Walt Whitman (1819–1892) became actively involved in the Civil War in 1862 when he heard that his brother, George Washington Whitman, had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Though the injury was only superficial, Whitman stayed on in Washington, visiting the Armory Square Hospital, among others, and tending to the wounded with a missionary zeal. ‘Down at the Front’ was Whitman's only first-hand account of battle and became the basis of his poem ‘A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim’ (included in Drum-Taps). ‘A Night Battle’ pieces together soldiers’ accounts of the Battle of Chancellorsville and exemplifies Whitman's method of description through cumulative visual detail. ‘Some Specimen Cases’ is, as the title suggests, a series of case notes. ‘The Real War Will Never Get in the Books’ expresses his scepticism about the depiction of the Civil War, which was already by the mid-1860s emerging as a major cultural issue.

Texts taken from Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect (Philadelphia: Rees Welch, 1882). The text of Memoranda during the War (Camden, NJ: author's publication, 1875–76) can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20080718102114/http://etext.lib. virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/WhiMemo.html. See also Peter Coviello, ed., Walt Whitman's Memoranda during the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).