1863

~I have spent the last several days considering whether I must give over my friendship with Miss Taylor. I was even twice on the verge of writing a note begging off accompanying her and her mother to the war hospital at Portsmouth Grove, but in the end I did not do so. Whether this is because I selfishly cannot deprive myself of the pleasure of her company, or because I have come around to thinking our colloquy on the hike back from the breakwater was but more of her satiric disposition, or whether there is something after all a little malign in me—that I would see where things led, though I would not lead them myself—I do not know. But I set my scruples aside and accompanied them on the expedition to the hospital. Now, returned, and seated at my writing desk, and taking up the notes I made this afternoon, I believe I have not erred.

The party from the Ocean numbered two dozen in all, ladies mostly (the men perhaps feeling in any such outing a latent accusation). I was relieved to see that Miss Taylor and her mother had the good sense not to dress as if they were members of a boating party, for some of the others from the hotel were arrayed in colors and frills that would surely strike a discordant note when we were among the sick and wounded. We each paid our quarter-dollar and boarded the Perry and took seats on the open deck under the morning sun.

I know I sometimes fall into the writing of a diary, and not the Writer’s Notebook I intend. Yet I find I cannot merely transcribe my notes without supplying them with the atmosphere that accompanied their making. And too: how can I know what detail, what undone button, what soiled cuff, altogether what glimpse of life as it is lived around me, may not unfurl a story? So I remake the world more fully here: the sparkle of the sun on the water as we made our way up the bay, the scream of the steam-whistle, the small clapboard houses along the shore each with its circle of life, unknown, unrecorded, unfathomable. Yet I must add too the tissue of my own life, and of Miss Taylor’s, for what is ordinary among us becomes fabulous when read by those distant from us in place and time. What wonders my breakfast (toast, Mother’s jam, a carved peach, and the kitchen table with its black ring where someone had once put down a hot pan) would hold for a reader in Moscou, or in centuries hence!

The war hospital is sited at Portsmouth Grove at the northern tip of Aquidneck Island, next to the small islands with the old Puritan names Prudence, Patience, and Hope. It was low tide when we drew near the wharf, so our first sight of the hospital’s patients was of those convalescents who were able-bodied enough to be employed down in the mudflats “clamming” with their trouser legs rolled up. They stopped to look at the ferry and watch us disembark. They looked a sorry lot, though they were likely the best we would see.

Word having been sent ahead, we were greeted by the Chaplain and one of the nurses. There were also those called sutlers who attempted to sell us goods and little cadeaux that we might present to the invalids within. I had understood from Father (who had delivered a lecture at the hospital this past winter) that gifts would be appreciated, so I had come with a small satchel of pamphlets and newspapers and some books (including an inscribed copy of his own Substance and Shadow, just printed, the giving away of which I hoped would relieve me of the duty of reading).

I must confess I did feel some inward discomfort as we were shown about, for it was very much as if we were sightseeing, Baedeker in hand, though the sights were human misery and suffering and sacrifice. The buildings all bore the mark (except the main administration building which had formerly been a resort hotel) of having been hastily thrown up, with no foundations to speak of, whitewashed so that the rough wood yet showed through. There were fourteen “pavilions” in all, our guide said, and they could hold as many as 2,400 wounded. Pointed out as well were the support buildings, the mess hall, the guard barracks, the stables, a laundry, bakery, blacksmith’s, etc. And there was a chapel where the convalescents might seek refuge and spiritual comfort, attached to which was a library where I left, discreetly I hope, Father’s book.

Notable as we walked were the condition of the guards themselves, each of whom had suffered wounding or amputation, though now recovered. They called themselves the Cripple Brigade, one of the soldiers ruefully informed us.

The Chaplain left us with the encouragement to go amongst the patients in their beds for, he said, they were always pleased to see visitors and to talk and to hear stories, and to receive our little gifts. Yet what a paralysis I felt! I, who have enough trouble speaking to the members of my own family, to be there amongst strangers, all of whom were so needing of comfort and I having no means to supply that comfort, and no words for them. The sutlers had followed us down into the great compound, knowing, I am sure, that we would want their wares now if we hadn’t before. And what misery we saw, and what disfigurement and bodily destitution! There were the most horrific wounds—limbs amputated, faces shot away, bodies luminescent with fever, wasted by bowel disorders. To those who were not so bad, or who were more along the road to healing, we spoke, and here I must say that Miss Taylor showed herself a most capable and forward nurse, for she gave to each invalid her most beautiful smile, and sat beside them and inquired of their names, and what town they were from, and how they had been wounded, and how they were getting on, and was there anything she could do for them. These were the most natural and simple of questions, yet how impossible I found it to ask them! And with what gracious ease did she do so! One soldier asked her if she might read a letter to him and from the condition of the letter we understood it had been read to him many times. It was from his mother, and Miss Taylor read it in a most lovely, calm voice, asking him when she was done about the various people mentioned by name and so giving the soldier, who was disfigured by a scar running from his temple to his Adam’s apple, the opportunity to talk of those whom he loved and missed.

For my eyes alone I will record here that while I moved amongst those several acres of men (some of them younger than I!) who had had their lives so wretchedly altered, I bethought my and William’s earlier enthusiasm for enlisting in the war effort and realized as deeply as I have ever realized anything how thankful I was that that had not come to pass. For no decision I ever make in life could be as wrong and against my being as would be the decision to go to war. I do not mean only that I recognized at that moment that I am no soldier, and could never be one, and that so inept would I be that surely my fate would have been as these around me, or worse. I mean rather that as I stood there and saw so many destroyed bodies, so much amputated life, I knew in the deepest part of my being that there was no cause, no country’s existence, no slave’s freedom that was worth my life, worth the mutilation of my consciousness and the extinguishment of my senses. Yes, how horrible to admit this of myself, and yet how true! I cannot, in my own presence, deny it! And what awe and wonder I felt for these men (and Wilky and Bob!) who had so selflessly given of themselves. Did they know and still give?

I am not proud of this—I will not call it cowardliness, rather egotism. (The bosom serpent!) But I will see clearly. Even to my own failings.

In one of the pavilions there was a quarter given over to cots on which lay soldiers of the Confederacy. They were attended to, so the Chaplain had said, without distinction. Whether that is true in practice I do not know, but they seemed no different than the Union troops, though there were none of the visitors about them. Maugre my dismal shyness, I had grown a little more at ease with the wounded, and with Miss Taylor’s deportment as my model had begun to ask the invalids little questions, and even came across one who hailed from Cambridge and so was able to speak some of his home. Another I sat beside because I saw Emerson’s Representative Men on his cot and so asked him about it. He said that though he read it he did not understand it, that at times it was just words to him, and he did not know whether this was the fault of his injuries or of Mr. Emerson. I in turn did not know whether he meant this humorously or not, so fell to explaining what I thought were the intention of the essays, getting quite stuck on Napoleon. I am afraid I left him in a worse state than I found him.

It was only then, upon standing up, that I became aware that Miss Taylor had crossed to the Confederate cots, was going from one to the next as she had been doing with the others. There was something of a stir in the room, I thought, something of disapproval. But those amongst the Confederate soldiers who could do so raised themselves in their cots, smiled at her coming, and thanked her. When she came to one who could not raise himself and who bore the signs of a dreadful fever, she sat beside him and spoke to him, and then (most boldly! most beautifully!) she took from her reticule a comb and, first wiping the fever-sweats from the boy’s face, began to comb his hair as we had seen one of the nurses do. The boy seemed only half-aware of her, yet I think he did calm at her touch. When she was done she straightened his bedclothes, and with a gentle caress of his feverish cheek rose and moved on.

“A very different excursion,” she said to me when we had regained the outdoors. I took her to mean different from our last to the breakwater.

“And which do you prefer?” I asked that I might fall in with her. She kept her gaze from me, and looked rather at the horizon.

“Both,” she said, inhaling so her chest swelled, as if it were life itself she breathed. She exhaled, and then let a weary look fall upon me, saying: “But I think I have had enough of this for now.”

We rejoined her mother, and then not knowing where else we might go, walked back to the wharf area, though it was still an hour before the steamboat returned from Providence. There were no benches there, but as we were tired and the day itself had broken decorum, we lowered ourselves and sat on a spot of turf under the spreading branches of an oak tree. We were shortly joined by some others who had as well had their fill. There was conversation of what we had seen and heard, and protestations over the inhumanity of the war and the evil of the South and its seceding. I stupidly found myself saying that though the South was surely evil, that evil was not due to its seceding, which I believed (and do believe) it had the right to do. Some of the others took me up on this (was I a sympathizer? etc.) and I found I had to defend myself, first marshaling much of Father’s rhetoric and lofty fire against slavery, but then more boldly explaining my belief that, slavery aside, any region of any country has the right to secede from that country. That to hold against their will those who wish to leave any union is itself an evil, the imposing by force of one will upon another.

“Which is,” I rather magnificently wound up, “the essence of slavery, is it not?”

There was much consternation over this, but I did not retreat, and went even further, maintaining that each person’s consciousness was a country unto itself, accountable to its own laws and truths. (To which someone said surely, I meant conscience, didn’t I? I did not.) And if those truths brought the solitary consciousness to seceding from the values and structures of the society it found itself in, then it must do so. For fidelity to the truth one found within oneself was, to me, the highest good.

To which Mrs. Taylor asked surely I did not mean that every union was frangible? Were not a husband and wife indissoluble? Were they not united until death did them part? And united to their family? And that family to other families? Where did one draw the line?

One drew the line, I answered her, always and forever, at the individual self.

On the ferry back we sat quietly in deck chairs, for the day had been exhausting. And in the declining sun I experienced again as I had on the breakwater a sense of Miss Taylor’s fineness, and how that fineness seemed to spread over me, and include me, and seep into the world so that the air was infused with a lucid charm, and the hour it took for us to glide back to Newport seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and unforgettable.

(Details I have not managed to work into the above narrative but which may someday prove useful: the stench of the latrines and outhouses; the bloody dressings; remnants of hardtack and salted beef; buttons used for checkers; bromine, quinine; one of the guards court-martialed for being “corned”; the railroad spur to the east with its solitary red boxcar; the cemetery; roll call for the able-bodied soldiers; the horses in the stables swishing their tails against the summer flies.)