Mickle Street Review
Summer 2001/Museums and Memoirs
No.14
Part of the Camden Online Poetry Project
The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War
by Roy Morris, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 270 pp.
Roy Morris's narrative history is a well-written and deeply absorbing rendition of Whitman's
life during the Civil War, during most of which time the poet tended the sick and dying in
Washington, DC hospitals. His careful stitching together of Whitman's journalistic writings,
notebook jottings, correspondence, Memoranda During the War (1875), and poetry from
Drum-Taps (1865) brings Whitman's story alive and makes it accessible to the general
reader. One of its greatest virtues is that it reenacts the history of the war from the
perspective of Whitman and common soldiers, as seen from the bottom, not the top; as
such, Morris succeeds in "put[ting] ... a human face on a most inhuman tragedy," and his
grasp of the many dimensions of the Civil War, including the military and medical, is
impressive, adding much to our understanding of Whitman in cultural context (ix). Indeed,
when Whitman observed in his Memoranda that "the real war will never get in the books,"
and that history writing is a "bloodless" affair, he could not have imagined a book like this
one, which does not dwell on the exploits of generals but on the many unrecognized heroes
who fought on the front lines (241, 240).
Before I point out the book's strengths, however, it is important to point out what this book
does not do: It does not add anything new to the basic story of Whitman's involvement in
the war; rather, it takes facts that are already known and brings them together,
constructing an engaging narrative out of them. Throughout the book, Morris relies heavily
on scholarship conducted by Charles Glicksberg (especially his Walt Whitman and the Civil
War) and Charley Shively, who discovered and published letters back and forth between
Whitman and soldiers with whom he had come into contact during his ministrations in
Washington hospitals. There is no original scholarship in Morris's book, and no previously
unpublished material is presented. In light of this fact, it is a bit disingenuous to say at the
beginning of the book, as Morris does, that there is a grave lack in Whitman biographies,
which "devote [no] more than a passing chapter, at best, to Whitman's Civil War years," and
that he has sought "to redress that somewhat surprising historical imbalance"; Glicksberg's
book alone proves that this interlude of Whitman's life has not been neglected, even if
Glicksberg's book is not, strictly speaking, a biography (ix). Indeed, even critical
biographies of Whitman, most recently David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America and
Jerome Loving's Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, do a very good job of documenting
these years and capturing the effect of them on Whitman, even if they do not have the
space to spell out Whitman's many emotional attachments during this period.
Having made clear what the book does not do, I'd like to detail what the book does do—and
do well. One of the most interesting aspects of the narrative is the way Lincoln is shown to
intersect with Whitman's life, as we are made to see the president as Whitman saw him, and
are thereby reminded of the fact that the war is being prosecuted by a man—a man on
whom the fighting took a terrible toll. Indeed, Morris' title The Better Angel is indebted to a
trope from Lincoln's first inaugural address, where he holds out hope of ultimate
reconciliation between the North and the South, appealing to "the better angels of our
nature" (12). Of course, with Morris applying that epithet to Whitman, it is clear what his
attitude toward the poet is: Whitman emerges from this book as a heroic figure, one whose
sympathetic human touch in army hospitals during the war left a lasting impression on all of
the soldiers he encountered—those who survived and those who did not. Whitman first lays
eyes on Lincoln when the president-elect visits New York in early 1861; he describes him
thus: "his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth
height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push'd back on the head, dark-brown
complexion, seam's and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair,
Mickle Street Review
Summer 2001/Museums and Memoirs
No.14
Part of the Camden Online Poetry Project
disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the
people" (15). Looking through Whitman's eyes, we see that composure and coolness
transform under the pressure of war. Just before the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln
appears to Whitman a changed man: "He looks more careworn ever than usual, ... his face
with deep cut lines, seams, and his complexion gray through very dark skin—a curious
looking man , very sad. I said to a lady who was looking with me, 'Who can see that man
without losing all wish to be sharp upon him personally'" (137). A few pages later on, we
are again let in to Whitman's thoughts on Lincoln, his adhesive relationship to him: "I love
the President personally" (150). We also sight Lincoln from the poet's brother's point-ofview; as a soldier at the front, George Whitman observes that the 1863 Emancipation
Proclamation is flawed, as it will not do anything concrete for those slaves freed in the areas
of the South not under Union control, even as it stiffens the resolve of the secessionists
(78). For the final time, Whitman spots Lincoln at his second inauguration in early 1865:
he looked "very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate
questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face;
yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the
furrows'" (206). After the assassination, Whitman reflects, Lincoln "'leaves for America's
history and biography ... not only its most dramatic reminiscence—he leaves, in my opinion,
the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality.... The tragic splendor of
his death, purging, illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will
remain and will grow brighter through time, while history lives, and love of country lives'"
(220). Morris clearly feels this way about Whitman, too, and Whitman's close connection to
Lincoln in the narrative is intended to suggest the angelic glow of one of America's most
empathic and moral poets (229).
This is not to say, however, that Whitman emerges without contradiction or blemish in
Morris' re-telling, a fact that rescues the biography from hagiography. For one thing, Morris
makes clear Whitman's ambivalence about race in America during the Civil War years. In
his description of Whitman's relationship with William O'Connor (the man who christened
Whitman "the good gray poet"), he points up Whitman's disagreement with his friend's
"ardent abolitionism" and the strain that Whitman's suspicion of blacks put on that
relationship (81). When casualties mounted, Whitman wondered whether the slaves were
worth it, and when Whitman notices Lincoln standing with his hat off to black soldiers, he
remarks that "it looked funny to see the President standing with his hat off to them just the
same as the rest" (119, 140). These sentiments are not very well known, eclipsed as they
are by Whitman's sympathetic identifications with slaves in the poems of Leaves of Grass,
although a poem like "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," which is in Drum-Taps, suggests his
ambivalence, notwithstanding the African-American poet Langston Hughes's embrace of the
poem. Especially on the question of prisoner exchange, Whitman's racism flares up, as he
decries Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's insistence that black men count the same as white
men in prisoner swaps between the North and the South (192, 197). Desperately wanting
his brother George released from Confederate prison, Whitman is perfectly willing to
overlook the rights of black Americans, seeing those rights merely as impediments. Morris
does not flinch from these facts, and the picture we get of Whitman is more rounded—and
more human—for it.
Morris is also quite sensible on the subject of Whitman's sexuality, a subject that sometimes
leads to trouble in biographies of the poet. When discussing Whitman's early hospital relief
work at Broadway Hospital in New York, he refuses to speculate about sexual liaisons
between the poet and stage drivers recuperating there ("This is not to suggest that all—or
perhaps any—of the young men became physically intimate with Whitman"), but he plainly
shows that Whitman found those drivers physically attractive, as he jotted down
descriptions of them in his notebooks (29). At another moment in the story, when Whitman
is depicted kissing a soldier in a Washington hospital, Morris shrewdly states, "At the far end
Mickle Street Review
Summer 2001/Museums and Memoirs
No.14
Part of the Camden Online Poetry Project
of another century, it is possible to read too much into that kiss. Same-sex affection had
not yet become eroticized, and overt demonstrations of affection between men—kissing,
hugging, stroking, and petting—were commonplace.... Nevertheless, the fervency of
Whitman's affection, particularly for [Thomas] Sawyer, seems to have exceeded mere
wartime camaraderie" (133). Quoting from letters Whitman wrote to Sawyer, Morris lets
Whitman's own ardent rhetoric do the talking, leaving no room to doubt the intensity of
Whitman's passion. When we reach Whitman's encounter with Peter Doyle, a coach driver
he met in Washington in the winter of 1865, we again find no speculation as to sexual
contact; rather, Morris gives us a very moving account of the deeply affective nature of their
relationship, an account driven by reports of those who actually saw them together.
Another fine aspect of this book is Morris's keen sense of Whitman's revolutionary poetic
style, and his several forays into literary criticism meet with much success. He sees well the
significance of a poem like "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" in Drum-Taps—its photographic
realism and masterful manipulation of point-of-view—and expounds beautifully on other
poems that attest to Whitman's imagistic art, his essential "modernity" (61, 67). He also
recognizes the modal trajectory of Drum-Taps, its movement from bombast to plaint. Too
often, biographical treatments of literary figures by writers from other disciplines are marred
by an inability to grasp or discuss intelligently literary effects. Morris is an exception, and
his own artful weaving of Venus, the evening star, in his book as a symbol of Lincoln and a
foreshadowing of his death sets up his finale—a reading of Whitman's famous elegy for
Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and its publication in Drum-Taps.
In 1873, Whitman moved from Washington, DC to his brother George's home in Camden,
New Jersey, and it was from this spot that Whitman published his memories of the war,
fearing that its intimate incidents and effects ("the seething hell and the black infernal
background of countless minor scenes and interiors") would be forgotten. Morris extends
Whitman's project, bringing to us in vivid color the events of the war as Whitman felt them,
that is, a ground-level view of the war. This trend in Civil War historiography is perhaps
best represented by Edward Ayers and Anne Rubin's CD-ROM and World Wide Web site The
Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, a hypermedia archive
that examines through letters, diaries, newspapers, and photographs the immediate and
engrossing experience of the war on families from one Northern (Franklin County,
Pennsylvania) and one Southern (Augusta County, Virginia) community. Likewise, in
Morris's drama, "all the vast and complicated events of the war, on which history dwells and
makes its volumes, fall aside," as in Specimen Days Whitman insisted they must.