This Republic of Suffering [59]
Soldiers had many allies among the civilian population in their effort to maintain their identities and to provide for notification of kin. Katherine Wormeley, serving on a Union hospital ship during the Peninsula Campaign, used the same method as the fatalistic soldiers. “So many nameless men come down to us, speechless and dying,” she wrote, “that now we write the names and regiments of the bad cases and fasten them to their clothing, so that if they are speechless when they reach other hands, they may not die like dogs.” To die without an identity seemed to Wormeley equivalent to surrendering one’s humanity, becoming no more than an animal. Nursing pioneer Clara Barton kept a series of small—one imagines pocket—notebooks into which she entered information about the families of dying soldiers so that when time permitted she could write to the survivors. The diary of T. J. Weatherly, a South Carolina physician who attended Confederate troops in Virginia, served a similar purpose. “Columbus Stephenson, Bethany Church, Iredell County, NoCa,” he noted on a torn and undated page, “to be written to about the death &c of Lt. Thomas W. Stephens[on].”
Receiving what one soldier called “Aufaul knuse.” Detail from “News of the War.” Drawn by Winslow Homer. Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862.
It is not hard to envision Dr. Weatherly asking Thomas Stephenson for his father’s name and address as he consoled him in his last moments. “AA Hewlett, Summerville Ala for Capt Hewlett; Mrs. S Watkins Wadesboro NC for S J Watkins 14th NC,” Weatherly’s list continued.33
Walt Whitman may have been the most famous of those who wrote from hospitals to notify kin of soldiers’ deaths. In 1862 the poet traveled to Virginia in search of his brother George, reported wounded after the Battle of Fredericksburg. George’s injuries proved superficial, but Whitman was deeply affected by his glimpse of war. Like many other Americans first encountering the aftermath of battle, Whitman was struck most forcefully by the sight in front of a Union field hospital of a “heap” of amputated “feet, legs, arms, hands, &c.,” pieces of humans who like the nation itself had been dismembered as a result of reasoned and would-be benevolent human intent. War’s ironies and man’s destructiveness both lay represented in that bloody pile. Whitman felt that any “cares and difficulties” he might have known seemed “trifling” in the face of such horrors: “Nothing we call trouble seems worth talking about.” The war and its suffering soldiers became his preoccupation. “Who are you…Who are you…?” he asked the dead, and concluded these soldiers represented “the majesty and reality of the American common people.” In these men lay the true meaning of the war. Whitman served, as literary critic M. Wynn Thomas has written, as “a surrogate mourner of the dead—one who took it on himself to do what the relatives could not do: to remember the dead man in the very presence of the corpse.”34
Whitman became a tireless hospital visitor, spending seven or eight hours each day ministering to patients, chiefly in Washington, D.C., where almost fifty thousand men lay sick and wounded. His efforts were less medical than consolatory; he provided rice puddings, small amounts of spending money, stamped envelopes and stationery, peaches, apples, oranges, horseradish, undershirts, socks, soap, towels, oysters, jellies, horehound candy—and love, comfort, and “cheer.” And he himself wrote hundreds of letters—often, he reported, more than a dozen a day—for soldiers unable to do this for themselves. After suffering with his family the torments of uncertainty about George’s fate, Whitman understood well the importance of communication between battle and home front. “I do a good deal of this,” he wrote to the New York Times, “writing all kinds, including love letters…I always encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them.