View of the Mall in 1863 with the Armory and the Wards along with the Smithsonian Castle and the Canal.
On March 11, 1856, President Franklin Pierce sent a message to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs with information regarding a suitable location for an Armory for "the preservation of ordnance, arms, etc., in Washington". The report was passed from the Ordnance Officer to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and then to the President. Five sites were analysed and the second one was recommended.[1]
The next site examined was at the intersection of B street south and Sixth street west, north of the former street and west of the latter. Situated at a nearly central point, the ground was "level and firm enough for building on" with easy access from other parts of the city and "ample space on the government reservation contiguous to the site not only for future extension of the building, but for military parade grounds, with little hazard of these two advantages of space being trenched upon by other improvements.[1]
Based on these recommendations, the Armory was built that same year next to the canal.
The Hospital
View of the eastern side of the Mall in 1879. The Armory is the first square building on the right.
Following the American Civil War's 1861 beginning, President Abraham Lincoln asked Doctor Willard Bliss to organize a system of hospitals in and around the city of Washington, D.C.[2] Among the facilities which resulted from this directive were several facilities which were built in or near Washington, D.C., including the Armory Square Hospital, which was built on the land surrounding the city's Armory in 1862.
It offered 1,000 beds in twelve wards (barracks) and overflow tents to treat the wounded from the battlefields of Virginia. Wounded soldiers were brought across the Potomac River to the city wharves in southwest Washington, D.C., including the Fish Wharf as well as on the Long Bridge which landed at the other end of Maryland Avenue SW a few blocks away. In addition to these barracks, quarters for officers, service facilities and a chapel were built on site.[3]
The closest to the arrival points for the steamboats of all of the Washington, D.C.-based Union Army hospitals, it became the treatment facility where the gravely wounded remained, receiving end-of-life care if terminally ill or undergoing additional surgeries or other types of treatment until well enough to be shipped home or moved to a hospital farther away from the war. Volunteers from the northern States came to provide assistance in the hospitals including the Armory as nurses as well as support staff. Dr. Bliss became the superintendent for the hospital and remained to practice in the city after the war.[4]
Among those volunteers was poet Walt Whitman, who had made his way from New York to Washington, D.C., after reading that his brother might have been wounded. After finding his brother and learning that he had sustained only a minor injury, Whitman realized the depth of suffering that other less fortunate soldiers were enduring, and began volunteering as part of the Christian Commission in the city hospitals, visiting wounded soldiers and developing close relationships with many of them and raising money for provisions for them. This experience would have a profound influence on him and his later writings.[5] In The Wound Dresser, he wrote:
I devote myself much to Armory-square hospital because it contains by far the worst cases, most repulsive wounds, has the most suffering and most need of consolation. I go every day without fail, and often at night – sometimes stay very late.[6]
Close to the White House, the Armory hospital was visited by President Lincoln in 1863, as reported by Amanda Akin Stearns in her memoir, The lady nurse of Ward E, which was published in 1909:
It was pathetic to see him pass from bed to bed and give each occupant the warm, honest grasp for which he is noted. I hear that he is especially interested in this hospital, and has suggested having flower beds made between the wards with plants from the Government gardens, which Dr. Bliss is having done. His homely face with such sad eyes and ungainly figure did not fill my youthful idea of a "President of the United States"; but it was a grand thing for him to come and cheer our soldier boys with his presence.[2]
Hospital chaplains also worked to ease the suffering of wounded soldiers, dispensing books and other reading materials, as well as words of comfort and advice. The first issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette was published on January 6, 1864. In an article entitle Salutatory, the publisher wrote: "the hospital is an episode in soldier's life—sometimes a painful termination of it, which has many an event worthy of a chronicle. Such we propose this paper to be.[7]
The Gazette went on for several months, offering reading and news updates to patients and recognition staff for their service. The last issue was published on the 21 August 1865. With hostilities ended following the Surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and the resulting decline in the number of patients being sent to Union Army hospitals, military leaders determined that the Armory hospital was no longer needed and was closed during the summer of 1865. The last edition of the hospital newspaper, which was published on 21 August 1865, offered the following reflection:
During the last three years, thousands of our brave soldiers have been inmates of Armory Square [...] One cannot conceive of a gun-shot wound that has not been treated here. Of nearly every disease in the catalogue we have had examples. Such an opportunity for the practice of surgery, or the study of pathology and the treatment of disease, will not probably occur again soon. God grant that the stern emergency of a bloody civil war, which rendered so many asylums for our wounded and sick soldiers a necessity, may never again arise to curse with its mildew blights our native land.
We now bid adieu to Armory Square—but not without some regrets [...] Within its walls we have learned many a lesson of wisdom, of patience under suffering—of the keenest grief—of faith, forgiveness, of true manhood.[8]
The hospital buildings north of the Armory began to be demolished in 1867, although the Armory building itself remained in use. By 1873 landscaping of the area as part of the Armory Square portion of the National Mall began.[9]
The National Mall is a landscaped park within the National Mall and Memorial Parks, an official unit of the United States National Park System. It is located near the downtown area of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States, and is administered by the National Park Service (NPS) of the United States Department of the Interior.
Walt Whitman High School is a public high school in Bethesda, Maryland, United States. It is named in honor of American poet Walt Whitman. The school serves grades 9-12 for the Montgomery County Public Schools.
"O Captain! My Captain!" is an extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865 about the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. Well received upon publication, the poem was Whitman's first to be anthologized and the most popular during his lifetime. Together with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day", and "This Dust was Once the Man", it is one of four poems written by Whitman about the death of Lincoln.
The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was a private relief agency created by federal legislation on June 18, 1861, to support sick and wounded soldiers of the United States Army during the American Civil War. It operated across the North, raised an estimated $25 million in Civil War era revenue and in-kind contributions to support the cause, and enlisted thousands of volunteers. The president was Henry Whitney Bellows, and Frederick Law Olmsted acted as executive secretary. It was modeled on the British Sanitary Commission, set up during the Crimean War (1853-1856), and from the British parliamentary report published after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) is a museum in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington, DC. The museum was founded by U.S. Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond as the Army Medical Museum (AMM) in 1862; it became the NMHM in 1989 and relocated to its present site at the Army's Forest Glen Annex in 2011. An element of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), the NMHM is a member of the National Health Sciences Consortium.
Lincoln Park is the largest urban park located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was known historically as Lincoln Square. From 1862 to 1865, it was the site of the largest hospital in Washington, DC: Lincoln Hospital.
Mower General Hospital was one of the largest Federal military hospitals during the American Civil War. Located across from the Reading Railroad depot in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, it operated from January 1863 through May 1865, and was closed with the cessation of the war.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Washington, D.C., the national capital, was the center of the Union war effort, which rapidly turned it from a small city into a major capital with full civic infrastructure and strong defenses.
The Wound-Dresser is a piece for chamber orchestra and baritone singer by composer John Adams. The piece is an elegiac setting of excerpts from American poet Walt Whitman's poem "The Wound-Dresser" (1865) about his experience as a hospital volunteer during the American Civil War.
The National Museum of Civil War Medicine is a U.S. historic education institution located in Frederick, Maryland. Its focus involves the medical, surgical and nursing practices during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
"Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day" is a poem by Walt Whitman dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. The poem was written on April 19, 1865, shortly after Lincoln's assassination. Whitman greatly admired Lincoln and went on to write additional poetry about him: "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and "This Dust Was Once the Man." "Hush'd" is not particularly well known, and is generally considered to have been hastily written. Some critics highlight the poem as Whitman's first attempt to respond to Lincoln's death and emphasize that it would have drawn comparatively little attention if Whitman had not written his other poems on Lincoln.
The state of medical knowledge at the time of the Civil War was extremely primitive. Doctors did not understand infection, and did little to prevent it. It was a time before antiseptics, and a time when there was no attempt to maintain sterility during surgery. No antibiotics were available, and minor wounds could easily become infected, and hence fatal. While the typical soldier was at risk of being hit by rifle or artillery fire, he faced an even greater risk of dying from disease.
Doctor Willard Bliss was an American physician and pseudo-expert in ballistic trauma, who treated President James A. Garfield after his wounding from a gunshot in July 1881 until his death two and a half months later.
Drum-Taps, first published in 1865, is a collection of poetry written by American poet Walt Whitman during the American Civil War.
Sequel to Drum-Taps: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd and other poems is a collection of eighteen poems written and published by American poet Walt Whitman in 1865.
Finley General Hospital was a Union Army hospital which operated near Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. It operated from 1862 to 1865.
Harewood General Hospital was one of several purpose-built pavilion style hospitals operating in the Washington, D.C., area during the Civil War which rendered care to Union military personnel. A purpose-built pavilion style hospital, it was in use from September 4, 1862, to May 5, 1866.
Mount Pleasant General Hospital was a Union Civil War hospital in northwest Washington, D.C., which operated from March 28, 1862, to August 10, 1865.
Campbell General Hospital was a Union Civil War hospital which operated from September 1862 to July 20, 1865, in northwest Washington, D.C.
Walt Whitman gave a series of lectures on Abraham Lincoln from 1879 to 1890. They centered around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but also covered years leading up to and during the American Civil War and sometimes included readings of poems such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The lectures began as a benefit for Whitman and were generally popular and well received.
References
1 2 Index of the Executive Documents Printed by Order of the Senate of the United States, First and Second Sessions Thirty-Fourth Congress, 1855–1856, page 10
1 2 The Lady Nurse of Ward E – Amanda Akin Stearns
↑ Whitman, Walt; Miller, Edwin Haviland (2007). The Correspondence: Volume I: 1842–1867. New York, NY: New York University Press. p. 91. ISBN0-8147-9421-1.
↑ The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion —Walt Whitman, 1898, page 89
↑ Armory Square Hospital Gazette – 6 January 1864 – The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
↑ Armory Square Hospital Gazette – 21 August 1865 – Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University
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