Voices in the Dead House

Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualties

After the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind,...