“Not feeling very well … we turned our attention to poetry”

Poetry; Washington, DC’s Hospital Newspapers; and the Civil War
  • Elizabeth Lorang
Chapter

Abstract

Over the course of the Civil War, Washington, DC, emerged as the medical center of the Union war effort. More than 150 hospitals treated patients in the district and the surrounding area, including Alexandria, Virginia.1 These medical facilities ranged in size and type from large, formal general hospitals that treated thousands of patients for the duration of the war to small, impromptu hospitals established in response to momentary need, such as the four-bed Washburne Hospital set up in a former blacksmith shop for two months in the summer of 1862. Reading and writing were intimately connected with the hospital. An enormous textual record developed out of the hospitals, including medical reports, diaries and letters, memoirs, short stories, and verse. Recognizing the value of and the need for reading material, as well as for an outlet for the writing of hospital patients and staff, military and civilian leaders at several institutions established hospital newspapers. From the beginning, poetry was a crucial component of these newspapers. and for the sick and wounded and their caretakers, the poems published in hospital newspapers such as the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, the Cripple, and the Soldiers’ Journal responded to and shaped the hospital experience; within the pages of the newspapers, the poems attempted to make sense of the war for readers at the hospital and at home.

Keywords

Daily Newspaper Eternal Life Camp Life American Patriot Hospital Newspaper 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Susan C. Lawrence, Kenneth M. Price, and Kenneth J. Winkle, ed., Civil War Washington, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, http://civilwardc.org, 2012, have identified nearly two hundred places that served as hospitals in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area during the course of the war. See the project’s database and mapping applications for information about hospitals, including locations.
  2. 2.
    Manuscript held at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, Shiloh, Arkansas. Donnell’s diary has been digitized as part of the Missouri Digital Heritage project, available at http://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh.
  3. 3.
    Elizabeth Lorang, “From the Canonical to the Non-Canonical: Editing, the Walt Whitman Archive, and Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Poetry,” Documentary Editing 32 (2011): 78–88, and “American Poetry and the Daily Newspaper from the Rise of the Penny Press to the New Journalism” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2010).Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Menard joined the Bureau of Emigration in the spring of 1862. See Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century, Second Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 99.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Philip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 138n30. Menard’s contributions to Douglass’ Monthly may be limited to a letter he wrote in response to Douglass’s negative views of emigration and colonization.Google Scholar
  6. 7.
    The manuscript of Lincoln’s poem is held by the John Hay Library of Brown University and is featured in the digital exhibit “John Hay’s Lincoln and Lincoln’s John Hay,” curated by the Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library. The exhibit is available at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/lincoln/Lincoln_Hay/index.html. Lincoln’s poem has previously been transcribed in several sources, including in Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859–1863, ed. Ron E. Fehrenbacker and Roy P. Basler (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), 480; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 447; Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 199; and Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries (New York: Harper, 2009), 158. The opening quotation mark in the transcription presented here appears in the original manuscript; there is no concluding quotation mark in the manuscript.
  7. 8.
    Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 346.Google Scholar
  8. 9.
    Critical understanding of the poetry of the Civil War was, for decades, shaped by the negative assessments of Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). Steven Conn’s “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why are these Pictures So Terrible?” History and Theory 41.4 (December 2002): 17–32, provides a useful context for thinking about Wilson’s and Aaron’s critiques as well as for considering the larger cultural output of the Civil War.Google Scholar
  9. 10.
    See, for example, Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller, Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Michael Cohen, “Contraband Singing: Poems and Songs in Circulation During the Civil War,” American Literature 82.2 (June 2010): 271–304; Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode,” Book History 9 (2006): 159– 75; Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eliza Richards, “Correspondent Lines: Poetry, Journalism, and the U.S. Civil War,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 145–69; Jessica Forbes Roberts, “A Poetic E Pluribus Unum,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2008): 170–97.Google Scholar
  10. 11.
    Earle Lutz, in “Soldier Newspapers of the Civil War,” Bibliographical Society of America 46 (1952): 379, gives the total number of hospital newspapers as 19. Unfortunately, Lutz does not actually identify the 19 newspapers, naming only the Reveille (New Albany, Indiana) and the Soldiers’ Journal (Alexandria, Virginia). The first hospital newspaper of the war, the Hammond Gazette of Hammond Hospital in Point Lookout, Maryland, appeared on November 17, 1862. See H. E. P., Samuel Artus, and John T. Morton, “Lincolniana Notes,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 48.4 (Winter 1955): 456–65.Google Scholar
  11. 14.
    Jackson was the editor of the paper beginning with the issue of May 7, 1864. This issue also explained Ingersoll’s departure: “The impossibility of giving to this paper the care and supervision which it needs, has induced the present Editor to resign her place to one who will, she trusts, be able much better to fill her place.” Woodbury is identified as editor of the August 21, 1865, issue.Google Scholar
  12. 17.
    The American Civil War Research Database, Alexander Street Press, 2011, accessed October 5, 2011, http://www.civilwardata.com.
  13. 18.
    “Prospectus” and “The Soldiers’ Journal—Salutatory,” Soldiers’ Journal, February 17, 1864, 4. In its first issue, the Soldiers’ Journal identified Bradley as the newspaper’s proprietor. Over the course of its run, R. A. Cassidy, Thomas V. Cooper, William P. Griffith, and R. J. Walradt served as editors of the Soldiers’ Journal. Griffith and Walradt edited only the last few issues.Google Scholar
  14. 19.
    Subscriptions to the eight-page Soldiers’ Journal were available for one dollar for six months or two dollars per year. Annual subscriptions to the Armory Square Hospital Gazette and the Cripple, both four-page newspapers, cost one dollar. (Originally, a one-year subscription to the Gazette was fifty cents.) One-month, three-month, and six-month subscriptions were available for 10, 25, and 50 cents, respectively. The Soldiers’ Journal was published on Wednesday mornings, and the Cripple and the Gazette were published on Saturdays.Google Scholar
  15. 20.
    On another occasion, the paper published a complete list of sub-scribers. The subscription list appears in the Soldiers’ Journal of June 29, 1864. The printing and distribution of lists in newspapers, particularly of lists naming the dead, wounded, and missing, emerged as an evocative cultural touchstone in popular visual art and literature, as did the dead letter office. For more on the images of list reading and the dead letter office, see Vanessa Y. Steinroetter, “Representations of Readers and Scenes of Reading in American Literature of the Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2011).Google Scholar
  16. 21.
    The quality of the microfilm reproduction of the newspaper makes it nearly impossible to determine an average number of deaths per week at the hospital.Google Scholar
  17. 22.
    Originally, this information appeared in the weekly “Chaplain’s Report.” After Chaplain William J. Potter was reassigned in May 1864, names of the dead appeared without a headline, just above or below the statistical report. Later, names were listed under the head-ing “Died,” typically printed above the statistical data. As recorded in the pages of more than 70 available issues of the Soldiers’ Journal, the number of deaths at Augur General Hospital averaged between three and four per week, with some weeks seeing no deaths and oth-ers as many as 18.Google Scholar
  18. 23.
    “[Caleb L. Depung]” and “[Chester Sheldon],” Armory Square Hospital Gazette, January 20, 1864, [3].Google Scholar
  19. 24.
    The American Civil War Research Database, Alexander Street Press, 2011, accessed October 5, 2011, http://www.civilwardata.com.
  20. 25.
    Ida Raymond, Southland Writers: Biographical and Critical Sketches of the Living Female Writers of the South (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1870), 2:808.Google Scholar
  21. 26.
    See Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 62.Google Scholar
  22. 27.
    The November 5, 1864, issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, for example, featured the poem “In the Hospital.” Unsigned when it appeared in the Gazette, the poem, by Frederick J. Willoughby, had first appeared in the Cripple on October 22, 1864.Google Scholar
  23. 28.
    Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). In The Selfish Gene Dawkins writes, “The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (206). Since the most common popular usage of the term today is to describe Internet fads, applying the term to nineteenth-century cultural phe-nomena may seem anachronistic. But Dawkins clearly imagined a much broader understanding of the word, one which encompasses “tunes … catch-phrases, clothes fashions,” and even the idea of god (206–7).Google Scholar
  24. 37.
    The exchange about the commissioning of African American soldiers begins in the issue of February 22, 1865. According to the editor of the Soldiers’ Journal, the “race that has heretofore been admired for its unobtrusive patriotism” must first “win the respect of the nation, and prepare its people for a change that implies equality.” Following the editor’s remarks, the paper published a letter advocating for the commissioning of African American soldiers. A letter in the issue of March 1, 1865, rebutted the editor’s comments, and one in the issue of March 8, 1865, argued against the commissioning of African American troops on the grounds of gradual change.Google Scholar
  25. 38.
    G. L. Mullock, “Federal Soldiers,” Soldiers’ Journal, August 3, 1864, 195.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Mark Canada 2013

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  • Elizabeth Lorang

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