America Aflame (45 page)

The gruesome scene reflected the heroism of the soldier as much as the foolhardiness of the officers. Fredericksburg, though a devastating defeat for the Union, stood as a symbol of Yankee bravery. A colonel of the 77th New York wrote: “None were ever more brave or more desirous to test their valor. The heroic deeds of those who did advance against the enemy will ever redound to the glory of our arms.” Walt Whitman, who had traveled hastily to Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother, asserted, “Never did mortal man in an aggregate fight better than our troops at Fredericksburg. In the highest sense, it was no failure.” Even the Confederates expressed admiration for the enemy's courage. General George E. Pickett, who would come to know the consequences of charging a well-entrenched enemy at its center, marveled in a letter to his wife at the heroism of the Union's Irish Brigade: “Your soldier's heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their death. The brilliant assault … was beyond description.”
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Better to be an admiring spectator on the Confederate side than reaping the laurels of certain death in a futile charge. Henry Livermore Abbott, of the 20th Massachusetts, led one of the unsuccessful charges and was withering in his assessment of the battle and the war. “The whole army is demoralized,” he wrote to a friend the day after the battle. “The strongest peace party is the army.… The men who ordered the crossing of the river are responsible to God for murder.” Abbott reported mutinous talk among the soldiers against “those blood stained scoundrels in the government.”
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Most northerners focused on the results of the battle, not the bravery of the troops. By now, the northern public was inured to casualty figures, but the lopsided result at Fredericksburg threw citizens across the North into the worst despair of the war. Even those who normally supported the administration now turned against it. The Republicans, already reeling from serious losses in the November midterm elections they blamed on military reverses and the impending emancipation decree, ripped into the administration. An editorial in
Harper's
reported that the events at Fredericksburg filled “the heart of the loyal North with sickness, disgust, and despair.” The writer charged that “the Government is unfit for its office, and … the most gallant efforts ever made by a cruelly tried people are being neutralized by the obstinacy and incapacity of their leaders.” He wondered aloud if “matters are rapidly ripening for a military dictatorship.” Lincoln especially received scorn and ridicule. A popular illustration of the time depicted Columbia angrily asking the president, “Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” to which Lincoln replies, “This reminds me of a little Joke.” Columbia cuts him off: “Go tell your Joke at Springfield!” Lincoln assessed his position accurately: “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”
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Confederates were relieved but subdued. Their military situation in the West continued to slip, inflation gnawed at civilians, the death toll had mounted precipitously during the preceding year, and a major Union force still menaced in Virginia. Fredericksburg lifted southern spirits, though. Jefferson Davis told a cheering crowd in Richmond shortly after the new year that their Confederacy was the last hope “for the perpetuation of that system of government which our forefathers founded—the asylum of the oppressed and the home of true representative liberty.” It was a speech Lincoln could have given. Preserving the last hope would not be easy, Davis averred. “Every crime which could characterize the course of demons has marked the course of the invader.”
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Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes did not fight at Fredericksburg; dysentery disabled him before he could take the field with his regiment. It was a disease that would kill more than forty-four thousand men during the war. Holmes survived, but the loss of comrades at Fredericksburg “to certain and useless death,” as he put it, had a profound effect on him. The battle persuaded him that the war, “in which the boldest are the likeliest to die, was a hideous human waste.” The Cause, any cause, paled before the fact that the best men experienced a senseless death. A week later, in a letter to his father, Holmes summarized his new feelings that peace rather than war offered the best chance for the abolition of slavery: “But if it is true that we represent civilization, which is in its nature, as well as slavery, diffusive & aggressive, and if civilization & progress are the better things why they will conquer in the long run … and will stand a better chance in their proper province—peace—than in war, the brother of slavery—brother—it is slavery's parent, child and sustainer at once.”
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On the evening of January 1, 1863, Frederick Douglass and three thousand of his friends gathered at Tremont Temple in Boston to await the arrival of the news that President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Three crucial differences from the preliminary emancipation document of September 22 appeared. The latest version made no mention of colonization, muted the preservation of the Union as the primary motivation for the proclamation, and recommended that able-bodied freedmen be “received into the armed service.” It was a radical proposal. Messengers waited at the telegraph office to bring the joyful news to the temple. The throng listened to inspirational speeches and Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” but by 11:00 P.M., no messengers had appeared. Near midnight, Judge Thomas Russell rushed into the temple waving a paper, which he read: “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and ports of States are, and henceforward shall be, free.” Douglass recalled, “I never saw Joy before. Men, women, young and old, were up; hats and bonnets were in the air.” In North Carolina, a newly freed slave thought, “These are the times foretold by the Prophets, ‘When a Nation shall be born in a day.'”
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CHAPTER 12

BLOOD AND TRANSCENDENCE

WALT WHITMAN FOUGHT
in another war. His war was deadlier than the one on the battlefield. Everyone was a hero in his war, all were comrades, and the enemy was invisible. Whitman fought against death as a nurse in Washington hospitals. He lost many battles, but he persisted and thanked God for small victories. For surely it was God and not the science of the day that accounted for the daily miracles of survival among the sick and wounded. In a cruel and senseless war, the hospitals were the cruelest places. They were also places of grace.

Whitman caught a train from New York the moment he heard his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg. He searched frantically through forty hospitals and homes in Washington, D.C., to no avail. Learning of a field hospital in Falmouth, Virginia, Whitman located his brother lying in a tent with a nonthreatening shrapnel wound in his cheek. Yet the poet could not leave. Here, death was as common as the morning. He saw three dead men lying on stretchers outside a tent, untended, each with a brown woolen blanket covering them. The poet wrote,

Then to the second I step—And who are you my child and darling?

Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
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The wounded lay in flimsy tents, often on the frozen ground, with only a blanket against the late December frost. He held their hands to comfort them. They would not let go. Far from home, far from family, they had made him their kin. He had found his life's new work. At the end of December, he accompanied a contingent of the wounded to Washington, D.C., serving as a scribe for the disabled soldiers writing messages to their families, and they returned his kindness tenfold. He stayed in Washington, found a job in the army paymaster's office, and, after work, dashed off to hospitals bearing gifts and solace for the soldiers.

Death had become so commonplace it bred indifference. Surgeons were careless in their amputations and unmindful of even the limited sanitary knowledge of the time. Attendants flung naked corpses onto a nearby field to await mass burial. Whitman never succumbed to the routine of death; it heightened his compassion and love. The sheer force of his being, Whitman believed, held healing powers. Over six feet tall, nearly two hundred pounds, with a ruddy complexion and a long gray beard, he was a commanding presence striding down hospital wards. He read stories and poems to the soldiers, changed dressings, cooled fevered brows, and wrote his verses, so different from the celebratory stanzas when the war began:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,

I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,

Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side-falling head,

His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,

And has not yet looked on it.
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It was in one of these hospital wards that Whitman encountered the young soldier John A. Holmes. The Massachusetts private suffered from diarrhea, an affliction that struck 54 percent of Union soldiers and an incredible 99 percent of Confederates. Excrement and offal fouled the drinking water at military camps, spreading disease rapidly. By the end of the war, a hundred thousand soldiers had died from the disease, representing roughly 15 percent of all deaths.
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Holmes, who could not hold down food, was evacuated from Fredericksburg in an open rail car to a field hospital in Aquia Creek, Virginia. He lay on the ground, unattended, for several days without anything to eat or drink. The army shipped him on a steamer with other sick and wounded to Washington, D.C. Lying on an open deck in frigid winter weather, he was too weak to draw his blanket over him for a semblance of warmth. Despite requests, nobody came to his aid. Dropped off at the wharf in Washington, he caught a ride to a hospital and immediately fell onto an open bed only to be rousted out and admonished that he could not lie down with his clothes on. He complied, and now naked he was ushered into a bathroom where attendants scrubbed him down with cold water. He collapsed into unconsciousness.

Whitman saw a glassy-eyed, pale, and despairing face on his way out of the ward one evening. It was clear that the man was dying, so he stopped but received no response at first. “I sat down by him without any fuss; talked a little; soon saw that it did him good; led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a letter for him to his folks … soothed him down … gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.” Holmes asked the poet for a few pennies to buy milk from the woman who came through the ward in the morning. When Whitman pulled the change out of his pocket, the dying soldier wept uncontrollably.

Whitman visited Holmes the next day and the next, expecting on each visit to find an empty bed or another unfortunate soldier in his place. He followed this routine for several weeks, and, to his surprise, Holmes got stronger and eventually rejoined his unit. As he left the hospital, Holmes told Whitman that he had saved his life that first day he sat on the soldier's bed. “I can testify,” the poet asserted later, “that friendship has literally cured a fever, and the medicine of daily affection a bad wound.”
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Patients like Holmes resided in the same ward as wounded soldiers, a good prescription for spreading disease, only one source of the deadly infections that plagued the wounded on both sides. Field hospitals were especially noxious. At Antietam, Union surgeons set up a field hospital in a stable ankle-deep in manure. Physicians operated clad in blood- or pus-stained coats, wielded instruments and sponges rinsed off with water after being used on previous patients, and sharpened their surgical knives on the soles of their boots. They moistened thread with saliva to facilitate its placement in needles for sutures and wrapped wounds in any cloth available.

If they survived the operating table, recuperating soldiers contended with the groans and screams of comrades, the indifference of hospital personnel, and incessant visits from ministers trying to save their souls. When the young men wrote home about such visits, they typically expressed exasperation. They had seen war and its consequences. If God was omnipotent, why would he allow such carnage and the accompanying misery for families across the land? Most soldiers retained their religious beliefs, but the war shook their faith. A wounded Ohio soldier recalled ministers “who would come into my ward and preach and pray and sing to us, while we were swearing to ourselves all the time and wishing the blamed old fools would go away.” One of the many reasons why Whitman's soldiers welcomed his presence was that, as one wounded private noted, he “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.”
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Whitman, the individualist, did not fit in well with the increasingly institutionalized methods of care promoted by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The commission, established by the government but funded privately, gathered supplies, recruited nurses, organized hospitals, and grasped the connection between sanitation and health. While its efforts improved the delivery of health care among Union soldiers significantly—no comparable group existed in the Confederacy—the approach was more bureaucratic than caring. As one official advised nurses, “Put away feelings. Do all you can and be a machine—that's the way to act; the only way.” Maintaining an emotional distance between nurse and patient became a paramount tenet of professionalism, which Whitman detested. He took every death personally and knew the signs of death, the delirium, the eyes turning back, the shallow breathing, as he walked through the wards. He would retrace his steps and see now a white sheet covering a form, another sacrifice, for what and for whom?
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The poet's disdain for bureaucratic care found resonance with a young Massachusetts woman whom he met in the days after Fredericksburg. Clara Barton, like Whitman, worked as a copyist in Washington, D.C., only for the U.S. Patent Office, the first woman to draw her salary from the U.S. government. A diminutive (not quite five feet tall), dark-haired woman of inestimable energy—she described herself as “athletic,” a decidedly unfeminine characterization for the era—she had moved to the capital in 1854 for health reasons. Barton was probably the only resident of the city who migrated there for its climate. She wanted to settle further south but feared a single woman would not be safe in the land below the Potomac.
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When the war began, Barton brought little gifts to soldiers stationed in the city. She preferred the single life and the independence accompanying it. Not that she embraced celibacy. As a friend explained, “She was so much stronger a character than any of the men who made love to her that I do not think she was ever seriously tempted to marry any of them.” During the war, she had a “tempestuous” affair with a married Union colonel. None of these biographical details were conventional for a middle-class New England woman, which hints at her greater destiny. Like Whitman, she moved to the front lines of the other war and made a lasting impact.
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The wounded soldiers returning from First Bull Run startled Barton. They were in horrible shape, bounced over rutted roads on transports and receiving little care. She collected three warehouses full of food and supplies for soldiers and resolved to deliver the goods in person. Barton played the tearful female to the quartermaster and received a pass to go into Virginia “for the comfort of the sick and wounded.” The surgeons had few supplies when Barton suddenly turned up at the field hospitals with her wagonload of goods. A surgeon recalled, “I thought that night, if heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one, her assistance was so timely.” She also ministered to wounded Confederates at a nearby hospital, something Whitman would do as well. These angels knew no distinction among combatants, only the quality of mercy.
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The other war generated ghastly scenes, such as those Barton came across after Second Bull Run. The field hospital was, literally, a field on a hillside, where sick and wounded Union soldiers baked under an unforgiving sun, the fortunate resting on straw, the others on the bare ground, and almost all without food or water for two days. Barton distributed her supplies and tended to many soldiers personally. She resolved to accompany the army on its next campaign so the wounded would receive immediate treatment. Barton and four supply wagons joined the procession of McClellan's army into Maryland.

The carnage at Antietam overwhelmed even Barton's store of supplies. She resorted to applying green corn leaves to wounds in the place of bandages. As male surgical assistants fled Rebel artillery fire, Barton remained on the field, oblivious to the shells and bullets, aiding fallen soldiers as best she could. A surgeon proclaimed, “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age,
the angel of the battlefield
.” The 21st Massachusetts made her a daughter of the regiment. Much as Whitman had found his calling in the hospital wards of Washington, Barton was at home traveling with the army: “I am a U.S. soldier you know and therefore not supposed to be susceptible to fear.”
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Fredericksburg nearly undid her. The sheer volume of casualties and the lack of space as the wounded crammed into private homes in the city and lay on floors slicked with blood, even on china cupboards, astounded Barton. In one house, twelve hundred men lay wounded. “I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing, before I could step.” Barton returned to Washington on New Year's Eve. Too exhausted to see in the new year, she collapsed on the floor of her one-room flat and sobbed herself to sleep.
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Whitman's and Barton's other war raged in the South as well. There, angels of mercy had many more obstacles to overcome. The percentage of Confederate soldiers killed by disease was twice that of Union soldiers. The Confederacy suffered from chronic shortages of medicines and bandages, the absence of organizations such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission to coordinate giving and train nurses, and the general prejudice among male physicians against women as nurses. Traveling to Corinth after terrible Shiloh, Kate Cumming, a Scots immigrant who had settled in Mobile, Alabama, complained, “The surgeons entertain great prejudice against admitting ladies into the hospital in the capacity of nurses.” Cumming prevailed, however, and entered a hotel, now serving as a hospital that included the wounded and sick from both sides. They lay strewn all over the floor, rendering her passage nearly impossible. Her thoughts cried out, “O, if the authors of this cruel and unnatural war could but see what I saw there, they would try and put a stop of it!”
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