The first immediate occasion of his going down to camp was on behalf of his
brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New York
Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a piece of shell at
Fredericksburg. From the spring of 1863 this nursing, both in the field and
more especially in hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and
nightly occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne to his
measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the work, and to the unbounded
fascination, a kind of magnetic attraction and ascendency, which he
exercised over the patients, often with the happiest sanitary results.
Northerner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same tending from
him. It is said that by the end of the war he had personally ministered to
upwards of 100,000 sick and wounded. In a Washington hospital he caught, in
the summer of 1864, the first illness he had ever known, caused by poison
absorbed into the system in attending some of the worst cases of gangrene.
It disabled him for six months. He returned to the hospitals towards the
beginning of 1865, and obtained also a clerkship in the Department of the
Interior. It should be added that, though he never actually joined the army
as a combatant, he made a point of putting down his name on the enrolment-
lists for the draft, to take his chance as it might happen for serving the
country in arms. The reward of his devotedness came at the end of June
1865, in the form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.
Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the _Leaves of Grass_; a
book whose outspokenness, or (as the official chief considered it)
immorality, raised a holy horror in the ministerial breast. The poet,
however, soon obtained another modest but creditable post in the office of
the Attorney-General. He still visits the hospitals on Sundays, and often
on other days as well.

The portrait of Mr. Whitman reproduced in the present volume is taken from
an engraving after a daguerreotype given in the original _Leaves of Grass_.