by ©2019 Sarah Becker Walt Whitman and the Civil War “In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish, Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look),” poet Walt Whitman wrote in 1867 in Old War Dreams. “Of the dead on their backs, with arms extended wide, I dream, I dream, I dream….Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields, Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen, Onward I sped at the time—but now of their forms at night, I dream, I dream, I dream.” In 1861 the United States offered approximately 40 medical schools and six schools of pharmacy. Despite the seeming sophistication, Civil War hospitals were mostly makeshift. “The [Prince Street] house is commodious, and, for a confiscated dwelling, is very fine,” the Alexandria Gazette noted in 1864. Alexandria’s Civil War hospitals included Prince Street Hospital, Lyceum Hall, Carlyle House, Lee-Fendall House and Episcopal Seminary. Also Prince Street’s L’Ouverture Hospital for colored troops. Medical and other supplies were secured, in part, from Fairfax Street’s Leadbeater & Co. including Lamp Oil, Charcoal, Castile Soap, Laudanum and Morphine Sulph. Virginia seceded from the Union on May 24, 1861, only to find the Federal Army ready to stake an Alexandria claim. Occupied Alexandria, a budding hospital town, served as an Army logistical supply center. It operated alongside the city of Washington, Georgetown and Aquia Creek. “Still sweeping the eye around down the river toward Alexandria, we see, to the right, the locality where the Convalescent Camp stands, with its five, eight, or sometimes ten thousand inmates,” Walt Whitman penned. Whitman, a New Yorker, traveled to Washington in 1862 to search for his brother George, missing in the Battle of Fredericksburg. He called infirmaries the “marrow…