they requested, writing letters for them, sometimes nursing them, and
even intervening on their behalf with the medical staff. Occasionally, he
claimed, he had dressed their wounds. And sometimes for a period of
days he sat beside a dying soldier as he clung to life. These activities
found literary expression in different forms. Whitman recorded his im-
mediate reactions to the sufferings and deaths of soldiers in occasional
newspaper dispatches, generally intended to rally support for the troops
or raise funds for his hospital labors. He wrote letters to the families of
injured or dying soldiers. And he ¤lled little improvised pocket note-
books, “jotted down on the spot,” with his impressions of wartime Wash-
ington, the hospital milieu, and the ailing soldiers. These notebooks, he
said, “brief[ed] cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside,
and not seldom by the corpses of the dead.” A selection of these notebook
entries, published in a little volume as Memoranda During the War (1876),
reprises these scenes of battles, carnage, and “the countless phantoms of
those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits” or
buried (many of them unidenti¤ed) in national cemeteries or improvised
battle¤eld cemeteries. Memoranda chronicles the courage and equanimity
of the hospitalized soldiers in their hours of suffering or dying—traits
that profoundly impressed Whitman and buoyed his faith in the heroic
character of America’s young men. Memoranda is one phase of the task
that Whitman had undertaken—to record the spirit of the war and to
demonstrate that the soldiers had passed his test for moral character.
Their calm and bravery in the face of suffering and dying sustained his
belief that a nation’s moral ¤ber can be measured by “what it thinks of
death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness.” Writing in the
corrupt, go-getting postwar “Gilded Age” of President Grant, he warned
that “in the mushy in®uences of current times, the fervid atmosphere and
typical events of those years [1861–1865] are in danger of being totally
forgotten.”^3 And he was determined that the trauma of the war years not
be forgotten. (Many of these impressions were also incorporated a decade
later in his informal autobiography, Specimen Days.)
The crowning literary achievement of Whitman’s war years, of course,
is the group of more than ¤fty poems that he assembled in Drum-Taps
and Sequel to Drum-Taps. Central to the collection is the wartime Whit-
man persona, one of the greatest inventions in American literature. The
poet’s exposure to the realities of war made a profound impression on
him and inspired an outpouring of poetry, for after he had been in Wash-
162 / “Come Sweet Death!”