On this episode of Our American Stories, before he became America’s most celebrated poet, Walt Whitman was simply a man searching for his brother on a battlefield. What he discovered there transformed him. The war showed him suffering on a scale he had never imagined, yet it also revealed the resilience of the human spirit. In makeshift hospitals and tents, he tended to both Union and Confederate soldiers, writing, comforting, and listening when few others could. Those encounters reshaped his poetry and deepened his belief that every life, North or South, carried the same worth. Hillsdale College professor Kelly Scott Franklin shares the story.

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