Type: Exhibition caption
Detail: Born on Long Island in 1819, American poet and journalist Walt Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, an experience he recounted in “The Great Army of the Sick," published in a New York newspaper in 1863. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he died in 1892. Whitman’s Civil War poetry included Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861) and the famous O Captain! My Captain! (1865). After hearing of Lincoln’s death, Whitman penned Hush’d be the Camps Today, seen in manuscript here, in haste, and added it to the end of Drum-Taps (1865).