Whitman spent a few months in Boston in 1860, overseeing the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass with the Boston firm of Thayer and Eldridge. When he returned to New York, events were moving rapidly toward the outbreak of the Civil War and, on April 12, 1861, Whitman read about the first shots fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Whitman's brother, George, enlisted and the north prepared for war. Stirring calls to arms for the Union cause were published widely. Whitman's contribution to the recruitment effort was "Beat! Beat! Drums!," which he wrote shortly after the first Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 and published in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Established in 1830, the Transcript was one of the forerunners of the "penny papers," cheap daily newspapers that sold for a penny a copy and were designed to appeal to urban working and middle class readers. The penny papers offered readers a wide variety of news and local interest stories, including police reports and accounts of criminal trials. A few days after the first appearance of "Beat! Beat! Drums!" in the Transcript, this popular poem was reprinted in the New York Leader and Harper's Weekly Magazine.
. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965.
. The Golden Age of the Newspapper. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999.
. The Daily Newspaper in America. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1937.
. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
. A History of American Magazines, 1865-1885. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.
. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
. "Beat! Beat! Drums!." In Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, edited by J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.