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But even if you've heard of Leaves of Grass, you've probably never heard this tale that Hillsdale College Professor Kelly Franklin brings us. It was winter in 1862 and Americans were fighting our nation's civil war. In mid-December, the Union suffered a disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The entrenched Confederates cut down wave after wave of Union soldiers, leaving the Northern Army with 13,000 casualties, more than double those of the Southern Defenders. From the Union's standpoint, things looked pretty bleak for the formerly United States of America. News of the casualties hit the papers right away and on December 16th, the American writer Walt Whitman learned that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg. With no other information, Whitman set out to find his brother. He searched the hospitals in DC with no luck until a friend lent him money and got him a pass to the front where George, if he were still alive, might be found.
Then, in Falmouth, Virginia, Whitman located his brother safe and sound with only a minor wound to his face. But Whitman also saw something else, something he never forgot. Outside a field hospital, Whitman saw a heap of amputated limbs, enough to fill a one-horse cart.
Horrified, he wrote in his diary. At the foot of a tree, immediately in front, a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening. By 1862, Walt Whitman had already achieved some fame and some notoriety as a poet that celebrated the human body. I am the poet of the body. He had written in his 1855 book Leaves of Grass. And I am the poet of the soul.
The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred. But in that grisly moment outside the field hospital, Whitman got his first real glimpse of the human cost of the Civil War. It wasn't long before he knew what he wanted to do about it. In January of 1863, Whitman returned to Washington, D.C., where he began perhaps the greatest undertaking of his life. While the war raged on, Whitman threw himself into the task of visiting the sick and wounded men, both Northerners and Southerners, who languished in the Civil War hospitals. The Union already had many doctors and nurses, but Whitman intuitively knew that people need more than medical treatment to get well.
Companionship, comfort, morale boosting, even a kind word. And as a volunteer, Whitman could provide that to the soldiers. He worked a part-time job in the mornings and spent the afternoons and evenings in the hospitals. He talked with the men, sat with them. He brought a satchel full of little gifts, candy, clothes, fruit, money, tobacco, stamps, and paper for writing letters.
When the weather was hot, he brought them ice cream. While in the hospitals, Whitman wrote down the names and descriptions of the soldiers in his notebooks, along with anything special they asked for. Henry Benton, Company E, 7th Ohio Volunteer, Ward K, Bed 44.
Wants a little jelly and an orange. Wounded last Sunday at Chancellorsville in Leg, I saw the bullet and a piece of the bone. Stout Hardy, Ohio Boy. Henry Eberle, Bed 8, Ward K, Company H, 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers.
Wants a German prayer book. Wounded in the left shoulder pretty bad. Not all of his visits were cheerful. Of a man named Hiram Johnson from the 157th New York Volunteers, Whitman wrote in his notebook, This is the bed of death. Although he supported the Union, Whitman left the politics of the war outside the hospital doors and treated the wounded equally. In his memoir of the Civil War, Whitman later described taking care of a 19-year-old boy from Baltimore whose right leg had been amputated. He writes, As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, I hardly think you know who I am. I don't wish to impose upon you. I am a rebel soldier.
I said I did not know that, but it made no difference. Visiting him daily for about two weeks after that, while he lived, death had marked him and he was quite alone. Many of these Civil War soldiers died, far from family and home. Some of them even died unknown and unidentified.
It was the era before dog tags and DNA testing. In March of 1864, Whitman described one of these cases in a letter to his mother. Whitman wrote of the arrival of a train carrying sick and wounded soldiers. Mother, it was a dreadful night, pretty dark, the wind gusty and the rain fell in torrents. One poor boy, he seemed to me quite young, he was quite small. He groaned some as the stretcher bearers were carrying him along and again as they carried him through the hospital gate. They set down the stretcher and examined him and the poor boy was dead.
The doctor came immediately, but it was all of no use. The worst of it is, too, that he is entirely unknown. There was nothing on his clothes or anyone with him to identify him, and he is altogether unknown.
Mother, it is enough to rack one's heart such things. Very likely his folks will never know in the world what has become of him. And many men died unknown in the war. Many were hastily buried or lost altogether in the chaos and aftermath of battle.
This meant that families and friends were denied many of the rituals of grief. But Walt Whitman was also at the height of his career as a poet, and during the war he would write poems of grief and mourning that would help him and the nation express those terrible losses. Walt Whitman had worked with words and language for most of his life.
Born on Long Island, he supported himself from a very young age, working at a printing shop, in a law office and as a teacher. But he soon found his way to authorship, writing journalism, conventional poems and fiction. Then, in 1855, Whitman published his experimental book Leaves of Grass, which violated all the current norms of poetry and celebrated the full range of human life, from democracy to sexuality, writing in powerful free verse about the body, the soul, nature and city life and the labors of working class men and women. But now, Whitman had a war to write about, and at the end of it he published a book of war poems called Drum Taps. In one of his best poems, Vigil Strange, I kept on the field one night, Whitman recreates an imaginary moment of grief and burial for the fallen dead. The poetic speaker describes seeing a young soldier struck down in the heat of battle. Unable to stop for the conflict rages on around them, the narrator charges ahead, but returns that night to keep vigil for a boy he calls both son and comrade. Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battlefield spreading, vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night.
The speaker stays with the body all night. Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appeared, my comrade I wrapped in his blanket, enveloped well his form, folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully overhead and carefully under feet. And there and then, and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude grave, I deposited.
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battlefield dim, vigil for boy of responding kisses, never again on earth responding. Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget how as day brightened I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket and buried him where he fell. Like in most of his poems, the soldier remains nameless, which means that he could be anyone, known or unknown, Yankee or rebel, any of the more than 600,000 men who perished in the war. Whitman continued to visit the hospitals on and off throughout the war.
He once estimated that he had visited somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers. He also wrote that, after his time in the hospitals, the pages of his notebooks were actually stained with soldier's blood. Walt Whitman would have a long and fruitful life and career as a writer right up to his death in 1892. But he always thought about his hospital years as something central to his life.
Those three years I consider the greatest privilege and satisfaction and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life. Those years of hospital visits represent a tremendous act of service to his fellow Americans during a time of war. While we tend to remember him as one of America's great poets, Walt Whitman's sacrificial charity during the Civil War may be his greatest legacy. But we can also be thankful he was a writer, although he once claimed that the real war will never get in the books. Walt Whitman's diaries, letters, poems and memoirs constitute a powerful eyewitness account, a moving record of one man's mind and heart during this bloody chapter in the story of American history. And great job on that, Robbie, and thank you to Hillsdale professor Kelly Franklin for telling us about a great man and a part of his life so few people know.
Walt Whitman's story, the story of the American Civil War. This is our American Stories. And with access to the Centurion lounge, you can catch the next game on the way home. That's the powerful backing of American Express.
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