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Historical Summary"TEACH my children to hate them with that bitter hatred that will never permit them to meet under any circumstances without seeking to destroy each other. I know the breach is now wide and deep between us and the Yankees. Let it widen and deepen until all Yankees or no Yankees are to live in the South." Such were the instructions of a Georgian contained in a letter to his wife, penned in the spring of 1862. Casualty lists, pillage, and propaganda fanned the flames of this hatred. The chivalry of Fort Sumter was soon supplanted by savage fighting, no holds barred, no rules observed. In depicting the macabre scenes of war with sincerity and emotional intensity, in recording the realism and horror of the military, conflict, Walt Whitman was unsurpassed among Civil War reporters. Some of his notebooks were stained with blood. Learning that his brother, George, had been wounded in battle, Whitman left for the South in December, 1862, and was able to locate him near Fredericksburg. Whitman now came closer to the wounded and the dying than he had when he served as a medical aide at the Broadway Hospital in New York. He plunged into intensive hospital work in Washington, acting entirely on his own, comforting the wounded and assisting at dressings and operations. In his letters to his mother, in his Memoranda During the War (1875), and in numerous articles in newspapers and magazines, he has left us a record of his experiences. The following account of a Civil War atrocity, apparently written by Whitman in the fall of 1864, was entitled "A Glimpse of War’s Hell-Scenes," and appeared in his Specimen Days in 1882.
Key Quote"The lion’s lapping thirst for blood."
Walt Whitman
"A Glimpse of War’s Hell-Scenes,"
1882
Walt Whitman Sees a War Atrocity
[1864]
In one of the late movements of our troops in the valley (near Upperville, I think), a strong force of Moseby’s mountain guerillas attack’d a train of wounded and the guard of cavalry convoying them. The ambulances contain’d about sixty wounded, quite a number of them officers of rank. The rebels were in strength, and the capture of the train and its partial guard after a short snap was effectually accomplish’d. No sooner had our men surrender’d, the rebels instantly commenced robbing the train and murdering their prisoners, even the wounded.
Here is the scene, or a sample of it, ten minutes after. Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieutenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg’d out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets struck through them and thrust into the ground. These
two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had receiv’d about twenty such thrusts, some of them through the mouth, face, etc. The wounded had all been dragg’d (to give a better chance also for plunder) out of their wagons; some had been effectually dispatch’d, and their bodies were lying there lifeless and bloody. Others, not yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning and groaning. Of our men who surrender’d, most had been thus maim’d or slaughtered.
At this instant a force of our cavalry, who had been following the train at some interval, charged suddenly upon the secesh captors, who proceeded at once to make the best escape they could. Most of them got away, but we gobbled two officers and seventeen men, in the very acts just described. The sight was one which admitted of little discussion, as may be imagined. The seventeen captur’d men and two officers were put under guard for the night, but it was decided there and then that they should die.
The next morning the two officers were taken in the town, separate places, put in the centre of the street, arid shot. The seventeen men were taken to an open ground, a little to one side. They were placed in a hollow square, half-encompass’d by two of our cavalry regiments, one of which regiments had three days before found the bloody corpses of three of their men hamstrung and hung up by the heels to limbs of trees by Moseby’s guerillas, and the other had not long before had twelve men, after surrendering, shot and then hung by the neck to limbs of trees, and jeering inscriptions pinn’d to the breast of one of the corpses, who had been a sergeant. Those three, and those twelve, had been found, I say, by these environing regiments. Now, with revolvers, they form’d the grim cordon of the seventeen prisoners. The latter were placed in the midst of a hollow square, unfasten’d, and the ironical remark made to them that they were now to be given "a chance for themselves."
A few ran for it. But what use? From every side the deadly pills came. In a few minutes the seventeen corpses strew’d the hollow square. I was curious to know whether some of the Union soldiers, some few (some one or two at least of the youngsters), did not abstain from shooting on the helpless men. Not one. There was no exultation, very little said, almost nothing, yet every man there contributed his shot.
Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds—verify it in all the forms that different circumstances, individuals, places, could afford—light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood—the passionate, boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain—with the light of burning embers—and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers—and you have an inkling of this war.
Chicago: Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, ed. Walt Whitman in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Co., 1951), Original Sources, accessed December 3, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=56XU7USJFALLF45.
MLA: Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days, edited by Walt Whitman, in History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, edited by Louis Leo Snyder and Richard B. Morris, Harrisburg, Pa., Stackpole Co., 1951, Original Sources. 3 Dec. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=56XU7USJFALLF45.
Harvard: Whitman, W, Specimen Days, ed. . cited in 1951, History in the First Person: Eyewitnesses of Great Events: They Saw It Happen, ed. , Stackpole Co., Harrisburg, Pa.. Original Sources, retrieved 3 December 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=56XU7USJFALLF45.
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