A rare letter written by the poet Walt Whitman for a wounded Civil War soldier has been found in the National Archives.
The Washington Post reports it was discovered last month by an archives volunteer on a team preparing Civil War widows' pension files to be digitized and placed online.
"It doesn't get much bigger, in my eyes," said Jackie Budell, an archive specialist who oversees the project. "It's just simply stunning. ... We're not going to find another one like this, probably, for a while."
The letter was written for Pvt. Robert N. Jabo of the 8th New Hampshire infantry, who was dying of tuberculosis. Whitman, who regularly visited hospitalized soldiers, offered to write for him.
Whitman, a poet, journalist and essayist, sat with wounded and dying soldiers and wrote letters for them.
"I do a good deal of this, of course, writing all kinds, including love letters," Whitman wrote in a dispatch for The New York Times in 1864.
A century and a half later, few of those letters have surfaced.
Volunteer Catherine Cusack Wilson found the letter Feb. 3. while sorting through pension files at the archives.
David S. Ferriero, who heads the National Archives, sent a scan of the letter to Whitman scholar Kenneth M. Price at the University of Nebraska. Price is co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive and an expert on Whitman's handwriting.
Price noted the unique way Whitman wrote the letters x, d, and I, and how he often used a plus sign instead of the word "and."
Whitman's signature in the letter resembles other Whitman signatures, Price said in an email.
The letter will be housed in a vault at the National Archives with other valuable documents.
