be punished by hanging. Instead of enlisting, Whitman engaged himself in hospital service, first
at the New York Hospital, then off Broadway in Pearl Street, later in Washington DC: I resigned myself / To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.' In some ways the Civil War hospitals were bloodier than the battlefield. Amputation wasthe
trade-mark of Civil war surgery.' Three out of four operations were amputations. At Gettysburg,
for an entire week, from dawn till twilight, some surgeons did nothing but cut off arms and legs.
Many of these dismemberments were quite unnecessary, and the soldiers knew it. Whitman was
horrified by what happened to the wounded, often mere boys. He noted that the great majority
were between seventeen and twenty. Some had pistols under their pillows to protect their limbs.
Whitman himself was able to save a number by remonstrating with the surgeons. He wrote:
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter
and blood.
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side
falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
bloody stump,
And has not vet looked on it.
More arms and legs were chopped off in the Civil War than in any other conflict in which
America has ever been engaged-but a few dozen fewer than might have been, but for Whitman.
A paragraph in the New York Tribune in 1880 quoted a veteran pointing to his leg: This is the leg [Whitman] saved for me.' Whitman calculated that, during the war, he made over boo hospital visits or tours, some lasting several days, and ministered in one way or another to over 100,000 soldiers. His book of poems Drum-Taps records some of his experiences. Not everyone welcomed his visits. One nurse at the Armory Square hospital said:Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and
unbelief to my boys.' The scale of the medical disaster almost overwhelmed him-one temporary
hospital housed 70,000 casualties at one time. Whitman considered the volume and intensity of
the suffering totally disproportionate to any objective gained by the war. Others agreed with him.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), later author of the famous bestseller Little Women (1868), spent a
month nursing in the Washington front-line hospitals before being invalided home with typhoid,
and recorded her experiences in Hospital Sketches (1863). This is a terrifying record of bad
medical practice, of the kind Florence Nightingale had utterly condemned a decade before,
including lethal overdosing with the emetic calomel. At many points her verdict and Whitman's
concurred.
Yet it is curious how little impact the Civil War made upon millions of people in the North.
When Edmund Wilson came to write his book on the conflict, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the
Literature of the American Civil War (1962), he was astonished by how little there was of it.
There were hymn-songs, of course: John Brown's Body,' Julia Ward Howe'sBattle Hymn of
the Republic,' to rally Northern spirits, Daniel Decatur Emmett's Dixie' to enthuse the South. The young Henry James was not there-he hada mysterious wound,' which prevented serving.
Mark Twain was out west. William Dean Howells was a consul in Italy. It was quite possible to
live in the North and have no contact with the struggle whatsoever. It is a notable fact that Emily
Dickinson (1830-86), America's greatest poet, lived quietly throughout the war in Amherst