The doctors and ward masters had never seen anything quite like it; soon they gave Whitman complete freedom of the wards, to come and go as he pleased.
At first Whitman divided his time among Campbell Hospital, Armory Square, Judiciary Square, and the Patent Office wards. From October 1861 until March 1863, the Patent Office, a Doric marvel on the corner of Seventh and F Streets, had given up an entire wing—three large apartments of the model-room—for the care of soldiers. Whitman was fascinated by these “immense apartments filled with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention . . .” Some of the trophies on display there were engines of war.
Between the lighted cases, and in a long double row of cots up and down the middle of the hall, the badly wounded, sick, and dying men were crowded. In a gallery running above this corridor there was another row of beds. “The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble paving under foot—the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in various degrees . . .” together made an ironic display of war’s barbarity amid Lincoln’s precious “Discoveries and Inventions.”
Whitman visited there many times, especially at night “to soothe and relieve particular cases.” The worst surviving casualties from Antietam and Fredericksburg, men dying from botched or infected amputations, catastrophic wounds, fevers, pneumonia, and diarrhea, were all kept in one large ward here, overseen by the surgeon and sculptor Horatio Stone. One winter evening, as Whitman stood near the cot of a dying soldier, this doctor told the poet that “of all who had died in that crowded ward the past six months, he had still to find the first man or boy who had met the approach of death with a single tremor, or unmanly fear.”
After the Patent Office cleared out the wards in March 1863, Whitman spent most of his time on the Mall, at Armory Square Hospital. He devoted himself to this hospital because, as he wrote his mother, “it contains by far the worst cases, most repulsive wounds, has the most suffering & most need of consolation.”
The eleven long pavilions of Armory Square were built side by side along the noxious canal at the foot of Seventh Street. The flagstaff building with its curved tin roof and cupola housed a reception room, offices for the chief surgeons, and a post office, dispensary, linen room, and officer’s quarters. Behind this building stood the mess hall and main kitchen, and the laundry shed. Five ward pavilions were positioned north and south of the flagstaff. Each wood-framed ward was 150 by 25 feet, and rose 13 feet from the wide floorboards to the ridgepole of the peaked roof. At one end lay the water closet, the ward master’s room, and the bath room. A ward held fifty or more beds.
“I am very familiar with this hospital,” Whitman noted, “have spent many days & nights in it—have slept in it often—have seen many die here.”
Early spring of 1863 provided a spell of relative calm after the disastrous battles of the previous fall and winter, and an ebb tide of the wounded in the hospitals. Doctors and nurses, like the public, hoped and believed that the worst bloodshed was behind them, as General Hooker prepared the Army of the Potomac to surround General Lee in Chancellorsville. Hooker improved morale. The President was cautiously optimistic, as was Whitman. “My plans are perfect,” Hooker declared. “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”
Whitman witnessed such awful suffering at Armory Square in March 1863, it did not occur to him that things could get much worse. And he saw how he was making a difference. Some men were dying. But thanks to him many more were leaving the wards to return home, or to their ranks. During this month his letters show that he was exhilarated, elated by the work that had begun while he was waiting for his government job. “I cannot give up my hospitals yet. I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and (so far) permanently absorbed to the very roots, as by these swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys—I get very much attached to some of them, and many of them have come to depend on seeing me, and having me sit by them a few minutes, as if for their lives.” He was happier than he had been for years, in love with life and his “boys.” “Much of the weather here is from heaven,” he wrote to his friend Fred Gray.
That promising spring, during the lull in the war, Whitman was able to answer the question that haunted Abraham Lincoln during his darkest hours: Was the Chief Executive doing his best for the country?
“I think well of the President,” Whitman wrote to Gray on March 19. “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” The intimacy of the description, especially of the skin, suggests it was drawn not from photographs but from recent observation; taking habitual walks by the White House he had probably glimpsed Lincoln. Soon the poet would be seeing the President so often he took it for granted. “My notion is, too, that underneath his outside smutched mannerisms, and stories from third-class county bar-rooms, (it is his humor,) Mr. Lincoln keeps a fountain of first-class telling wisdom. I do not dwell on the supposed failures of his government; he has shown . . . supernatural tact in keeping the ship afloat at all [how this would have pleased Lincoln!], with head steady, not only not going down, and now certain not to [this is both a vote of confidence and a poet’s prophecy], but with proud and resolute spirit, and flag flying in sight of the world, menacing and high as ever.”
In this letter, for the first time, he used the nautical metaphor that would shape his most famous poem: “I say never yet captain, never ruler, had such a perplexing, dangerous task as his, the past two years. I more and more rely upon his idiomatic western genius, careless of court dress or court decorums.”
Few men would have romanticized the embattled President as the poet then did. For most of the country Lincoln was practically a pariah. This effusion marks the beginning of hero worship that would culminate after the war in Whitman’s great elegies for Lincoln. Whitman was falling in love with the President, just as he had fallen in love with his soldiers, leaves of grass on the storm-torn battlefield of America.
Nellie O’Connor kept bringing up the subject of marriage, in the abstract, and in Whitman’s particular case, and he always told her that marriage was “the true and ideal relation between the sexes.” Then he would explain that he doubted it would have been well for him “to have formed that closest of ties,” because he was too fond of his freedom.
“True if I had been caught young,” he told her, “I might have done certain things, or formed certain habits.” He also confided to Nellie that he “did not envy men their wives, but he did envy them their children.” Years later she recalled a day the two were walking along the street, and a little girl—a total stranger—smiled at Whitman and said, “I know you.” Upon which he returned her smile and responded, “I wish I knew you.”
As long as he was enamored of his “boys” as a group, he did not need to fear acting immorally. But his passionate diaries and letters show that it was inevitable that his affection would become particularized and erotic. Whitman’s sensitivity and ardor made him a natural soldier’s missionary; the same temperament made him vulnerable to his patients.
In December he had met in Falmouth a nineteen-year-old Confederate captain who had just had his leg amputated. Whitman did what he could to cheer him up (“poor boy, he has suffered a great deal, and still suffers—has eyes bright as a hawk, but face pale”) and soon found that his ardor for the soldier was reciprocated. The Captain followed Whitman to Washington, where he was admitted to Emory Hospital. Visiting him there in January Whitman confessed, “our affection is quite an affair, quite romantic—sometimes when I lean over to say I am going, he puts his arm around my neck, draws my face down, & c. quite a scene for the New York Bowery [a popular Manhattan theater].”
Whitman understood the danger in this particularization of his “love of comrades.” Ironically he cautions other nurses against it in a New York Times dispatch: “He who goes among the soldiers with gifts, et
c. must beware how he proceeds . . . there is continual discrimination necessary . . . Some hospital visitors, especially the women, pick out the handsomest-looking soldiers, or have a few for their pets. Of course, some will attract you more than others . . . but be careful not to ignore any patient.” It was advice meant for himself. No woman visiting Armory Square could have been more susceptible to male beauty or the mingling of Eros and Thanatos than Whitman, who captured in his notebook “The shining beauty of the young men’s hair dampened with clots of blood.”
Poor fellows, too young they are, lying there with their pale faces and that mute look in their eyes. O how one gets to love them, often particular cases, so suffering, so manly and affectionate!
Lots of them have grown to expect as I leave at night that we should kiss each other . . . I have to go around; poor boys—there is little petting in a soldier’s life in the field, but . . . I know what is in their hearts—always waiting— though they may be unconscious of it themselves.
Whether he wanted to or not, in the intoxication of that first year in the hospitals he lost his perspective—he began to interpret certain soldiers’ craving for attention as romantic love. This is painfully evident in a series of letters he wrote that spring to Sergeant Thomas P. Sawyer after his discharge from Armory Square.
Sawyer had occupied the same Ward K as Lewis “Lewy” Brown, another of Whitman’s favorites. Brown was eighteen when he enlisted in Purnell’s Legion. A year later, on August 19, 1862, a Confederate bullet shattered his left leg. A prisoner of war, Lewy lay for days among other wounded Union soldiers before an exchange permitted his transfer to Washington. Sergeant Sawyer received a less serious wound while serving in the Eleventh Massachusetts Infantry at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The twenty-one-year-old soap maker from Cambridgeport—like his comrade Lewy from Elkton, Maryland—was semiliterate. Thomas Sawyer, thanks in part to Whitman’s affectionate ministrations, would be strong enough in about six months to return to active duty; Lewy Brown, after more than a year of agony, would lose his leg.
By the time Thomas Sawyer was ready to leave Washington in March, the poet was hopelessly in love with him. He bought Sawyer a fine blue shirt, new socks, and underdrawers, and then waited for the young man to come to him in his third-story room on L Street to gather them before departing for the front. The poet did not wrap the gifts in paper and string to take to Sawyer at the hospital or depot; he got him to agree to come to his room, where Whitman sat on his bed in the fading light of day from the south window, waiting. He waited at first with his heart pounding in exquisite anticipation. Then as evening turned to night and the bells tolled for vespers he waited in gloom, fearing the fellow had forgotten his promise, had a change of heart. He thought of Sawyer trying on the new clothes in this room and his heart ached.
“I am sorry you did not come up to my room to get the shirt and other things,” he would write to his love. “I should have often thought now Tom may be wearing around his body something from me . . .”
He waited for weeks to hear from the soldier, to get some explanation, or at least an account of Sawyer’s new adventures with the Army of the Potomac. In the meantime he took comfort in his attachment to Sawyer’s best friend in Ward K, Lewy Brown. At last, on April 21, Whitman wrote a love letter in which his passion for the two comrades is nearly indistinguishable.
“Tom, I was at Armory last evening, saw Lewy Brown, sat with him a good while . . . Lew is so good, so affectionate—when I came away, he reached up his face, I put my arm around him, and we gave each other a long kiss, half a minute long.”
Then Whitman grows wistful, plaintive, as he describes his life since Sawyer left town. “I go around some, nights, when the spirit moves me, sometimes to the gay places, just to see the sights. Tom, I wish you was here. Somehow I don’t find the comrade that suits me to a dot—and I won’t have any other, not for good.”
Was his description of Lewy’s long kiss an attempt to make Sawyer jealous? For all of Whitman’s high-minded and sincere dedication to the health of his boys in the abstract, the poet was only human, a lonely forty-four-year-old bachelor. Consciously or not, he was searching through the wards of needy soldiers for a man who might be his comrade “for good.”
“Dear comrade, you must not forget me, for I never shall you. My love you have in life or death forever.” When the war is over, he fantasizes, the men will live together in idyllic bliss. “We should come together again in some place where we could make our living, and be true comrades and never be separated while life lasts— and take Lew Brown too, and never separate from him. Or if things are not so to be—if you get these lines, my dear, darling comrade, and any thing should go wrong . . . my soul could never be entirely happy, even in the world to come, without you, dear comrade.”
Such romantic poetry stands in contrast to the harsh world of facts and human contingencies. It is not unlike Whitman’s naïve expectation of a political office based “on literary grounds,” his idolizing a President widely regarded as incompetent, or his faith on March 19, 1863, that the ship of state was certain to stay afloat. Whitman was no realist. A realist would have seen that the war was a stalemate. His strengths as a poet were consonant with his weaknesses as a man. Inspired, he could rise to the heights of prophecy, but he could also descend into foolish self-deception. He never considered that as grateful as the boys were for his kindness, he was part of a nightmare most of them wanted to forget.
Probably embarrassed, Thomas Sawyer did not respond for nearly a year to Whitman’s letter, or to the ones that followed, by turns pleading, scolding, desperate for some reciprocal expression of love. When his answer came, it was terse. Thankful as he might be, he would never see the poet again.
Whitman’s emotions were powerful and unstable. Hopeful, exhilarated by his success in the hospitals, and in love with Sawyer, he was as happy in mid-March as he could be. But Sawyer’s departure, and his disappointing silence, coincided with the darkening clouds of war. Writing to him on April 21, Whitman reported: “there is great excitement now about the Army of the Potomac, no passes allowed, mails held over . . . they seem to be shoving troops off from here all the time . . . So I suppose something is up.” General Hooker was about to make his move. Two weeks earlier the Union had suffered its worst naval loss of the war, at Charleston, and Whitman admitted: “the war news is not lovely is it? We feel disappointed about Charleston—I felt as blue about it as anybody.”
The hospitals were beginning to take a toll on Whitman despite his boasting about perfect health. He wrote to his mother on April 15, “if you or Mat [his sister-in-law] was here a couple of days, you would cry your eyes out. I have to restrain myself and keep my composure—I succeed pretty well.” He had begun to complain of severe humming in his ears and occasional deafness, “stupor-like at times,” that made him unfit for work. He thought this came from a head cold. But it was probably high blood pressure, which also accounted for his rosy cheeks; it presaged the strokes that would paralyze him after the war. Nevertheless, he was in good spirits.
Then the news came from Chancellorsville.
On May 1, 1863, hardly a Union man in the Federal City doubted that General Hooker had Robert E. Lee exactly where he wanted him, and the Rebellion would soon be over. The Rebels were outnumbered 130,000 to 60,000. The Army of the Potomac was in excellent condition, Hooker’s strategy seemed foolproof, and the General himself exuded confidence. It was believed he could not fail.
The city was in a state of denial, lulled by a “Congratulatory Order” Hooker issued on April 30 stating, “the enemy must either ingloriously fly or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.” The drama had seemingly unwound, and the citizens sought diversion in sporting events and stage plays. Hundreds left on trains bound for Charlestown, Maryland, to see a real fight, between Joe Coburn of New York and Mike McCoole, regarded as the Champion of the West, who would battle bareknuckle to the
finish on May 5 for the championship of America. According to the Morning Chronicle, “The largest collection of the sporting fraternity ever collected on this continent assembled to witness the fight,” some five thousand fans. Coburn, the lighter of the two, “had everything his own way” against the stronger McCoole, who was heavy and slow. Coburn was declared the winner after sixty-nine rounds, by which time McCoole’s “face was beaten to a jelly, and his head swelled to twice its usual size. He was taken from the ground completely disabled.”
While this news reached Washington promptly, the casualties from Chancellorsville were signaled only by the boatloads of wounded and dying men arriving at the Sixth Street wharves.
On May 5 the Washington Star was still quoting the Congratulatory Order, the last word from the General, commenting, “Our readers can rely upon it that the great battle of the war is now being fought by the Union troops under Hooker with a determined and persistent bravery that augurs conclusive results and a victory that shall sound the death knell of the rebellion.”
Lincoln loved the theater, Shakespeare especially. So he might have liked to see Othello at the Washington Theatre, had it not been for the torrential rains the nights of May 4 and 5. John Wilkes Booth had leased the playhouse on the corner of Eleventh and C Streets; with Alice Gray in the role of Desdemona, and Booth as the homicidal Moor, the young actor/manager was enjoying enormous success. The Chronicle reviewer began by saying such a role should be attempted only by a great actor, and ended by declaring that Booth “lacked nothing, either physically or intellectually, to satisfy the lover of Shakespeare in his interpretation . . . We have rarely seen so good a performance, and, we might add, never a better one.”
Lincoln and Whitman Page 13