Memoranda During the War: Civil War Journals, 1863-1865

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2010, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by the author in Camden, New Jersey in 1875–76. Bob Blaisdell has provided a new Introduction specially for the Dover edition.

Copyright Copyright © 2010 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892.

Memoranda during the war / Walt Whitman ; with an introduction by Bob Blaisdell.

p. cm.

Originally published: Camden, N.J. : Author’s publication, 1876.

Unabridged republication—T.p. verso.

9780486140810

1. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Diaries. 2. Poets, American—19th

century—Diaries. 3. United States—History—Civil War,

1861-1865—Personal narratives. 4. United States—History—Civil

War, 1861-1865—War work. I. Title.

PS3231.A355 2010

818′.303—dc22

2009048622

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

47641301

www.doverpublications.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

MEMORANDA DURING THE WAR

INTRODUCTION

I have once or twice fear’d that my little tract would prove,

at best, but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences.

Well, be it so.

—Memoranda During the War

In Whitman’s grand presence, with his big mind and body vibrating in response to the men he observes, we can witness the wounded and dying soldiers of the Civil War as they lie suffering in bed, seemingly unnoticed or overlooked by anyone else. In a Washington, D.C., hospital we see and feel what Whitman, the soldiers’ missionary, feels as he gazes on New York Cavalry Private Thomas Haley: He lies there with his frame exposed above the waist, all naked, for coolness, a fine built man, the tan not yet bleach’d from his cheeks and neck.... Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without the least start, awaken’d, open’d his eyes, gave me a long, long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier—one long, clear silent look—a slight sigh—then turn’d back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover’d near.¹

Whitman’s heart had brought him several months before to Washington in search of his brother George, who was serving in the 51st New York Volunteers and had been listed as a casualty at the battle of Fredericksburg in December of 1862. It was while hunting for George, ten years younger than Walt and who had enlisted at the first opportunity in the spring of 1861, that Walt discovered what the war really was. Not finding George in any of the few dozen hospitals in Washington, Walt traveled to the Union camps near Fredericksburg, where he learned from George’s fellow soldiers that George, whose cheek had been pierced by a fragmented shell, was otherwise in fine health. (George Whitman served the entire war and was promoted at its end to Major. On September 30, 1864, he was captured with his regiment in Virginia and spent almost five months as a prisoner of war.)

Walt, most readers will remember, had been born in West Hills, Long Island, on May 31, 1819, the second son in a large family. He grew up in Brooklyn and at the age of eleven began working as an office-boy; over the next twenty years he worked variously as a printer, school-teacher, editor, and writer. In 1855, he published what became the first internationally influential collection of American poetry, Leaves of Grass. (Most of the initial hubbub about the unique volume was created by Whitman himself, after planting self-written reviews and testimonials and publicizing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kind but private response to the poems.)

When the War of Secession (as Whitman calls it) started in the spring of 1861, the poet, already 41, continued his freelance writing life and railed away from the sidelines at the local and national politicians. Visiting the battlegrounds and war hospitals, however, converted him into a beneficent and active participant. He had found his new and consuming purpose in Washington, and he moved there, where through friends he obtained a part-time job in the Army Paymaster’s Office. His primary work, though, was as a volunteer soldiers’ missionary, which, for him, involved no orthodox Christian preaching but, instead, passionate and tactful sympathy. He was not, as is sometimes mistakenly believed because of his great The Wound-Dresser poem, a wound-dresser, but a spiritual comforter. He chatted with the men, he listened to them, he petted them, kissed them, held their hands, and brought them gifts of money, knickknacks, food, and writing materials; he wrote letters for them and took dictation. He was the foster brother, uncle, father, mother, or dear friend they hungered for. Each case has its peculiarities, and needs some new adaptation, he noted in his Memoranda. I have learnt to thus conform—learnt a great deal of hospital wisdom. Some of the poor young chaps, away from home for the first time in their lives, hunger and thirst for affection. This is sometimes the only thing that will reach their condition.... The men like to have a pencil, and something to write in. I have given them cheap pocket-diaries, and almanacs for 1864, interleav’d with blank paper.² His gift-giving was funded by his own salary and by donations from his friends and acquaintances, for whom he described his experiences.

The best of many unmatched moments in Whitman’s Memoranda are those caught on the fly, and these moments are the germ of a real book, a book that the Memoranda promises to be but did not after all become: As the period of the war recedes, I am more than ever convinced that it is important for those of us who were on the scene to put our experiences on record. There is infinite treasure—O inestimable riches in that time! ... I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote. No prepared picture, no elaborated poem, no after-narrative could be what the thing itself was.... You want to catch the first spirit, to tally its birth. By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught.³ And of course he was right—he repeatedly catches life in his notes, but many of the entries of the Memoranda were not written at the instant but only later as uninspired reflections: Who know the conflict hand-to-hand—the many conflicts in the dark, those shadowy-tangled, flashing-moonbeam’d woods—the writhing groups and squads—hear through the woods the cries, the din, the cracking guns and pistols—the distant cannon—the cheers and calls, and threats and awful music of the oaths—the indescribable mix—the officers’ orders, persuasions, encouragements—the devils fully rous’d in human hearts … (As if waiting for the Muse to rescue him with a tap on the shoulder, he concludes: Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—who e’er can write, the story?⁴)

Unfortunately, when Whitman relies on hearsay, history, or received opinion, he usually gives us little that is better or smarter than any other uninformed by-standing commentator. Neglecting to keep his attention on the myriad details in front of him, he hears nothing but his own voice and thoughts; he agrees with himself (not at all contradictory). In the Notes, which are essentially appendices of discards and outtakes with which he concludes Memoranda During the War, the otherwise extraordinary author becomes not everyone but nobody, and sometimes a disagreeable nobody, espousing dime-a-dozen prejudices on, among other topics, race, patriotism, and democracy. Finally, his repeated returns to Abraham Lincoln, about whom he would recite memories and refabricate his friend’s eye-witnessing of the assassination at Ford’s Theatre, became morbid and exploitative: The sense of Lincoln’s murder as a dramatic set piece came later; at the time Whitman was as shocked and depressed as everyone else.⁵

On the other hand, we can read thousands of pages of eyewitness accounts of the Civil War and discover no observations more brilliant and evocative and moving as many in the Memoranda hodgepodge; in Whitman’s portrait of a twenty-year-old from Wisconsin, after he recounts the boy’s background and recent heroism, he concludes: "He kept a little diary, like so many of the soldiers. On the day of his death, he wrote the following in it: Today, the doctor says I must die—all is over with me—ah, so young to die. On another blank leaf he pencill’d to his brother, Dear brother Thomas, I have been brave, but wicked—pray for me."⁶

These descriptions he also used in letters and articles for The New York Times and later in the Weekly Graphic. In the midst of his experiences, he also saw a bigger opportunity, pitching a book proposal in the fall of 1863: My idea is a book of the time, worthy the time—something considerably beyond mere hospital sketches—a book for sale perhaps in a larger American market—the premises or skeleton memoranda of incidents, persons, places, sights, the past year (mostly jotted down either on the spot or in the spirit of seeing or hearing what is narrated)—... full of interest I surely think—in some respects somewhat a combination in handling of the Old French Memoires, & my own personality (things seen through my eyes, & what my vision brings)—a book full enough of mosaic, but all fused to one comprehensive thing—... (The intended fusion of the book Whitman describes here never happened, but Memoranda During the War, read with his other treatments of the war, is indeed a unique contribution.) I have many hospital incidents, [that] will take with the general reader ... the book is very rapid—is a book that can be read by the five or ten minutes ... (being full of small parts, pieces, paragraphs with their dates, incidents &c)—...⁷

The Memoranda did not find a publisher at the time, but Whitman, never averse to making do, having indeed already used large patches in articles and letters and sounded the depths of his experiences in his poems, Drum-Taps and Sequel (1865), continued to mine them, turn them over, and publish and revise them into verse and prose. He published Memoranda During the War himself in 1876, and then incorporated most of the material into Specimen Days in 1882. He was not, after all, satisfied with the results, but what has lasted and will last are the vivid, body-electric recordings of men and moments he collected in his little homemade notebooks: Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me.⁸ Just as they evoked memories for him, they have created impressions for us.

Again and again, Whitman lands his attention on the young men—invariably attractive—who are near death. (When or where Whitman first understood his homosexuality has been unresolvedly debated; whether he more gloried in his understanding of it or tortured himself over it is also not clear. But he certainly found personal freedom of expression of his whole self in his poetry and in his on-the-spot observations—observations he trusted, as can we, because they were recordings of the world and his simultaneous responses to it.) His admiration of the wounded men’s beauty turns any traces of his pity into sympathy, and, at times, into Whitman’s weird and believable imaginings of himself in the young unknown’s place: "... and there, haply with pain and suffering, (yet less, far less, than is supposed,) the last lethargy winds like a serpent round him—the eyes glaze in death—none recks—Perhaps the burial squads, in truce,