Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
[6]MR. GARFIELD (_In the House of Representatives, April 15,'79_.) "Do
gentlemen know that (leaving out all the border States) there were fifty
regiments and seven companies of white men in our army fighting for the
Union from the States that went into rebellion? Do they know that from
the single State of Kentucky more Union soldiers fought under our flag
than Napoleon took into the battle of Waterloo? more than Wellington
took with all the allied armies against Napoleon? Do they remember that
186,000 color'd men fought under our flag against the rebellion and for
the Union, and that of that number 90,000 were from the States which
went into rebellion?"
HOSPITALS ENSEMBLE
_Aug., Sept., and Oct., '63._--I am in the habit of going to all, and
to Fairfax seminary, Alexandria, and over Long bridge to the great
Convalescent camp. The journals publish a regular directory of them--a
long list. As a specimen of almost any one of the larger of these
hospitals, fancy to yourself a space of three to twenty acres of ground,
on which are group'd ten or twelve very large wooden barracks, with,
perhaps, a dozen or twenty, and sometimes more than that number, small
buildings, capable altogether of accommodating from five hundred to a
thousand or fifteen hundred persons. Sometimes these wooden barracks or
wards, each of them perhaps from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet
long, are rang'd in a straight row, evenly fronting the street; others
are plann'd so as to form an immense V; and others again are ranged
around a hollow square. They make altogether a huge cluster, with the
additional tents, extra wards for contagious diseases, guard-houses,
sutler's stores, chaplain's house; in the middle will probably be an
edifice devoted to the offices of the surgeon in charge and the ward
surgeons, principal attaches, clerks, &c. The wards are either letter'd
alphabetically, ward G, ward K, or else numerically, 1, 2, 3, &c. Each
has its ward surgeon and corps of nurses. Of course, there is, in the
aggregate, quite a muster of employes, and over all the surgeon in
charge. Here in Washington, when these army hospitals are all fill'd,
(as they have been already several times,) they contain a population
more numerous in itself than the whole of the Washington of ten or
fifteen years ago. Within sight of the capitol, as I write, are some
thirty or forty such collections, at times holding from fifty to seventy
thousand men. Looking from any eminence and studying the topography in
my rambles, I use them as landmarks. Through the rich August verdure
of the trees, see that white group of buildings off yonder in the
outskirts; then another cluster half a mile to the left of the first;
then another a mile to the right, and another a mile beyond, and still
another between us and the first. Indeed, we can hardly look in any
direction but these clusters are dotting the landscape and environs.
That little town, as you might suppose it, off there on the brow of a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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