As 1862 staggered along, Whitman became increasingly anxious. He and his family in Brooklyn were worried about George. They were able to follow the progress of his regiment through newspaper accounts. What they could glean was alarming. The 51st seemed to be involved in far more than its fair share of combat. Throughout the year, George’s regiment saw action in a dizzying succession of major battles: Roanoke Island, New Bern, Cedar Mountain, Chantilly, and South Mountain. George was also at Antietam, where 3,654 men were killed during a few hours of close-range fighting in a Maryland cornfield. That battle remains the single deadliest day in American combat history.
Following each battle, the Whitmans would pore over the lists of injured and dead soldiers that ran in all the major New York papers. The lists grew longer and longer. Each time they made it through without encountering George’s name, a huge feeling of relief settled over the family. They knew that soon they could expect one of George’s letters with details of the battle. Because he lacked Walt’s facility with language, also because he wasn’t an especially emotional person, George’s letters recount bullets whistling past his head and the gruesome demises of some of his fellow soldiers with surprising nonchalance. Unintentionally, these homely missives struck the perfect comforting tone for the nervous Whitmans back in Brooklyn. Of course, the letters also arrived after a time lag, depending on the punctuality of the mail service, sometimes lasting days, sometimes weeks. By then, George had long since moved on to a fresh battle with new dangers. For all the family knew, they were reading the last words of a dead man. Read George’s laconic account of the previous battle. Scan the papers for news of the latest one. It was an excruciating cycle.
Whitman became increasingly depressed, falling into what he called a “slough.” He actually upped his attendance at Pfaff’s, if that was possible. He began going every single night—excepting Sundays, when the saloon was closed. Yet even though surrounded by people, Whitman appears to have been lonely. He hadn’t had a serious romantic attachment in the couple of years since his relationship with Fred Vaughan ended. He continued to meet men in the other, larger, room at Pfaff’s or while walking through the midnight streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. As always, he made notations about who they were (soldier on furlough, butcher, picture-frame maker), what they looked like (blond or brunette, mustachioed or clean shaven), what they did (talked maybe, or went for a stroll), and sometimes he mentioned if they spent the night together.
Thos Gray good looking young Scotchman elegantly dress’d,—does the tricks, cutting hs finger &c—at Pfaff’s . . .
John McNelly night Oct 7 young man, drunk, walk’d up Fulton & High st. home works in Brooklyn flour mills had been with some friends return’d from the war
David Wilson—night of Oct. 11, ’62, walking up from Middagh—slept with me—works in blacksmith shop in Navy Yard—lives in Hampden st.—walks together Sunday afternoon & night—is about 19
Whitman didn’t publish a single poem in 1862. Only two years earlier, with the third edition of Leaves of Grass, he’d published an entire cathedral’s worth. Strangely, though, a poem credited to Whitman and entitled “Wounded” did appear during the year. It was published in a magazine called the Continental Monthly and was reprinted a couple of places, including the Oneida (NY) Circular. It’s a pretty good approximation of Whitman’s free-verse style. But it wasn’t his work. Someone was trading on his good name.
Not only did Whitman publish no poetry during the year, but he didn’t write much of it, either. One of his few efforts—little more than a fragment, really—is entitled “The Two Vaults.” Whitman scrawled it in pencil in a notebook:
The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink
and carouse,
While on the walk immediately overhead, pass the myriad feet of
Broadway
As the dead in their graves, are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, reckoning not of them,
Laugh on laughers! Drink on drinkers!
Bandy the jests! Toss the theme from one to another!
Beam up—Brighten up bright eyes of beautiful young men!
Eat what you, having ordered, are pleased to see placed
before you—after the work of the day, now, with appetite, eat,
Drink wine—drink beer—raise your voice.
Behold! your friend, as he arrives—Welcome him, when, from the upper
step, he looks down upon you with cheerful look
The poem continues for another dozen or so lines, growing increasingly fractured. Words are crossed out in numerous places. Then it ends abruptly, cutting off midline:
The lights beam in the first vault—but the other is
entirely dark
In the first
Still, where Whitman was headed with the poem is clear enough. He seems to have been aiming to create an association, per the title, between two vaults, the first being that celebrated room in Pfaff’s saloon and the second—a burial vault. But the poem would remain unfinished, not discovered until after Whitman’s death.
Then comes an evening, sometime late in the autumn of 1862. Whitman was at Pfaff’s, as ever, sitting at Clapp’s long table. Maybe it was the 250th time—or maybe the 251st—that he’d been to the saloon that year, sitting and listening, talking a bit, taking bites of beefsteak, and listening some more. As the hour grew later and looser, George Arnold—master of effervescent verse, sometimes called “the Poet of Beer”—stood up at the table and launched into an elaborate verbal conceit, some kind of mock toast. He droned on, enumerating the supposed virtues of the Confederacy and the secessionist cause. He even raised his glass and offered, “Success to the Southern Arms!” As Arnold jested, Whitman grew increasingly irritated. Finally, he stood up, face gone crimson, those drowsy eyes now flashing, and started yelling at Arnold, telling him what an ass he was being and perhaps was. Arnold reached across the table, grabbed hold of Whitman’s beard, and tugged hard.
Quite a scuffle ensued. Clapp jumped in between the two men, dropping and breaking one of his precious clay pipes. Herr Pfaff reportedly cried out in broken English, “Oh! mine gots, mens, what’s you do for dis?” As Whitman and Arnold tussled, according to one account, “we all received a beautiful mixture of rum, claret, and coffee on the knees of our trousers.”
Whitman stormed out of Pfaff’s.
And then a morning not long afterward: December 16, 1862. The New York papers were filled with news of a battle that had just been fought near Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was the largest engagement of the Civil War so far, pitting 114,000 Union troops under General Ambrose Burnside against 72,500 Confederates commanded by Robert E. Lee. Despite superior numbers, the North was defeated. More than 1,000 Union soldiers were killed. Two-thirds met their deaths in the same spot, shot down in front of a low stone wall as wave upon wave tried in vain to take a piece of ground called Marye’s Heights. The bodies just kept piling in front of the wall. Mixed with the dead were the wounded and dying; accounts say the air was filled with their howls and moans of suffering. On learning of the defeat, Lincoln reportedly said, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”
In Brooklyn, the Whitmans anxiously riffled through the New York Herald. On page 8, under the heading “Wounded,” they came across “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore.” The last name was different. But the rank of lieutenant was correct, as were the two initials and the wounded soldier’s regiment: 51st New York. The account contained no additional information, such as the type or severity of the injury. Still, the Whitmans were certain—sickeningly certain—that this was George.
The family instantly mobilized. Walt made plans to set out for Washington at once. There was a decent possibility that wounded George had been moved from the battlefield to one of the numerous hospitals in and around the capital. Walt rushed to the Brooklyn mayor’s offic
e and secured a letter of introduction to a US congressman who represented his district. Through his boss at the Brooklyn Water Works, Jeff obtained a second letter of introduction for Walt, this one to the assistant quartermaster of the Union army. Mother Whitman hurried to the bank and withdrew $50 in savings for her son’s journey.
Within hours, Walt was on the Brooklyn ferry, crossing the East River. In Manhattan, he boarded a second ferry and crossed the Hudson River to Jersey City. There, he caught a train to Washington, DC, requiring a switch in Philadelphia. This was the exact route taken by countless soldiers as they were mustered into active duty. On December 16, 1862, it was the route taken by the loved ones of soldiers, legions of them, descending on Washington in the day following the disastrous battle. All along the way, the various modes of transport were heavily crowded, filled with panicked travelers.
In Philadelphia, Whitman was pickpocketed. So he arrived in Washington penniless. The letters of introduction proved worthless, too. Not only were the congressman and assistant quartermaster unavailable, but their offices didn’t offer the poet any assistance. Whitman went from hospital to hospital on foot, but he wasn’t able to locate George. Neither was he able to gather any information about his brother’s condition or whereabouts. “The next two days I spent hunting through the hospitals,” Whitman recalled, “walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people, &c—I could not get the least clue to anything.”
Fortunately, he managed to connect with Charles Eldridge. With the outbreak of war, the young publisher of Leaves of Grass had departed Boston for Washington, where he’d taken a post attending to clerical matters involving the Massachusetts volunteers. He gave Whitman some money. About the incident in Philadelphia, Eldridge would later quip, “Any pickpocket who failed to avail himself of such an opportunity as Walt offered, with his loose baggy trousers, and no suspenders, would have been a disgrace to his profession.”
Eldridge also secured a pass that allowed Whitman to take government transport all the way to the front. On Friday, December 19, Whitman arrived at a vast military encampment near Falmouth, Virginia. It was on the west bank of the Rappahannock River, the side opposite Fredericksburg. The Union army had massed here in the days leading up to the battle. In the aftermath, the army was trying to regroup there.
Whitman worked his way among the soldiers, going from campsite to campsite, looking for the 51st New York. On the day he arrived, he was able to find George’s regiment and with it George—alive and well. He had been injured, all right, but his wound—though gory—was minor. During the battle, a percussion shell had exploded at his feet, and a piece of shrapnel had torn a hole in his cheek. “You could stick a splint through into the mouth,” noted Walt. Following the battle, George had written home to Brooklyn to tell everyone he was fine, but the letter was still in transit when Walt arrived. Actually, George was better than fine: he’d just been promoted. “Remember your galliant Son is a Capting,” he wrote to his mother.
Just to be certain, to make sure the family was aware that George was safe, Walt made an arrangement with someone headed to Washington. The man agreed to send a telegram to the Whitmans in Brooklyn.
Walt decided to stay on for a while with George at the front. He ate military rations. He slept in his brother’s tent, crowded into its tight confines with three other enlisted men. At night, around the campfire, Whitman enjoyed listening to the soldiers’ stories. In one of his ever-ready notebooks, he recorded bits of overheard slang: A “healthy beat” was a reliable soldier, while a “dead beat” was someone full of excuses. New recruits were “$700 men.” Crackers were called “army pies,” and “wash” was the name for coffee. Pour some whiskey into coffee, and it became “western milk.”
The flippant terms belied a far-harsher reality. Months of hard fighting had decimated George’s regiment; its number had dwindled from eleven hundred to two hundred. One soldier told him he had spent fifty hours lying wounded on a battlefield, unable to even lift his head. He was one of the lucky ones.
Whitman looked on as a burial detail crossed the Rappahannock under a white flag of truce. They returned to the Falmouth side, bearing bodies of their dead comrades. The detail made quick work of its grim task. There was little ceremony, only a few muttered words as the bodies were piled into unmarked graves. “Death is nothing here,” noted an amazed Whitman. He sketched out a few lines:
Sight at daybreak (in camp in front of the hospital tent) on a
stretcher, three dead men lying, each with a blanket spread over
him—I lift up one
and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow. ’tis strange!
(Young man: I think this face, of yours the face of my dead Christ!)
This would become the basis for “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” But first, he would need to rework and re-rework it, polishing it into a finished poem.
Brother George was busy with soldiering duties, leaving Walt to spend a great deal of time alone. He didn’t mind. “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it,” goes a line in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” That had always been his approach at Clapp’s table (both in and out of the game), and so it was at Falmouth. This was a new world—a world at war—with its own sights and sounds and rules and mysteries, all for the gleaning. There was something eerie, Whitman found, about the sound of a donkey braying on the edge of camp at midnight. He took the time to watch an observation balloon as it rose slowly up into the air. “A beautiful object to me—a graceful, pear-shaped thing,” he noted. Then he continued watching as the balloon came slowly back down, even walked over and examined it as it lay on the ground.
Whitman was particularly drawn to the makeshift field hospitals. He spent hours visiting them. Often they were nothing more than large tents, crowded with wounded soldiers. Some of the soldiers were awaiting transport to hospitals in Washington and other points North. Many were simply too badly injured to be moved. There were no cots or even mattresses. The wounded lay on blankets spread on the ground, with a layer of pine needles or maybe some hemlock twigs as their only cushion. Not only was the ground hard, but it was bitter cold in the winter of ’62. “I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying,” Whitman wrote, “but I cannot leave them.”
The worst cases were confined to Lacy House, a stone mansion on a hill overlooking the Rappahannock. Out front was a horrifying sight: piles of amputated arms and legs. Inside utter pandemonium reigned: surgeons wielding saws, soldiers screaming, soldiers dying, every minute, it seemed. Still, Whitman visited repeatedly. He found that merely by talking to the soldiers, he could provide them some peace in this hellish place.
On Christmas Day 1862, Whitman went off by himself for a time. He sat on a pine log in the middle of a deserted camp. It was high ground, and he could see two or more miles in every direction. Nearby, he watched as an interminable train of army supply wagons lumbered past, each one drawn by a six-mule team. In the distance, he could see “regiments, brigades, and divisions” spread out “at every point of the compass.” These were engaged in various military drills. In the crisp air, he could hear bugle calls and the clatter of sabers. As a cavalry unit passed close by, he could feel the earth shake from the horses’ hooves. After being sealed away in Pfaff’s saloon, hermetically almost, during the first part of the war, it was as if his senses suddenly awakened. He was taking it in, just taking it all in.
After nine days at the front, Walt bid farewell to George and traveled back to Washington. He intended to remain there for a few days. While visiting his brother’s camp, Whitman had learned that two soldiers from Brooklyn were laid up at a hospital in the capital. He intended to visit them and carry news of their conditions back to their families.
Then Whitman had a change of plans. A new year had broken, 1863, and with it the promise of shaking free of the “quicksand.
” Whitman now glimpsed a way to find his own place in the vastness of a war.
12: Bohemia Goes West
FITZ HUGH LUDLOW—the fresh-faced, high-strung, word-crazed drug aficionado—also found a route to salvation. Like fellow Pfaffians Menken and Ward—Whitman, too, it now appeared—he discovered a way to make sense of his life during wartime. Early in 1863, an incredible and unexpected opportunity came his way. The painter Albert Bierstadt invited Ludlow to accompany him on a journey across the continent.
For Bierstadt, the trip presented a chance to sketch various scenes and gather fresh inspiration. The artist planned to return to New York versed in the wonders of the West and ready to make new paintings that would further bolster his already considerable fame. Ludlow was charged with chronicling the journey in a series of newspaper articles, designed to build up interest in Bierstadt’s work. But Ludlow certainly saw the potential for major personal glory in the undertaking. Crossing the continent was still a rare feat. It was sure to provide the grist—at long last—for a worthy follow-up to The Hasheesh Eater.
For some time now, Ludlow had been in a slough of his own. The very first time he visited Pfaff’s, it had been as an established literary force, an enfant terrible who “held the town in his slender right hand,” according to one account. The intervening years had been a steady and relentless slide. Lately, he’d found that he could no longer earn a living, even a meager one, solely as a writer, and he had taken a position with the New York City Customs House. The job was pure drudgery, his salary a paltry three dollars per day. He was writing an occasional piece on a freelance basis, but his work was drying up.
Rebel Souls Page 18
