The fates of two remarkable
people – Clara Barton
and Walt Whitman –
intersected during the
Civil War at the Old Patent Office
Building, now the National Portrait
Gallery and Museum of American
Art. Washingtonians may be surprised
to learn that this magnificent building,
newly renovated and re-opened in
2006 (and whose portico entrance
was designed as an exact copy of
the Parthenon in Greece), was once
used as a hospital. Both Barton and
Whitman held jobs as clerks in this
building; during the war, they both
volunteered there as nurses.
A feminist before there was such a word,
Barton was also a nurse before the advent of
the modern nursing profession. She started the
first free public school in this country and was
the first woman to work as a clerk in the Patent
Office, where she insisted on getting the same
pay as the men. This didn’t sit well with the other
employees, and she was soon harassed out of a
job. When the war broke out, the Army Medical
Department was unprepared to deal with the
overwhelming number of casualties and the
gravity of the injuries. Barton raised money for
medical supplies and brought them to the war
zones herself. She became known as the “Angel
of the Battlefield” at Antietam on the longest,
bloodiest day of the war. Legend has it that while
giving a fallen soldier a drink of water, she felt
her dress rustle. Looking down, she found that a
bullet had passed through her sleeve and hit the
soldier she was helping, killing him instantly.
She met Whitman at the Battle of
Fredericksburg. Already a famous poet and
journalist, Whitman was there looking for his
brother, who had been reported wounded. His
aid to the fallen men on the battlefield would
forever influence his writing and his outlook on
life. Both Barton and Whitman eventually ended
up in Washington, where over 50 makeshift
hospitals had been erected to accommodate
casualties from both sides of the fight.
Whitman penned a haunting account of
the scene at the Patent Office hospital. The
wounded – as many as 800 patients at some
points in the conflict – were placed on cots
on the floor among tall glass display cases,
which held the models of inventions. The cots
were arranged this way to facilitate access to
models of particular inventions by examiners,
inventors and the general public.
Clara Barton attended to the wounded men
in these hallways. Whitman, with his rumpled
clothes and wide-brimmed hat, was a welcome
visitor, bringing food, tobacco and writing
materials to the patients. He once brought ten
gallons of ice cream to one of the hospitals. He fed it to wounded soldiers, some of
whom, he said, could “not possibly live,
yet … quite enjoyed it.”
At the war’s end, Whitman got a
job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
housed in the Patent Office Building.
Upon finding a copy of The Leaves of
Grass, a supervisor fired Whitman, saying
that the poems were “injurious to the
morals of men.” Friends campaigned for
Whitman to be reinstated, referring to
him as “The Good Gray Poet,” a name
that stuck with him for the rest of his
life. The campaign worked, and he was
given another government job.
After the war, Barton went to
Europe to recuperate from typhoid fever and
discovered a Swiss organization called the Red
Cross, which was given immunity to go into
war zones and help wounded soldiers. When she
brought the concept back to her own country,
she was distressed to find that the government
would not endorse it. The Civil War was so
devastating that government officials, not yet
anticipating involvement in foreign wars, truly
believed the country would never again go
to war. She finally prevailed and founded the
American Red Cross, the accomplishment for
which she is best known. She retired and died
in 1912, in Glen Echo, Maryland, where her
home is now a National Historic Site open to
the public
Walt Whitman is revered as one of the
great poets of American literature, but in
Washington, in the darkest days of the Civil
War, he was the kind, gray-bearded gentleman
who brought food and cheer to wounded
soldiers. The man who sat through the night
by the cots of the sick and dying, holding vigil
so that a wounded soldier would not have to
die alone, earned the respect that goes with
the title, “The Good Gray Poet.”
|
