The ideas, thoughts, and words on this non-profit page were compiled from Angel Price's article, "Whitman's Drum Taps and Washington's Civil War Hospitals".  Some wording and phrases from the original source have been slightly edited / modified for middle school use by Sam Greene.  To view the source article, navigate to the following links: http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7ECAP/hospital/whitman.htm 

Prior to reading this passage, make sure you've previewed the questions to focus your reading of this article.  This is a reading strategy you can and should use in all your classes.  Walt Whitman, Abe Lincoln, and the Civil War Questions

Walt Whitman, one of America's greatest poets, began his career as a printer and journalist in New York City.  During the Civil War he worked in military hospitals in Washington D.C.   Besides firsthand diaries of soldiers, the most poignant scenes of the Civil War come from Walt Whitman's wartime prose and most distinctly his book of poetry entitled Drum Taps (1865). Many of its poems resulted from his years in Washington, D.C., spent as a psychological nurse to sick and wounded soldiers. Referring to how helpful his cheerful disposition and careful attention to the welfare of the soldiers was, Whitman wrote to a friend in 1863 saying, "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield".  He brought to life the emotions and realities of the Civil War. 

To fully understand Whitman's writing from the time, one must consider the conditions in which he composed his work.  It had a profound effect on him and the men for whom he cared.  Before the war began, Washington D.C. was a relatively rural town with limited medical accommodations. There were no military hospitals and very few medical facilities. Yet by the end of the Civil War there were approximately fifty hospitals marking the Washington landscape.  Several government building were used to house the wounded and ill, including the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.  

Sanitation was of little concern in the hospitals of the time. Before knowledge of microbes and infection, there was no concern for sterilization of instruments and used bandages littered the floor.  Doctors moistened stitching thread with their saliva before sewing wounds and sharpened surgical knives on the soles of their boots. The water supply was a serious consideration because the barracks were seldom participants in municipal conveniences. As a result, blood poisoning, tetanus and gangrene were extremely common.

Although he never met President Lincoln in person, Whitman often saw the President at a distance in Washington.  Possessing many of the same qualities -- a gentleness of spirit, working-class background, and a burning love of America and democracy -- Lincoln and Whitman held each other in the greatest respect. There is no record of their having ever met one another, but in his account of seeing Lincoln on his way to the Second Inaugural, Whitman wrote of "the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows" of Lincoln's face. 

The details of Whitman's relationship with President Lincoln are sketchy, yet the effect Lincoln had on the Good Gray Poet, as Whitman was called, was undeniable. Lincoln was the ideal of the public man as civil servant, much in the same way that Whitman was the ideal of the private citizen. Lincoln embodied Whitman's ideal of the common man: a strong, plain Westerner-- an American through and through. In one of his many Washington notebooks Whitman recorded, "Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going gray horse, is dress'd in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat and looks about as ordinary in attire as the commonest man."

Lincoln's death in April of 1865 at the conclusion of the Civil War was a tragic moment in our country's history, coming as a great shock to Whitman. He would forever refer to the assassination as Lincoln's "murder" in his speeches given in memory of Lincoln in the years to come. Considering the hope Whitman held concerning a unification of social classes and geographies after the war, Lincoln's assassination shattered many of his expectations, moving Whitman to compose two of his most famous poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."  

O Captain! My Captain!
By Walt Whitman

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up- for you the flag is flung- for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths- for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman