Complete Prose Works
yards distant. Clusters of gnats swimming and dancing in the air in all
directions. The oak leaves are thick under the bare trees, and give a
strong and delicious perfume. Inside the wards everything is gloomy.
Death is there. As I enter'd, I was confronted by it the first thing;
a corpse of a poor soldier, just dead, of typhoid fever. The attendants
had just straighten'd the limbs, put coppers on the eyes, and were
laying it out.
_The roads_--A great recreation, the past three years, has been in
taking long walks out from Washington, five, seven, perhaps ten miles
and back; generally with my friend Peter Doyle, who is as fond of it as
I am. Fine moonlight nights, over the perfect military roads, hard
and smooth--or Sundays--we had these delightful walks, never to be
forgotten. The roads connecting Washington and the numerous forts around
the city, made one useful result, at any rate, out of the war.
TYPICAL SOLDIERS
Even the typical soldiers I have been personally intimate with,--it
seems to me if I were to make a list of them it would be like a city
directory. Some few only have I mention'd in the foregoing pages--most
are dead--a few yet living. There is Reuben Farwell, of Michigan,
(little "Mitch;") Benton H. Wilson, color-bearer, 185th New York; Wm.
Stansberry; Manvill Winterstein, Ohio; Bethuel Smith; Capt. Simms, of
51st New York, (kill'd at Petersburgh mine explosion,) Capt. Sam. Pooley
and Lieut. Fred. McReady, same reg't. Also, same reg't., my brother,
George W. Whitman--in active service all through, four years,
re-enlisting twice--was promoted, step by step, (several times
immediately after battles,) lieutenant, captain, major and lieut.
colonel--was in the actions at Roanoke, Newbern, 2d Bull Run, Chantilly,
South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburgh, Vicksburgh, Jackson, the
bloody conflicts of the Wilderness, and at Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor,
and afterwards around Petersburgh; at one of these latter was taken
prisoner, and pass'd four or five months in secesh military prisons,
narrowly escaping with life, from a severe fever, from starvation and
half-nakedness in the winter. (What a history that 51st New York had!
Went out early--march'd, fought everywhere--was in storms at sea, nearly
wreck'd--storm'd forts--tramp'd hither and yon in Virginia,
night and day, summer of '62--afterwards Kentucky and
Mississippi--re-enlisted--was in all the engagements and campaigns, as
above.) I strengthen and comfort myself much with the certainty that
the capacity for just such regiments, (hundreds, thousands of them) is
inexhaustible in the United States, and that there isn't a county nor a
township in the republic--nor a street in any city--but could turn out,
and, on occasion, would turn out, lots of just such typical soldiers,
whenever wanted.
"CONVULSIVENESS"
As I have look'd over the proof-sheets of the preceding pages, I have
once or twice fear'd that my diary would prove, at best, but a batch of
convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so.
They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement
of those times. The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it,
can indeed be best described by that very word _convulsiveness_.
THREE YEARS SUMM'D UP
During those three years in hospital, camp or field, I made over six
hundred visits or tours, and went, as I estimate, counting all, among
from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand of the wounded and sick,
as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree, in time of need. These
visits varied from an hour or two, to all day or night; for with dear
or critical cases I generally watch'd all night. Sometimes I took up my
quarters in the hospital, and slept or watch'd there several nights
in succession. Those three years I consider the greatest privilege
and satisfaction, (with all their feverish excitements and physical
deprivations and lamentable sights,) and, of course, the most profound
lesson of my life. I can say that in my ministerings I comprehended
all, whoever came in my way, northern or southern, and slighted none. It
arous'd and brought out and decided undream'd-of depths of emotion. It
has given me my most fervent views of the true _ensemble_ and extent of
the States. While I was with wounded and sick in thousands of cases from
the New England States, and from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
and from Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the
Western States, I was with more or less from all the States, North
and South, without exception. I was with many from the border States,
especially from Maryland and Virginia, and found, during those lurid
years 1862-63, far more Union southerners, especially Tennesseans, than
is supposed. I was with many rebel officers and men among our wounded,
and gave them always what I had, and tried to cheer them the same as
any. I was among the army teamsters considerably, and, indeed, always
found myself drawn to them. Among the black soldiers, wounded or sick,
and in the contraband camps, I also took my way whenever in their
neighborhood, and did what I could for them.
THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM'D UP
The dead in this war--there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and
valleys and battle-fields of the south--Virginia, the Peninsula--Malvern
hill and Fair Oaks--the banks of the Chickahominy--the terraces of
Fredericksburgh--Antietam bridge--the grisly ravines of Manassas--the
bloody promenade of the Wilderness--the varieties of the _strayed_ dead,
(the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill'd
in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown'd--15,000 inhumed
by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound
localities--2,000 graves cover'd by sand and mud by Mississippi
freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)--Gettysburgh,
the West, Southwest--Vicksburgh--Chattanooga--the trenches of
Petersburgh--the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere--the
crop reap'd by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery,
inflammations--and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living
burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle,
&c., (not Dante's pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations,
filthy torments, excell'd those prisons)--the dead, the dead, the
dead--_our_ dead--or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all,
finally dear to me)--or East or West--Atlantic coast or Mississippi
valley--somewhere they crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies,
or on the sides of hills--(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons,
bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are
occasionally found yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous,
taken from us--the son from the mother, the husband from the wife,
the dear friend from the dear friend--the clusters of camp graves, in
Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee--the single graves left in
the woods or by the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)--the
corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores,
floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the
pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)--some lie at the bottom of the
sea--the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the
States--the infinite dead--(the land entire saturated, perfumed with
their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and
shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and
every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)--not only Northern
dead leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye tens of thousands, of
Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
And everywhere among these countless graves--everywhere in the many
soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over
seventy of them)--as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories
of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles--not only where
the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all
the peaceful quarters of the land--we see, and ages yet may see, on
monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of
thousands, the significant word UNKNOWN.
(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At
Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown
are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national
monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the
spot--but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate
that spot?)
THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER GET IN THE BOOKS
And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been, or may be,
to others--to me the main interest I found, (and still, on recollection,
find,) in the rank and file of the armies, both sides, and in those
specimens amid the hospitals, and even the dead on the field. To me the
points illustrating the latent personal character and eligibilities
of these States, in the two or three millions of American young
and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in those armies--and
especially the one-third or one-fourth of their number, stricken by
wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest--were of
more significance even than the political interests involved. (As so
much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how it stands personal
anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies,
and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, we get far profounder
clues to the antique world than all its more formal history.)
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal
background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official
surface-courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of the
Secession war; and it is best they should not--the real war will never
get in the books. In the mushy influences of current times, too, the
fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of
being totally forgotten. I have at night watch'd by the side of a sick
man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his
eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr'd to the cruelties
on his surrender'd brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward.
(See in the preceding pages, the incident at Upperville--the seventeen
kill'd as in the description, were left there on the ground. After they
dropt dead, no one touch'd them--all were made sure of, however. The
carcasses were left for the citizens to bury or not, as they chose.)
Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior
history will not only never be written--its practicality, minutia; of
deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier
of 1862-'65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible
dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce
friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality,
lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say,
will never be written--perhaps must not and should not be.
The preceding notes may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and
into those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey'd to the future.
The hospital part of the drama from '61 to '65, deserves indeed to
be recorded. Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange
surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the
dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody
battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and
bounties--the immense money expenditure, like a heavy-pouring constant
rain--with, over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle,
an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans--the