Memoranda During the War. [“June 18.”] Haley was shot in the spine at the battle of Snicker’s Gap in Virginia. The “death-stricken boy” died on June 14, 1863. See Martin G. Murray’s Index of Biographical Annotations to the Memoranda in “Whitman’s Memory”: http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume2/price/memoranda/annotations/.
Memoranda During the War. [“Washington: Again—Summer of 1864.”]
Quoted in Walt Whitman’s Civil War. Edited by Walter Lowenfels. New York: Knopf. 1961. 14.
Memoranda During the War. [“Death of a Hero.”]
Roy Morris, Jr., in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. 220.
Memoranda During the War. [“Death of a Hero.”]
An inveterate salesman, Whitman went on: “It should be got out immediately . I think an edition, elegantly bound, might be pushed off for books for presents &c for the holidays, if advertised for that purpose. It would be very appropriate. I think it a book that would please women. I should expect it to be popular with the trade. ... Only it is to be done while the thing is warm, namely at once. I have been & am in the midst of these things, I feel myself full of them, & I know the people generally now are too (far more than they know,) & would readily absorb & understand my mem[oranda]. ...” Walt Whitman. The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842–1867. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Gay Wilson Allen and E. Sculley Bradley, editors. New York: New York University Press. 1961. 171–172. [October 21, 1863.]
Memoranda During the War. [Whitman’s introduction.]
Memoranda During the War. [“May 12—A Night Battle, over a week since.”]
In 1863, in a letter to his friends back in New York, he wrote, once more highlighting the sympathetic imagination by which he expanded his consciousness: “These Hospitals, so different from all others—these thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife) ...” Walt Whitman. The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842–1867. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Gay Wilson Allen and E. Sculley Bradley, editors. New York: New York University Press. 1961. 81–82. [March 19-20, 1863.]
Memoranda During the War. [“W.H. E., Co. F., Second N.J.”]
Quoted by Roy Morris, Jr., in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. 151.
Walt Whitman. The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842–1867. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Gay Wilson Allen and E. Sculley Bradley, editors. New York: New York University Press. 1961. 89. [April 15, 1863.]
Quoted by Roy Morris, Jr., in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. 109.
Memoranda During the War. [“A New York Soldier.”]
Walt Whitman. The Correspondence, Volume 1: 1842–1867. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Gay Wilson Allen and E. Sculley Bradley, editors. New York: New York University Press. 1961. 157. [October 6, 1863.]
Whitman once remarked: “... what the government didn’t get from me in the office it got from me in the hospitals. If there is any balance in the matter I don’t imagine it’s on my side.” Quoted by Roy Morris, Jr., in The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. 203.
Memoranda During the War. [“Three Years Summ’d Up.”]
Memoranda During the War. [“Soldiers and Talks.”]
I shall not easily forget the first time I saw Abraham Lincoln. It must have been about the 18th or 19th of February, 1861. It was rather a pleasant spring afternoon, in New York city, as Lincoln arrived there from the West to stop a few hours and then pass on to Washington, to prepare for his inauguration. I saw him in Broadway, near the site of the present Post-office. He had come down, I think, from Canal street, to stop at the Astor House. The broad spaces, sidewalks, and street in the neighborhood, and for some distance, were crowded with solid masses of people, many thousands. The omnibuses and other vehicles had been all turn’d off, leaving an unusual hush in that busy part of the city. Presently two or three shabby hack barouches made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance. A tall figure step’d out of the centre of these barouches, paus’d leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the dark granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds—and so, with very moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown-looking persons, ascended the portico steps.
The figure, the look, the gait, are distinctly impress’d upon me yet; the unusual and uncouth height, the dress of complete black, the stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, the dark-brown complexion, the seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, the black, bushy head of hair, the disproportionately long neck, and the hands held behind as he stood observing the people. All was comparative and ominous silence. The new comer look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity. In both there was a dash of something almost comical. Yet there was much anxiety in certain quarters. Cautious persons had fear’d that there would be some outbreak, some mark’d indignity or insult to the President elect his passage through the city, for he possess’d no personal popularity in New York, and not much political. No such outbreak or insult, however, occurr’d. Only the silence of the crowd was very significant to those who were accustom’d to the usual demonstrations of New York in wild, tumultuous hurrahs—the deafening tumults of welcome, and the thunder-shouts of pack’d myriads along the whole line of Broadway, receiving Hungarian Kossuth or Filibuster Walker.