Whitman, Walt,
1819-1892. Memoranda During the War Electronic Text Center,
University
of Virginia Library
-- In one of the Hospital tents for
special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of
neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with
fever,
but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. The other
was what we now call an "old veteran" (i. e., he was a Connecticut youth,
probably of less than the age of twenty-five years, the four last of which he
had spent in active service in the War in all parts of the country.)
The two
were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C.
Calhoun's monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said:
"I have seen Calhoun's monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I
have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South; nearly the whole generation of
young men between seventeen and fifty destroyed or maim'd; all the old families
-55- used up -- the rich impoverish'd, the plantations cover'd with weeds, the
slaves unloos'd and become the masters, and the name of Southerner blacken'd
with every shame -- all that is Calhoun's real monument."
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Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Memoranda During the War Electronic Text Center,
University of Virginia Library Calhoun's Real Monument.
The two
were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C.
Calhoun's monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said:
"I have seen Calhoun's monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I
have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South; nearly the whole generation of
young men between seventeen and fifty destroyed or maim'd; all the old families
-55- used up -- the rich impoverish'd, the plantations cover'd with weeds, the
slaves unloos'd and become the masters, and the name of Southerner blacken'd
with every shame -- all that is Calhoun's real monument."
