Many of Whitman’s stories and poems first appeared in print in newspapers and other periodical publications. On display here is his poem Beat! Beat! Drums! as it appeared in the Harper’s Weekly September 21, 1861 issue (erroneously printed as September 28, 1861). This poem, published just months after the start of the Civil War, would become the “most widely reprinted and circulated poem of Whitman’s career” (Genoways, Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 117).

It was during the Civil War years, following the publication of the 1855, 1856, and 1860 editions of Leaves of Grass, that nearly all of Whitman’s income came from his writing (Myerson, “Walt Whitman,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 3, 359). In late 1862, the consequences of the war came to Whitman on a very personal level when his brother George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman left home to find George, looking in a number of Washington, DC, hospitals and finally locating him near the site of the battle (his wound was only minor). Whitman then returned to Washington where he acquired a job as a clerk and spent his off hours visiting and nursing wounded soldiers for three years. In 1865, his book Drum-Taps was published: “...a sequence of...poems about the Civil War, [which] stands as the finest war poetry written by an American. In these poems Whitman presents, often in innovative ways, his emotional experience of the Civil War” (Gutman, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, as reprinted on The Walt Whitman Archive website).