Channing, a Unitarian minister then residing in Washington, “I say stop
this war, the horrible massacre of men.” Channing calmed him, saying
“You are sick; the daily contact with these poor maimed and suffering
men has made you sick; don’t you see that the war cannot be stopped
now? Some issues must be made and met.” Later, a friend observed that
Whitman had apparently come to accept the war as “a struggle that had
to go on until some conclusion was reached.” He was able to do so by
making a distinction between what he called “the Nation,” in whose es-
sential unity he had long believed, and what he derided as the “secession-
slave-power.”^18 Still, throughout the war his deep-seated feelings of re-
vulsion against the bitter reality of the war contended with his sense of
patriotism. As he told his mother, “one’s heart grows sick of war, after all,
when you see what it really is—every once in a while I feel so horri¤ed
& disgusted—it seems to me like a great slaughter-house & the men
mutually butchering each other—then I feel how impossible it appears,
again, to retire from this contest, until we have carried our points—(it is
cruel to be so tossed from pillar to post in one’s judgment).”^19 Despite
whatever dissatisfactions he may have felt about the war’s misconduct, its
brutality, and the ill-treatment of the injured soldiers, Whitman’s dedica-
tion to the preservation of the Union ultimately made him accept the war
as a necessary sacri¤ce. His dedication to those whom he regarded as the
war’s primary victims—the wounded and dying soldiers, many of them
adolescents—was a response driven by his compassionate nature. And by
observing their quiet bravery as they endured pain or as they lay dying he
was able to establish the centrality of death in his poetic rendering of the
war. The war positioned him—and through him his poetic persona—in
the military hospitals and on the ¤eld of battle where death was the
grimmest reality. In turn, he made death the core of his wartime poems.
Throughout his remaining lifetime he felt that his service to the soldiers
had strengthened his position as the poet of death.
In January 1863 Whitman decided to remain in Washington, obtained
work at the Army Paymaster’s of¤ce, and immediately commenced his
program of visits to the city’s military hospitals—a practice he continued
through the war years and for some time after the war ended. Summing
up his activities during those terrible years, he claimed to have visited
from eighty thousand to one hundred thousand soldiers, Northerners and
Southerners, in camps and hospitals—a recollection skewed by the vaga-
ries of memory, for that awesome number is equivalent to his having
168 / “Come Sweet Death!”