AUTHORS ON THE RECORD

The Letters of Walt Whitman

The Poet and His Family Were Active Correspondents
by hilary parkinson

Visitors to Washington, D.C., see the words of Walt Whitman engraved on the Dupont Circle Metro station
entrance. The quotation is from “The Dresser,” a poem in Leaves of Grass. In the poem, the speaker moves
among the wounded, offering comfort, as Whitman himself did in the Civil War hospitals of Washington:
I sit by the restless all the dark night-some are so young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet and sad
Although Whitman was a noncombatant, he saw and recorded the ravages of the Civil War as he worked as a nurse
in the hospitals. He was also a prolific letter writer who wrote to and received letters from his brother George, a
Robert Roper

Union soldier and veteran of major battles. In his book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the
Civil War, Robert Roper looks at the correspondence and experience of the Whitman family during the Civil War.
Roper is the author of a number of novels as well as of Fatal Mountaineer, which won London’s Royal
Geographical Society Boardman-Tasker Prize in 2002. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Outside, and National Geographic. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lives in Maryland and California.

What inspired you to look at the Whitman family
experience through the lens of the Civil War?
I was always moved by what I knew about Whitman’s
service as a nurse in the Civil War hospitals. The hospitals
were often dreadful places, and Whitman worked hard, for
long years, tending to thousands and thousands of men.
Then I learned—I think from Roy Morris, Jr.’s interesting
book, The Better Angel—that one of Walt’s younger brothers
was a Union soldier, and moreover, a soldier who served for the
full extent of the war and who saw a tremendous amount of
combat. I thought there was an interesting contrast in the styles
of the two men: Walt a nurturing noncombatant, and brother
George a militant warrior.
Then I learned that they had written many letters to each
other—Walt’s were unfortunately lost, but George’s were
mostly preserved. Then I discovered . . . the mother! The family
correspondence had almost all passed through her hands, and in
fact, though she is known to literary history as an “illiterate,” she
wrote scores of letters to her sons during the war.
I sought out those letters (collected in the fine Walt Whitman
Archive at Duke University). Some of them were brilliant, and
all were rich with the flavor of lived life. I began to want to tell
the story of that life, the life of the Whitman family before and
during the Civil War, in ancestral Brooklyn, in Washington,
and on the battlegrounds where George fought.
There is a huge network of letters between Mrs. Whitman and
her children, and Walt Whitman also carried on a copious
correspondence with friends and soldiers. Not all the letters
survived. What missing letters do you wish you could read?
There’s a simple answer to that: the letters that Walt, Mrs.
Whitman, and a third brother, Jeff, wrote to George when
he was soldiering. George read and then quickly threw
away the letters that reached him at the front. Soldiers were
encouraged to do so, because letters that fell into enemy
hands might contain important intelligence.
The letters that Walt wrote would be fascinating to read, but
I think as much and possibly even more, I would like to see Mrs.
Whitman’s letters. She was a natural mimic and storyteller,
she was psychologically very astute, and she loved and trusted
George—I think her intimate letters to him would have been
deeply revealing, both of her own state of mind and of how the
Brooklyn family was dealing with its many hardships.
You used records from the National Archives to look at the 51st
Regiment, in which Walt’s brother George served. You also
looked for evidence of another brother, Jesse, as a sailor in the
crew lists. What was your experience as researcher like?
I was a newcomer to the National Archives. My previous 30-
year career as a writer, mainly of novels, had never required me to
access the Archives, and I had only a general idea of the holdings
from having read historians’ accounts of their research projects.
I had a kind of “undeveloped” interest in the Civil War—I grew
up in Maryland, a short distance from many battlefields, and a
neighbor who was a very knowledgeable amateur historian often
talked to me about the war and showed me artifacts he collected.

62 Prologue Summer 2010

 Without ever having read much Civil War history, I had grown
up with a great emotional investment in it, and the story of the
Whitmans awoke it in me with a great intensity.
The military records at the National Archives are superb,
and I was quickly able to answer many of the questions I had
about the war careers of the junior officers who were close to
George Whitman and whom Walt came to know when he
visited George at the front. I read widely in Record Group 94
(Office of the Adjutant General, Volunteer Organizations) and
in the “Record of Events” for the 51st New York.
In the packet of documents pertaining to George’s service,
I came upon a handsome sheet of paper inscribed in a bold,
familiar hand—it was a letter that Walt himself had written,
to try to get an extension of leave for George in April 1865.
(The extension was granted.) Walt was writing in the persona
of Dr. Edward Ruggles, the Whitman family physician back in
Brooklyn. This wonderful letter was simply there, waiting for a
citizen researcher to stumble upon it. I like what that says about
our archival system and our historic commitment to free access.
The hunt for Jesse Whitman was great fun. The story in the
family was that he had been a sailor on oceangoing vessels for
some years; that he took a fall out of the rigging of a ship and
suffered a brain injury; that he recovered, but that some years
down the line he started to go mad. He ended his life in an
insane asylum. No previous researchers had found any naval
or other maritime records of his service, however.
My research assistants and I spent some hours at the National
Archives regional archives in downtown Manhattan, going over
ships’ crew lists from the late 1830s into the 1850s, and eventually
one of my assistants found mention of Jesse on two ships, one
that sailed in 1839 and one in 1841. With these and other records
(of Jesse’s later employment in a naval shipyard in Brooklyn; of
his life at home with his mother in the early 1860s; of his final
hospitalization, Walt being the one who committed him), I
was able to start putting together a picture of this little-known
Whitman son, who in his youth was said to have had “the best
mind of any of the children.”
Did looking at the records of the 51st Regiment help clarify
any questions you had from reading the accounts of battles
in George’s letters, especially at the Wilderness?
The Archives records were essential in that I inevitably
found myself writing a kind of book within a book—a book
that Walt, himself, was supposed to have written. This was a
regimental history of the 51st, one of the most battle-hardened
and longsuffering of Union infantry regiments. As I told
George Whitman’s story, I found myself sketching in the
stories of his brother officers and enlisted men.
The 51st fought in both the east and the west; they were in
the thick of things at New Bern, Chantilly, South Mountain,
The Letters of Walt Whitman
Antietam, Fredericksburg, Jackson, the Wilderness, Spotsyl-
vania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, and the Crater, among
other battles. Walt knew that his brother was fighting with an
unusual outfit, one whose story was essentially the story of the
whole war, and early on he began collecting documents that
would help him to write a regimental history. But somehow
he never got around to doing it—too much poetry to write, I
guess (as well as his superb Memoranda During the War, about
his hospital service, published in 1876).
Walt spent a great deal of time in Washington, D.C. Were
you able to visit the city and see any of his old haunts?
Yes, I was able to visit Washington, and I sought out some
of Walt’s haunts, or his old addresses, anyway, now much
transformed. The most important visits I made were to
battlefields, especially Fredericksburg and Antietam. By studying
the terrain and walking it, I was able to understand better George’s
descriptions of certain famous passages of battle—for instance,
at Burnside’s Bridge, Antietam, and before Marye’s Heights,
Fredericksburg. George was an accurate and skilled describer of
battles, but without these visits some aspects of the maneuvers on
both sides of the fight would have remained opaque to me.
Walt crossed paths with several important figures. He
nodded at Lincoln on the street, worked on the hospital
wards with Clara Barton, and met with Emerson, Thoreau,
and Alcott. Yet it seems that these encounters are on the
periphery of Walt’s Civil War experience in his letters
home—were you surprised by this?
I wasn’t surprised once I came to understand the tenor
of Walt’s communications with his mother. It was very
intimate, and Walt was often writing to her seeking a deep
kind of understanding, counting on her ability to shore him
up and heal him psychologically. As the years passed, his
harrowing work in the hospitals exhausted and depressed
him to a dangerous extent. He had more urgent things to
discuss with his mother than his sightings of Clara Barton
(whom Mrs. Whitman had probably never heard of in 1862,
when Walt saw her in a field hospital at Fredericksburg).
Walt did share news of President Lincoln with his mother—
they were both deeply enamored of Lincoln. Walt was at
home in Brooklyn when news reached New York of Lincoln’s
assassination. He spent that day with Mrs. Whitman in her
kitchen, neither of them speaking much, neither of them able to
eat. They gathered the local newspaper accounts and read them
in silence, passing them to each other. Both of them felt that a
great soul had passed with Lincoln’s death, and out of this grief,
which he shared with his mother (and the nation), Walt some
months later wrote the greatest elegy in our literature, “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
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