the soldier’s remembrance as personal and confiding sort of relationship existing between the soldier boys and "Uncle Abe". The scene at the bedside of the dying President has been described in the Press, and as the news swept around the earth, all the children of men, in the entire civilized world, wept with those about his couch. That deathbed scene will never be forgotten. Those involved in the military, such as Whitman, held deep admiration toward Lincoln. The unforeseen tragedy had transversed the civilian population and had stunned the Union officers. During the Civil War Walter Whitman ministered to wounded soldiers in Union army hospitals in Washington, D.C. The soldiers had--wept like little children when told "Uncle Abe was dead” (A Lawyer Called to Serve 2000). Whitman’s involvement in the Civil War had instilled in him a deep ingrained respect toward President Lincoln.The night before Lincoln’s death he experienced melancholy dreams. Lincoln states, “There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me,” he said, “then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping, and I thought I left my bed.” (Clark, Champ 172). Whitman similarly foreshadowed the haunting dreams of the event, and the characters associated with them that night before the Assassination. Through the relationship between the dreams of Lincoln and Whitman the impact becomes clearer.In his free time, Whitman wandered the streets of the capital, occasionally seeing a weary President Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman draws into account his daily encounters with President, Lincoln, a man he admired. Whitman states, “I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town...(one day while he was riding his horse) I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly...and he happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye, and the expression on his mouth was one of the grea...
