LAUSR

In March 1888, eleven years after the end of Reconstruction, Walt Whitman’s disciples Horace Traubel and Richard Maurice Bucke left Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman then lived, and traveled as the poet’s emissaries to visit his old friend and supporter William Douglas O’Connor, who was ailing at his home in Washington, DC. O’Connor and Whitman had been close friends in the early years of Reconstruction in Washington, when Whitman would regularly go to the home of O’Connor and his wife Nellie to engage in lively and intense conversation about the issues of the day. The conversations grew much too heated, however, in the early 1870s after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave freed male slaves the right to vote. Whitman worried about ignorant freedmen having their votes bought and voting in a bloc, and he insisted they needed to be educated before gaining the franchise; O’Connor could not believe he was hearing this from the radical democratic author of Leaves of Grass (1855–1891), and when Whitman stormed out of O’Connor’s home one night, it would be the last they would communicate with each other for nearly a decade. Nellie O’Connor (n ee Ellen Calder) later recalled that when the Fifteenth Amendment “was up for discussion in 1871, it proved a topic that provoked the most vehement battle,” with “Walt taking the ground that the negroes were wholly unfit for the ballot, and