By Mitchell Santine Gould
It seems that every generation needs a reminder that our long road to liberation and equality did not begin at Stonewall. Consider: in 1969, when the Stonewall Rebellion began, same-sex love was more than just a “dirty” open secret: it was a regular topic for condemnation from the nation’s pulpits. But a century prior, and all the way back to Christianity’s early days, it was defined precisely and strictly as “that horrible crime not to be named among Christians.” The topic was largely tabooed from print and public discourse. During the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, therefore, same-sex lovers were a profoundly muted, muzzled class. It was also a dangerous time to be different. In the city, the merest whisper of alternate sexuality could terminate a career. And in the country, into the 1900s, society was still significantly ruled by vigilante violence.
In 1872, for instance, a young poet named Charles Kelsey was lynched in Walt Whitman’s hometown of Huntington, New York. His unwanted attentions to a young girl resulted in his being tarred and feathered, then castrated, and soon thereafter murdered and dismembered. In 1873, the lower half of Kelsey’s body, still tarred and feathered, was found floating in Long Island Sound. Down the years, the garbled echoes of this horrifying incident probably gave rise to the gossip that the other sexy poet from Huntington had once been tarred and feathered.
By the end of this era, Camden, New Jersey, had come to represent a rebellion of another sort, as the final home of Walt Whitman (1819 — 1892). In his sprawling anthology of poems, Leaves of Grass (various editions, 1855 — 1892), Walt had declared, “I will escape from the sham that was proposed to me… I will give an example to lovers, to take permanent shape…” He thundered, “My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.” One could go so far as to say that just as Susan B. Anthony could not make the world safer for lesbians until she first made the world safer for women, Walt Whitman could not make the world safer for gay lovers until he made it safer for strait lovers. After all, masturbation was generally viewed as a morbid addiction capable of destroying one’s very life. Even the cherished gold standard of sexuality — married intercourse — was widely considered hazardous to health, beyond an occasional effort deliberately intended to conceive a child. Against this highly repressive milieu, Leaves of Grass did more than any other book to defend the sanctity of sexual relationships.
Walt’s modest house, although bathed in the foul fumes of Camden’s nearby fertilizer factory, became a shrine to the cause, attracting pilgrims such as Oscar Wilde, Dracula author Bram Stoker, and the great English gay-rights reformer Edward Carpenter. Walt Whitman House curator Leo Blake has by now spent decades discouraging visitors from the notion that Whitman could have imagined himself gay (and indeed, in his last years, the literally brain-damaged old poet, himself, issued a scathing denunciation of the suggestion). But the house, today, remains a shrine to Whitman’s vital gay-rights legacy. Even though it’s located smack in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, the historic site continues to draw international visitors.
Just across the Delaware River, Philadelphia herself need not feel left out of this noble heritage. Until now, the City of Brotherly Love has been hiding her own secret contribution to Whitman’s legacy. One can find it in a most unlikely place: Mount Moriah Cemetery. The cemetery is almost as forlorn, forgotten, and neglected as the secret I’m about to reveal. Because in this weedy, abandoned graveyard — now reclaimed by The Friends of Mount Moriah — stands a little monument to Frederick Burpee Vaughan (1837 – 1893).
As scholars since 1990 have very slowly come to appreciate, Fred Vaughan’s love for Walt Whitman was likely one of the key inspirations behind Leaves of Grass. Any of the poems which allude to a young man passionately loved by the bard — from the stories, in Calamus, of love joyously claimed and tragically lost, to the loafing lover and bedfellow in “Song of Myself” — could have been inspired by the nights they shared in Walt’s Brooklyn bedroom.
In 1921, Vaughan’s name first surfaced in a study of Whitman’s daybooks, and the author mentioned that letters from this “friend” were at the Library of Congress. It was not until the 1980s that Charley Shively seriously studied this small cache of letters — ten in all — from Fred to Walt. This resulted in the most unique and important finding in Whitman scholarship of that century.
Previous to this, Whitman Studies had been conducted under a noxious cloud of homophobia. Shively, as a militantly gay English professor, may have encountered pushback for any attempt to interest nervous academics in his frank views of Whitman’s love life. In any event, he reported his discovery in what was surely the most shocking, potty-mouthed literary essay ever printed, while working with a radical gay-rights newspaper called Fag Rag. Shively’s findings (although marred by the inclusion of unsubstantiated fantasy sequences), however, turned out to be a smoking gun. Although they didn’t fix the precise date, they proved that Fred was actually living in the Whitman household as the earliest editions of Leaves of Grass were being conceived and executed. As a matter of fact, Fred implored Walt, while the latter was preparing the Third Edition in Boston, to send him the galley proofs.
Fred remains largely a mystery to us today because he got married. His youthful relationship with Whitman was never, ever, to be “mentioned amongst Christians” or anyone else. And yet his love must have been vital if Walt quietly squirreled away for posterity a few of Fred’s letters. So, there is only so much that any of us can say about Fred Vaughan, but I have bits of new insight to report here.
Frederick Burpee Vaughan was born in Canada; probably St. John’s, New Brunswick. (After his death on January 27, 1893, the Brooklyn Eagle alerted the newspapers there — home to families of Vaughans and Burpees — to copy the notice.) As a boy, he may have initially settled in Boston, because he was warm friends with that city’s bus drivers before meeting Walt. (These were the original buses: horse-drawn omnibuses.) But at a young age, he shipped out as a sailor boy.
We don’t have the details of Fred’s boyhood, but during the Age of Sail, this was often the fate of a boy who had already exhibited loose morality. As Herman Melville put it, “The sins for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger in some of these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.” Actually, Melville was understating the case. In 1871, Dr. Albert Gihon reported to the US Navy that he had never been attached to a ship in which same-sex acts “were not practiced.” Other officers, he said “may deny that they have heard of them, but I know these vices to be common, and generally unknown only because uninvestigated or undiscovered.”
Before the Civil War, Walt Whitman’s “mast-hemmed Manhattan” was not just an amphibious world. It was also an ambisexual world. The rule, as famously hinted much later by Winston Churchill, was gay sex afloat and red-light sex ashore. My documentary, Sailors: the Wheels on Melville’s Coach, established a unified theory of this historic bisexuality. The thing common to both “crimes” was the thrill of novel, scandalous, forbidden sex.
Today, psychologists specializing in “sensation-seeking” (that is: thrill-seeking) behavior recognize extreme sexual daring and promiscuity as another facet of a fundamentally restless, reckless, death-defying personality. For a sailor during the Age of Sail, sexual pursuits accompanied his intense boredom on land; his gambling and squandering of cash; his boozing in the sailors’ dance halls; his hunger for new scenes and exotic peoples; and the intense rush of climbing forty feet up a mast to reef the sails during a howling gale. What all this amounts to is this: throughout his life, Fred’s deepest yearnings often returned to Walt Whitman, his handsome, muscular, passionate lover — but within a few years after their love affair started, he was “railroaded” into marriage, and soon thereafter became a father. None of the letters from Walt to Fred have survived: they certainly might have contained details that would expose Fred, his wife Frances, or their children.
When Walt met him, young Frederick Burpee Vaughan had taken on the arduous life of a Broadway omnibus driver (making him one of Walt’s favorite types). Beloved by his fellow “Jehus,” he was physically strong enough to handle two Morgan horses in the frenetic, dangerous crush of Broadway traffic. As Walt himself testified in 1881, Fred’s colleagues were:
And yet, for all that, Fred can’t be dismissed as just another semi-literate “rough” in the mold of Whitman’s well-known Civil-War-era lover, Pete Doyle — and he was clearly unlike the scruffy juvenile delinquents Old Walt pursued after his massive stroke of 1873. Fred’s letters reveal an affable, humorous, if somewhat anxious personality. Like Doyle, he was Irish-American (in itself something of a fetish for Walt), but he had a finer poetic spirit than any of Whitman’s famous friends-and-lovers: John Burroughs, William Douglas O’Connor, or Edward Carpenter. Unlike them, poor Fred never had the good fortune to be able to express himself in print.
For a while, Fred endured the claustrophobic madhouse of the Whitman family home on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. Walt had likely wrested him away his job at an express delivery company, in an attempt to teach him typesetting, because Fred recalled being involved with “the Press.” Neither that attempt nor his life with the Whitman family worked out. Fred moved in with a friend named Bob Cooper, who lived with his mother somewhere in Manhattan. Regardless of the status of his relationship with Walt at the time, this made much more sense than crossing the East River before dawn, on the Brooklyn ferry, to rejoin his former job as a clerk with Westcott, Dodd, & Co.’s delivery firm at 168 Broadway.
Fred left Brooklyn prior to Whitman’s publication trip to Boston in March of 1860, as shown by the first of the ten letters which Walt preserved for us. In that letter, Fred said he twice visited their famous haunt — Pfaff’s rathskeller — to say goodbye to Walt, without seeing him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed Walt Whitman to Boston. Striding to and fro across the Commons, they held a debate over the pros and cons of Walt’s new heterosexually-oriented Children of Adam poems, a meeting which has become the stuff of legend. But before Walt finished his mission in Boston, Emerson was lecturing in New York, and Fred heard him speak. “I think he has that in him which makes men capable of strong friendships,” wrote Fred. Emerson said that “a man whose heart was filled with a warm, ever enduring not to be shaken by anything Friendship was one to be set on one side apart from other men, and almost to be worshipped as a saint.”
Fred’s letter nervously teased Walt with the spectacle of “them setting you & myself, and one or two others that we know up in some public place, with an immense placard on our breast, reading Sincere Friends!!!” The triple bangs indicate just how ill-advised Fred thought the notion was. His conclusion was, in fact, highly revealing of the tragedy to come: “Good doctrine that but I think the theory preferable to practice.” Fred was not willing to join Walt, out on the scary open road. In “Song of the Open Road,” Walt had barked:
Like a bolt out of the blue, on May 2, 1862, Fred announced he was to be married — on the very next day: “I shall have no show! I have invited no company. — I want you to be there. — Do not fail please, as I am very anxious you should come.” We now know that at age 24, he married young Frances Emma Colvin, daughter of the late Jacob Colvin, Chairman of the Democratic-Republican Party in the 22nd Ward, a supervisor of street construction. After Jacob died, Frances Colvin was living with her family at 169 Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. She was only 15.
Is it possible that Fred had begun courting Frances by 1859, when Walt would have composed the Calamus poem about a lover who could “content himself without me”? She would have been 13 years old then. Shocking as this is today, about one out of every four married women in New York State in this era were teen-agers. Feminist author Elizabeth Oakes Smith, for instance, had married at age sixteen. Thereafter she was always appalled whenever she saw “a mere girl promising at the altar to love, &c. ‘till death.’ What does she know of human emotion, of the depths of her own soul or that of another?” After all, no one, even at mature age, could be sure that they would love their spouse forever. But at least, insisted Smith, “they should be of years to realize the solemn import of the words, and willing to hazard the test.” Radical reformer Victoria Woodhull, married at 15 — the same age as Fanny Vaughan — wrote:
And yet, the evidence suggests that the wedding was hardly Fred’s idea. In his terse listing of milestones in life, there is a vague reference to a “railroad marriage.” On January 22, 1863, Fred’s first son, named for his father, was born — 264 days after the wedding. A full-term pregnancy is typically 280 days. Fred and Frances couldn’t have known she was pregnant by their wedding day, but their families must have suspected premarital intercourse. The wedding may have been forced purely on that basis.
For Whitman, Fred’s marriage and brother George’s war wound meant that 1862 marked an end to his existence as a New Yorker. He had to head to the front to determine how badly George had been wounded. And he recognized it as his self-styled “Quaker” duty to serve the maimed combatants. He left for Washington, for an heroic ministry in the army hospitals while being employed as a government clerk. At the close of the war, he acquired his most famous lover, Peter Doyle. Their passionate, frustrating, stormy relationship would last about a decade. In 1870, Walt left us a record of his distress with [P]eter [D]oyle, alphabetically encoded as [16.4]: “GIVE UP ABSOLUTELY… this FEVERISH, FLUCTUATING, useless UNDIGNIFIED pursuit of 16.4… so humiliating… All this diseased, feverish disproportionate adhesiveness… Remember Fred Vaughan…”
During the Civil War, Fred eluded the draft, as fortunately, he was not a citizen; he waited until October 16, 1865 to take his oath of allegiance. In February, 1865, he served on the arrangements committee for a ball at the Academy of Music, hosted by Brooklyn's Fortitude Masonic Lodge. Then, on the night of September 4, 1866, Fanny and little Freddie were returning from a picnic when they fell from the deck of a barge into the East River. They were rescued by a fellow Irishman and Mason, who kept both mother and child afloat for twenty minutes until rescued by the police.
Then we lose the thread of Fred’s life until 1874, when he began to correspond with Walt again. Like any other New Yorker, in 1873, Fred had heard about “all your sorrows which has been made public,” affirming, “I have sorrowed with you — most especially in the death of Dear Mother and your own illness [the paralytic stroke].” For the previous four years, he’d been secretly writing Walt a letter every week: “sometimes I write long letters, sometimes short ones. But so you know my dear friend they are all real to me — and I often keep them months before I destroy them.”
One of these letters, however, he preserved. Shively determined that it was written before Whitman’s mother moved to Camden in 1872. I’ll not try to reproduce its eloquence here, but it can be found online on the Walt Whitman Archive for August 11, 1874. It’s one of the most beautiful letters I’ve ever read: “Connected with all and yet distinct from all arises thee Dear Walt. Walt — my life has turned out a poor miserable failure… I feels [sic] that I have not been honest with myself — my family nor my friends.”
On November 16, 1874, he wrote again, in a heartfelt letter as moving in its poetic beauty as the other one. “Father used to tell me I was lazy Mother denied it — and in latter years I used to tell your Mother you was lazy and she denied it. You have asserted yourself [with your literary accomplishments]. I have confirmed my Father.” He listed the skeletal outline of a life growing very dark: Express / Babies / trouble / Rum / More trouble / More Rum / Estrangement from you… Again, I encourage readers to appreciate this remarkable letter in its entirety online.
Two years later, America was celebrating its centennial, and the world was coming to Philadelphia for the Exposition — the first world’s fair to be held in America. In July or August, Fred called upon Walt in its suburb, Camden, where the disabled poet was hobbling around on a cherished cane gifted by Peter Doyle. In 1879, Whitman was well enough to visit New York from April to June, staying with his wealthy friend, the jeweler J. H. Johnson. On May 14, he found his old friend Bob Cooper, who told him that Fred was conducting the New York Life Insurance building’s elevator at Broadway and Leonard.
Fortunately, there were still occasional little flashes of happiness for Fred in his declining years. In 1884, the Lincoln Club’s entertainment committee tapped him to sing “several entertaining songs” with “enlivening effect.” But thereafter, he left his family behind in Brooklyn. The circumstances are unknown, but he had utterly lost his battle against Demon Rum. Like Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, he moved to Philadelphia. One can only wonder whether Fred became friends with Pete. In 1890, he visited Whitman on his deathbed, probably for the last time. Walt died in 1892, and Fred, 17 years his junior and only 54, died the next year — cause of death: alcoholism. He was buried, as previously mentioned, in Mount Moriah Cemetery.
The question naturally arises whether, given his addiction and self-professed “laziness,” Fred made an effective father. We have mixed evidence for this. The year Fred died, his well-liked son Harry C. Vaughan, a book-keeper who still lived with his mother, was arrested for retrieving his employer’s ledger and partially burning it, in a vain attempt to shield his embezzlement from discovery. His boss, a lithographer, had heard stories that he was leading “a fast life,” and had taken “considerable interest in racing matters.” When confronted by a reporter, poor Frances tried to manufacture an alibi for Harry’s absence from her home, before “collapsing completely.”
On the other hand, Fred’s son Frank Colvin Vaughan served as a Brooklyn alderman in 1898; ran the Long Island Title Guarantee Company in 1902; and acted as Commissioner of Deeds for the City of New York in 1907. And even Harry may have redeemed himself, because one of his descendents, Harold Cecil Vaughan, became not only a beloved teacher at Brooklyn Friends School (run by the descendants of Walt’s friends, the Quakers), but the author of several respected historical studies.
Finally, the reader will naturally share my own longstanding curiosity about Fred’s appearance. As an aspiring novelist and illustrator, the profound lack of information has given me the license to romanticize him as a handsome, red-haired Irishman. However, Walt’s writings repeatedly brag about his own attraction to men not considered good-looking, suggesting something a little more mundane. Artists as well as writers were fond of joining Walt and Fred in the “Vault at Pfaff’s.” Therefore, it wouldn’t be surprising that the couple could have been caricatured by one of them before Fred’s marriage caused him to slip entirely under the gaydar, if you will.
The March 17, 1860 issue of the short-lived Vanity Fair, associated with the bohemians at Pfaff’s, depicted a considerably ugly-fied Walt Whitman in the act of hiding, under his enormous hat, a smiling, mustachioed leprechaun of a young man. The unknown friend looks a bit like a youthful edition of Peter Doyle. This drawing was an illustration for a patently homophobic parody of “Song of Myself,” entitled “Counter-Jumps:”
This image encapsulates our entire understanding of Fred Vaughan: a sensitive young man at great risk for homophobic abuse if he accompanied his lover on the Open Road, a kind soul just looking forward to being hidden from a hateful world by Walt’s steadfast discretion — until long after both had died.