Saving Lt. Whitman

We arrived in Fredericksburg, Va., early Wednesday afternoon. My in-laws live here, within musket range of the battlefield, just beyond the trees and ranch-style homes across the street. On Dec. 13, 1862, 13,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded during an insane frontal assault on a fortified Confederate position, Marye's Heights, about two miles from where I'm sitting. Within days, casualty lists appeared in Northern newspapers. Among the readers were Walt Whitman and his family, in Brooklyn, N.Y. In The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (2000), Roy Morris Jr. describes the scene:

"Walt was home with his mother on the morning of December 16, when the New York Tribune carried another list of regimental casualties. Among those cited for the 51st New York was `First Lieutenant G.W. Whitmore [sic], Company D.' There was no description of the type or severity of George's wounds, but Walt had seen enough operations at Broadway Hospital to fear the worst. Hurriedly packing a few clothes, some notebooks, and fifty dollars in cash from Mrs. Whitman's scanty nest egg, he left within the hour for Washington. Except as a visitor, he would never again return to Brooklyn. His `New York stagnation,' he told Ralph Waldo Emerson two weeks later, was over. The rest of his life, although he did not yet know it, had already begun."

For old Whitman hands, who already know how the most convulsive event in our history transformed the poet into a greater poet and a secular saint, Morris' book contains few revelations. But his writing is clean and he musters all the available information in a compact 270 pages. Morris' first sentence is memorably paradoxical, and he spends the rest of the book explaining it:

"The Civil War saved Walt Whitman."