Photographic history of the Civil War (bevezetés)
WILLIAM C. DAVIS
THE ORIGINS of the Civil War Times Illustrated Photographic History of the Civil War are just about as obscure and unlikely as they could be. At their remotest distance, they date from 1960 in a cramped two-bedroom bungalow in Sebastopol, California, in the heart of the redwood and wine country. Not exactly a place one associates with the Civil War.
But there I was, aged almost fourteen, having read perhaps two books on the "late unpleasantness," and vaguely aware that I found the general subject interesting. Then I saw an advertisement in the now long-defunct True Magazine. It was for a book titled Campfire and Battlefield of the Civil War, and emphasized that the volume included almost 1,000 photographs from the conflict. In fact, though the ad did not botherto say so, it was a reprint of one of the very first Civil War photographic books, put together by Rossiter Johnson and first published around the turn of the century when the development of the halftone printing process made it practical to reproduce photographs in books and magazines.
To a typical fourteen-year-old—meaning one with no job and no money—the terms were alluring. The book cost $15.00 plus postage and handling, could be ordered on approval with no money down, and paid for in four installments of $3.95 each. Remember, this is 1960, and begging even $3.95 a month from financially hard-pressed parents was no easy feat. As I recall, I ordered the book unilaterally, trusting that I would find the money somewhere later on.
When the book arrived I experienced something like unto an epiphany. Day after day I poured over the book. I never read the text then or later. To this day I have not read it, nor would I advise anyone else to do so, for intervening years of experience have taught me how unreliable was most of the material being written at that time.
But the photographs transfixed me. The reproduction was awful. Even the originals were not too clear, for halftone printing was still fairly primitive when Campfire and Battlefield first appeared. The reprint I bought was merely photographed from an original copy, and with little care given to quality. Nevertheless, it was what was in the photos, and not their quality, that seized me. Here were the actual faces and figures of the men and women of the Civil War, their weapons, their homes, their forts and railroads. These were not just stilted paintings or the crude woodcuts of the time, but the faces of the Civil War exactly as they appeared to each other.
I treasured that book, and have it still. It was the very first Civil War book I ever bought (eventually someone made those $3.95 payments, though I cannot remember who). More to the point, it inaugurated a fascination with the photographic record of the conflict that has lasted to this day, and that along the way has produced some of the most exhilarating moments of my life, and with them these new volumes of the Civil War Times Illustrated Photographic History of the Civil War.
No one is interested in the life stories of historians, and wisely, I might add, so I will skip the next eighteen years and pick up the story in 1978. Through a series of accidents, fortuitous circumstances, and only occasional design, by then I was editor of Civil War Times Illustrated, the nation's largest and leading magazine devoted to the conflict, and living in central Pennsylvania where it was published. One of the happiest aspects of editing that magazine was that almost every week, thanks to its wide circulation and reputation, the magazine's editorial offices received letters out of the blue regarding new discoveries in Civil War photography. Collectors sent in copies of the treasures they uncovered in flea markets and antique stores. Dusty attics disgorged long hidden images of the great and small. And in the course of researching illustrations for articles, our editors and art director constantly found overlooked rarities in public archives.
With no particular object in mind, I filed all of this in the back of my mind along with all the rest of the clutter that a historian carries around. Then in 1978 the thunderbolt struck. At nearby Carlisle sat the United States Army Military History Institute, the Army's chief repository of books and documents. In that year the Institute received an incredible bequest. A defunct Civil War veterans organization, the Massachusetts commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, seeking a secure home for its fabulous collections of documents and artifacts before they were vandalized into oblivion, turned most of the material over to the Army. Among the donations were some photographs.
About 40,000 to be exact! The Massachusetts MOLLUS commandery—the acronym by which the group was known—had accumulated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century the greatest collection of Civil War photographs in existence, yet for years it had been virtually unknown outside the MOLLUS membership. Even the people at Civil War Times Illustrated, which by then had been publishing for almost two decades, had never heard of the collection. I'll never forget the day the 100 and more leather-bound volumes arrived at the Institute. Colonel George Pappas, then director of the Institute, piled them on a metal trolley and wheeled load after load into the archives room, where I and a couple of other expectant Institute staff attacked them greedily. Almost every page yielded something new, something never-before-published. Here were portraits of generals we had never known to exist, regiment after regiment standing at attention for the camera, nurses at work in the hospitals, even photos of the photographers themselves at work. The magnitude of the collection was staggering, dwarfing by several multiples the largest known holdings of the time.
As near as I can recall, that same evening, stunned by what I had seen, I lay awake most of the night turning over in my mind just what could be done with that collection. It was out of that sleepless night, whose own roots went all the way back to a fire lit in 1960, that the Civil War Times Illustrated Photographic History of the Civil War eventually emerged.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
