Walt Whitman and the Civil War

Photos: 

#1  Mock war encampment on the Maumee River at the Applebutter festival in Grand Rapids, Ohio.  October 9. 

#2  Allen (my husband) with our dog, Buddha, at the festival. 

#3  The Maumee.on the day of the festival.  I was surprised at how low the water level was.

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I've only lived in two states, North Carolina and Ohio.  Both states (in part) define themselves by which side they were on in the Civil War.  

Last Sunday, Allen, Buddha (our dog), and I went to the Applebutter Festival in Grand Rapids, Ohio.  Every year, the festival draws thousands, who come for the brats, the hot Apple Cider, the Applebutter, the crafts, and the historic reenactments.  Every year, people dress in Civil War clothes (Union outfits) and display themselves in encampments beside the Maumee River.   It's a step back in time, sort of.

Recently, I've been taking another step back in time.  I've been reading Walt Whitman's Specimen Days.  It is a collection of his stray writings, including writings from his Civil War days, the days he spent comforting wounded and dying soldiers.

I've lived in the South and now I live in the North.   I know the Civil War was about having to choose a side.   It was about being patriotic, about loving your home, your "country."

Yet I once read somewhere that a true writer has no country.  It's always a danger to take quotes out of context, but I believe what was meant by that was that a writer has to be true to a higher calling than governments or politics. 

Walt Whitman was surely such a writer.  Oh, he loved America and rhapsodized about America.  But it was an idealized America.  I believe he thought America should be true to a higher calling, too, a higher  calling than power.

The following lines help to illustrate the higher calling Whitman  answered:

"I staid to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years. ... very feeble, right leg amputated, can't sleep hardly at all--has taken a great deal of morphine, which, as usual, is costing more than it comes to.  Evidently very intelligent and well bred--very affectionate--held on to my hand, lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, 'I hardly think you know who I am--I don't wish to impose upon you--I am a rebel soldier.'  I said I did not know that, but it made no difference.  Visiting him daily for about two weeks after that, while he lived, (death had mark'd him, and he was quite alone,) I loved him much, always kiss'd him, and he did me."

Whitman's higher calling was to humanity.  I hesitate to say his higher calling was to God, because I don't think Whitman defined himself that way.  I think he was very spiritual, just not religious in the way we've come to think of being religious.  

One day Whitman ministered to a dying soldier who asked Whitman to read to him from the New Testament.  Whitman wrote in Specimen Days:

"The poor, wasted young man ask'd me to read the following chapter... how Christ rose again.  I read very slowly, for Oscar was feeble.  It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes.  He ask'd me if I enjoy'd religion.  I said, 'Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and yet, may-be, it is the same thing.'"

I know I would like to be the kind of person and the kind of writer that Walt Whitman was.  Mostly, I'm drawn to his never-ceasing optimism.  Even in the face of ugliness and brutality and death, Whitman never lost his belief in humanity.   He believed all was holy.  He believed we were all connected to one another and to nature and that is what divinity was to him. 

In one of his nature jottings, Whitman said:  "What is happiness, anyhow?  Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?--so impalpable--a mere breath, an evanescent  tinge?  I am not sure--so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt."

How like Whitman to ask, Am I happy?  And, not being sure, to give himself the benefit of the doubt.

That's the way I want to be.

As a writer, I, too, want to be moved by a high calling.  I think this is where anyone who is thinking about being a writer needs to begin, by asking, "What is it to which I want to be true?  What calling?"