A Full Load for a One-Horse Cart

Robert Shultz: He records a dramatic moment where he’s standing in front of this field hospital and sees at the foot of two trees a pile of amputated limbs. He says, “A full load for a one horse cart.” And these are limbs that had been thrown out the windows of the surgery in the haste of the battle and the emergencies.

Ed Ayers: That is scholar and artist Robert Schultz. He says that this was the inciting incident that sparked Whitman’s passion for tending the wounded.

Robert Shultz: And then he saw the men, and he traveled back by boat and rail to the Washington DC hospitals and stays there for the duration of the war. He finds clerical work in the government, but spends his most valuable hours among the men in the hospitals.

Ed Ayers: How old was he at this time?

Robert Shultz: Well, let’s see. He was in his mid 30s. He’s in his middle age. He really gave himself, even his health… I mean, it was a terrific strain. He talked to Horace Traubel, the man who documented almost everything Whitman said late in life when he was living back in Camden, New Jersey in the years before he died. He told Traubel about the way he ruined his health. He suffered a few strokes, pretty bad strokes at the end of the war. He really wore himself out. He told Traubel, you know, “I had to pay a lot for this experience, but it seemed cheap.” And then he says, “And what did I get? Well, I got the boys. For one thing, the boys. Thousands of them. They were, they are, they will be mine. I gave myself for them, myself. I got the boys. Then I got Leaves of Grass, the consummated book. The last confirming word.” So he understood that his vocation during the war and the writing that he did completed and consummated this lifelong book, Leaves of Grass, that he started building in 1855.

Ed Ayers: So he dealt with Confederate soldiers as well. How would that have been?

Robert Shultz: Well, whoever was wounded and got scooped up was tended all the way back to DC and in the hospitals. They were not separated out.

Ed Ayers: What was his sympathy toward them? Did he sort of hold them to account for rebelling against the United States, or did he approach them on a more personal level?

Robert Shultz: That’s really interesting because there’s sort of two levels here in which he deals with any individual, and certainly we know he was all for Union. He would certainly have condemned the rebellion, as he would have termed it, and he would have certainly judged the soldiers who fought on the wrong side. But then on another deeper level, the one that we see in “Song of Myself” and all through the career, there was a sense that every man is, every woman is an eternal soul in passage through this lifetime toward an eventual transcendental perfection. And in his wonderful postwar poem “Reconciliation,” we see this gesture whereby he honors the enemy. He says, “For my enemy is dead. A man divine as myself is dead. I look where he lies, white faced and still in the coffin. I draw near, bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.” So at some ultimate level, he believed in every self as divine.

Ed Ayers: There’s a sympathetic tone in Whitman that we also find in Abraham Lincoln. Maybe you could talk about the relationship that those two men had, and what Lincoln meant for Whitman.

Robert Shultz: He first saw him when Lincoln was traveling to DC after his election. He only ever saw Lincoln from afar. They never met. There’s some evidence that Leaves of Grass was seen by Lincoln in his Illinois law offices. We don’t know for sure.

Ed Ayers: Let’s assume that it was. I just like that image too much.

Robert Shultz: Yeah, me too. But from the very beginning, from his first glance at this westerner, this tall, bearded westerner, Whitman idolized him. I mean, he always thought of the western states and its dirty hands, its brawny shoulders, the men and women, a kind of American rough or pioneer, and idolized them as the strength and sinews of the nation. And once Whitman had an apartment in DC during the war years, it turns out that his street was on the route that Lincoln took in from Soldiers’ Home when he spent the nights out there during the hot summers. And often Whitman would apparently stand in the street and the president go by in his carriage, or sometimes simply on a horse with a few calvary accompanying him. He records some various sightings and says that once he thinks that they met eyes and wonders if there had been a recognition.

Ed Ayers: You’re involved in a very interesting effort of your own, an art project, War Memoranda. Could you tell us about that?

Robert Shultz: Yes, sure. It started quite a long time ago when I first saw some very interesting artwork by the photographer Ben Donne, who works in the Bay Area. His work was about the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide. He took iconic photographs and Khmer Rouge portraits of their captives and developed these images in the flesh of leaves through a chlorophyll action. They’re kind of sun prints. And I walked into the Art Museum of Western Virginia about 12 years ago and saw these things, and they just knocked my socks off. These genocide victims resurrected in leaves that grew out of the ground. And I thought, does this guy know Whitman? This is amazing. This is the central trope of Whitman, death goes into the ground and life comes back out of it.

Robert Shultz: So I contacted him, and I started writing poems in response to these beautiful artworks. Someone else must have fallen in love with this work, because Hollands University invited him to spend a semester here as a resident, and we started working together face to face. He had not read Whitman, so I took care of that. We started traveling up the East Coast, visiting the battlefield sites. He’s very much a landscape photographer too. And in these car trips, we started talking about Whitman and the Civil War landscape and art, and an art exhibition developed out of it. And recently, we’ve made a book encapsulating our art response to Whitman and the war, and it’s called War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials.

Ed Ayers: We know in recent years, people have criticized the Confederate memorials as a kind of false attempt at reconciliation, as a kind of shallow reconciliation over the lives of African American people. How would Whitman’s ideas of reconciliation differ from those ideas of reconciliation we see in the Lost Cause?

Robert Shultz: I think he has delivered an uncannily direct rebuke to the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting the Nazi slogan, blood and soil, because for Whitman, American blood and American soil was not a tribal claim. And for him, the land entire as he called it, was the most fitting memorial to the war dead. And he wrote in memoranda during the war about the war dead south or north, ours all, and said, “The land entire is saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes, exhalation in nature’s chemistry distilled, and shall be so forever in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows and every breath we draw.”

Ed Ayers: So Whitman really is the poet of egalitarianism, of acceptance, of embrace rather than rejection. Do you think we’ll be listening to him with new ears now?

Robert Shultz: I hope people get sent back to Whitman to read him, because the biggest thing I feel when I think of Whitman is, this picture comes into my mind of the aged Whitman, sort of barrel chested, arms spread wide, because you know, he made his discriminations, he made his judgments, but finally his embrace was wide and his vision was hopeful and humane, and we could use that right now.

Ed Ayers: Robert Schultz is the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College and the coauthor of War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials.