Meeting under similar weather conditions to the one today (i.e. cold with rain), I was still super excited to see everything. Even though I am a native Virginian, it takes about four and a half hours to get to Washington, D.C. and thus, I have only explored the city (minus trips to Dulles, traveling through or past, etc) once on a field trip in 7th grade. Sad, I know. So, I was extremely excited and and the whole ride up I was chomping at the bit to finally get out of the car and race around D.C. acting like Mrs. Whitman (Sorry, Brendan ;] ). I think pictures captured my favorite moment…you know, when I started tearing up and had to fight back a break down when his haversack was revealed to us. Even his hair or glasses didn’t have the same effect on my emotions as that old, crumbly leather bag. That bag saw things we can’t even imagine, it sat on the ground, on the ferry, on the wooden boards of hospitals. Who knows the kinds of dangerous, gangrenous bacteria that lived on it because of the hospital trips. Could that bag be the a main reason Whitman’s health declined so much? Would Whitman touch the bag, then touch his eyes, nose, or mouth with the same hand and, in that infinitesimal moment, compromise his wellbeing and health? It fascinates me to think “if only that bag could talk”. I wanted to hug and kiss our Library of Congress guide (her name has left me, I’m sad to say-Laurie Ann?) and just thank her for appreciating our enthusiasm and understanding our rabid adoration for this man who some Americans don’t even know about.

Flash forward ([shoutout] to a really great show!) to last night and my contemplation must have stirred something in Whitman. I had a dream where I sat with Whitman (in his last days, think the photo of him with his caretaker in a shipyard, I think it was) and we talked. I held his hand and told him that he left an imprint on my heart a hundred and half years from when he walked the earth. He told me it was simply coincidence that it all happened. He wanted something great to happen and feels like he achieved it with my experience. I don’t remember much more from that magical dream, but when I woke up I couldn’t believe it. I told my mom and she just frowned and said, “Oh, that’s weird…and kind of creepy,” while paying bills or something. I know no one else will appreciate this except for the people who traveled this Whitmanian journey with me. So there ’tis…I hope I meet him again in dreamland, maybe he’ll tell me he’s choosing Brendan over me, and if he does, I’ll just have to smile and hold his hand.

The field trip to DC, as I’m sure everyone would agree, was a fantastic experience for all of us. One of the things that I found the most interesting was going to places I’d already been, but wearing my Whitman goggles. A week or two before the field trip I had been in the National Equality March (something I think Whitman would have supported) which started in almost the same place as the tour and took a similar path. It was very interesting to wander those same streets and imagine Whitman wandering the streets while pigs wandered through the mud.

During this class I’ve found myself more and more able to imagine the people of the past as I stand in places with a lot of history. The field trip definitely was one of the reasons that this happened for me. Listening to Kim list to us in detail various differences between Whitman’s time and ours, like the view he had from his office of the Washington monument, transported me back to that time, I felt as if I could see the mud streets and wandering soldiers.

I had  similar reaction to Ford’s Theater. Listening to the presenter speak about the details of Lincoln’s death made me feel as if I had been there. If Peter Doyle was able to describe that night in as much detail as the presenter I can see why Whitman felt like he had been there that night.

I’m trying to upload the video of the Ford’s Theater presentation since some of you mysteriously don’t remember it even though we were all paying attention, but for some reason youtube hates me and won’t upload it. I’ll keep trying and see if I can get it up there.

Since I did my final project on a revolutionary, Jose Marti, the memory of standing behind the wall on Sunken Road that the Confederate soldiers used has been on my mind a lot. Just imagining thousands of young soldiers lying dead was a very powerful image and really brought Whitman’s post-battle descriptions home to me. And it would not have been those whom we consider “the good guys” lying on the ground in front of Sunken Road. It was a deathtrap for Union soldiers. For me, that contributed to  an already very powerful image that can easily be applied to a revolution and, in light of my recent research and writing, made the weight of Jose Marti’s ideas apparent.

During his life, Marti was calling his fellow countrymen to revolt against Spanish rule over Cuba. Even though Spain was weak compared to the other major European powers at that time, they far outstripped the military strength of the Cuban forces. When he said that he wanted his people to fight with him, Marti knew that he was potentially putting them in the same situation as the Union soldiers were in at Fredericksburg. They were the people who we consider the ‘good guys.’ They were fighting against colonial tyranny. It just casts war in a whole new light to go to a battlefield.

It got both Chelsea and I thinking: in the age of technology, with emails and AIM, what is our legacy going to be like? Emails and IMs are deleted within minutes and what with their ability to be instantaneous, I think we tend to make them a lot more impersonal. There’s just something lacking when you type in Times New Roman, size 12. Furthermore, where are they going to be saved? How are we going to pass some of these things on for people a hundred years ahead?

Granted, I think part of the reason we are able to take Whitman’s letters to heart today is because he knew he was going to be pretty special. Score one for egotism But I can’t help wonder what his legacy would  be like if Whitman was reduced to 140 characters (sorry, Jim Groom!). At any rate, the idea has made me get out my pens and write some letters via snail mail. I even sealed them with wax. So maybe I’m not going to be famous like Whitman, and future generations would probably care less what I wrote to my grandmother, but at least my children might one day get a glimpse of what I and my super trippy handwriting were  like (I’ve been told I have the cursive of a serial killer, seriously).

Okay. At the risk of this not having anything much to do with our field trip, I’m going to post several of the pictures of Whitman’s letters and handwritten notes. I dare you not to tear up a little (or at least the Whitmaniacs in Digital Whitman, anyway).

Sometimes when we talk in class about Whitman, I feel as though we are honoring this perfect nonhuman being. Prior to the field trip, it was hard for me to fathom the fact that Whitman was someone who had human faults and weaknesses. Rather, I always believed Whitman was this ideal prophet-like individual with awe inspiring ideas and who could foresee the future of America.

The picture of the Bust of Whitman created by S.H. Morse and the street sign depicted my view of Whitman prior to the field trip.

I thought of Whitman as this statue like person who was greater both physically and mentally than any other human. I associated Whitman as a Moses like figure leading his people. At the same time however, Whitman’s names was still associated as a “historical figure” who happened to be recognized for his talents and who like many other famous individuals had streets and buildings named after him.

But, this misconstrued idea of Whitman was slowly broken down throughout the day. Walking down Constitution Ave, standing at Freedom Plaza, and entering into the grand Willard Hotel I began to see how Whitman too had to walk these same streets. Although DC in 2009 is much different than the DC Whitman experienced from 1863-1873, these lines from Brooklyn Ferry stand out in my mind when trying to put into words how Whitman’s humanity was discovered.

“Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh’d”

This discovery of the human Whitman continued as I saw firsthand Whitman’s personal possessions. Although I was deeply moved at the unveiling of the haversack, what captivated my attention the most was Walt Whitman’s glasses and pen.

This picture of Whitman’s glasses show how Whitman had physical ailments and was affected by the outside world around him. The right eye is frosted over and as Barbara Bair, the librarian at the Library of Congress told us, his loss of eyesight in an eye could have been due to the multiple strokes that Whitman had during the later years of his life. So seeing these glasses made me realize that Whitman although brilliant was not perfect.

The pen is a reed that was Whitman’s in 1891. The simple reed pen, changed my perception of how Whitman did not miraculously create his works, but rather, he tirelessly labored pen in hand over paper. Much like what we, as students, do today. So, although Walt Whitman’s work is under the category of canonical American literature, Whitman is no longer a name to me. After this trip Whitman is human just like you and I.

]]> http://jpike1.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/08/whitman-searching-in-dc/feed/ 1 http://chelseanewnam.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/07/washington-d-c-through-new-eyes/ http://chelseanewnam.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/07/washington-d-c-through-new-eyes/#respond Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:38:25 +0000 http://chelseanewnam.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=106 All I was able to think about during our trip to Washington D.C. was how much Whitman would be smiling if he knew how devoted we were to uncovering his life’s work.  Walking through D.C., a place I have been many times in my life, became a new experience for me as I looked at the area through “Whitman-colored” glasses.  Buildings, grassy areas surrounding buildings, even roads became something new that I had never seen before.  Things I had previously taken for granted as ordinary became fascinating as I thought about the ways that particular place functioned for Whitman. 

Whitman was not merely ”under [our] bootsoles” (88), he was everywhere – Lafayette Park, the White House, Department of the Treasury, the Washington Monument, Hotel W and the Red Robin Bar, Constitution Ave., etc.  Everywhere we went he was around the corner, or he was the corner:

Being in these places made me a believer in Whitman’s insistency that time need not be as much a disconnector as we would often have it.  In “Song of Myself” he writes, “Distant and dead resuscitate, / They show as the dial or move as the hands of me….and I am the clock myself” (63).  If Whitman is the clock, then we were keeping time through and by him as we journeyed through D.C.

This particularly hit home for me while visitning the Library of Congress, an experience which render even words insufficient descriptors of its impact.  As our class greedily gathered around the tables to see handwritten letters, pictures, books, a pen, a watch, a “Calamus” staff, glasses, his haversack, etc. it struck me that Whitman’s historical preservation consciousness was one of, if not the only, reasons why we had the fortune of viewing any of those things.  Whitman transcended time; he was aware of his surroundings, his potential legacy, and he succeeded in sharing them with others, even across a century.  A group of undergraduate students “oooh”ed and “aahh”ed over artifact after artifact because Whitman cared enough about preserving history to give us that.  We have become the ‘gymnastic learners’ he desired and we, in many ways, are forever connected to him because of that.

I thought Whitman would appreciate this sign:

These are both the lovely Meghan Edwards examing the bullet holes at the Innis House. 

My attempt at artistry: The information sign at the Innis House.  The house was probably owned by Martha Stephens who refused to leave her home (the Stephens’ House marked by the foundation nearby the Innis House) during the battle.  She provided drink to both Union and Confederate soldiers, an act of promoting peace between the two sides during a time of war.

“Leaves of Grass” near the Confederate Cemetery.  Looks like a beard to me… 

Walt Whitman gang sign? (outside Chatham Manor)

Ouside Chatham toward what was originally the front of the house.  The entrance was eventually changed to the garden side, the side we entered before our tour.

Jim Groom examining one of the catawba trees Whitman wrote about in Specimen Days.

Whitman, nestled in the crook of the catawba tree.  The passage in the second picture is from “Down at the Front” in Specimen Days.  It reads, “Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart.  Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket” (736).

Ben Brishcar & Sam Protich: a new kind of frontispiece (near the catawba trees at Chatham) 

The ghost of Whitman? or Erin Longbottom? (looking out from a window at Chatham Manor toward the catawba trees)

Whitman, are you under my Converse-soles too?

Sam Krieg looking out over the Rappahannok a few hundred yards away from the Chatham House.

Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot (in rare non-rainy moment)

When we went into the actual theater (or, in some of my students’ cases, the napping room–shame on you!), I was disappointed at first that the guard ushered me upstairs since the downstairs was full.  But in the balcony I realized I was actually at eye level with Lincoln’s box, shown below.  Both Lincoln and Booth made their way through the crowded balcony that night; the door Booth entered and jammed shut is just to the right of what I captured on this photo.  The theater is very intimate, and the box is really hanging over stage left.  I had real chills when the ranger was narrating the events of April 1865.

Presidental box, Ford's Theater (image of Washington in center frame)

Afterward we toured the Peterson House where Lincoln actually died– such a small, nondescript room with a sloped ceiling and bed so short (the real one is in Chicago, but the replica) that Lincoln had to lie diagonally while they waited for his heart to stop; he was brain dead pretty much instantly after being shot.

At the Library of Congress, Barbara Bair had set out three different tickets to Whitman’s Lincoln lecture, an advertising poster for it, and the text Whitman used for the lecture, which was a novel into which he had glued written bits, parts of his published works, annotations, etc.

Tickets to W's Lincoln lectures

Advertisement with our heroes side by side

The pasted-up text of W's Lincoln lecture (wish that was my hand!)

Digital Whitman can attest that I am probably a little–well, over-invested in Lincoln.  But these artifacts, though not as personal as some others we saw, were indeed very moving to me.

]]> http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/01/o-lincoln-my-lincoln/feed/ 0 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/28/favorite-manuscript-moment/ http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/28/favorite-manuscript-moment/#respond Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:46:21 +0000 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=288 I am indebted to Other Sam for drawing my attention to this very moving detail.  One of the best things I saw at the Library of Congress was Whitman’s letter of December 29, 1862 (that is, exactly 106 years before the day I was born), to his mother about finding George in Fredericksburg.  We were able to read aloud his words about the suffering of the soldiers putting other suffering into perspective.  We have read this letter in a collected of selected letters: “Dear, dear Mother, . . . I succeeded in reaching the 51st New York, and found George alive and well–in order to make sure that you would get the good news, I sent back by messenger to Washington (I dare say you did not get it for some time), a telegraphic dispatch . . .”  What is not visible in that version of the letter is the revision Whitman made, no doubt anticipating the anxiety with which his mother would scan the letter if she had not received the “telegraphic dispatch” or was desperate for information about her wounded son.  Lovely:

revision ("alive and well"), photo by MNS 10/24/09, LOC

WW notebook #94, Library of Congress American Memory site

WW notebook, photo by MNS, Library of Congress

The one on top is from a link to the Library of Congress I gave the class a few weeks ago, urging them to use these digitized images to study what OMW recorded about the soldiers.  The bottom was taken on our field trip, and is surprisingly focused given that I, Brady Earnhart, and our students were nearly all literally in tears in that weird institutional room with lockers, blackened windows, and government-issue tables.  Unless we were crying with simple gratitude for the incredible time that Barbara Bair had given us (or because we were soaked to the bloody skin  and had been standing for 10 hours with two or three to go), why were we?  Nothing was much easier to read in person, as those of us who stumbled reading aloud can attest (writing still spidery, bleeding through paper, plastic protection on many items reflected flourescent glare, etc.).  We couldn’t touch anything (though, good lord, we certainly breathed all over it), couldn’t feel the paper, the wood, the leather, the hair (the hair!).

Whitman's hair, deathbed edition, photo by MNS 10/24/09

I couldn’t even smell the leather of that haversack or of its decay, and I have one good super-sniffer.

cue to tears: the haversack, photo by MNS 10/24/09

Obviously, what I am suggesting is this: the artifacts of the Library of Congress archive were in some ways no more accessible or immediate (indeed, let’s be honest, a lot LESS accessible or even immediate if we mean time instead of proximity) than the digitized images of those artifacts online.  I saw that the inside of the haversack is brown canvas.  Brendon found a fingerprint and will NOT entertain suggestions that it belongs to anyone but Walt Whitman.  But tears?

Presence.  Through the blog we are present to each other online even when we are physically apart during the week (or have never seen each other: hallooo out there, Brooklyn, Camden, and Novi Sad!).  Agreed.  But finally Saturday we were (good) old-fashioned groupies, we were Whitman lovers, and we were bodies (finer than prayer, but, geez, we were a bit rank by Hour Ten of the marathon).  We desired the physical–the textured, the pasted, the water-stained.  We may have cried because the broken skins of brittle pages and fragile covers, the light-sensitive [associative digression: Whitman's Camden eyeglasses: so small, and with one lens protectively glazed over after strokes] and subsequently entombed haversack, and the tickets to a lecture on Lincoln long since delivered were as close to Whitman (brittle, entombed…) as we are going to get, as present as we can be.  Unlike the wounded soldiers, we won’t get the healing presence of his 200-pound, hirsute, maroon-coated, deep-pocketed self.  But it turns out that the digitized can’t hold a gas lamp to the physically present, and even if it’s paper and not flesh, I’ll take it.  Whitmaniacs, pass the tissues.

• Yesterday I left my house at 10am and did not return until 9:30pm.
• Rain.
• Wind.
• Lots of walking.
• Exhaustion.
• Grumpiness.
• Nap in Ford’s Theater.
• Library of Congress was awesome.

At 11am we began our walking tour that took us around to the places that Walt Whitman worked at and wrote about, i.e. The U.S. Treasury Building (formerly the Attorney General’s Office where Walt Worked), The Willard Hotel (where Walt occasionally visited and now there hangs a sketch of him in the bar), and The White House and Ford’s Theater (feeding into Walt’s super-man-crush on Lincoln). The highlight of the walking tour, at least for me, was Walt Whitman Way, which is between 7th and 8th streets on F. This is where Walt worked at the Patent Office (now the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery) and had previously tended to soldiers in this same building, and also lived in various boarding houses around the same area.

This image is from flickr, and most certainly not taken the day we were there– note the blue sky.

After a lunch break, we all went to Ford’s Theater. At this time I was at the precipice of grumpiness and tiredness. Here’s a brief overview of what interested me:

• John Wilkes Booth’s actual gun used to assassinate Lincoln.
• The Ranger who spoke to us looked like Drew Carey.
• The inside of my eyelids.

And that’s all I got.

Then, lots more walking in the rain. A quick trip into the Starbucks that used to be Alexander Gardner’s daguerreotype studio (shout out to Matthew Brady!) and then on to The Library of Congress. Here’s where I, and it seemed like everyone else, came alive.

HOW FREAKIN’ COOL!

To see the actual sheets of paper with Walt’s handwriting scrawled on it, his little edits in the margins, to see his letters the same way his recipients saw them– amazing! Of course, the piece de resistance was Whitman’s leather messenger bag, now falling apart and preserved in a special box, revealed to a crowd of gaping mouths, sounds of shock, and a couple sets of teary eyes. Plenty of pictures to come of this bag, we were like the paparazzi catching sight of Paris Hilton with that thing. It was truly incredible to see what the Library of Congress has preserved: locks of both Peter Doyle’s and Whitman’s hair, George Whitman’s small diary, Whitman’s journals from the hospitals, Whitman’s eye glasses, his cane, his pen, a cast of his hand, and lots more. It was overwhelming. Sam Protich, at some point, said excitedly, “this is awesome! Who gets to study like this?!” And of all the many intelligent, insightful, some times long winded, comments I have heard Sam make, this one is the most profound to me.

I’ll admit that I complain about my “Walt Whitman Class” all the time, to the extent that my friends call him my “Needy Boyfriend” because I spend so much time “doing” him, but I’m going to keep it real for a second: I love this class. Yes, it’s a lot of work. Yes, I was extremely tried, cold, hungry, and grumpy during our field trip. However, walking away from the Library of Congress, I felt good. I felt enriched. This class is not only worth my tuition money, but worth my time and mental vigor. I am actually learning. And I like it.

Reflecting on this feeling of “good” and enrichment, my mind was drawn to Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” (shout out to Jim Groom). Freire’s essay describes how limiting education can be, how the teacher/professor can fall into a pattern of narration, while the students become “containers” that mechanically memorize facts and promptly forget them after spewing them out on a test: “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” This, sadly, is the mode of education that is most familiar to us. However, this course breaks that mold, nay it shatters it! What we have developed in this class is what Freire calls “authentic thinking,” which, “does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.” Communication is our middle name; in class, students are speaking 80%-90% of the time. We are physically connecting to what we’re learning about. Instead of mindlessly “consuming” Whitman’s letters, we went out and saw them, were inches away from them. The reason we all feel personally connected to Walt Whitman is because he has become more than information and we have become more than “containers.” This is what it feels like to be a student.

Along with their comments about Whitman being my boyfriend, my friends will joke, “wow, you’re going to be, like, an expert on Whitman by the end of this semester.” To which I respond (not-jokingly), “yeah. I f–in’ will.”

The walking tour was pretty cool, our guide, LeeAnn (?), was so knowledgeable and easy to talk to. The most interesting thing were the Innis and Stephens Houses. Only the Innis house was still standing, and had even been lived in up until the 1970s!! Crazy! Even though the house was closed to the public, it had many windows that we could see in, and we could see the bullet holes peppering one of the walls, and even outside the house there were a few bullet holes (or very large woodpecker holes). It was so surreal to be standing there, faces pressed up against the glass, imagining Martha Innis running back and forth between the two houses (I’m sure she did that as little as possible during the actual battle right on her front stoop), trying to get water and food to the soldiers needing it.

these pictures are from the NPS, since I only had the flipcam and not an actual camera.

CRAZY!

As we were standing by the Innis and where the Stephens houses were, I couldn’t help but wonder if the old trees swaying in the warm fall breeze were witness trees. Alas, they weren’t but they were so old, and tall, and their girth was amazing that I think they were planted very shortly after the war. One of the most beautiful things I learned about was the Angel of Marye’s Heights. Richard Kirkland, a soldier from SC, heard a Union soldier calling out for help and asked his superior if he had permission to run onto the battlefield, mind you that’s where bullets were whizzing by and Union soldiers were collapsing from gunfire. Kirkland was allowed to run onto the field and give water and help to the man calling for help. This is his monument. I think that if Whitman could have met this Kirkland fellow and knew of Kirkland’s good deeds, he would be moved.

After the walking tour on Sunken Rd (by the way, the road was closed to public just a few years ago), we went to the Chatham Mansion, where Whitman wrote about seeing the amputated limbs. In fact, the catalpa trees where the limbs were, loaded up on a buggy with a horse or mule waiting patiently, WERE STILL THERE. I have a video coming soon, if I can figure out how to load it “correctly” to youtube. The Mansion also featured a rather interesting video, not quite as dry as one might expect coming from the NPS (the movie we saw before walking Sunken Road was rather interesting too). I had no idea that the mansion had such an extensive history, being owned and built back before the Revolutionary War. It was first owned by the Fitzhugh’s, then the Jones’, then the Lacy’s (the Civil War owners), when the Lacy’s left, it was abandoned for a while. Vagrants graffitied the walls, which are still shown when touring the house along with other paraphernalia of the Civil War. In fact, the room in which we viewed the movie was the operating room, apparently there are stains on the floor from blood as well (found that on the nation park service website!). After the war, the Lacy’s moved back but were not able to maintain the property appropriately. There were a succession of owners, then the Devore’s owned it in the 20′s and probably had some swinging parties there. The Devores tried to restore the house to its original state, which included altering it so it would pretty much never have the same architecture as when Whitman saw the house. After the Devore’s, the Pratt’s owned the estate then willed it to the NPS.

I will try to post the vids from the trip shortly!

This one isn’t of the battlfield, but the man on the left was a confederate soldier who went out on the battlfield and gave water to wounded union soldiers. I want t say he was called the angel of Fredericksburg, but I’m not sure that was his name. The picture on the right is a monument to him.

The picture on the left is of the battlefield wall with the Innis house in the distance. The right hand picture is of the same wall with the Innis house.

This photo is of the Steven house, which you can see the foundation of on the right.

Picture of what the battlefield originally looked like, and a picture of what’s there today.

You can see the images at a larger size if you go to my flickr account, I think if you go here you should be able to see them. Hopefully I’ll be adding more picture from the trip within the next two days.

Hill on which the Confederates fought

Part of the original wall

The Innis House, which still has bullet holes from the battle in its walls

One of the bullet holes in the Innis House

Inside the Innis House, where several bullet holes are also visible

The Union Cemetary, which is hidden away behind the battlefield (unlike the Confederate one, which is in the center of town). I'm a little ashamed to say that this was a recent discovery for me.

Hill overlooking the Union Cemetary. It really is way back away from everything.

Cannons just outside the Union Cemetary

Grave of an unknown soldier.

Chatham House, where the military hospital was. It's much changed since Whitman saw it.

The gardens at Chatham. These were added in the 1920s, in an effort to bring back the estate to its colonial roots.

The garden was kind of a testament to just how much things have changed since the Civil War.

Graffiti on the walls in Chatham

More graffiti

These are the same Catalpa trees that Whitman observed the amputated limbs by in "Speciman Days." Definitely the best part of the trip, especially since our guide had prepared a specical Whitman reading by them for us. This was also one of the places where I felt the most connected to Whitman, especially since everything else is so changed.

All right. That’s all for now. I have a written post that I’m finishing up; I’m just tweaking it so that I say exactly what I want to say in it. It’ll be here before we go to DC. I cross my heart.

Our first stop was the battle ground on Sunken Rd, which was the site of an extremely bloody massacre of Union soldiers. The geography of Marye Heights gave the Confederates at easy victory, despite the fact the Union had more troops and had been stationed in Fredericksburg longer. However, none of this is really that interesting, lets be honest. Far more interesting was the wedding party taking photographs nearby as we commented on their ironic existence in the space. Where thousands upon thousands of men were killed 150 years ago, now hosted a group of well dressed young adults smiling, laughing, and embarking on new life. I believe it was Professor Brady who made the Whitman reference saying something like, “how Whitmanic, new life springing from a place of death.”  Then later, Professor Groom alluded to “This Compost!” The foul meat that perhaps remained beneath the shiny leather shoes and high heels of the wedding party, reminding us that the Earth, “grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.”

Chatham House, formerly known as The Lacy House, was our next stop. This was where Whitman spent time nursing wounded soldiers. The house is beautiful, though one room was painted in an off-putting Pepto Bismal pink color, and the grounds surrounding the property are perfectly manicured and stunning. Again, the irony played within my mind. Where hospital tents had stood before, now grows flowers and grape vines.  We watched the informational DVD on a flat screen TV in the room that had formerly been the amputation room. The chasm between the past in the present seems alienating and inescapable. However, there was a specific moment when that chasm was bridged (perhaps like the pontoon bridge built by the Federals over the Rappahannock?), and when we all experienced something tangible in 2009 that Whitman experienced in the 1860s.

Still standing outside the Chatham house are the two tangled Catalpa trees where Whitman saw a pile of amputated limbs. The trees are directly outside the windows of the amputation room. Our tour guide was kind enough to read Whitman’ words about the trees. It seemed a sobering moment for everyone as we all realized that this was the “closest” we have been to Whitman so far; we connected his words to our physical surroundings. After this moment, I found myself looking around with new eyes, wondering if Washington, Lincoln, and of course Whitman, looked over the Rappahannock River and Fredericksburg as I was at the same time of day, on the same day of the year, many years ago. Maybe that’s nerdy… but we were all a little bit nerdy today.