In the same month Whitman obtained a clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, and thoroughly enjoyed the contact into which he was thus brought with the aboriginal Americans. They on their side appear to have distinguished him as a real man among the host of colourless officials, and to have responded to his advances.[432] This was the early spring of Lincoln's death; and Walt was at the President's last levee.[433] He looked in also at the Inauguration Ball held in the Patent Office--strangely converted from its recent uses as a hospital. There he remarked the worn and weary expression of the beloved brown face; for still the great tragedy dragged on. Five or six weeks later, a young Irish-Virginian, one of Walt's Washington friends,[434] was up in the second gallery of the crowded theatre upon the tragic night of the assassination, and saw the whole action passing before his bewildered eyes. Whitman was at home again in Brooklyn: seeing George, we may presume, and making final arrangements for his _Drum-taps_; on his return he seems to have heard the whole graphic story from his friend. It is doubtful whether Whitman and the dead President had ever spoken to one another, beyond the ordinary greeting of street acquaintances. They had met perhaps a score of times, and it is recorded that once, when Walt passed the President's window, Lincoln had remarked significantly--"Well, _he_ looks like a man".[435] It seems possible that at first Whitman may have felt something of the public uncertainty about the character of the new President.[436] How deep-rooted in the average American mind was the distrust or dislike of his policy is seen in the fact that, only six months before the death that was mourned by the whole nation, the opposition to his re-election was represented by a formidable popular vote. The South was in revolt, and therefore of course disfranchised; but even so, McClellan polled as large a total as had the President at the previous election; though Lincoln himself increased his former vote by a little more than one-fifth. So strong ran popular feeling against the whole policy of interference with the seceding States even in the fourth year of the war. But Lincoln's death revealed his true worth to America. And the sense of the almost sacramental nature of that death, as sealing for ever the million others of the war, and finally consecrating the re-established union of North and South, grew upon Whitman, who long before had realised that Lincoln was the father of his country and the captain of her course.