Everyone has heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Just as the monument honors the nameless and unrecovered soldiers of our country’s wars, Whitman also sets his pen to do justice to the unburied and forgotten brave heroes of the civil war:
No formal general’s report, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper, embalms the bravest, north or south, east or west. Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. (Whitman, p. 748.)
Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier is one passage of many that celebrate the strength of America’s fighting youth, both on the field and in the hospitals. Whitman gives name to these men, abbreviating some to protect their privacy, but details their bravery in the face of pain and death, their strong silence and humbleness and their struggle and will to survive. Each case or “specimen” in Whitman’s work gives a unique and individual clause to the greater work, bringing the account of the war down to a personal, humanitarian level.
Whitman spoke in the preface to Leaves of Grass that America was itself one great poem, and that a poet of the people must write from the level of the common man. Therefore, Whitman does not wax patriotic with stories of the heroism of the generals of the war, but details the ins and outs of the cavalry and infantry. Even his passages about Lincoln describe the president as humble, courteous and yet deep and distinguished in the sadness in his face. Lincoln and his wife go about attired in black in a simple carriage, and while the president is alone he goes with a small ensemble of cavalry at the insistence of this men.
The hot-blooded patriotism of Whitman’s early poems is absent here, replaced with gruesome scenes of the hospital and the field. Whitman describes a battlefield in a fiery wood in A Night Battle, Over a Week Since. Both the wounded and the dead are consumed in the fire, flames that echo the burns that soldiers sustain if they survive the enemy cannon fire. Other scenes describing amputation, gangrene and violent hemorrhages range from stirring to deeply disturbing. Most of the soldiers are young, often between ages sixteen and twenty-one, and often described as farm boys–those who have little stake in the struggle between plantation owners and northern factory workers.
In Europe’s many military conflicts it came as no surprise that wars were waged by the rich with the ranks of the poor. America may claim to be different, but the reality of the Civil War proves that even democracy does not prevent this bitter, cruel reality from occurring.
