Whitman, Walter

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Walter Whitman
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    0
    No. of Children
    0
    Family
    Walter Whitman (father), Louisa Van Velsor (mother),
    Occupation
    Educator
    Journalist
    Writer or Artist
    Other
    Other Occupation
    Clerk
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Church or Religious Denomination
    Quakers (Society of Friends)
    Government
    Lincoln Administration (1861-65)

    Walt Whitman (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    The first two years of the war are fairly blank in the Whitman biography, but he surfaces again in the fall of 1862. His younger brother, George Washington Whitman, an officer in the Fifty-first Regiment of New York Volunteers, was reported in the New York papers to have been seriously wounded in the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Whitman was dispatched to Washington, D.C., by anxious family members in Brooklyn to search for his brother in the more than forty wartime hospitals. Failing to find George there, he went to the battle site to find his brother only slightly wounded. He remained in camp with his brother's regiment for more than a week and then returned to the nation's capital, escorting a group of seriously wounded and dying soldiers. Once at his destination, he felt he could not return to civilian life in New York. He remained in Washington throughout the war and beyond, worked at various government jobs, and devoted himself to cheering up sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals. This unselfish service earned him the titles of "wound dresser" and "the Good Gray Poet," but no government pension (which Whitman later said he would have refused anyway).
    Jerome Loving, "Whitman, Walt," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01761.html.
    Chicago Style Entry Link
    Ljungquist, Kent. "Meteor of the War": Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman Respond to John Brown." American Literature 61, no. 4 (1989): 674-680. view record
    Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. view record
    How to Cite This Page: "Whitman, Walter," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6851.