the letters and notebook entries that reveal a friendship, not close but enduring, between Whitman and a woman who shared some of his Long Island memories. It is not known just when Whitman met Elisa Seaman, later Leggett, nor do we know the circumstances of their meeting, but indications are that their acquaintance owed much to Whitman's admiration for the Quaker Elias Hicks, who married into the Seaman family, and that it may have been furthered by their mutual friendship with William Cullen Bryant, whose Cedarmere estate still graces Long Island. [3]

Elisa Seaman was born at 90 (later 21) Beekman Street, New York City, on 9 May 1815, four years before Whitman's birth in West Hills, Long Island. A fifth-generation Seaman, Elisa was descended from Captain John Seaman, who came from England in 1630, settled in Hempstead, Long Island, and died there in 1695. Sometime before 1686 Captain Seaman became a member of the Society of Friends, and his descendants remained Quakers. 4 In 1771, one of those descendants, Jemima Seaman, married Elias Hicks, later a famed Quaker leader, who was a childhood friend of Walt Whitman's paternal grandfather. Elias Hicks was revered by Whitman's parents and similarly held in the highest esteem by the poet who, late in life, wrote a biographical tribute to him. [4]

Jemima Seaman Hicks was a cousin of Elisa Seaman's father, Valentine Seaman. Dr. Valentine Seaman was a man of no small repute, having been most active in the medical fight against yellow fever in the 1790s when New York suffered the worst epidemical outbreaks. Dr. Seaman also introduced smallpox vaccination to New York City after having gone to England to learn the method directly firom Dr. Edward Jenner, and is noted for having instituted an innovative school in New York for the training of women nurses and midwives. [5]

Elisa was the youngest of ten children, and at her father's death in 1817 she was the only child remaining at home with a deaf mother, a housekeeper she later claimed was "half crazy," a cook whose husband was an escaped slave and required hiding as did others like him who were given refuge in this Quaker home, and the cook's grandchildren, who were Elisa's principal playmates. Two other playmates were skeletons left in the attic from a brother's medical school days, which Elisa would dress for tea parties. When General Lafayette visited New York on 4 July 1825, Leggett was not so fortunate as the boy Whitman, who had the privilege of being lifted over a barrier by the general; she remembered only that Lafayette rode in an open carriage, and that she stood so close to the war hero that she might have touched his hand, "but did not dare to." At an early age she developed a longing to meet and know literary figures, the first of whom, Washington Irving, lived not far from her house. Almost every afternoon she would sit on her front stoop with a beautiful doll and hope that Irving would stop and speak to her. She never knew for certain if he did, but continued to hope, even years later, that he had in fact been one of those who greeted her in passing. [6]

In a later encounter with a literary figure the young Elisa was more fortunate. While visiting Philadelphia with family members, she stayed at the same boarding house where the famed Unitarian preacher, William Ellery Channing, and his wife were stopping. Disappointed that Channing was not well enough to appear at breakfast, Elisa later spoke to a gentleman at dinner of her great admiration for the Bostonian and was thrilled at the gentleman's somewhat reluctant admission to an acquaintance with Channing. After leaving the table her brother informed her that the gentleman was the very man she had hoped to meet. So began Elisa Seaman's list of literary giants. Years later she enumerated for her grandson: Irving, Channing, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Mrs. C. M. Kirkland, Charles A. Dana, William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman. To these she added the name of Lucretia Mott, "considered the greatest woman in mind that our country has," and told of having attended the wedding of Mott's daughter to Edward A. Hopper in Philadelphia. [7]

In her childhood Elisa spent summers on Long Island among her father's Quaker relatives at the home of one, William Hicks, who operated a store and lumber mill in Hempstead Harbor (present-day Roslyn), and was the first postmaster of Roslyn after its name change in 1844. He and his wife lived at what was later Cedarmere, Bryant's estate, when it was the Richard Kirk house. In 1834 Hicks became owner of Sycamore Lodge, and though title to the Lodge passed out of his hands in 1841, William and his wife continued to live there until his death in 1888. [8]

Sycamore Lodge was sizable and accommodated visiting Quakers who declined stopping at inns where liquor and tobacco were used. Here Elisa spent happy summer days, which she recalled in a letter written to Whitman from her home in Detroit in 1882:

So often I think of the days of my youth, amid the calm content of Quaker society, so beautiful. The home where often four generations in one family lived, a bit of the farm given to a child at his coming of age, and the marriage of youths scarcely separating families. Until I came to Michigan, thirty years ago, all my surroundings were among Friends, twelve years at Roslyn and Friends meeting at Westbury. [9]

It was here, among Long Island Quakers, that Elisa Seaman met Augustus Wright Leggett, who, like her, was a New York resident, he at 307 Pearl Street. Though never in formal membership, Leggett had extensive connections to Quakerism. They married in New York in 1836, not long after the Quaker Separation of 1827-28. The separation between orthodox and radical Quakers, the latter wing led by Elias Hicks, created a permanent schism. Though Elisa was dismissed by the orthodox New York Yearly Meeting for "marrying out," there is no record of a similar action by the New York Monthly Meeting of Hicksite Quakers. After living on Mercer Street in New York for a short time, the Leggetts moved to Peekskill where the first of their nine children was born. From there they moved to Hempstead Harbor on Long Island to live among her Quaker relations at "Hillside," property adjoining that which was soon to become Bryant's Cedarmere. [10]

The Leggetts were part of the circle of neighbors, including the Bryants, who in 1844 chose the name Roslyn when their community of Hempstead Harbor found it was being confused with Hempstead, North Hempstead, and Hempstead Branch. In 1843 Elisa Leggett took membership in the Westbury Monthly Meeting (Hicksite). She retained many Quaker ways throughout her life, addressing family members with the familiar "thee," and Whitman, in letters, as "Friend," explaining to him that "it seems very much out of tune to say Mr. to Walt Whitman," and that she preferred "the good old Quaker dignity of addressing one by name alone... " [11] Because the only publication of some of her surviving letters to Whitman is long out of print, essential portions will be included here.

The next trace of Elisa Leggett appears on 3 February 1851, when Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonck, a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church and a local historian with long family roots in the Hempstead Harbor/Roslyn area, responded to her request for information on the region.

His lengthy, detailed recollections covering the years 1796 to 1811 were published much later, in the Roslyn News of 3 July 1903 in a column devoted to local history, "Ye Olden Roslyn." [12] Three months after Onderdonck wrote his letter to Leggett, however; a New York newspaper, the Plaindealer, for 28 May 1851, published an article titled "Sketches of Roslyn," which it said was copied from the Brooklyn Advertiser. This piece enjoyed a long and involved history. In 1920, the Roslyn News reprinted portions of it from its own earlier reprint of 17 July 1878; the 1920 version included a note by the 1878 editor which referred to a column in the 1851 Plaindealer called "Our Department" (evidently a women's column) "conducted by 'E. L. S.,' a lady in every sense of the word." No doubt this was a reversal, intentional or in error, of Elisa Seaman Leggett's initials, for Augustus W. Leggett was the founder and editor, from 1850 to about 1852, of the Roslyn Plaindealer, and his wife, who fancied herself a writer, would have written the column. Of interest here is the reference to the Brooklyn Advertiser and the. fact that between 18 May and 6 June 1850, the editor of the Advertiser had published no less than sixteen sketches of Brooklyn written by the unemployed journalist Walt Whitman, who had recently lost his editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle. One wonders if the original Advertiser sketch of Roslyn was also written by Whitman using the facts supplied to Mrs. Leggett by Onderdonk, and if Mrs. Leggett, through her husband's newspaper connections, had been instrumental in securing for him these frequent publications; there is, however, no reference to it in their surviving correspondence. [13]

With her high regard for writers, it is not surprising that Elisa Leggett pursued the Bryant family when they became her next-door neighbors. Though the great man seems to have found her something of a bore, a lasting friendship developed between the two families, and to the end of her life Elisa recalled those happy times for her children and grandchildren. In a letter to Whitman (who, of course, was also a friend of Bryant's) written in October 1880, Elisa tells of feeling lonely in October since Bryant's death two years before:

Always in this month I used to write to him, just that I might be ahead in my congratulations upon his birthday [3 November]. I remember the sweet October days in Roslyn, when he and his wife would come over to Hillside, on some soft, dreamy afternoon in the Indian summer; perhaps with a small basket with nice lunch in it and a book.... [14]

A happy side-benefit of this relationship for Elisa was the opportunity afforded her to meet, through Bryant, "many of the best known thinkers and writers of that time." That Whitman was not one of them we can gather from her query, in one of her letters, if he ever visited Roslyn, but his response has been lost. While there is no evidence of such a visit, we have his words describing the place which indicate some familiarity, though he appears to have confused Roslyn with neighboring Glen Cove, formerly Mosquito Cove.

In 1889, three years before his death, Whitman said of Bryant's Long Island home that it was "a beautiful place-somewhat clify [sic] - rather clify: of old it was called Mosquito Cove, but when the wealthy New Yorkers came along with their handsome stately villas, Mosquito Cove had a plain, rude sound, which they changed to Roslyn ...." [15]

In 1852 the Leggetts moved to Michigan, along with Augustus Leggett's parents, brother, and an assortment of children, nurses, servants, and horses. They lived first in Pontiac, then Clintonville, and finally Detroit, where Augustus Leggett was Collector of Customs. Their home in Detroit was a center for progressive people, and they entertained everyone from the governor down; Bronson Alcott, on one of his lecture tours, stayed for weeks, and Sojourner Truth is mentioned as a guest at the time of one of Mrs. Leggett's letters to Whitman. Elisa Leggett found much that needed doing in Detroit, starting with public drinking fountains, and she obviously knew whom to address about their want. As she wrote Whitman:

When we came into Detroit, fifteen years ago, there was no place in the streets for a drink of water-no old-fashioned pumps, and no newfashioned fountains. I knew three editors of daily papers. I said: "It is no wonder that dogs go mad in Detroit. They must run down to the river before they can get a drink. And it's no wonder that the beer saloons flourish, for not even a little boy or poor laboring man can get a cup of cold water." So I talked in season and out to everybody, thinking I might touch the hem of some garment, and virtue would go out from it. So, after a year or more, one morning, there came a nice editorial advocating fountains, such as they had in Philadelphia and the City Fathers were moved, and now we have all we want. [16]

At the time of writing, Leggett had undertaken another crusade, to have a national holiday declared for 14 October in commemoration of Columbus's arrival in the New World. It was because of her commitment to this cause, she told Whitman, that her husband made her a gift of a copy of the poet's "Prayer of Columbus," his 1874 poem written when, having suffered a paralyzing stroke, he felt himself to be as he described his hero, "A batter'd, wreck'd old man." [17]

On 3 June 1880, Walt Whitman (having recovered from his stroke) set out on a journey north to visit his friend Dr. Richard M. Bucke of London, Ontario, Canada. He must have written Elisa Leggett before that date to say he would stop to visit with her and her family in Detroit (he entered her address in the notebook he took on his trip), for in October she wrote:

We felt sorry not to have you come to us. All the summer the chair stood for you on our piazza. It stands there yet, with its broad arms waiting for you. All summer the old willows swayed and rippled, and spoke the "various language." All summer thousands of sparrows came home at early twilight and talked in the great ivy on the east wall of our home, and Walt Whitman came not to sit beside us. Well, we all felt sorry. When I say all, I mean three generations, a goodly company of old and young, down to the babe of a few days old. It may be the baby felt sorry. If it don't now, it will when it learns of our disappointment, for its mother did. My son sent me your picture last week from New York, the one sitting on the rocks, by Sarony. I don't know when it was taken, but it looks younger than the one he sent me three years ago, the one with the large necktie. [18]

Mrs. Leggett, thanking her for her letter and "for the print of EH." This was the print of the portrait of Elias Hicks done from a Henry Inman engraving, which Whitman used to illustrate his biographical sketch of Hicks in November Boughs. In December 1880 he sent Leggett a letter and some "poetry slips," meaning some of his recently published poems. In February the following year, he sent a copy of The Critic of 29 January with the first installment of his essay, "How I Get Around at Sixty, and Take Notes," and later mailed her a copy of the 21 May issue of the Philadelphia periodical, the American, containing his poem "A Summer's Invocation" (later "Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling"). In August, Whitman sent the 15 August 1881 New York Tribune in which his "City Notes in August" appeared, as well as the 4 August Long Islander (the newspaper he founded in 1837 and sold in 1838) containing two features, Mary E. Wager-Fisher's "Poets' Homes," which included mention of his West Hills birthplace, and "Walt Whitman in Huntington." Later notations indicate he sent Leggett copies of his poem "Fancies at Navesink" and his article "A Word About Tennyson." [19]

In the same decade, another link was forged in the friendship of these two Long Islanders. In 1880, Percy Ives, grandson of Elisa Leggett, arrived in Philadelphia to study with Thomas Eakins at the Academy of Fine Arts and paid his respects at Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman lived. Whitman describes Percy in his notebook as "age 16, a student, intends to be an artist, lives bachelor's hall fashion in Philadelphia - reads Emerson, Carlyle, and is a son of Lewis T. Ives, Artist-Academy of Fine Arts." [20]

On a number of occasions in 1881 and 1882 Whitman made note of visits from young Ives, of whom he seems to have greatly approved. The friendship between the two raises the possibility of Whitman having met Thomas Eakins, through Percy, earlier than the 1887 date Whitman assigned to the meeting, and may prove a. step toward eventual verification of current speculation that the Eakins photo of a nude elderly male, taken sometime in the early 1880s, is of Whitman. Percy Ives may also prove to be the intermediary through whom Eakins came into contact with William Duckett, Whitman's young driver, whom Eakins photographed in the nude sometime between 1886 and 1892. Because Duckett was about the same age as Percy, the two may have met in Camden, with Ives perhaps suggesting that Duckett obtain work as a model for Eakins. [21]

According to the records of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Percy Ives, son of Elisa Leggett's daughter Margaret and Lewis T. Ives, also a painter, studied with Eakins from 1881 to 1884 (two years before Eakins was forced to leave the Academy), after which he went to Paris to continue studying, and later moved to Detroit, Michigan. Like his father, he became a noted portrait painter, though his most important commission, an oil portrait of President Grover Cleveland executed during his time in office, was originally made to Lewis Ives until illness made the undertaking impossible and the son took his place. Later, Percy Ives was a founder of the Detroit Art Institute (originally the Detroit Museum of Art). He died in 1928. While studying in Philadelphia, young Ives did an oil portrait of Whitman, sketches of which, done by the artist, are in the Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress. [22]

Four letters from Whitman to Elisa Leggett written between 1880 and 1882 are missing, but on 19 December 1882 Leggett sent Whitman a Christmas greeting in which she mentions hearing from Percy "that you are in better health than you were during the summer." She refers to an invitation sent to him for the wedding of her daughter Blanche in June of the previous year, which he did not attend. "Choose who you like to come," she reports having told Blanche when the invitations were being prepared, to which the bride-to-be responded, "Oh, I would be so glad to have Walt Whitman! He seems so much like one of our family." "I send you her picture," the mother adds, "that you may think of the child who feels like a sister to you." [23]

From glimpses such as this into the feelings of the Leggett family for Whitman it appears that their relationship with him was a strong and emotional one. It makes the scholar long to know the details of when this relationship began and how it was maintained in the years prior to the Leggetts departure for Michigan.

News of the October 1890 oration by Robert G. Ingersoll, to be delivered at Philadelphia in the poet's honor, prompted Elisa to write her congratulations to Whitman on 20 October 1890, and to write to another daughter, Augusta Pease, immediately after. Still full of joyful emotion, she tells Augusta she "can hardly hold my Pen." Confident that Whitman will be "a great deal better known after he is dead," she concedes that "the present is always stupid...just wait a hundred years." Then, perhaps because she is writing to a daughter and/or because Leggett was a strong supporter of the women's movement of her time, she quotes Whitman's friend and admirer, Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, on the failure of the present to accept Whitman: "we cannot reach up high enough," and describes Gilchrist as "an English Author and great thinker [who] called him the 'Shakespeare of America." [24]

Just a portion of another letter exists, addressed to the same daughter, Augusta Pease, and evidently written soon after Whitman's death in 1892. In it Elisa Leggett confesses to feeling "sort of bewildered" at the death, and as if "something has gone out of my heart." She "always did have such a sort of pity for him," she says, adding that she always felt he was "lonely.... Well never mind," she concludes, "it's over now - but the heartbreak of the man -." [25] With this unfinished thought the line of connection between the two Long Islanders fades. It is heartening, however, to find this evidence of Whitman's having maintained contact with someone from his Long Island days. As the events of his life led him further and further away from West Hills, and as friends (such as Bryant) and acquaintances died, there were fewer opportunities for the kinds of exchanges the "chanter from Paumanok" enjoyed with Elisa Seaman Leggett.

1. Oscar Lion Collection, New York Public Library. In a footnote to a description of Long Island in Specimen Days, Whitman attributes this to John Burroughs. Floyd Stovall, editor of Prose Works, vol. 1, could not locate it in Burroughs's works, however, and says it was "from what appears to be a newspaper clipping inserted by Whitman..." (11). I suggest that the clipping may have been the advertisement Whitman wrote for the 1872 edition of Leaves of Grass.

2. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, October 1, 1891-April 3, 1892, Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac, eds. (Oregon House, Cal.: W. L. Bentley, 1996)9:407. Rather than "Storey Creek," Whitman no doubt meant Stony Brook. The Mount collection in The Museums at Stony Brook include Mount's theater sketches.

3. A portion of the description of Long Island quoted above appears in Whitman's biographical sketch of Hicks in November Boughs; see Prose Works (New York, 1964) 2:629.

4. The Seaman Family in America as Descended from Captain John Seaman of Hempstead Long Island, compiled by Mary Thomas Seaman (New York: Tobias and Wright, 1928), 127-29.

5. See my Epidemics in the Modern World (New York: Twayne, 1992), 62-63, and Lloyd G. Stevenson, "Putting Disease on the Map: The Early Use of Spot Maps in the Study of Yellow Fever," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 20 (1965):226-61.

6. Elisa Seaman Leggett, "My Book of Life," 46, unpublished ms. account written in 1888 for a grandson, Augustus Wright Ives, in the Roslyn Public Library, Roslyn. This ms. is complete; another, also in the Roslyn Library, written later for a granddaughter, Ellarose A. Randall, is an extract. Most of the information on Leggett's life is from "My Book of Life." Whitman's account of Lafayette's visit is in Prose Works 2:13.

8. Catherine B. Fahnestock, Story of Sycamore Lodge, Roslyn Harbor, Long Island (Port Washington, 1964), 1-10.

9. Leggett to Whitman, 9 October 1880, reprinted in Thomas Donaldson, Walt Whitman the Man (London: Gay & Bird, 1897), 239.

10. Later, in 1851, this "Hillside" property was owned by Edward W. Leggett, who once complained to Bryant of obstructions placed in the easement through Bryant's property that allowed access to the Leggett estate (Bryant, Letters 3 [1849-1857]), 172. I have not been able to determine the connection between Edward W. Leggett and Augustus Wright Leggett.

12. Portions of the Onderdonck letter appear in Roy W. Moger, Roslyn Then & Now (Roslyn Public Schools, 1965), 22-28.

13. Another, earlier Plaindealer was owned by the radical Democrat William Leggett, a partner with Bryant on the New York Evening Post. This Leggett, a political mentor of Whitman in his days as New York journalist, died in 1839; I have found no connection between the two families of Leggetts.

15. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Carbondale, II: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1964), 5:467

17. Her other projects included the establishment of a public park, and the founding of a history club and a weekly discussion group. She was also active in collecting money for the refugees in the Freedmen's camps.

18. Donaldson, 240; the photo, by the New York photographer Napoleon Sarony, was taken in 1878.

19. Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1978) 1:188, 217, 224, 222, 246; 2:360.

21. Traubel, 4, 155,; for the nude photograph, see Ed Folsom, "Whitman's Calamus Photographs," in Breaking Bounds, eds. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 193-219; for the Duckett photo see Folsom, "Whitman's Calamus Photographs."

22. Charles E. Feinberg, "Percy Ives, Detroit and Walt Whitman," Detroit Historical Society Bulletin 16 (Feb. 1960):4-11.

23. Donaldson, 247. This letter includes a bizarre story about Percy's mother, Margaret, at the age of seven. A child was born dead to someone in the house while the girl was at school. On Margaret's return, her mother, Elisa Leggett, wishing to learn if children have a natural dread of death, dressed the dead infant and gave it to her daughter to hold as if a doll. The child accepts the "doll," holds it, and asks to keep it awhile. The mother leaves the room; soon the child asks to have the doll taken away because it is "so still it makes me feel so strange!" Leggett commented that it may have been the silence that was so powerful, "So I feel the silences in the meetings of Friends" (Donaldson, 248). While the story seems somewhat morbid, the desire to learn by observation, and the attempt to connect sensory perceptions with psychological states suggests Elisa may have inherited her father's scientific curiosity.

24. Letter in the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library; Leggett's letter to Whitman of the same date, mentioned in the letter to her daughter, is lost. Ingersoll, the "great agnostic" and freethinker, had become an admirer of Whitman after a reading, in 1888, of Leaves of Grass; Whitman welcomed his attentions. The 1890 lecture, "Liberty, in Literature," was a benefit held for the poet's assistance.

25. The undated fragment is in the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.