Story

Images of Disorder and Early Sorrow

AH article image

Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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February/March 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 2

Not long after the turn of this century, an enterprising man named Bender bought at auction some one hundred thousand glass negatives of Civil War scenes. He took them home, busily scrubbed off the fragile images for their silver, then peddled the clear plates to makers of gauges and meters—one of whom is reputed to have later cut up his share into eyepieces for the gas masks through which a new generation of American boys saw the fighting in France in 1918.

That story comes from the introduction to the first volume of The Image of War: 1861–1865, a recently completed six-volume compendium of almost 4000 Civil War photographs, edited by William C. Davis of the National Historical Society. It is a fine survey, culled over a ten-year period from more than one hundred thousand surviving pictures scattered among three hundred collections, supplemented by solid articles on campaigns and battles and individual cameramen, and marred only by some disappointing printing.

The editor does not claim to have compiled a pictorial history of the war, because, as he sensibly explains, no such book is possible. Although there were perhaps three thousand professional photographers at work in America in 1861, and an astonishing percentage of them recorded portraits or scenes having to do in some way with the war that moved over so much of the American landscape, a lot of the fighting took place in areas where no cameraman thought to go. And most of the photographers who did haul their heavy equipment into the field were interested less in history than in commerce: the idea was to make the pictures the boys in camp and their families back home would most like to see. There is still no known photograph of men in combat, though two pale, shaky views made during the siege of Charleston in the summer of 1863 by the fearless Southern photographer G. S. Cook come very close. Both are reproduced in Volume Four: one, taken from the parapet of Fort Moultrie, caught three distant Federal ironclads at the instant they began arcing their shells over the photographer’s head into the fort; the other, much retouched, includes a Federal shell-burst inside the pocked walls of Fort Sumter itself.

 

Leafing through the nearly 3000 pages of The Image of War, even someone who has seen a lot of Civil War pictures comes away with fresh impressions. I was struck first by the relentless grubbiness of much of everyday America in the 1860s. Through the unblinking lens, the biggest cities and most prosperous small towns look oddly seedy, their main streets scored with wagon ruts even when momentarily dry, the buildings that line them already stained and battered and often without shade, as if trees were embarrassing reminders of the wilderness our ancestors had labored to obliterate. And the men themselves, even the most important men—politicians, admirals, generals, photographed far behind the lines in