Walt Whitman and Civil War Washington

Abstract

Walt Whitman famously described his visits to thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers in Memoranda During the War, a volume with a largely ignored subtitle: "Written on the Spot in 1863-'65." I want to highlight that subtitle and its emphasis on space and time-its geo-temporal specificity-to ask what it meant to have a writer of Whitman's sensibilities thrust into the nation's capital city in the final three years of the war, when it had become a city of hospitals. More wounded soldiers were treated in Wash­ ington, DC, than in any other city, and Whitman, a visitor to dozens of hos­ pitals, gravitated toward the epicenter of suffering. He spent most of his time at Armory Square Hospital, which hosted the worst cases and had the highest death rate. At a time of unprecedented maiming and killing, Whitman engaged in the work of healing. Leaves of Grass, his poetic masterpiece, intertwined the physical bodies of men and women and the symbolic body of the nation and saw in both a capacity to embrace contradictions and diversity while still remaining united and whole. Both the nation and Whitman's poetic project were at risk as he confronted innumerable broken and battered bodies. In this new context, he reassessed the possibilities for poetry, the future of democracy, and even the efficacy of affection, a quality that he had always believed sus­ tained civil society. Faced with massive destruction, in what ways did Whitman succeed and fail in making meaning ofit, in finding reasons for hope? The crisis of war remade both Whitman and Washington, DC. The city more than tripled in size from 63,000 to 200,000 inhabitants and underwent profound change, as the maps available on the Civil War Washington digi­ tal site illustrate; once a relatively quiet town with a busy political season, it absorbed a new and year-round population of soldiers, bureaucrats, prosti­ tutes, adventure-seekers, merchants, doctors, nurses, and undertakers. During the course of the War, forty thousand fugitive slaves, known as "contrabands," fled to the nation's capital: they often resided in camps run by the government and charitable organizations and many worked on military projects. (The term "contraband of war," used by General Benjamin Butler in 1861 to refer to for­ mer slaves who reached Union lines, became widely adopted thereafter.) The routine of life in the city was frequently interrupted by military drills and the