![]() ![]() One of the men died before they docked at the Sixth Street wharf.īack in Washington, Whitman found part-time work as a copyist in the paymaster’s office, where he saw firsthand the inadequate efforts by the government to aid wounded veterans. It was the first humble step of a great one-man humanitarian enterprise. During the three-hour trip, Whitman went from man to man, collecting information to send to their families back home. Traveling with him was a large contingent of seriously wounded soldiers headed for the various military hospitals in the rear. Whitman left Falmouth on December 28 aboard a government steamer bound for Washington. No one makes an ado.” He made notes for a new poem about one of the victims: “Young man, I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!” It would later become the basis of one of his most memorable poems, “A Sight in Camp.” “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 grey 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. “The men looked well to me,” Whitman noted in the Times article, “with the look of men who had long known what real war was, and taken many a hand in-a regiment that had been sifted by death.”Īs a civilian, Whitman marveled at the men’s matter-of-fact attitude in the face of death. Their patriotism, if not their numbers, remained high. “It is an impressive sight to me to see the countless numbers of youths and boys, many of them already with the experiences of the oldest veterans.” Of the original 1,000 soldiers who had enlisted in George’s regiment at the start of the war, only about 200 still survived. “The mass of our men in our army are young,” Whitman wrote in an article published in the New York Times. He was struck immediately by how young many of the soldiers were. Whitman spent 10 days visiting his brother and the other soldiers in the regiment. George, for his part, was unfazed by his close brush with death and glorying in his promotion to captain of the 51st New York Infantry. There he found George in surprisingly good health, only slightly wounded by a piece of Confederate shrapnel that had pierced his cheek. At last someone suggested he go to Falmouth, outside Fredericksburg, where the Army of the Potomac was camped for the winter. The futile period of searching, he told his mother, was “the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life.” It did not help that Whitman’s pocket was picked in the train station in Philadelphia, leaving him literally penniless. Walt Whitman, photographed by Mathew Brady in 1862.įor three days and nights Whitman searched in vain for his brother, trudging from hospital to hospital through streets clogged with dispirited Union soldiers and wild rumors of impending Confederate invasion. ![]() Whitmore, Company D.” Fearing the worst, Walt threw together some belongings and hurried south to Washington, where the main Union hospitals were located. Among those listed was “First Lieutenant G.W. Walt was at home in Brooklyn with his mother on the morning of December 16 when he unexpectedly came across a list of regimental casualties in the New York Tribune. Whitman’s time in Washington began with the wounding of his brother George at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in late December 1862. ![]() In his own humble way, Whitman was also a war correspondent-not on the front lines of the battlefields, but in the rear, where the battles’ true costs were hidden away. By the end of the war, Whitman would personally make more than 600 visits to the hospitals and speak to some 100,000 soldiers during his rounds. For the first three of those years, the great American poet was a regular visitor to the various military hospitals in and around the nation’s capital, where he devoted himself to bringing cheer and companionship to the thousands of suffering young soldiers confined to their beds with wounds, illness, or infection. He wound up staying for the next 10 years. Walt Whitman arrived in Washington, D.C., in late December 1862, intending to stay for a few days. ![]()
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