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.13
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.”16
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:an unceremonious and vicious tactic that amounted to nothing more than murder... sharpshooting never affected the outcome of a major battle but instead only killed individual soldiers for no real gain ... when not performing an important [military] role, the sharpshooters would often kill not for tactical advantage but for the sake of killing.17
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.19 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.21 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.
PART IV JUSTIFICATION
THE EMANCIPATION WAR
OCTOBER 1862 TO MAY 1863
CHAPTER 18
“ALL WHO DIE FOR COUNTRY NOW, DIE ALSO FOR HUMANITY”
In 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!”1 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.
In July Congress enacted a new militia act, the Second Confiscation Act, expanding the legal basis for freeing slaves of all “disloyal” owners. The act effectively freed all fugitive slaves escaping to Union lines from their Confederate owners. The Militia Act, passed the same day, permitted the employment of blacks in any capacity “for which they may be found competent.”3 Northern soldiers saw in this act the potential to substantially build up their military might, even as Confederates lost theirs.
With some reservations, Lincoln signed both congressional acts.4 At the same time, he revealed his own ideas on the subject in a meeting with his cabinet. There, on July 22, Lincoln proposed a limited Emancipation Proclamation and read a preliminary draft to the gathering. Limited emancipation was a risky business, virtually certain to raise the stakes of war. It was a risk Lincoln was willing to take. After Lincoln had shared the draft with his cabinet, Secretary of State Seward urged him to wait for a military victory before announcing his policy. Otherwise it might look like a desperation measure to disguise losses on the battlefield.
Both Lincoln and Republicans in Congress realized that by their combined actions, they—the Federal government—were serving notice that the meaning of the war had changed dramatically. No longer would the war be fought just to preserve the Union, and certainly not the “Union as it was.” Henceforth, it would be a much bigger war—one that would reweave the South’s social fabric in a revolutionary way and ensure that postbellum America would be radically different from antebellum America. Both the North and the South would feel the tremors. The slaveholding class would exist no longer, and they would react strongly as they recognized that their very way of life was at issue. With tens of thousands of bodies already in the grave, they would most likely call for total war on all fronts—no matter what the consequences, no surrender. Lincoln was prepared to take this risk because he had already himself determined on a course of total war as the only solution to entrenched Confederate nationalism. In these terms, emancipation decisively furthered the draconian military course he had already set.
As ambiguous a “victory” as Antietam was, it sufficed for Lincoln. Indeed, he perceived it as a providential signal to act.5 On September 22, 1862, he announced his Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863. The message was brief and lacked Lincoln’s customary sense of literary style. But the substance said it all. After establishing the context for his proclamation “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,” Lincoln went on to declare, “that all persons held as slaves within said designated [rebellious] States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”6 With that proclamation, the war assumed a double significance for the North as a war for union and a war for freedom. For the South, the proclamation also confirmed a double significance: to protect a sovereign nation’s right to self-defense against an outside invader, and to protect that nation’s white population from slave insurrections and disloyalty
At the same time that Lincoln targeted the rebellious states for emancipation, he also called for congressional approval of gradual, compensated emancipation for slaveholders in the border states. If the border states could be convinced, it might even turn the Confederacy and end the war at a much cheaper price. To prepare the way, he met with a congressional delegation from the border states to persuade them of the wisdom of his plan. In that meeting, he pointed out that antislavery sentiment was growing so strong in the North that he doubted the institution would survive the war. Instead of losing all their value with a constitutional amendment and coerced emancipation, why not gradually free slaves over the next decades with compensation of $400 per slave? To those in the border states, and even more, the free states, who objected to the staggering costs of such compensation, Lincoln replied that it was far cheaper than war and coerced emancipation. Even more important, compensated emancipation saved lives that coerced emancipation wasted.
However logical the argument, Lincoln’s appeal fell on deaf ears. Two days after the meeting, twenty of the border-state congressmen formally rejected Lincoln’s proposal, and a minority of eight approved.7 Freedom for slaves would not appear on any slaveholder’s agenda until coerced by force of arms or law.
Despite its place in American memory as America’s abolition declaration, the Emancipation Proclamation was hardly an abolitionist document. Nor did it represent any change in Lincoln’s war aims (at least none that he could admit to publicly). But that did not stop either side in the conflict from effectively and intentionally misreading the proclamation as a new and revolutionary document. In that deliberate misreading, Northern abolitionists created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The proclamation reaffirmed Lincoln’s stated war purpose as the restoration of the Union and reaffirmed his int
ention still to strive for compensated emancipation. He reiterated that abolition was not a war aim of the North. If the Confederacy came back into the Union before January I, the proclamation provided that the institution of slavery might continue in those states. Yet, as the historian J. G. Randall shrewdly recognized, “[t]he truth of the matter was that the proclamation became a species of slogan or shibboleth; its dramatization in the popular mind was of more effect than its actual provisions.... [I]t came to be pretty generally assumed that in September of 1862 the war somehow took a new turn, and that thenceforward it was being prosecuted as a war against slavery”8
Whatever the popular interpretation, coercive universal emancipation was not what Lincoln intended by his proclamation. In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he reiterated his favored solution of a constitutional amendment implementing compensated emancipation through the issue of Federal bonds to be completed by 1900. This would be expensive, but less expensive than war: “The war requires large sums, and requires them at once. The aggregate sum necessary for compensated emancipation, of course, would be large. But it would require no ready cash; nor the bonds even, any faster than the emancipation progresses. This might not, and probably would not, close before the end of the thirty-seven years.” Left unsaid by Lincoln was the fact that in compensated emancipation, abolition would come gradually, not immediately.
Along with this proposal, Lincoln also took the occasion to reiterate his preference for voluntary colonization of freedmen: “I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.” As for Northern freedmen, “I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country, which is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious.”9
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 22
