In February 1861, the president-elect of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, began a grueling 13-day train trip through the country to introduce himself to the divided people who had voted him into office (barely). Along the way, he had to deal with bruising adversity, including a serious assassination plot, but he also used the trip to develop his thoughts about the complicated country he was about to lead, and to meet or at least be seen by millions of Americans, including Walt Whitman. That first encounter would never be forgotten by Whitman, and he would expand upon it in lectures for the rest of his life.

Ted Widmer is Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. He has also directed research centers and libraries, notably at the Library of Congress, Brown University and Washington College, and he was a speechwriter and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. In 2019, he curated the Morgan Library’s Whitman Exhibit, “Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy.” He writes actively about history for the public, including the “Disunion” series in the New York Times, which chronicled the Civil War, and “The Year of the Crack Up,” which described the upheavals of the year 1919, also in the New York Times. In 2020, his book, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washiington was published by Simon and Schuster.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she was the curator of “Whitman and the Promise of America” (South Street Seaport Museum, NY, July – December 2005), “Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman” (with Susan Tane; Grolier Club, NY, May – July 2019), and most recently, “Robust American Love: Avid Visions by Walt Whitman and John Ransom Phillips” (BlackBook Presents, Brooklyn, August – September 2019).