1 - Wartime Masculinities

Summary

Civil War soldiers marched home in 1865 as changed men. No longer holiday soldiers, they were now seasoned veterans. In “The Return of the Heroes,” poet Walt Whitman celebrated the “worn, swart, handsome, strong” men who had been made from the “stock of homestead and workshop,” hardened by the “long campaign and sweaty march,” and inured to the “hard-fought, bloody field.” Disease or marching had enervated all; shot and shell had maimed some and shaken others. Whitman nevertheless projected a vision of regenerative masculinity. The immortal ranks tramping through the poem’s stanzas displayed a manliness grounded in the work of the antebellum era, transformed by the experiences in war, and redeemed by the agricultural pursuits of the postwar years. Whitman’s poem serves as a reminder that nineteenth-century Americans thought deeply about what made a man and recognized masculinity’s mutability.