The futile period of searching, he told his mother, was “the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life.” It did not help that Whitman’s pocket was picked in the train station in Philadelphia, leaving him literally penniless. Walt Whitman, photographed by Mathew Brady in 1862.įor three days and nights Whitman searched in vain for his brother, trudging from hospital to hospital through streets clogged with dispirited Union soldiers and wild rumors of impending Confederate invasion. Whitmore, Company D.” Fearing the worst, Walt threw together some belongings and hurried south to Washington, where the main Union hospitals were located. Among those listed was “First Lieutenant G.W. Walt was at home in Brooklyn with his mother on the morning of December 16 when he unexpectedly came across a list of regimental casualties in the New York Tribune. Whitman’s time in Washington began with the wounding of his brother George at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in late December 1862. In his own humble way, Whitman was also a war correspondent-not on the front lines of the battlefields, but in the rear, where the battles’ true costs were hidden away. By the end of the war, Whitman would personally make more than 600 visits to the hospitals and speak to some 100,000 soldiers during his rounds.
For the first three of those years, the great American poet was a regular visitor to the various military hospitals in and around the nation’s capital, where he devoted himself to bringing cheer and companionship to the thousands of suffering young soldiers confined to their beds with wounds, illness, or infection. He wound up staying for the next 10 years.
Walt Whitman arrived in Washington, D.C., in late December 1862, intending to stay for a few days.