Civil War

This Week in the Civil War

00000174-b11b-ddc3-a1fc-bfdbb1a20000The Schreiner University Department of History is honoring the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War with a series of short vignettes focusing on events from 1861 through 1865. The Civil War was the most destructive conflict in American history, but it was also one of our most defining moments as a people and as a nation. Let us know what you think about "This Week in the Civil War." E-mail your comments to Dr. John Huddleston at jhuddles@schreiner.edu.Airs: Weekdays at 5:19 a.m., 8:19 a.m., 4:19 p.m. on KTXI and 4:49 a.m., 9:29 p.m. on KSTX.

This Week in the Civil War - 485

Texas Public Radio | By Texas Public Radio

Published January 16, 2013 at 11:05 AM CST

On January 16, 1863, Walt Whitman wrote a pained letter to his brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, in which he bemoaned the Union’s recent defeat at Fredericksburg as the most “complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth's wars.”

While Whitman today is celebrated as one of America’s greatest poets, works like Leaves of Grass, penned in the 1850s, were seen as scandalous by an American reading public unready for Whitman’s unconventional lifestyle. An opponent of slavery, Whitman supported the Union with the poem Beat! Beat! Drums and volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals.

After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, Whitman penned Oh Captain, My Captain, eulogizing the President for having navigated the ship of state through the storm of war, only to meet a violent end.