Nearly 3,000 documents in Whitman's handwriting cast light on his experience as a government clerk.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Kenneth Price, a professor of American literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-director of the Whitman archive, uncovered the thousands of documents at the National Archives vault in Washington DC. "I can remember getting glazed as I went over page after page, seeing no handwriting that looked like Whitman's," said Price. "And then suddenly I turned a page and there it was: unmistakably Whitman's handwriting."
The papers – almost 3,000 of them – have now been conclusively identified as Whitman's for the first time. They were written while the author of Leaves of Grass was employed as a government clerk between 1865 and 1874. He worked mainly as a scribe and copyist, drafting correspondence, copying letters written by others and researching a variety of issues.
Topics covered by the documents range from charges of treason to war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Clan and whether smallpox was used as a weapon during the civil war.
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