I Had You to Look Forward To: Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle
When Walt Whitman stepped aboard Peter Doyle’s streetcar on a stormy night in Washington, D.C., in 1865, the Civil War had only recently ended.
By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
They met by chance on a nearly empty streetcar in the wounded capital of a divided nation. What began between America’s great poet and a young workingman became one of the deepest relationships of Walt Whitman’s life, preserved in letters filled with longing, tenderness, fear, and the stubborn hope of being together again.
When Walt Whitman stepped aboard Peter Doyle’s streetcar on a stormy night in Washington, D.C., in 1865, the Civil War had only recently ended. The country was mourning its dead, struggling with emancipation and reunion, and attempting to imagine a future after four years of extraordinary violence.
Whitman was forty-six, a poet, journalist, former teacher, and devoted volunteer in the military hospitals of Washington. His visits with wounded and dying soldiers had changed him, deepening both his compassion and his understanding of the love that could exist between men.
Doyle was approximately twenty-two, an Irish immigrant, former Confederate soldier, and streetcar conductor. He had survived the war from the opposite side of the conflict, witnessed Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, and was now making his living among the ordinary workers of the capital.
They differed in age, education, profession, politics, and wartime allegiance. Yet something passed between them before either man had time to explain it.
Doyle later remembered Whitman wrapped in his blanket and looking like an old sea captain. Whitman was the only passenger, so Doyle entered the car and began talking with him. They felt comfortable with one another almost immediately, and when the streetcar reached the end of the line, Whitman remained aboard for the return journey.
Doyle recalled placing his hand on Whitman’s knee and feeling that they understood one another. From that night forward, they became nearly inseparable.
