Walt Whitman

Whitman and the War

Not a soldier

Whitman did not enlist for active duty at the start of the war. His age was one reason. Already forty-two, he was too old to serve in the ranks and untrained as an officer. (Most soldiers were twenty- to thirty-years-old). He had trouble anyway with the thought of firing a gun or drawing a sword on another man. Furthermore, the war at the outset was expected to be a quick affair. President Abraham Lincoln called for only 20,000 volunteers to bolster the Union's small regular army, and they were expected to take the South's chief city, Richmond, Virginia, in short order.

Finally, there was the matter of Whitman's mother. He felt very close to her ("How much I owe her! It could not be put in a scale" [Lowenfels, p.133]), and after Whitman's father died in 1855, Whitman felt obligated to care for her. So he stayed out of the fighting, but his younger brother George was drafted. George must have fought well, for within a year he was leading troops into action as a first lieutenant in the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Early battles

The early fighting of the war did not go well for the North. The Southern secessionists, or Secesh as Whitman was fond of calling them, seemed to pick more capable military leaders than the North. Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson beat the Union army in the first great battle at Bull Run. General Robert E. Lee had some early success around Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. Much of this fighting took place on battlegrounds between the two capitals, not far from Washington, D.C.

The early 1800s had seen the development of rifles, guns that gave the bullet a spin out of the barrel (making them more accurate), and explosives that sent that bullet off when the charge was struck. These new weapons, which could be fired again and again quickly and at long range, produced heavy casualties. Four of every ten soldiers in the Civil War were wounded in battle. At first, most of the casualties were on the Union side. However, the wounded from both sides were sometimes sent to Washington hospitals. Whitman himself encountered enemy brothers in a hospital there: "One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought on their respective sides, both badly wounded, and both brought together here after a separation of four years. Each died for his cause" (Lowenfels, p. 125).

The city became a massive hospital site. Even the railroad station was devoted to medical care. Endless rows of cots became beds for suffering soldiers, who lay dying or hurt. New medical sites were hurriedly set up by erecting tents in open spaces throughout the city.

The Battle of Fredericksburg

Several major battles had been fought before the Battle of Fredericksburg, December 11, 1862. By then, the Confederate army in Virginia had grown to 78,000 soldiers while the Union force swelled to 120,000. Some 18,000 were killed or wounded in the four days of fighting at Fredericksburg. Northern newspapers wrote daily accounts of war events, publishing casualty lists of the Union soldiers who were wounded in battle. Listed among the wounded was a Lieutenant George Whitman.

Volunteer wound dresser

Whitman caught a train for Washington, D.C., and from there planned to travel to Fredericksburg to find his brother. In Washington, the center of Union activity, Whitman could hardly avoid seeing the hospitals with wounded soldiers in desperate need of care. Everywhere, he saw crippled, hungry, and thirsty young men.

Whitman hurried on to Fredericksburg, where he found that his brother had only been slightly wounded and was already back in action. He spent a week in his brother's tent and wrote to his mother: "When I found dear brother George and found that he was alive and well, O you may imagine how trifling all my little cares and difficulties seemed ... George is about building a place, a half hut and half tent for himself.... Every captain has a tent in which he lives, transacts company business, etc., has a cook (or a man of all work); and in the same tent mess and sleep his lieutenants and perhaps the first sergeant" (Lowenfels, pp. 31-32).

Whitman described the battle, explaining that everyone from the colonel on down was forced to lie full length on his back or belly in the mud, protected, until they lifted their heads, using the slightly raised ground as shelter from Southern sharpshooters. And after the battle, he described the destruction: "Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital tent during the night; perhaps there is a row of three or four of these corpses lying covered over. No one makes an ado" (Lowenfels, p. 36).

War-time impressions

Such scenes weighed heavily on the poet. For the next three years, he took it upon himself to give physical and spiritual comfort to the wounded. He meanwhile wrote down some of his impressions in letters, poems, and newspaper articles.

In one case Whitman's writing testifies to the brutal handling of some Union soldiers after they surrendered. Two Union lieutenants, already wounded, were dragged on the ground and surrounded by some Confederate guerrillas: "[Each guerrilla fighter] was stabbing them [the lieutenants] in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinned firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them.... These two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had received about twenty such thrusts, some of them through the mouth, face, etc" (Lowenfels, p. 41).

The Union army, in response, captured and shot some Confederate officers. Whitman described the whole incident, and then asked the reader to multiply the scene a few hundred times to get some inkling of the horrors of this war.

After touring the camps for a while, Whitman felt a need to return to Washington to nurse all the injured there. He took various part-time jobs, every day or evening working somewhere among the wounded. He wrote his mother, describing how the wounded and sick got more plentiful all the time. He debated how to make money in the meanwhile for his hospital and soldiers visits. From 1862 to 1865, Whitman wrote a selection of pieces published in New York papers describing the hospitals and wounded. His articles were based on a mass of personal experiences. Whitman befriended more than 1,000 young men in this time, making more than 600 visits to hospitals and military fields: "I adapt myself to each case and to temperaments—some need to be humored; some are rather out of their head; some merely want me to sit with them and hold them by the hand. One will want a letter written to mother or father...; some like to have me feed them...; some want a cooling drink...; others want writing paper, envelopes, a stamp, etc" (Lowenfels, p. 113).

"Wound Dresser"

In the poem "Wound Dresser," Whitman explains how their pain became his own: the fractured thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, the countless amputations. He felt their suffering, and they responded: "Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested / Many a soldier's kiss dwell'd on these bearded lips" (Whitman, p. 319).

Whitman's clear and detailed descriptions of events provide a vivid picture of a nation at war. He pointed out, for example, that there were more Southerners, especially from the border states, in the Union army than most people suspected. He described huge droves of cattle passing through the streets of Washington during the war. He explained how soldiers warmed their battlefield tents by digging a long trough in the ground under them, covering it over with old railroad iron and earth, then building a fire at one of the open ends to let it draw through to the other. He said of prison camps, "Starvation is the rule. Rags, filth, despair" (Lowenfels, p. 211). He visited black troops and questioned how well the Republican party would look out for them, repeating a comment he had heard: "The Negro will get his due from the Negro—from no one else. I say so, too; that is the whole story, from beginning, middle, and end" (Lowenfels, p. 227).

The war had turned Whitman from a poet preoccupied with his own actions to one who wrote with deep feeling about the surrounding conditions and people and their effect on him.

Lincoln's death

Whitman was still caring for the injured when news arrived that President Lincoln had been assassinated. This too the poet documented in a final speech about Lincoln. He had seen the president almost every day, happening to live where Lincoln passed to and from some lodgings just outside the city. Whitman considered Lincoln America's most moral personality, allowing for his faults but celebrating his honesty, shrewdness, conscience, goodness, and sense of Unionism.

In a lecture describing Lincoln's murder, Whitman recounted that Lincoln heartily enjoyed watching plays. A scene had just been performed in which two ladies were told by a Yankee that he was not a wealthy man, and therefore poor marriage material. The actresses then exited, leaving only the actor on the stage for a moment, at which point the fatal gun was shot: "The actual murder, transpired with the quiet and simplicity of any commonest occurrence.... Through the general hum following the stage pause ... came the muffled sound of a pistol shot, which not one hundredth part of the audience heard at the time ... and then through the President's box, a sudden figure, a man raises himself with hands and feet, stands a moment on the railing [of the second tier] leaps below to the stage (a distance of perhaps fourteen or fifteen feet) .... Booth, the murderer, dressed in plain black broadcloth, bareheaded, with full, glossy, raven hair ... holds aloft in one hand a large knife..." (Lowenfels, p. 275).

Whitman also wrote two poems about the event: "When Lilies Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!," which captures the mood of the country after the murder: gloom dampening the sweet joy that had come with the ghastly war's end.

In the end, it was Whitman's ability to communicate with the soldiers that so greatly affected his post-war versions of Leaves of Grass. He did not ask a wounded person how he felt. Instead, as the poet explains, someone else's agony was one of his changes of garments. He became the wounded person, and the patient felt it.

Government clerk

At the end of the war, people began to recognize the valuable work Whitman had done as an army volunteer. Some persuaded the government to find employment for him, and he became a clerk in the Treasury Department. James Harlan, the secretary of the treasury, read parts of Leaves of Grass, however, and decided that Whitman wrote too freely about sex in the book. He fired the new clerk, but friends in Washington came to Whitman's rescue. Soon he was hired as a clerk in the office of the attorney general.