The Opening Battles (The Photographic History of the Civil War)

396 Pages·1957·55.196 MB·English

by  Francis Trevelyan Miller

$10.00
The Photographic
History of the Civil War
In Ten Volumes
Part One: The Opening Battles
When The Photogrciphic "••'" oj
the Civil War firstappeared in i,'l1 to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary
of that great conflict, it was hailed as a
unique pubhshing achievement. Col-
lectorsofAmericana,studentsofhistory.
Civil War enthusiasts, Americans in
every walk of life eagerly sought out
these vokmies so that, in time, they be-
came extremely scarce, obtainable only
from dealers in rare books. Now avail-
able in a popular edition, this ten-vol-
ume series is certain to elicit the same
warm praise that it enjoyed when it
first appeared.
The Civil War has the distinction of
being notonly thefirst and only totally
American war, but the first war in his-
tory to be extensively photographed.
This lastfactaloneaddsan unparalleled
dimension to accounts of this war. In-
deed, it was said of Mathew Brady, the
leading photographer of the period,
'Thecorrespondents oftheRebel news-
papers are sheer falsifiers; the corre-
spondents of the Northern journals are
not to be depended upon; and the cor-
respondents of the English press are
altogether worse than either; but Brady
never misrepresents." Never before in
history did historians and the public
generally have the stark reality of the
photographwithwhichtojudgethetrue
natureofwar.Andwhoin thesemodern
times can conceive ofa war without re-
membering the photographs one has
seen of it?
{Continued on back faij)
The Photographic History
of The Civil War
In Ten Volumes

PREPARING FOR WAR—A CONFEDERATE PHOTOGRAPH OF '61
ridaOpenstheGrimGameofWar. OnasandypointattheentrancetoPensacolaBayovertwohundredyearsago,theSpaniards
)solongheldpossessionofwhatisnowtheGulfcoastoftheUnitedStateshadbuiltafort. Onitssite theUnited StatesGov-
menthaderectedastrongfortiBcationcalledFortBarrancas. Betweenthispointandalow-lying sandyislanddirectlyopposite,
vesselsgoinguptoPensacolamustpass. OnthewesternendofthisislandwasthestronglybuiltFortPickens. Earlyin18B1
hfortswerepracticallyungarrisoned. Thisremarkablepicture,taken bythe NewOrleans photographerEdwards,in February,
1,belongstoaserieshithertounpublished. Outof thedeepshadowsof thesallyportwelookinto the glaringsunlight uponone
heearliestwarlikemoves. Hereweseeoneoftheheavypieces of ordnancethatwereintendedtodefendtheharborfromforeign
!,beingshiftedpreparatorytobeingmountedontherampartatFortBarrancas,which,sinceJanuary12th,hadbeeninpossessionof
tetroops. FortPickens,heldbyamerehandfulofmenunderLieutenantSlemmer,stillflewtheStarsandStripes. Butthemove
ItatetroopsunderordersfromGovernorPerryofFlorida,inseizingFortBarrancasandraisingtheStateflagevenbeforetheshotthat
usedthenationatFortSumter,maywellbesaidtohavehelpedforcethecrisisthatwasimpending.
"
The Photographic History
of The Civil War
The Opening
Battles
Francis Trevelyan Miller
Editor in Chief
Contributors
William H. Taft George Haven Putnam
President ofthe United Sutes Major,L'.S.V.
Henry Wysham Lanier Makcus J. Wright
Art Editor and Publisher Brigadier-General,C.S.A.
Eben Swijt Henry W. Ei^on
Lieutenant-Colonel,U.S.A. ProfessorofHistory, Ohio University
French E. Chadwick James Barnes
Rear-Admiral,U.S.N. Authorof"David G. Farragut
With a New Introduction by
HENRY STEELE COMMAGER
CASTLE BOOKS * NEW YORK
This Edition Published by Arrangement
With A. S. Barnes & Co., Inc.
The Special Contents ofthis Edition©(^96«
By Thomas Yoseloff, Inc. ^
Manufactured in theUnitedStatesofAmerica
—
INTRODUCTION
Writing half a century after the attack on P'ort Sumter, Francis Trevelyan Miller,editor
of the Photographic History of the Civil War, discovered a general lack of interest in that
war, and ascribed it, somewhat haphazardly, to the fact that "this is not a military nation."
We are still not a military nation, not in the sense of Germany or France, for example, but
no one now complains of any lack of interest in the Civil War. Indeed a passionate and
pervasive preoccupation with the Civil War is one of the arrestingintellectual phenomenaof
our time. Certainly no other war in which Americans have engaged, not the War of Inde-
pendence, not even tlie titanic World Wars, has made a stronger or more lasting impression
on the American mind and imagination. What explains this persistent and consuminginter-
est; what explains the Civil War Round Tables, Civil War book clubs. Civil War magazines,
the unearthingofscores of Civil Wardiaries andjournals,thevastoutpouringofbiographies
and monographs, the republication of such substantial works as Battles and Leaders of the
Civil War, and, now, the massive Photographic History?
Thereis,to besure,thecircumstance ofa Civil Warcentennial,but thatis largel}' adven-
titious. There was no centennial when Douglas Freeman publishedhis R. E. Lee, which, in
a sense, started the whole thing, and in any case we have by now survived so many cen-
tenary celebrations thatwe are hardenedto them. Otherconsiderations are more persuasive.
There is, for example, a livelier and more anxious interest in military history in general than
there was halfa century ago, and a realization thatthe CivilWar was the firstofthe modern
wars, and in many respects the most rewarding to study: the first war which involved the
whole population, the first to depend on railroads andthe telegraph,the firsttouse ironclads
on a large scale, or entrencliments, or balloons, or the repeating rifle. There is the some-
what nostalgic realization that this was not only an all-American war, but the last of them,
that it was a laboratory where we can analyze American conduct and character in more
unadulterated form than we can in our twentieth-century laboratories. There is a grow-
—ing appreciation ofwhat the Civil Warcontributed toouremotionaland sentimental heritage
our traditions, our songs and stories, above all our heroes: what other country has had
the good fortune to have both a Lincoln and a Lee to stir its imagination and to solicit its
sympathies in time of crisis? And there is, too, the very relevant consideration that the
CivilWarhas leftusa recordthatisabundant,and almostoverwhelming,onethatcanoccupy
our attention fora longtimetocome.
The CivilWarrecord is not only voluminous; it is authentic,itis intimate,it is universal,
and it is, to a most remarkable degree, eloquent. "Through our great good fortune," wrote
the thrice-wounded Oliver Wendell Holmes, "in our youth our hearts were touciied witli
fire. . . . We have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy
heights of honor, and it is for us tobear the report to those wiio come after us." And bear
the report they did. Almost everyone, it seems, contributed to the record. The great cap-
tains wrote, Grantand Sherman, Longstreet andGordon,andso,too,did the privates, bythe
hundred, for these were the most literate of armies. Surgeons wrote, and nurses, members
of the Christian Commission and of the Sanitary Commission, engineers and telegraphers,
scouts and spies, cabinet members and diplomats, all contributed their quota of recollection
and criticism and, as the years passed, of celebration. Poets wrote as they fought
Buchanan Read and Stedman and Lanier and John Banister Tabb and Henry Timrod and,
after a fashion, Walt Whitman; novelistscaught tlie drama of the war even as they marched
"' fought or languisiicd in prison; iiistorians, like Thomas Livermore or John Ropes or
Sntrobuction
Charles Francis Adams, did not await the end of the war before launching their interpreta-
tions. And there was one other group that contributed to the historical record as well, a
group whose contributions are only now coming to be recognized and appreciated: the
photographers.
For this was the first modern war in photography, as in other things. We have, to be
sure, a few daguerreotypes from the Mexican War. and a handful of photographs from the
Crimean, but it was with the American Civil War that photography came of age. Indeed, in
his 1911 forewordto this collection, Francis Miller proclaimedthe pious hopethat "whilethe
hand of the historian may falter, or his judgment may fail . . . the final record ofthe War is
told in these time-dimmed negatives." That is saying a good deal; we are not so sure of
finality, now,and we need not venture so sweepinga claim. Itis enoughthat this collection
of photographs provides us with a record of the Civil War more immediate, authentic, and
comprehensive than that for any other chapter of history that is not contemporary-.
Many things were new in the Civil War, but nothing was moredramatically new than the
photograph. Louis Daguerre had introduced the process which bears his name some twenty
years earlier, and at that time, too, the Englishmen William Henry Talbot and Sir John
Herschel had made their first tentative gestures toward modern photography. Not until tlie
fifties did the daguerreotype give way to the more manageable ambrotype, and then to paper
photography; the tintype and the card photograph, so familiar to the last generation, made
their appearance in 1860, and so, too, did aerial photography and the use of photographs by
the Patent Office and other government departments. So, as with the ironclads and the re-
peating rifle, photography was ready for the warjustin the nick oftime.
"Photography" is an abstraction; if the war was to be recorded it was necessary to have
photographers to record it. By great good fortune the photographers M'ere there, too.
Especially thegreatestofthemall: Mathew Brady.
Wliat—a remarkable man he was, this Bradj', a technician, an administrator, an artist, a
historian and a patriot, too. He had learned the rudiments of photography fromthe great
painter-inventor Samuel F. B. Morse who had visited Louis Daguerre in Paris and pro-
nounced the daguerreotype "one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age" and hurried
home to make his own. Brady had worked, too, with tlie English-born Professor .John Wil-
liam Draper of the University of the City of New York, one of the scientific geniuses of his
day, and a philosopher to boot. Draper had made tlie first photographic portraits ever
recorded by sun, as he liad made so many things, and like Brady he was to devote mucli of
his talents to the interpretation of the American Civil War. In 1844 the youthful Brady
openedhis own studioin New YorkCity, andwithin a yearhehadlaunched a projectwhich,
even by itself, would iiave insured him fame: a photographic gallery of distinguished Ameri-
cans. It is to his pioneering enterprise that we owe those wonderful photographs of Presi-
dents John Quincy Adams and Jackson and Polk, made just before they died, works of art,
all of them. Happily, Brady's notion of distinction was eclectic, and he photographed not
statesmen alonebut artists and teachers, lawyers and engineers,actresses and clergymen,and
foreign visitors as well. Our image of the fifties is largely a reflection on a Brady lens.
By 1860 Brady was successful and fashionable. His studios in New York and in Wash-
ington were crowded with eager patrons; he had won awards at the Crystal Palace Exhibi-
tion in 1851,andat a dozen others as well,andhe wasonthe waytobecomingan institution.
To be photographed by Brady was a justification for a visit to New York or Washington,
and almost a prerequisite to fame. From John Quincy Adams on,every ex-President, Presi-
dent, and Presidential candidate had been glad to pose for him, and with some prescience
Lincoln sat for him when he came on to talk at Cooper Union. Brady was almost forty
when the war broke out, and he might well have contented himself with the Washington
political scene and left to younger and more vigorous photographers the record of the war