1865: Whitman, Drum-Taps

Walt Whitman, 1865. Color by Richard White.

Walt Whitman is 41 and living in Brooklyn when Abraham Lincoln is elected President on November 6, 1860.

On April 12, 1861, the Confederates attack Fort Sumter and the active phase of the Civil War begins.

In 1862, Whitman’s brother is wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman goes to console him in a hospital in Washington, D.C. He ends up spending three years as volunteer nurse, making over 600 hospital visits and seeing between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers (see “The Wound-Dresser” and Specimen Days).

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his troops to Union general Ulysses S. Grant.

On April 14 (Good Friday), John Wilkes Booth shoots and kills Abraham Lincoln.

In May 1865, Whitman publishes Drum-Taps.

In the fall of 1865, Whitman publishs “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” in a section of the book titled “Memories of President Lincoln”