Upon the Altar of the Nation (30 page)

Gardner left Brady soon after Antietam and created his own business out of a Washington, D.C., studio two blocks away from Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. The two remained amicable, but their differences in approach and philosophy overrode their partnership.
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Photography’s origins in portraiture meant that the intellectual meaning and interpretation it brought to the war were perceived by the public less as “news” or current events than as historical preservation. In American memory, Brady’s and Gardner’s Civil War photographs stand as the epitome of war art and photojournalism. But they were not widely viewed at the time.
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For photographers no less than other artists, Civil War images focused primarily on the patriotic and the promotional. That meant that if patriotism required it, the camera had to “lie.” When publishing his battlefield photographs, Gardner composed deceptive captions using the same corpses to represent Confederate soldiers desolated by defeat or Union soldiers heroic in self-denying victory. On occasion photographs could be doctored. When photographing the “Devil’s Den” at Gettysburg a year later, Gardner’s assistant Timothy O’Sullivan planted a dead body from another location on the scene and placed a rifle in his hand to represent “Dead Confederate soldier at sharpshooter’s position in Devil’s Den.”
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Northern photographers showed a decided preference for Confederate over Union corpses. Similarly, Brady shot photographs of emaciated Northern and Southern prisoners of war, but only the Northern prisoners were exhibited publicly. Photographs of the Confederate prisoners of war suffering in the Union prisons would not be available to Northern (or Southern) viewers until after the war.
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Clearly in photography as everywhere, realism and criticism were subordinated to patriotism and the “imagination” of art. Photographs that might conjure self-censure were simply dismissed.

 

Like photography, paintings would endure and shape America’s Civil War memory more than they informed contemporary news. With few public spaces to exhibit them, their production was slow and uneven. Artists accustomed to painting landscapes adjusted with difficulty to capturing scenes of war. No artistic renderings of note would appear until after the great battles of 1862 and 1863.
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Of all the great American painters, Winslow Homer emerged as the most important oil painter of the Civil War. The timing was right—he was in his early twenties when the conflict began, and as the war matured, so did the artist. The great seascape artist of the future first encountered his destiny in battle scenes from the Civil War.
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Homer’s access to the Civil War came mainly through his attachment to the Army’s Second Corps, including, most importantly, the Sixty-first New York Infantry Regiment. By April 1862 Homer obtained passes to follow the troops into Virginia, where he completed several on-site sketches and paintings. On April 5, 1862, he drew The Ocean Queen with Irish Brigade on Board Going Down the Potomac. On April 6 he drew Assault on Rebel Battery at
Lee’s
Mill.

Homer’s first battle scene appeared in the July 1862 issue of
Harper’s
Weekly and featured a bayonet charge at the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks). Rendered as a lithograph for Harper’s Weekly, the print shows a massive scene of close combat but little blood or “patriotic gore.” In a romantic departure from the facts of the battle, the Union was depicted routing the enemy in a blur of charging energy at the very time when, in reality, Union troops were hastily retreating on the Peninsula.

The following week another Homer wood engraving entitled The
Surgeon
at
Work
at the
Rear
during
an Engagement
appeared in
Harper’s.
Again the theme was more denial than encounter. The view from Fair Oaks was meant to assure Northern audiences that wounded soldiers were immediately attended to by caring physicians. The reality, however, was different, as the wounded soldiers lay overnight in the rain awaiting railroad transport behind the lines.
¹⁴
In a letter to his mother written from Harrison’s Landing, one Union soldier wrote: “The surgeons don’t know or care whether a man is sick or not and have so little care for patients in the hospital that it is the last place a man wants to see.”
¹⁵

Four months later, following the Seven Days’ Battles, on November 15,
Harper’s Weekly
again printed a Homer painting,
The Army of the Potomac
—
A
Sharpshooter on
Picket-Duty.
The bold portrayal of a Union sharpshooter introduced a stark and difficult dimension of the war, namely the targeting of officers by snipers. The first organized use of snipers occurred during the Peninsular campaign, when Union marksmen organized in two specialized regiments known as Berdan’s Sharpshooters, after Hiram G. Berdan. Their prize possession would become their Sharps rifles, symbolizing their status as individual killers free to attach themselves to any line as needed.

In his romantic account of the Berdan’s Sharpshooters, Captain C. A. Stevens nevertheless conceded unpleasant side effects of the “license” snipers were given. He told of one unsavory soldier who “carried a stick, and whenever he shot a man he made a notch in it. He would sit for hours behind a stump or clump of earth until he got sight of a rebel’s head, when bang went the rifle, and down dropped the rebel, and out came the stick to receive its notch.”
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Snipers took advantage of cover and long distances to shoot unaware soldiers in cold blood. To modern sensibilities, snipers, like civilian casualties, are a part of war. But to a society in transition from a professional’s war to modern warfare, they offended the sense of fair play. Homer himself understood the morally ambivalent nature of his subject. Several years later, he described looking through the scope of the sniper’s rifle: “As I was not a soldier—but a camp follower and artist, the above impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army and I always had a horror of that branch of the service.” According to Christopher Kent Wilson, many soldiers believed it to be:

The observations of Wilson and Homer span a century but share the horror of war’s escalating effects. What neither of them recognized is that by late 1862, snipers differed very little from regular soldiers in a furious modern war in which killing increasingly existed “for the sake of killing.”

 

In time, the photograph would become the staple of war art, but not in the Civil War. America’s quintessential nineteenth-century democratic art form was the stone-engraved lithograph. Not surprisingly, the Civil War would mark a high point of lithographic art and probably extended its life for a decade.

When James Merritt Ives joined the shop of Nathaniel Currier, an American institution was born.
¹⁸
In all, the partners created more than seven thousand prints that sold in the “uncounted millions of copies”—at one point, 95 percent of all lithographs in circulation in the United States.

The nonverbal information contained in a lithographic print, when combined with verbal description underneath, created “news” about America at its most basic. With photojournalism still in the future, lithographs were the most important source of large-scale visual images in the mass media. They put images where before had been only names, places, and events described in words and disseminated through print. These images were not intended to be “art” in the formal sense of the term, nor were they designed to be literal or objectively “real” in the vein of the photography soon to come. Rather, they reflected what the consumers wanted to imagine about their democratic America and its citizens’ war.

In all, Currier & Ives produced more than two hundred lithographs of the Civil War that sold in the thousands. Later there would be a comparable market in Lincoln prints, especially after his assassination.
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Two qualities are especially striking about them. First is their preoccupation with heroic battle scenes. While the occasional camp scenes or cartoons appeared, the big battles predominated. Ordinary Northern Americans apparently wanted a war they could visualize. Second is the extent to which the lithographs avoided visualizing the war too graphically. People wanted imagined battles, and no one could create these better than lithographic artists, freed as they were from the facts to present poses and gallantry as they wished.

Consequently lithographs, no less than speech and print, avoided any sort of moral commentary on war, nor did they attempt to bare its violent soul. Civilian sufferers are never present in the pictures, nor is excessive brutality Instead, all is charging horses, fixed bayonets, and always, everywhere, battle flags and “Old Glory.” Where political cartoons could be vicious in their dehumanization of the enemy, Currier & Ives tended, in the historian Bryan LeBeau’s words, to avoid “the sordid realities of battle ... retaining the romance and glory of the war.” They were reluctant to dehumanize the Southerners, who would one day return as fellow citizens and, they hoped, as customers.

In a word, their art was comforting. Currier & Ives provided moral reassurance that Union sacrifices were for a righteous cause without demonizing the enemy.
²⁰
These prints portray plenty of emotion, especially a sort of sentimentalized loyalty to the cause, but they lack the passion of moral inquiry or anomie of war that might have derailed 100 percent support for the war effort, no matter where it led.

In many instances, lithographic prints were not only romantic but downright deceptive. Battles that turned out to be devastating losses for the North, like First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (really a draw), or Fredericksburg, emerge in prints as outstanding Federal victories. Triumphant Union soldiers were depicted overwhelming Confederate defenses, even as the reality of the battles pointed in the opposite direction.

In
The Battle of Mill Spring,
a bayonet charge is depicted with the caption: “Terrific bayonet charge of the 9th Ohio Volunteers and total defeat of the Rebel army under Gen. Zollicoffer.” In fact, there was a bayonet charge at Mill Springs, but General Zollicoffer was hardly a dominant presence. Badly nearsighted and disoriented, Zollicoffer mistook Federals for Confederates and rode right into their ranks, where they promptly shot him dead. Bayonet battles were rare in the Civil War, but the vast majority of battle lithographs figured swords and bayonets in close combat situations.
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They captured the war as seen from West Point manuals, not the war as it was actually fought.

With the public clamoring for visual images from the front, major American illustrators such as Alfred and William Waud, Edwin Forbes, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Nast journeyed to the front and sketched the battles around them. Teams of artists and craftsmen worked for the larger newspapers, as well as for illustrated weeklies such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
Harper’s
Weekly, the New York Illustrated News, and, in the Confederacy, Southern Punch and the Southern Illustrated News. With as many as fifty artists at the front, prints could be rendered within less than two weeks of their occurrence. As “action images,” the sketches were superior to photographs and presumed to be just as accurate.

Reality, of course, is in the eye of the perceiver, and what the images revealed was a reality the producers assumed their viewers wanted to see. In time, the public’s interest became more visceral and violent so that field artists grew increasingly realistic in their action sketches. But in the first year of the war, avoidance was the rule.

When sermons, newspapers, and public art and music are put together and examined for their critical perspective, a static picture emerges in an ever-changing dynamic war. Even as battles loomed ever greater and closer to noncombatants, the commentary remained fixed. It did not matter what the photographs showed as Americans sang their patriotic songs and clung to their romantic images. Love of country and irrational fascination with war’s glory brought reality and illusion together in deceptive ways. Commentators everywhere looked to an uncharted future without scruples.

I
n reflecting on those dark days of 1862, Lincoln later explained: “Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing... that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!”
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By Lincoln’s calculation, the killing must continue on ever grander scales. But for that to succeed the people must be persuaded to shed the blood without reservations. This, in turn, required a moral certitude that the killing was just. Only emancipation—Lincolns “last card”—would provide such certitude.
²
In so doing he counted on a rising tide of antislavery sentiment in the North, an even greater tide of hatred for the “enemy,” and a mounting desire to hurt the South where they would feel it most.

In April 1862 Lincoln had approved the joint resolution of Congress calling for gradual emancipation of the slaves by the states. At the same time, Congress passed a measure abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, with compensation to the owners. On June 19 Lincoln signed into law a measure prohibiting slavery in the territories of the United States, without compensation. But he could not keep up with a Republican-driven Congress that was hastening along an antislavery agenda of its own.