More from Adam Goodheart

When the first shells exploded over Charleston’s Fort Sumter on the night of April 12, 1861, the news reached New York in a matter of hours. Journalist and historian Adam Goodheart describes the reaction of one New Yorker, a poet named Walt Whitman. Goodheart’s new book on the start of the Civil War is called 1861, and he’s been tracking the beginning of the war, day-by-day, on the blog Disunion.