The Better Angel

On May 26, 1863, Walt Whitman wrote to his mother: "O the sad, sad things I see - the noble young men with legs and arms taken off - the deaths - the sick weakness, sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations...just flickering alive, and O so deathly weak and sick." For nearly three years, Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experience with immediacy and compassion. In this book, biographer Roy Morris, Jr. gives us an account of Whitman's profoundly transformative Civil War Years and an historically important examination of the Union's treatment of its sick and wounded. Whitman was mired in depression as the war began, subsisting on journalistic hackwork, wasting his nights in New York's seedy bohemian underground, his "great career" as a poet apparently stalled. But when news came that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed south to find him. Though his brother's injury was slight, Whitman was deeply affected by his first view of the war's casualties.