Walt Whitman (1819–1892) wrote abundantly and often very movingly about the Civil War: poems in Drum-Taps (1865), prose reminiscences in Specimen Days (1882), letters to his family and especially to his mother Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. His experience as a volunteer hospital nurse for wounded Union soldiers exposed him to some of the war’s most harrowing and excruciating consequences. He never finally opposed the war, however, even as he witnessed and lamented its human costs. An ardent supporter of the war president Abraham Lincoln, he even occasionally wished that more violent force could be brought to bear more quickly against the Confederacy, to hasten a victory he felt was essential, at any price.
“Reconciliation,” however, published in Drum-Taps in 1865, beautifully states one of the principles central to much opposition to war: “my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.” (The British war poet Wilfred Owen will echo that line in 1918, in “Strange Meeting”: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”)
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in
time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night
incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this
soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I
draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face
in the coffin.