Memoranda during the War by Walt Whitman

During the course of the war, forty thousand fugitive slaves, known as 'contrabands,' fled to the nation's capital. Once a relatively quiet town with a busy political season, it absorbed a new and year-round population of soldiers, bureaucrats, prostitutes, adventure-seekers, merchants, doctors, nurses, and undertakers. The city tripled in size from 63,000 to 200,000 and underwent profound change, as the maps available on the Civil War Washington digital site illustrate. The crisis of war remade both Whitman and Washington DC. Faced with massive destruction, in what ways did Whitman succeed and in what ways did he fail to make meaning of it and to find reasons for hope? In this new context, he reassessed the possibilities for poetry, the future of democracy, and even the efficacy of affection-that quality that he had always believed sustained civil society. Both the nation and Whitman's poetic project were at risk as he confronted innumerable broken and battered bodies. 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. At a time of unprecedented maiming and killing, Whitman engaged in the work of healing. 1 He spent most of his time at Armory Square Hospital, which hosted the worst cases and had the highest death rate. 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 geotemporal specificity-to ask: what did it mean 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? Washington treated more wounded soldiers than any other city, and Whitman, a visitor to dozens of hospitals, gravitated toward the epicenter of suffering.

Memoranda during the War by Walt Whitman