This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [126]
Walt Whitman engaged this same tension. He was fascinated with the war’s magnitude, which was for him one measure of its democratic reach. Statistics offered a vivid means of displaying the conflict’s dimensions and impact, and it was to numbers that he readily turned to present the war “summ’d up” when the fighting ceased. He defined his own experience by estimating the sick and wounded he had visited (“80,000 to 100,000”). But to capture and characterize the war, he invoked the numbers of the dead: conjecturing how many lay entirely unburied, how many in “hitherto unfound localities,” and finally, and most important, how many gravestones carried “the significant word Unknown.” Even as he tried to imagine these “countless” dead—“The Million Dead,” he designated them—he claimed each one as his own. They were at once “infinite” and intimate: “all, all, all, finally dear to me.” Every soldier was to Whitman “a man as divine as myself” each was “my loving comrade,” even if he lay unheralded and unknown. These singular soldiers represented for Whitman “the real war,” the true meaning of the devastating conflict. His abstraction from the one to the many and his embodiment of the many in the one served as both political and poetical synecdoche. To understand even “an inkling of this War,” Whitman believed, it was necessary to try always to “multiply…by scores, aye hundreds,” the particular “hell scenes” of battle and the individual soldiers he had watched suffer and die.24
This problem of the one and the many challenged northerners and southerners alike and served as a central theme in the war’s popular culture. How could the meaning of so many deaths be understood? And conversely, how could an individual’s death continue to matter amid the loss of so many? “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” a song claimed and sung by both Union and Confederacy, focused with irony upon the dismissal of a single soldier’s death as unworthy of notice. “’Tis nothing,” it said, in the face of the lengthy casualty lists that have become commonplace: “a private or two now and then will not count in the news of the battle.” Yet the work of the song was to reclaim the importance of this individual life, the husband and father who was just as dead in this night of “quiet” as if he were one of the thousands who had perished in the din of dramatic battle. He was a man, the song insisted, who counts, even if he was not counted.25
Walt Whitman. Photograph by Mathew Brady. Library of Congress.
An 1862 story in Harper’s Weekly entitled “Only One Killed” echoed the same theme and served as a gesture of popular resistance to the insignificance of an individual death amid what the writer called “a fearful aggregate of woe.” The story’s main character blithely responds to a report of “one killed” by declaring the news so insignificant as to be “hardly worth the cost of a telegram.” The “pair of sober gray eyes” of a man sitting nearby offer a “silent rebuke” to this heartlessness, and indeed subsequent information reveals that the slain soldier is this man’s only son. “Only one killed!” the narrator exclaims. “How differently the fact impressed me now! It was no longer an unrealized newspaper announcement, but a present stern reality.” The problem of the one and the many was central to the problem of “realizing” with which Americans struggled. “One, two, three hundred killed or mangled. It is awful to contemplate; and yet we must come down to the single cases to get at the heart of this fearful matter,” the writer explained, having in his story tried to do exactly that. A soldier from New York, Charles Lewis, chose almost the same language as the Harper’s author after his brigade was reported to have lost “but one” in an engagement. “We say ‘but one,’ never thinking