March 15, 2023
“I Want Something to Do”: Alcott and Whitman in the Washington Hospitals
John Matteson
Distinguished Professor of English, John Jay College, C.U.N.Y.
Introducer: Len Berlik/ Speaker; John Matteson
Minutes of the 23th Meeting of the 81st Year
President John Cotton called the meeting to order. There were two guests. Stan Rosenberg introduced Robert Bierman, and Joan Fleming introduced her husband, John Fleming. Joan Fleming read the minutes of the previous meeting.
The President announced that at the next meeting a questionnaire would be distributed soliciting volunteers to serve on the various Old Guard committees.
Len Berlik introduced the speaker, John Matteson. A professor of English and Legal Writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Matteson is a Princeton University graduate and received an LLB from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Columbia. He has written dozens of articles and won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Eden’s Outcasts.
The Civil War produced little literature from combatants who actually experienced it. Some of the most creative writing of that period, however, came from two emissaries of peace, Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman. Alcott wrote the novella, Hospital Sketches, and Whitman wrote a poetic collection, Drum-Taps. Both these now famous writers served as nurses after the Union army’s disastrous 1862 battle at Fredericksburg.
Putting his remarks in an historical context, Matteson explained that President Lincoln appointed General Ambrose Burnside commander to the Army of the Potomac. Burnside made some strategically devastating errors that resulted in the Fredericksburg debacle. Two among the thousands of wounded that factored into the literary development of Alcott and Whitman were Private John F. Suhre of the 133rd Pennsylvania and Captain George Washington Whitman of the 51st New York.
Alcott was eager to join the war effort. Unfortunately, she was limited to sewing “violently on patriotic blue shirts” for the Union army until the age of 30. No longer deemed a “sweet young maiden” she joined the Union Army Nursing Corps and was sent to a hospital in Georgetown.
That was the day that General Burnside sent seven divisions, including the 133rd Pennsylvania, toward a Fredericksburg wall atop a hill, behind which Lee’s troops were more than prepared to resist. It was the 133rd’s first and sadly their only battle.
Private John Suhre, a young blacksmith from Pennsylvania, was hit by two bullets and transported to the Georgetown hospital.
Alcott began caring for him, describing him in multiple entries in her journal. He had the “serenest eyes I ever met,” was a “prince of patients,” had a “noble character, a heart as warm and tender as a woman’s, a nature fresh and frank as any child’s.” He was “a piece of excellence.”
He was taciturn, asking for little, never complaining, seeking no one’s pity. As time passed, however, he grew less confident of his own recovery and asked a surgeon whether he was likely to pull through. Alcott was present, heard the surgeon’s equivocating reply, and wrote later that it seemed “as if in that brief eclipse, he had acknowledged the existence of some hard possibility.” Alcott, later forced to tell Suhre he was dying, watched his tears. “Let me help you to bear it, John.”
As the end drew near, Suhre said, “I guess I’m moving on.”
Alcott became very ill herself and her brief nursing career ended. But the letters she wrote home and the very special relationship she had with Suhre helped her find her voice. These experiences in the hospital “showed me my style and taking the hint, I went where glory awaited me.”
Hospital Sketches was a triumph. It caught the attention of Editor Thomas Miles who asked her to consider writing a book for girls. Seriously doubting she could do this, she compiled nine chapters and sent them off to Miles. The rest is history. Little Women along with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began what is now the canon of children’s literature.
Walt Whitman was cast into a brooding silence during the war. He had published the third edition of Leaves of Grass. Response to some of the sensualism of this edition was swift and cruel. He was devastated. With other artists he spent time at the pub, Pfaff’s. Most of his friends were drinking themselves to oblivion. Though Whitman was not a heavy drinker, Matteson described this time in his life as a “symbolic burial.”
His younger brother, George Washington Whitman, had signed up to fight early in the war and Walt Whitman discovered he had been wounded at Fredericksburg.
He raced to his brother and happily found him well into recovery, not seriously wounded. But exposure to other wounded turned Whitman’s despondency around. Shortly after connecting with his brother, he came upon three corpses outside a hospital tent. Lifting the cloth covering one, he was profoundly moved by the face of the dead man and wrote three moving lines in his journal as a result. He left his brother, traveling to Washington, determined to find an undemanding job to support himself and devote his free hours to caring for the sick and wounded in the hospitals. He developed an art of dealing with the wounded. Sitting with John A. Holmes of the 29th Massachusetts, “I sat down by him without any fuss—talked a while—saw that it did him good—led him to talk about himself—got him somewhat interested—wrote a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts…soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much agitated and had tears in his eyes—gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.” He saw in Holmes’s eyes and those of other wounded men “the best expression of American character I have ever seen or conceived.”
Whitman kept a notebook, comparable to Alcott’s journals, and served the wounded for a year and a half, though never in an official capacity. His collection of war poems, Drum-Taps, came from his experiences with the wounded. He also was a huge admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Devastated by Lincoln’s assassination and touched by friend Peter Doyle’s actual witnessing of the assassination, he wrote what Matteson argued was Whitman’s greatest lyrical achievement, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. This was followed with perhaps his most popular poem, a tribute to Lincoln, O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman was a fully formed artist before his wartime experiences. His early editions of Leaves of Grass had already been published. Yet Whitman wrote in his essay Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, “Without those three or four years of war and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.”
Though the violence of war itself could not be redeemed, Alcott and Whitman, in saving the lives of others, succeeded in their personal errands of redemption, raising themselves to a more powerful creativity and a higher humanity.
Respectfully submitted,
Julie Denny
The President announced that at the next meeting a questionnaire would be distributed soliciting volunteers to serve on the various Old Guard committees.
Len Berlik introduced the speaker, John Matteson. A professor of English and Legal Writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Matteson is a Princeton University graduate and received an LLB from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Columbia. He has written dozens of articles and won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Eden’s Outcasts.
The Civil War produced little literature from combatants who actually experienced it. Some of the most creative writing of that period, however, came from two emissaries of peace, Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman. Alcott wrote the novella, Hospital Sketches, and Whitman wrote a poetic collection, Drum-Taps. Both these now famous writers served as nurses after the Union army’s disastrous 1862 battle at Fredericksburg.
Putting his remarks in an historical context, Matteson explained that President Lincoln appointed General Ambrose Burnside commander to the Army of the Potomac. Burnside made some strategically devastating errors that resulted in the Fredericksburg debacle. Two among the thousands of wounded that factored into the literary development of Alcott and Whitman were Private John F. Suhre of the 133rd Pennsylvania and Captain George Washington Whitman of the 51st New York.
Alcott was eager to join the war effort. Unfortunately, she was limited to sewing “violently on patriotic blue shirts” for the Union army until the age of 30. No longer deemed a “sweet young maiden” she joined the Union Army Nursing Corps and was sent to a hospital in Georgetown.
That was the day that General Burnside sent seven divisions, including the 133rd Pennsylvania, toward a Fredericksburg wall atop a hill, behind which Lee’s troops were more than prepared to resist. It was the 133rd’s first and sadly their only battle.
Private John Suhre, a young blacksmith from Pennsylvania, was hit by two bullets and transported to the Georgetown hospital.
Alcott began caring for him, describing him in multiple entries in her journal. He had the “serenest eyes I ever met,” was a “prince of patients,” had a “noble character, a heart as warm and tender as a woman’s, a nature fresh and frank as any child’s.” He was “a piece of excellence.”
He was taciturn, asking for little, never complaining, seeking no one’s pity. As time passed, however, he grew less confident of his own recovery and asked a surgeon whether he was likely to pull through. Alcott was present, heard the surgeon’s equivocating reply, and wrote later that it seemed “as if in that brief eclipse, he had acknowledged the existence of some hard possibility.” Alcott, later forced to tell Suhre he was dying, watched his tears. “Let me help you to bear it, John.”
As the end drew near, Suhre said, “I guess I’m moving on.”
Alcott became very ill herself and her brief nursing career ended. But the letters she wrote home and the very special relationship she had with Suhre helped her find her voice. These experiences in the hospital “showed me my style and taking the hint, I went where glory awaited me.”
Hospital Sketches was a triumph. It caught the attention of Editor Thomas Miles who asked her to consider writing a book for girls. Seriously doubting she could do this, she compiled nine chapters and sent them off to Miles. The rest is history. Little Women along with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began what is now the canon of children’s literature.
Walt Whitman was cast into a brooding silence during the war. He had published the third edition of Leaves of Grass. Response to some of the sensualism of this edition was swift and cruel. He was devastated. With other artists he spent time at the pub, Pfaff’s. Most of his friends were drinking themselves to oblivion. Though Whitman was not a heavy drinker, Matteson described this time in his life as a “symbolic burial.”
His younger brother, George Washington Whitman, had signed up to fight early in the war and Walt Whitman discovered he had been wounded at Fredericksburg.
He raced to his brother and happily found him well into recovery, not seriously wounded. But exposure to other wounded turned Whitman’s despondency around. Shortly after connecting with his brother, he came upon three corpses outside a hospital tent. Lifting the cloth covering one, he was profoundly moved by the face of the dead man and wrote three moving lines in his journal as a result. He left his brother, traveling to Washington, determined to find an undemanding job to support himself and devote his free hours to caring for the sick and wounded in the hospitals. He developed an art of dealing with the wounded. Sitting with John A. Holmes of the 29th Massachusetts, “I sat down by him without any fuss—talked a while—saw that it did him good—led him to talk about himself—got him somewhat interested—wrote a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts…soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much agitated and had tears in his eyes—gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.” He saw in Holmes’s eyes and those of other wounded men “the best expression of American character I have ever seen or conceived.”
Whitman kept a notebook, comparable to Alcott’s journals, and served the wounded for a year and a half, though never in an official capacity. His collection of war poems, Drum-Taps, came from his experiences with the wounded. He also was a huge admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Devastated by Lincoln’s assassination and touched by friend Peter Doyle’s actual witnessing of the assassination, he wrote what Matteson argued was Whitman’s greatest lyrical achievement, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. This was followed with perhaps his most popular poem, a tribute to Lincoln, O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman was a fully formed artist before his wartime experiences. His early editions of Leaves of Grass had already been published. Yet Whitman wrote in his essay Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, “Without those three or four years of war and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.”
Though the violence of war itself could not be redeemed, Alcott and Whitman, in saving the lives of others, succeeded in their personal errands of redemption, raising themselves to a more powerful creativity and a higher humanity.
Respectfully submitted,
Julie Denny