APPRAISER: When you doing the show you don't know what's coming in. You don't know who
you're gonna meet. You hope something comes in that's wonderful and one of the
things that did come in was this Walt Whitman letter.
GUEST: To my mom's great-great great-grandfather. Walt Whitman would go around as I
understand and would be the scribe for injured soldiers in Washington DC during
the Civil War. And this young man was a foster child in that family. GUEST: I've done
this all my life I mean literally from when I was a little kid I was in the
book store with my father. It still is just so thrilling to be able
to touch a piece of paper that Walt Whitman or someone famous like him, you
know? They held that piece of paper, they touched that piece of paper. Most of the
time when you see this type of material you're in a library situation.
It's either under glass or it's, you don't get to put your little pinky on it
and go, "oooh!" The letter is dated in 1863 in Washington. A lot of soldiers either
got sick, wounded, hurt, and they had to come off the battlefield and we're in
the hospital. Now Walt Whitman, he had a brother in the Civil War and the brother
got wounded Walt Whitman went down to find his brother to see how he was. Found
him alive fortunately, but in the trip he saw the amputations the wounding. He saw
the destruction, and he immediately wanted to help. One of the things he did
was soldiers who were too sick to write home he would sit there and write
letters for them. And you see this is all in Walt Whitman's handwriting, it's not
just the front but it's a longer letter He's talking about, "please family please
write to me I miss you write me long letters." And then what really adds to the
tragedy is he says, "my diarrhea is still somewhat troublesome yet I feel in
pretty good spirits." It didn't get better and he died
within two weeks. I did a lot of checking and I didn't find hardly any letters
that he wrote for the patients and he obviously did a lot but people weren't
necessarily saving them because they weren't Walt Whitman letters per se they
were the family. I would say that a collector would easily pay in the eight
to twelve thousand dollar retail range. GUEST: Oh my gosh! That's wild.
I never would have thought that. APPRAISER: One of the things when you do appraisals either
at an Roadshow or personally is you don't necessarily always need to know
everything. Matter of fact you never will know everything and if you did know
everything it would get boring. But you just need to know who to call. Ken Price
is the co-director of the Walt Whitman archives. If it's Walt Whitman he's one
of the people to get in touch with. I have heard that Abby is bringing the
letter with her so that Ken Price can actually see the physical letter. PRICE: Abbie?
GUEST: Oh, hi Ken. PRICE: It's really nice to meet you. GUEST: It's nice to meet you after all this time.
PRICE: Wow, terrific, man that's beautiful. I've been working with Whitman's manuscripts for
30 years or so and so I feel as if I can recognize his handwriting the way I can
recognize my mother's handwriting. I find these letters that Whitman inscribed for
other people when he's writing for them he's being a ventriloquist as it were. I
find him especially moving. He's not doing it in a pretentious way he's not
trying to sound like a famous poet nor is he trying to take a lot of credit for
it. Sometimes he writes these letters and he doesn't, as he did in the case of this
letter for Ally and Hubbard, write at the bottom, "written by Walt Whitman." Sometimes
he just inscribes it and then
selflessly does this as a service to other people. GUEST: We just brought it in
actually as a supporting document to other items and when I showed it to the
man at the folk art table he said, "I think Ken Gloss might like to see this,
why don't you come over here with me." And we knew that it was probably you know
something interesting but it was so it just was it all unfolded in our laps. We
had no idea that it would be anything like this, it was just one of those
things. APPRAISER: The original appraised price was eight
to twelve thousand dollars. At the time I knew it was rare. I didn't realize that
this is one of the only known.There were a couple in archives and libraries. I
think now you could probably get into the maybe 15 or $20,000. On the other
hand, if you're a Walt Whitman collector be it of literary institution, a library,
an archive, or a collector, if you want an example of the type of letter that he
wrote in the Civil War for somebody you might never get one in a whole career of
collecting.