Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Ludlow also managed to confound the expectations of the San Francisco Bohemians. Naturally, they had assumed that the author of The Hasheesh Eater would be world-weary and jaded. Instead, they were treated to this slight and bookish young man, spouting big words and brimming with exotic enthusiasms. They nicknamed Ludlow “the Hasheesh Infant.” The group was particularly bemused by Ludlow’s lengthy impromptu discourses on Darwin and the theory of evolution. It was less than three years since On the Origin of Species had been published. For the California circle, these were odd new ideas, courtesy of an odd new friend.

  Whenever talented writers visited San Francisco, Golden Era editor Lawrence had a policy: “We purchased their pens and pencils before they had been [here] an hour.” In short order, Ludlow was contributing to the paper. Apparently, 1863 was a busy year for Lawrence, for he was also courting another promising out-of-towner: Mark Twain.

  Twain, in the midst of a several-month visit to San Francisco, was down from Virginia City, Nevada, where he worked for a highly regarded newspaper called the Daily Territorial Enterprise. He was rail thin with gray eyes and curly red hair. Only twenty-seven, Twain had lived an itinerant life, had already experienced entire other careers: as a blacksmith’s apprentice, grocery store clerk, and riverboat pilot.

  He’d spent the first months of the Civil War back home in Missouri. There, he was one of a group of young men rounded up by a zealous Union army recruiter, but he escaped and took up with the Confederacy instead. He joined a tiny militia, maybe fifteen strong, called the Marion Rangers. It was an exercise, Twain would recall, in “sham soldiership.” Mostly, the outfit sneaked around the backwoods, trying to stay ahead of the Union troops moving through Missouri. “I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” he later joked.

  Eventually, he simply wandered away from the Marion Rangers (“deserting” is too official sounding) and headed out West. Twain had only recently adopted his pen name. Thanks to his knack for sly, subversive humor, he was starting to develop a regional reputation, though he was a complete unknown back East. During Twain’s visit to San Francisco, Lawrence offered him a full-time staff job on the Golden Era. He wasn’t ready to leave Nevada Territory, but agreed to contribute some pieces on a freelance basis. One issue of the Golden Era features both Twain’s “How to Cure a Cold” and Ludlow’s “On Marrying Men.”

  Of Twain, Ludlow commented, “He makes me laugh more than any Californian.” (Never mind that he was actually a Nevadan at present.) For his part, Twain included the following in a letter to his mother: “And if Fitz Hugh Ludlow (author of The Hasheesh Eater) comes your way, treat him well.”

  Ludlow deserves credit for being an easterner early to take note of Twain. Other Pfaffians were destined to forge deeper, more meaningful connections with him.

  The time came for Ludlow and Bierstadt to return home. Back East, Alexander Gardner was feeding the public’s insatiable hunger for Civil War news with his groundbreaking photographs of battlefields strewn with dead soldiers. The images, some of which were exhibited at Mathew Brady’s Broadway studio, offered intimate, privileged flashes from the front, and they left viewers stunned. This, then, was war in all its horror and brutality. Bierstadt, armed with a huge variety of oil studies, was now prepared to answer an opposite need, equally pressing, with peaceful images of prairies and mountains and waterfalls. And Ludlow, diary filled with vivid observations, was ready to paint his own portrait of the West—to deliver in words Eden itself.

  The pair had traveled by land all the way to California. For their return trip, they opted for a faster route. They took a steamer down the Pacific Coast and then crossed the isthmus through Panama, before steaming up the Atlantic Coast to New York City.

  Before they left, however, Ludlow chose to make one last excursion, alone. During his final week in San Francisco, he paid a visit to Chinatown, slipping down the narrow streets, past butchers and apothecaries, past restaurants with their paper lanterns and barbershops marked by their characteristic signs, featuring four little red knobs, until he arrived at a hong.

  A hong is an opium den. A typical one in nineteenth-century San Francisco consisted of a single dimly lit room, tight-packed with patrons, some on the floor, some reclining on bunks. The air would be thick with opium smoke, which has a pleasant, inviting aroma, akin to roasted nuts. On arrival, a visitor would be furnished with a small box made of horn, containing a dollop of black opium paste. It was necessary to break off a little portion. Then, using a piece of wire, one skewered the bit of paste and held it over the open flame of a lamp. When the paste began to smoke, it was transferred to a pipe consisting of a stone bowl, about the size of a thimble, attached to a long bamboo stem. Inhale. Hold breath. Exhale. Smoking opium is so much more potent than taking it in tincture form.

  Having traveled across the continent, Ludlow now slipped into a haze.

  13: The Soldiers’ Missionary

  ON JANUARY 2, 1863, while visiting Campbell Hospital in Washington, DC, Whitman stopped at bed 49 to pass a few minutes with a complete stranger. John Holmes, a twenty-one-year-old private from a Massachusetts regiment, was laid up with a severe stomach ailment and bronchitis. Since arriving two weeks earlier, Holmes had received no medical care whatsoever. Holmes was glassy-eyed and listless; he had pretty much given up hope. Whitman summoned a doctor and insisted that the ailing soldier be given attention. He also gave Holmes a few coins to buy a glass of milk from a woman who was circulating the ward selling goods. At this kindness, the young man burst into tears.

  The episode crystallized something for Whitman. Originally, he’d planned only to visit the two soldiers from his brother’s regiment before returning home. But he found himself deeply drawn to hospital work, as he had been at the front. There was such a vast, heart-rending need. He decided to stay on indefinitely. While Ludlow wended his way across the continent—visiting American states and other states of consciousness—Whitman would remain in the Union capital, ministering to wounded soldiers. He would keep up with his Pfaff’s circle from a distance—both his circles, actually, the Bohemian artists and the gay men who gathered in the saloon’s other, larger, room. “I cannot give up my Hospitals yet,” wrote Whitman in a letter to his family back in Brooklyn. “I never before had my feeling so thoroughly and (so far) permanently absorbed, to the very roots, as by these huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys.”

  Whitman settled into Washington at a time when it was little more than a provincial backwater. The hallowed notion of states’ rights—the very notion that had sparked the war—had kept the city in a state of arrested development. A federation of states didn’t require a glittering capital, and throughout its history the city had dutifully reflected this by remaining humble and low-rise. Official buildings had been kept to a minimum: the Capitol, White House, Treasury, and a smattering of others. Construction had stalled on the Washington Monument, and it remained a mere stump, rising 156 feet, a third of its eventual height. Even major thoroughfares such as Pennsylvania Avenue were mostly unpaved, swirling with dust in the summer heat, mired in mud when it rained. The seat of government was a small, odoriferous town, built on reclaimed swampland, home to roaming hordes of feral pigs that rooted through garbage.

  For $7 a month, Whitman found a little room at 394 L Street, the first of several shabby rentals he’d take in Washington. Such accommodations, which Whitman described as appropriate to “a sort of German or Parisian student life,” suited the poet, now forty-three, just fine. Charles Eldridge came through once again, this time with a job. ­Eldridge—the publisher of Leaves of Grass, who earlier helped Whitman get to the front to find his brother—worked for an army paymaster. He got Whitman employment in the same department, as a copyist. It was an incredibly undemanding post, requiring Whitman to spend two or three hours a day duplicating documents such as vouchers and reports. That left Whitman with ample free time to make the rounds of hosp
itals.

  As of 1863, Washington had around thirty-five hospitals, tending to about twelve thousand soldiers at any given time. This meant the infirm population was one-fifth of the city’s peacetime population. To deal with this influx, Washington had been forced to add hospitals at a breakneck speed, starting from a single hospital at the outbreak of the war. While a few true hospitals had been built such as Campbell and Armory Square, many were temporary facilities: churches, schools, and warehouses called into service. One such makeshift hospital was created by joining together the neighboring houses of Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, rival candidates who had split the Democratic Party in the 1860 election. Even the US Patent Office building was converted into a hospital. Arrayed around glass cases that exhibited patented American inventions were cots filled with the sick and wounded, groaning in pain.

  Some of the worst casualties received treatment in Washington, often soldiers transferred from the front. Many were gunshot victims. The new pointed bullets were made of soft, low-grade lead that blunted on impact, mangling limbs and shattering bones. Amputation was often seen as the wisest course. The hospitals were overflowing with soldiers either awaiting amputation, recovering from rush-job battlefield amputations, or facing the prospect of having the procedure performed again—higher on the stump—because it was botched the first time. They were also full of the chronically ill, soldiers suffering from lingering conditions such as malaria, tetanus, and diarrhea. In fact, forty-five thousand Union soldiers succumbed to diarrhea, the leading cause of Civil War death by disease. Whitman would later say, “That whole damned war business is about nine hundred and ninety nine parts diarrhea to one part glory.”

  Plenty of soldiers also fell victim to the hospitals themselves. In a pre-antiseptic era, the conditions were shockingly unsanitary. Doctors used their own saliva to wet stitching thread. Nurses dabbed wounds with sponges that, following the previous operation, had been cleaned in simple tap water. There were constant outbreaks of dreaded conditions such as gangrene, erysipelas (a severe bacterial skin infection), and pyemia (back then, the medical term for blood poisoning). Historian George Worthington Adams would observe that “the Civil War was fought in the very last years of the medical middle ages.”

  Amid so much chaos, any help was welcome in Washington’s hospitals. All kinds of people, with all sorts of motives, roamed through the wards. Mothers of soldiers parked themselves cot side and gave their sons the kind of attention the overtaxed medical staffs were unable to provide. Freelance nurses circulated, unaffiliated with the hospitals or any organized aid society. Clara Barton, who would found the Red Cross after the war, fell into this category. (At Falmouth, Barton had been working at Lacy House, the temporary hospital that treated severe injuries, when Whitman visited. Strangely, despite being at the front at the same time, despite both serving in the Washington hospitals, Whitman and Barton appear never to have met.) There were also plenty of unsavory characters slinking about. Petty thieves pilfered items. Scam artists talked woozy soldiers into adding them to their wills, signing away their remaining earthly possessions.

  In this lax environment, Whitman had great latitude to carve out his own role. Initially, he acted as a representative for the Christian Commission, an outfit that distributed supplies and religious literature. Such officialdom held no appeal for Whitman, though, and the connection quickly ended. He preferred to work solo. Whitman came up with his own singular role, best expressed by the legend scrawled on the inside cover of one of his notebooks from this time: “Walt Whitman, Soldiers’ Missionary.”

  He wasn’t a nurse, nor did he provide medical care in any traditional sense. Rather, he did a lot of what might be called advocacy, though that’s too formal of a term. He appealed to the overwhelmed hospital staffers, trying to get them to focus their fragmented attentions on the neediest wounded soldiers. Thanks to Whitman’s intervention, Private Holmes—the man who had cried at the kindness of a glass of milk—recovered, returned to his unit, and served out the war. He would always credit the poet with saving his life.

  Whitman also spent a great deal of time simply keeping the sick and wounded company, sitting at their bedsides. If a soldier wanted to make diverting small talk, or relive battlefield glory, or unburden himself of a pent-up anxiety, or, overcome by pangs of homesickness, if he wanted to talk about his folks—Whitman was there. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments,” he wrote in the poem “Song of Myself”: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . I myself become the wounded person.”

  These are prescient lines given that they first appeared nearly a decade earlier in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. In the wartime hospitals, a poet’s empathy became Whitman’s great gift. Often he simply listened to the soldiers. Whitman was always most comfortable in that role, as he’d shown at Pfaff’s. But he adjusted his methods as needed. If a soldier was quiet, Whitman might do the talking, trying to draw the man out. Sometimes Whitman would read to a soldier, or even sing. Still other times, Whitman would sense that a patient was desperate for quiet, just some peace and quiet. He might sit beside this wounded soul for hours, lending silent support. Once, the poet passed an entire evening at the bedside of Charles Cutter, 1st Massachusetts heavy artillery, fanning him while he dozed in the stifling ward. The hospitals could be such terrifyingly anonymous places, especially for a man or boy—some were no more than boys, truly—who was injured or sick and far from home. Through his mere presence, Whitman gave these soldiers hope, something that was critically lacking. As he put it, “I supply the patients with a medicine which all [the hospitals’] drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield.”

  Every day, before setting off to make his rounds, Whitman ate a large, hearty meal and took a long, hot bath. This became his routine. His goal was to radiate good cheer and robust health. As a devotee of concepts such as phrenology and animal magnetism, Whitman held mystical ideas about health and one’s ability to project it onto others. To this point in his life, Whitman had never suffered any kind of serious illness. It was a point of great personal pride. In the absence of medical training, he viewed health as one of his primary attributes, a blessing that was his to bestow. In a letter to his mother, he noted, “I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals, among the poor languishing & wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair.”

  Whitman fell into the habit of distributing various items to the soldiers. His notebooks are filled with their modest requests:

  David S. Giles, co. F. 28th N.J.V.bed 52 W. 6— . . . wants an apple

  Hiram Scholis—bed 3—Ward E.—26th N. York—wants some ­pickles­—a bottle of pickles.

  Henry D. Boardman co. B 27th Conn Vol. . . . Bed 25 . . . wants a rice pudding milky & not very sweet.

  Whenever Whitman set out for the hospitals, he would bring a leather haversack, slung over his shoulder, stuffed with items. He answered a huge variety of requests, delivering peaches, preserves, biscuits, licorice, oysters, tea, horehound candy, and raspberry syrup for soothing aching throats. He also provided toothpicks, combs, underwear and socks, pencils and paper, and books to read. Of course, all of this cost money. Whitman was earning about $15 per week at his new government job in the paymaster’s office. Nearly half this pay was devoted to goods for the wounded soldiers. So he started soliciting donations from friends back in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Small amounts trickled in: $2 here, $3 there. Every bit helped.

  A few months into his hospital service, Whitman bought a cheap wine-colored suit. He wore it every day, the trousers tucked into heavy leather boots. He hadn’t shaved since leaving Brooklyn. The total effect—reddish suit, bushy beard, the haversack—was like a Bohemian Santa Claus. One day, he showed up at Carver Hospital with ice cream and dished it out to the patients. “Many of the men had to be fed, several of them I saw cannot probably live, yet they quite enjoyed it,” he noted, addin
g, “I gave everybody some—quite a number western country boys had never tasted ice cream before.”

  Whitman also filled requests for items such as brandy and playing cards. The soldiers appreciated the fact that he wasn’t a moralist. Along with worried mothers and freelance nurses, a constant stream of preachers poured through the hospitals. Many provided great spiritual solace. Nevertheless, soldiers often objected to the sheer volume of preachers; so many visited that the little cot-side shelves reserved for one’s few belongings were often piled high with tracts and testaments. “A wounded soldier don’t like to be reminded of his God more than twenty times a day,” recalled Colonel Richard Hinton. “Walt Whitman didn’t bring any tracts or Bibles; he didn’t ask if you loved the Lord, and didn’t seem to care whether you did or not.” Instead, at Hinton’s request, “this old heathen came and gave me a pipe and ­tobacco . . . about the most joyous moment of my life.”

  Whitman got to know certain soldiers quite well. Often he was present at their bedsides, sitting in vigil, as they exited this world. His notebooks, filled with the soldiers’ wants (oranges, a handkerchief), are also filled with details about their deaths (typhus, pyemia)—both equally humble. Lorenzo Strong, 9th US Cavalry, was hit by a piece of shrapnel and had to have his right leg amputated. He died from complications. Oscar Cunningham, 82nd Regiment Ohio Infantry, arrived at Armory Square hospital, a big, hulking man, but Whitman had seen him waste to a skeleton by the time he died of a stomach ailment. John Elliott, 2nd Pennsylvania Cavalry, shot in the leg and weakened by infection, was administered chloroform for an operation and never came to. “Poor young man,” Whitman wrote to his mother, “he suffered much, very very much. . . . Not a soul here he knew or cared about, except me.” Whitman added, “To see such things & not be able to help them is awful—I feel almost ashamed of being so well & whole.”