We begin with poet Walt Whitman. In mid- December 1862, the 43 year-old author of Leaves of Grass learns that his younger brother George was wounded in the 13 December Battle of Fredericksburg. Hurrying from New York to Washington and then to Fredericksburg, Whitman is relieved to discover a lightly-wounded George. Whitman begins to visit and minister to the wounded at Fredericksburg, and when he prepares to return to Washington, he is asked to accompany a group of wounded soldiers to their assigned hospitals. Whitman's ministry to the wounded then continued to the end of the war. A book titled The Wound Dresser came out of that experience. In it Whitman identifies two Catalpa "witness trees" in the yard of Chatham Manor that, though aged and decayed, still stand there today.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not personally appear in our region, but his son Charles did. In the spring of 1863, Charles slipped away from the family's home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and went off to join the army. The eldest of five children, he was an outdoors, athletic type. At some earlier time, Charles had managed to blow off a thumb with a shotgun, and the infantry wouldn't take him. The artillery commander to whom he applied, a Longfellow family friend, got an OK from Mr. Longfellow and signed Charles up as a private. Soldiering turned out to be second nature for Charles, and he was soon offered a 2nd lieutenant's commission in the 1st Mass. cavalry. He fought at Chancellorsville, but then bouts of typhoid and malaria kept him out of the field until late summer 1863. At New Hope Church on 27 Nov 1863, during the Mine Run Campaign, Charles' unit was fighting Confederate cavalry for possession of a desirable artillery position. A bullet passed through his back from shoulder to shoulder, just nicking the spine in the process. Mr. Longfellow took him home for an extended recuperation. After the war, Charles did some traveling and writing, then died in Cambridge in 1893 at age 49.

Massachusetts born artist Winslow Homer had received an exemption from military service as a Special Artist to Harper's Weekly, but he did not shun the hard life of the soldier. For two months of 1862 he traveled up the James-York peninsula with the Army of the Potomac, and in 1864 he caught up with Sherman's army in Georgia. In between, he came our way. During the peninsula days, he had made friends with a young New York officer named Francis Channing Barlow. By the spring of 1864, Barlow was a division commander in the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, and Homer wrangled an invitation to travel with him. One of the many sketches and paintings that came out of that experience is his Skirmish in the Wilderness that appears on the cover of Gordon Rhea's highly regarded book, The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864.