Walking the Berkshires

Unknown: A Local History Civil War Mystery

I came upon this grave marker recently in Cornwall Hollow Cemetery.  It caught my eye as a government issued headstone of the "Civil War" type, authorized in the 1870s for the graves of Union soldiers (and also was used for unmarked graves of veterans of earlier wars).  Given its low status position over at the very edge of the graveyard, I wondered whether it would prove to belong to a black soldier, for there were social and racial hierarchies even in New England graveyards and I often find veterans of the 29th Connecticut colored infantry in such places.  What I found instead has left me searching for explanations.

This weathered marble stone has no name or associated company and regiment.  It is inscribed simply  "Unknown U.S. Soldier".  If this private cemetery were near some battleground or a place that had seen the passage of armies, I would not have given it another thought.  But this is northwest Connecticut, hundreds of miles from the battlefields of the Civil War, and in a part of the state which has never seen a military engagement since its settlement. 

The presence of this artifact at this location raises many questions.  How did it come to be here?  Are there remains associated with the grave marker, and how were they associated with Cornwall, Connecticut?  The marker was provided at no cost for veterans by the government, but someone covered the expense of the plot, and if the soldier died far from Cornwall, also paid to transport the remains here.  

Graduate school taught me the value of testing the assumptions of every explanatory hypothesis.  The available evidence at the outset consists of the stone itself and the site where I found it, which is a matter both for the archeologist and the historian.  My initial inquiry in Cornwall has determined that neither the historical society nor the town clerk, nor the sexton have any knowledge of a written record beyond what is recorded on the stone, nor of how it came to be here.  So let us begin with the stone.

As the photograph at the top of the page illustrates, this marble headstone is discolored and weathered, consistent with other military grave markers of its time period.  It is of a "Civil War" type used for Union veteran's graves beginning in 1873, and authorized for use in private cemeteries in 1879.  This establishes the earliest date in which this artifact would have appeared at this site.  Such markers were in use until a significant design change after WWI.  This one has straight rather than curved sides coming to a point at the bottom of the sunken shield, which is the earliest variation on this design.  Although unmarked graves of U.S. veterans of from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Indian Campaigns and Spanish American War were furnished with this type of headstone, (Confederates got their own from the U.S. government in the early 20th century), this stone - because of its apparent age and the sheer number of soldiers involved - is most likely for an unknown Civil War soldier.

This is not the first design for grave markers of unknown U.S. soldiers, however.  According to this site"

"In 1873 Secretary of War William W. Belknap adopted the first design for stones to be erected in national cemeteries. For the unknown dead, the stone was a block of marble or durable stone six inches square, and 30 inches long. The top and four inches of the sides of the upper part were finished and the number of the grave cut on the top...The use of stone blocks for marking graves in national cemeteries was discontinued on October 21, 1903, and the graves were marked with the same design as those furnished for the known dead."

It is possible that this practice had already been followed in private cemeteries long before 1903, but I do not know how regular it was.  Two of the federal contractors for Union grave markers were located in the southern Berkshires in Stockbridge and Lenox, Massachusetts.  Quite possibly the stone was manufactured there.

Coincidentally, there is another Civil War connection between the little cemetery in Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut and Stockbridge,  Massachusetts.   Major General John Sedgwick came from here and is buried beneath a prominent monument in the Cornwall Hollow Cemetery, with another monument to his memory located across the road.  A branch of the Sedgwick family moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts from Cornwall, where his cousin Catherine Maria Sedgwick was prominent fiction writer.

That is about all that I can surmise about the stone itself.  There is also its position in the cemetery to consider, in a low status plot at the very edge of the graveyard.  This is not a public memorial, though it is a dutiful acknowledgment of the military service of an unknown soldier with a government headstone in a private cemetery.  I believe that while the stone itself may have been moved within the cemetery and probably replaced an earlier marker of some kind, there were indeed once unknown remains with which is is associated. 

How did an unknown U.S. soldier of this time period come to Cornwall?  It is hard to imagine a scenario where remains of an unknown soldier from the Civil War were at least partially identified such that they could be positively to assigned to a soldier from this particular rural community in Connecticut.  Cornwall Hollow is in the northeast corner of the town, but even if we consider Goshen, and Canaan/Falls Village as well it still seems implausible.  Remains that preserved evidence of a Corps badge colored by division, a regiment number and company letter would stand a good chance of being positively identified unless there were several candidates from the same company who came from the same place and died in the same place.

Blaikie Hines "Civil War Volunteer Sons of Connecticut" has a wealth of detail about the service and casualty figures for every Connecticut regiment and community.  The majority of the enlistments in this communities was in the :county regiment": the 2nd CT Heavy Artillery (40% of those credited to Cornwall, 34% of Canaan's soldiers, 53% from Goshen).  Yet even on their worst days of the war, such as Cold Harbor where the Heavy's took heavy casualties and remained under fire for days thereafter, the number of dead in these communities was very low.  Cornwall suffered 11 casualties on June 1st at Cold Harbor but only 1 battlefield death (another was wounded mortally).  Canaan lost just 2 at Cold Harbor and 2 at Antietam and the remainder were single fatalities.  Goshen lost 2 at Winchester.  At no time did these communities suffer multiple battlefield deaths from the same unit (or any combination of units) except at Cold Harbor where Goshen and Cornwall together lost three from the 2nd C.T.H.A.  This strongly suggests that there was not a situation where a group of men from the same communities died and became unknowns at the same place.

I also discount the likelihood that some private individual cared enough about unknowns (perhaps having lost but not recovered a loved one in the war) to pay for the transportation of the remains of an unknown to stand for them all and then bury at the edge of a private cemetery, procuring a government issue headstone somewhere along the way.

The only other explanation I can think of involves considerable conjecture.  It might have been that a Union veteran was passing through the area, alone, unknown in the community, and died here before he could leave.  This might have happened after mustering out - probably not as a deserter because he would have avoided drawing attention to himself identifiable as a soldier - or as an invalid separated from his friends.  He might have been buried "in a pauper's grave", and his original wooden marker replaced with government issue sometime thereafter.  It would have been a lonely end, and in that case someone did the decent thing and buried him with recognition of his service, if not his name.

I honestly do not know the answer.  But I find the possibilities fascinating.  Any readers willing to test my assumptions or offer other insights would be most welcome.

Postscript (November 6th, 2009): Remarkable what data may be lurking in Google books.  In a February, 1876 record of Congressional testimony regarding contracts to furnish soldier's headstones, I find that the contract for the original headstone blocks for unknown soldiers of the Civil War was awarded to one D.C. Sage, of Cornwall, Connecticut.  The unknown soldier grave marker in Cornwall Hollow was not one of Sage's blocks, but could have been a later replacement.

Locally Grown History Weekend

Lightning struck twice for me in October, as Facebook's personal marketing profile proved to be well calibrated to my interests, at least where local events are concerned.  Facebook's sidebar suggestion that I experience the new Walkway Over the Hudson sent me and my children on a grand adventure a week ago.  Then last Friday it picked up on my Revolutionary War interest and clued me in to a pair of terrific events in Torrington, not to mention a whole local history initiative in Western CT about which I had previously been unaware.  Score one for social media: it is still a long way from a decent batting average, but a nice example of what is possible.

Locally Grown History is aspparently in its second year, and an effort to showcase the extraordinary opportunities in our region to experience its history and cultural heritage and integrate these resources with what our children learn in schools, as well as what the public in general knows about our past.  Sponsored by the University of Connecticut in collaboration numerous groups and agencies, including the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Corridor, it is a wonderful local resource.  It seems to be doing for our heritage of regional history the same sort of thing that the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative that I direct is striving to achieve for regional conservation by aggregating the resources and talents of local conservation groups in the service of important land protection efforts.  I would commend any effort out of hand that tackled this objective for our history, but in addition to that the organizers of last weeks events produced a high quality forum on the Revolutionary History of Connecticut that was most welcome and very well received.

It began on Friday evening at UNCONN's Torrington campus (immediately after a Civil War Sesquicentennial event at the site of John Brown's birthplace) with a screening of Mary Silliman's War.  The movie was presented by historian Richard Buel, who produced the film and was the co-author of the book The Way of Duty on which it is based.  The opportunity to see this film was very timely for me, as that very day I noted that J.L. Bell at Boston 1775 discussed the paucity of historically accurate, watchable films about the American Revolution.  I can now confidently add Mary Silliman's War to that impoverished list.

This movie was not a big budget Hollywood film - and regrettably it will set you back $75 to purchase a DVD from the distributor - but they did wonders with the resources they had.   The acting, particularly by Nancy Palk in the title role, is quite compelling.  From an historiographical perspective it belongs in the a progressive tradition, viewing the war as a socially disruptive civil conflict on a human scale, more in keeping with My Brother Sam is Dead than Johnny Tremain.  Professor Buel shared his thoughts on the compromises that are made translating a book to film and conveying complex events and ideas in visually compelling ways. In one interesting aside, he mentioned that the officer leading the reenactors who represented the royalist forces who burned Fairfield objected to one scene of sexual violence saying; "The British did not rape", demonstrating a blind spot that is not borne out by any serious study of the subject and the historic record.  I've been reading Sharon Block's Rape & Sexual Power in Early America, so I feel fairly current in this regard.

I found it particularly well done regarding the values, attitudes and expectations (changing and immutable) that the characters had of themselves and for each other.  The film displays the Silliman household, with its children, servants and slaves, in a way that does not trivialize or over exploit power relationship and the effects on the family of the loss of the patriarch.  As an aside, my ancestor Ebenezer Olmsted of Ridgefield, CT fought in Silliman's regiment From June-December, 1776, and both of them were present at the Battle of Ridgefield during Tryon's Danbury Raid the following year.

It was a terrific set up for Sunday afternoon's Revolutionary War forum.  The keynote address was by Professor Robert Gross, author of The Minutemen and their World.  He spoke of  his experience of the marvelous diorama at Minuteman National Park of the fight at Concord Bridge that prompted his book.  As he gazed at the little figures, frozen under glass, he was struck at how this depiction of a highly symbolic moment in time placed both the event itself and the people of Concord out of context.  His subsequent research revealed that militant patriotism only took hold in Concord in 1774 with the revocation of the colonial charter, and it was this event, rather than taxes and tea, that threatened the local institutions that were already fraying in Concord.

There were a number of workshops offered following this address.  I participated in two: 

• Revolutionary Archaeology in Connecticut:  Dr. Nicolas Bellantoni, Connecticut State Archaeologist

• Children and the Revolution through Literature: Prof. Christopher Collier, University of Connecticut, former Connecticut State Historian and co-author of the Newberry award-winning My Brother Sam is Dead and other historical novels for young adults.

Each presenter had a unique style - Bellantoni's clear enthusiasm for his subject and Collier's thoughtful pedagogical engagement with each of the participants - and I learned new things from each.  I will be sure to follow the Rochambeau Trail through Connecticut and revisit Collier's novels at my earliest opportunity.  As I myself am writing a novel based in the Revolutionary era - albeit a counterfactual one - I was keenly interested in Collier's thoughts on how to stay true to the values and attitudes of his characters and their time while making them empathetic and approachable to modern readers.  He very kindly provided us with a number of free copies of the teaching aid he wrote for his historical novels for young adults entitled My Brother Sam and All That and there is much there about writing historical fiction as well as using it in the classroom that I am enjoying thinking about.

The last session was a round table of the topic of Religion and the Republic: Approaching a Central Theme in Connecticut History.  In keeping with the spirit of Locally Grown History, this was a collaborative effort, expertly woven together by Professor Andrew Walsh of Trinity College.  I have come to believe that the first Great Awakening, as much as any other causal factor of the Revolution, played a pervasive and dominant role in determining loyalties within communities and the direction of social, and therefore political life.  In an increasingly secular society, where we are either too partisan, polite, or politically constrained to thoughtfully discuss the history of religion in America and its influence on the growth and development of our Republic.  This is an area of study to which I need to give more thought.

I felt the afternoon, despite the dreary wintry mix outside, was a grand success, and look forward to becoming moire involved in future  Locally Grown History events.  This collaboration is a true regional asset.

Civil War Memorial in Stanford, NY

If you have occasion to travel through the Town of Stanford, NY on County Route 82, as I did yesterday, you might notice that in company with many northern towns and villages, it has its own Civil War memorial.  The monument does not dominate the Town square, nor preside over the community from atop a noble granite column. In fact, is is unique for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that despite the verdigris of its oxidized bronze, the memorial is not of great antiquity but a far more recent creation.  It certainly was not there when I grew up within the township.

In 1996, in fact, the Stanford Historical Society erected a statue commissioned from local artist Peter Wing to commemorate all of the Town's Civil War soldiers. The sculpture is quite unusual in that it depicts an actual person rather than a homogeneous representative soldier as was the practice with such monuments erected in the decades after the war.  The bronze statue depicts one native son in particular: Maj. Cornelius Nase Campell, one-time Town Moderator of Stanford and then 1st Surgeon in the 150th N.Y.S. Volunteer Infantry ("The Dutchess County Regiment").

This three year's regiment saw service in both theaters of the war, fighting with the 12th Corps at Gettysburg and then with the Army of the Cumberland in the redesignated 20th corps.  The sculpture of Maj. Campell wears the distinctive 5 pointed star of the 20th corps as a cap badge.  The 150th fought in the Atlanta campaign and marched as part of Sherman's Army through Georgia and the Carolina's, participating in the Grand Review in Washington before heading home in June of 1865, having lost 132 to deaths during its three years in service.

Peter Wing - himself a Viet Nam veteran - was able to consult this wartime image of Maj. Campell from the collection of the U.S. Army Military History Institute when sculpting his likeness.  His name is often recorded as "Campbell", with the notable exception of the dedication plaque on the Standford monument.

Maj. Campell is an intriguing choice for the subject of a late 20th century Civil War Memorial.  I would be very curious to know what was the impetus for the modern day residents of the Town of Stanford, only a small proportion of whom are likely to be descended from those veterans they chose to commemorate, to commission and erect this monument generally to those who served and specifically to Maj. Campell.  It may have been a happy chance that there was local talent available to create the bronze statue, for most 20th century memorials tend to emphasize names on plaques rather than images of soldiers.  In that sense, this memorial is a deliberate look back at an earlier aesthetic, yet it reflects the sensibilities of our era by depicting an actual person to stand for the whole.

In fact, most modern Civil War memorials are commissioned not for hometowns but for battlefields - those that will still accept them.  The motivations for erecting them may be genealogical, as with two monuments I observed at Perryville Kentucky paid for by the descendant of a particular confederate NCO who died on the field, or cultural, such as the relatively recent monument to the Irish Brigade at the Bloody Lane in Antietam.  When such monuments appear in our time, when no one's living memory encompasses the individuals and events they commemorate, it is worth considering what motivated these remembrances even as we acknowledge those they seek to honor.  

The Stanford memorial was dedicated even before the sculpture was created.  Freedom Square Park lies below the public school on the other side of a rail fence near Rte 82, and this memorial is its principal monument.  The quotation on the plaque at the base of the pedestal is from another native son of Stanford - Talmadge Wood, who died of wounds received at Gettysburg.  Clearly the Historical Society had access to material like this that enabled the Town to personalize its memorial and make direct links between our time and second hand memory of the past.

I grew up in an isolated corner of the Town of Stanford, although I was in both a different school district and a different postal district than the rest of the Township.  I remember celebrating the Bicentennial in Stanford, though, right where the monument now stands and still have the souvenir wooden nickel from the festivities.  I wish I had still been around in the mid 1990s when this statue was commissioned and the memorial was dedicated.  Now that my curiosity has been peaked, I will have to pay a visit to the Historical Society and see what else i can learn about this role of Civil War Memory in my old hometown.

Must See: Becker Collection of Civil War Era Drawings on Exhibit in Boston.

The Boston Globe calls it "a revelation...the most engrossing exhibition in Boston so far this fall."  First Hand: Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection opened at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art last month and runs until December 13th.  Anyone with even a passing interest in the nineteenth century reporter illustrators who covered the American Civil War should find this utterly fascinating.  The Becker Collection contains nearly 700 drawings from artists in the field that have never before been published, and which were often changed in the engraving process .  I wrote about this collection a few months ago and look forward to seeing the exhibit before it closes.  At Boston.com, you can watch a clip of my cousin's cousin Sheila Gallagher, co-curator of the collection, showing off some of her ancestor Joseph Becker's collection at the exhibit. 

If you can get to Boston by then, this would be well worth seeing.  Kevin Levin, here is your excuse to come north before the end of the school term!  Let me know if you can swing it and I'll join you.

When the Terms of Victory Ensure a Lost Cause

I left the following in the comments of Kevin Levin's blog Civil War Memory, in response to a discussion about the Wal-Mart / Wilderness controversy:

Historic landscapes are increasingly rare in the intensively developed Eastern corridor of the United States. Just as habitat fragmentation reduces biodiversity, battlefield fragmentation eliminates some of its potential to inform and affect visitors and community identity. Rarely can land protection efforts realize the full conservation potential of a significant landscape, either as habitat or for its historic value. Where such opportunities still exist, it may well be a top conservation priority to invest all the time, treasure and creativity at society’s disposal to ensure that these landscapes maintain their full integrity.

How many American battlefields still have this potential? Antietam? Gettysburg? Saratoga? Not many more. And sadly, not the Wilderness.

Many, many other battle sites have not been isolated in time, where historic viewsheds can be maintained and the surrounding community becomes identified, for better or worse, by a signature event that occurred there long before living memory. If you want to interpret the site of Bunker Hill, you must contend with a obelisk in the midst of the Charlestown that rose from the ashes and a community whose residents have other sources of self and community identity. For some of us today, this is a regrettable loss,but for the generations who came after the Revolution, the monument was a fitting memorial and the idea that valuable real estate would be locked up in the interest of preservation would have made little sense.

There are many different values at play in situations like this. One thing I have learned in my years in the land protection business is that community support is vital if you want to conserve significant amounts of land, and there is no better way to derail a well-intentioned preservation effort then to let it become characterized as an imposition by outsiders – or worse, by Government – that values a rare species over the needs of local people, public land over private property, or the memory of something that happened long ago over the perceived needs of those who live there today. It may be a false dichotomy, but it can be lethal for conservation.

Places like the Wilderness are without a doubt under intense development pressure. It goes against our instincts to accept the loss of another irreplaceable acre of land with historic significance. Yet those terms of victory will ensure a lost cause.

On the other hand, there are many examples across this country, even in places typically thought of as intensely conservative and staunchly in favor of private property rights, where it is a condition of development permitting that lost wetlands and habitat be mitigated by the restoration or conservation of an equivalent amount at another location. What if Wal-Mart, as a condition of the permitting it received, had purchased for preservation another area of the Battlefield, perhaps with even greater significance? This would not have addressed all the impacts of development – traffic, for instance – but it could have been a creative solution and provided an outcome other than the zero sum game.

It would only be possible if those granting the permits, those working for preservation, those concerned about economic development, and the developers themselves were willing to work toward such an outcome. Sometimes, giving an inch is an unacceptable concession. Far more frequently, it can result in a negotiated compromise that provides benefits for more than just one side. This is a hard lesson, but one we need to grapple with before the next crisis that threatens the special places we value.

Really Bad History Movies

There are plenty of instances where anachronisms creep into historical films, or screenplays play a bit fast and loose with the facts for the sake of a good story.  The massacre of Colonel Munro's column by Indians in the woods beyond Fort William Henry made for stirring drama in the most recent version of The Last of the Mohicans, even if it didn't happen quite that way in 1757. 

We are not concerned about the occasional wristwatch on a Viking or a misplaced chronology here or there.  Even films that scrupulously strive for historical accuracy can slip up from time to time.  No, what this post intends to expose to much deserved scorn are other sorts of movie altogether - the counter-factual "docudrama" with pretensions to truth, and the faux historical epic with hardly a minute of actual fact in an otherwise sloppy sea of melodrama.

The difference between the two may be a matter of sins of commission and sins of omission.  Ollie Stone's JFK and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation are both slickly produced revisionist fantasies masquerading as history, as sumptuous and seductive as propaganda as they are devoid of historic merit.  Much can be learned from both, but not what the directors intended.  These films tell us a great deal about the political sensibilities of their creators and their times, but far less about the actual events they purport to depict.

The wall of shame would need to be long, indeed, to account for the many travesties passed off on film as history, though in fairness it must be said that Hollywood gets much of it right far more often than not.  I am loathe to suggest a "top ten" list for the very worst, but the following films should be avoided by any seeking to learn something of the history they make such hash of for our entertainment:

-  Pearl Harbor:  I am told that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and indeed this happens in the movie.  The rest is absolute rubbish as far as history goes.  One gets the impression that the producers figured if James Cameron could get audiences to believe in Leonardo and Kate's characters, Ben Afleck ought to be able to get them swooning past a movie so cavalier with history that it, too, will live in infamy.

- The Patriot:  Amazingly, the loyal farm workers on the plantation were all freemen!  Nosiree, no slaves in the revolutionary South (they were all off fighting for their freedom with the British, presumably).  Apparently you can't have a redcoat in green, even if Tarleton's (oh, right, Tavington's) Legion were green coated loyalists, but you can have Abraham Lincoln's face on a greenback that Gibson's character passes off on a shopkeeper.  About the only things that are accurate in this movie are the flintlock pistols fired at the gallop - and they shouldn't be!

- Braveheart: The noble Lowland Scot recast as a dyed-in-the-woad Highlander who raises an army of mullet headed savages, this movie is among the least deserving ever to win the best picture Oscar.  Biggest howler: William Wallace impregnates the future queen of England, even though the real Isabella of France was 2 years old at the time.  About right for a Mel Gibson movie, however.  The man makes Tom Cruise look completely rational.

- Gods and Generals: A Lost Cause fantasy with an army of overfed, middle aged actors and reenactors that is utterly unwatchable and grinds on for an interminable three hours and thirty-nine minutes, or so I am told because I switched it off long before the end. Ted Turner blows $60 million financing this fiasco of clean limbed, mawkish sentimentality.

- Revolution: I am certain Al Pacino wishes this film would vanish from his filmography.  I swear, it would have been  better history if they had included legions of zombies, and certainly more entertaining.  The final confrontation amid the towering cliffs of Yorktown bears no resemblance whatsoever to tidewater, Virginia, but by they you are passed caring.  Donald Sutherland was in this film and in Kelly's Heroes, which is the more historically accurate movie.  But then, so is Hogan's Heroes.

- Every film ever made about Robin Hood, but especially the most recent BBC series, with Guy of Gisborne wearing what looks like a Drizabone Aussie raincoat, Maid Marion moonlighting as The Green Arrow, and a female Saracen garbed as one of the lads among Robin's handful of Merry Men.  Modern dialog and moralizing about how muslims and christians need to understand each other better must have Mallory turning in his grave.  They killed off Marion in Season II, but Robin has a new wench in Season III, and Holy Shogun, Batman, she fights with a Katana!  Look for Richard the Lion Heart to come riding back on a mastodon.

I am sure you can suggest some other candidates for the pillory.

The Becker Collection of Civil War Sketches

The American Civil War has been a strong historical interest of mine since I was nine, and while my study has broadened to other time periods, it is still the period in our country's history that I know the best.  So many iconic images were produced during that time: particularly photographs, but also engravings of artist scetches published in the newspapers and journals of the day.  It is unusual for me to come across images from the Civil War that I haven't seen before, or which brings a fresh perspective on these well chronicled events, but recently I was alerted to an extraordinary collection in the holdings of Boston College that does both.

Sheila Gallagher, an Associate Professor at BC and a longtime friend from down the beach at Wareham, also has the priviledge of curating a collection of artist sketches made by her great, great grandfather Joseph Becker and his colleagues for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper.  Sheila is Co-Director of The Becker Collection, which includes 650 largely unpublished drawings by these artist reporters that covers an extraordinary scope of subjects over a broad geographic range and timeframe.  

The Collection's website includes this biography of Becker:

"Becker’s career at Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. Hired by Frank Leslie as an errand boy at the age of eighteen in 1859, he retired in 1900 after supervising the art department for the last quarter of the century. At 22, he was sent as an artist–reporter to cover the Civil War, and he traveled with the Union Army recording scenes of daily military life as well as the preparation and action of battle. After the war, he traveled throughout the West to draw images for the series “Across the Continent.” It included such diverse subjects as the western landscape, Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, and Mormons in Utah. His drawings possess a liveliness and immediacy rarely achieved in contemporary photography and a wealth of information previously unavailable.

However, Becker did not work alone. Frank Leslie sent numerous artists to see and record the facts of the American experience: J.F.E. Hillen, Henri Lovie, Edwin Forbes, Frederic B. Schell, Francis H. Schell, Edward Hall, James E. Taylor, Andrew McCallum, C.E.H. Bonwill, William T. Crane, Arthur Lumley, E.F. Mullen, and others. They all sent drawings back to New York where editors selected images that fit stories, and other artists traced and altered the original work. Most of the drawings never appeared in print. As supervisor of the art department, Becker saved the discarded drawings."

He did a tremendous service by doing so, and Sheila and her colleagues have done us another by conserving and documenting this collection and making it searchable on-line.   There are sketches from seventeen states and the District of Columbia, and notably several among those depicting African Americans that manage to transend caricature and show them as part of the fabric of the events.  An excellent example can be found here in a sketch entitled "Dedication of a Monument to the memory of the New Hampshire Regiment in the battle of Winchester", recording a ceremony that took place the day after Lee's Surrender at Appomatox.  The details in the forground are sharper than the orator standing at the monument, or the hollow shell of the war damaged building in the background.  The onlookers include men and women, soldiers and civilians, and a number of African Americans dressed in their best clothes.  It rings true, right down to the small dog which alone turns its face fully to the viewer.  It also puts those relegated to the back in the forefront.

I highly recommend taking some time to explore The Becker Collection on-line, and look forward to seeing it in exhibition in the near future. 

Caption This! Reconstructionist Edition

This image from a University of Iowa collection of political photos is rather unimaginatively captioned:

"Tableau representing Confederate and Union reconciliation to free Cuba - Spanish American War"

I am confident that you, dear readers, can do far better than that!

 

Damn Yankees and Civil War Art

"Confederate stuff sells", observes Cenantua's Blog in a fascinating discussion of the Civil War military art market today.  It then then goes on to ask;

"Is there any art focused on Union military leaders and their softer side? If so, what? If not, why? Is there anything really wrong with creating military art that shows scenes that feature things other than combat? Would art showing Union leaders in similar situations actually sell?"

Well that is interesting.  There do appear to be disproportionately more Confederate reenactors taking part in living history than those depicting Union soldiers.  The sight of the US flag of 1861 leaves no impression on a modern viewer whatsoever, but the Confederate battle flag is among the most recognized, controversial, and marketable symbols of that, or indeed any era in American history.

But during the war itself, and for a number of decades afterward, there was quite an appetite (in the North, at any rate) for patriotic art steeped in Victorian sentimentality and featuring the northern soldier.  Consider this Kurz and Alison lithograph of a very stylized battle of Antietam, published in Chicago in 1888.  Kurz and Allison churned out reams of this stuff, covering a wide range of events and including those that were fought by colored troops (with their gallant white officers) or were notable Union losses (though depicting the action before the boys in blue had broken).  Little attempt was made at realism - after all, no one wanted to hang one of Alexander Gardner's photographs of battlefield corpses in the front parlour.  The public clearly had an interest in the romantizied artwork, however, and it made Kurz and Allison boththe Currier & Ives and the Mort Künstler of  their era.

In the early 20th century, the Brandywine School of American illustrators tackled Civil War subjects from time to time.  Howard Pyle created the artwork for many stories in Harper's Weekly set during the Civil War.  They featured dramatic clashes of arms of the "brother against brother" variety, as well as some iconic Lost Cause portraits that would be very recognizable in today's Civil War art market.  His protege N.C. Wyeth created illustrations with a signature, dreamlike quality, though  the image of Billy Sherman, at right, is more the stuff of nighmare.

In popular imagination, images of the North are steeped in mechanization, modernity, and, as embodied by Grant, Sherman and their ilk, a ruthless determinination to pay any price to crush the rebellion.  They play the Roundheads to J.E.B. Stuart's Cavaliers.  They are the descendants of the Federalists bringing the fractious parts of the country into line.  It is a decidedly unromantic view of government and unity, and one that is clearly out of synch with the independant streak in the American character.   Unless you like Yankee pinstripes, most of us root for the underdog over the over powerful juggernaut (though as a Red Sox fan in these heady times of successful championships, I may no longer be in that category).

You see the same thing, incidently, in French and Indian war reenactments, with every 2nd unit, it seems, depicting independant companies of rangers rather than the powdered regulars of the Crown.  We like to think of ourselves as rebels, rather than just working for the Man.  Even, I daresay, when the idols of our affection are slave holding aristocrats.  A classic image that juxtoposes lost cause gentility with something that looks very much like northern deference is the 1920 painting "Let Us Have Peace" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.  One unfamiliar with the historical event of Appomatox might be forgiven after viewing this work if he or she remained uncertain as to just who was surrendering to whom.  The image of Washington on the wall is particularly striking, bookending the shabby Grant with the two most famous Virginians.

We do not venerate Northern leaders, aside from Lincoln, as so many do the vanguished Sons of the South.  Lincoln stands alone, and for all.  He takes on the sins of a guilty nation in martyrdom so that "that nation might live."  N.C. Wyeth manages to capture both extremes of the northern character in popular imagination in his portrait of Lincoln the westerner, with the storm clouds roiling above him, and the three carpetbackers at right.

Among the military artists working today, there is a cadre that prizes historical accuracy in minute detail.  Formost of these are Don Troiani and Keith Rocco, who go to great lengths to place their subjects in scrupulously researched and rendered settings, with kepis creased just so and every uniform button and acoutrement true to the unit in question.  Both artists also have a flair for the dramatic, and at their best manage to capture some of the swirling chaos of 19th century combat.  They do not steep their battlefields in gore, which would not serve their artisitic purposes.  Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory has taken up this subject on a number of occassions, and notes:

"In the end I think these prints are more about us than they are about the subjects they depict. The intention is to engender in us a certain emotion, which may or may not have any connection with history...Our primary interest is to be entertained by the war; in this regard I include myself. The art minimizes the horror of war, including the battlefield scenes painted by Troiani which hang on my office walls. We don’t really want to be reminded of the extent of the suffering that took place on and off the battlefield or the carnage that was left in its wake."

The idea that southern soldiers were somehow more pious and christian than their northern counterparts is a another popular misconception reenforced by some Confederate themed military art.  The 1860s were a time of fervent religious revival, and the North because of its diversity of national origins represented many faiths and denominations.  National days of prayer and Thanksgiving reflected a religious tradition with origins in the fast days of Puritan New England, but this theme of Yankee godliness is seldom expressed in today's Civil War art, with the notable exception of Don Troiani's painting of an Irish Brigade chaplain blessing the advancing Sons of Erin before the Sunken Road at Antietam.  The "Wild Geese", though, are themselves archetypical underdogs and rebels, and Irish nationalism, as Hollywood knows full well, is popular with American audiences.

There are many reasons why someone might wish to purchase and display modern renditions of Civil War subjects.  I collect toy soldiers from this period, for goodness sake, and am in no position to tell collectors what to like.  I do find it interesting, however, that "Confederate stuff sells", and am in agreement with Kevin here that such artwork, produced for modern consumers, has more to say about us and what shapes our memories of the past than about the subjects they depict.  

Massachusetts Main Streets and Backs Roads Has One of My Stories

Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads ,a quarterly publication from the same folks behind Vermont Quarterly hits the newstands this month with its first edition.  The Magazine covers the history and lore, food and entertainment of Western Massachusetts, and I was approached to contribute a story on Berkshire history.  The Spring 2009 edition features a two page article of mine entitled "Berkshire's Big Dig" about the Hoosac Tunnel, an engineering marvel in the northern reaches of the county.  Along the way,  Readers of this Blog will not be surprised to discover, I manage to incorporate a good does of natural history, a reference to the "Great Road" through a "hideous howling wilderness", and a picture of a Civil War General on a one-man pontoon boat.

When there is an on-line link to the piece, I'll be sure to steer you to it.  If you live in the region, keep your eye out for a copy.  I'm on track to write recurring features for this magazine, and am starting to think up an appropriate topic for the summer edition (ideas welcome).