CHAPTER 1

SARAH BURNS AND DANIEL GREENE

The Homeat War, theWar at Home

The Visual Culture ofthe Northern Home Front

Not long after the end of the Civil War, game manufacturer Milton Bradley issuedthe Myriopticon, a miniature toy panorama that unrolled the history of the "Rebellion"in some twenty-two colorful pictures copied from illustrations that hadappeared in Harper's Weekly magazine during wartime. The design of the foot-squarecardboard box mimicked a proscenium stage draped in patriotic bunting. Itcame with play tickets, a mock advertising poster, and a script for the narrator, tobe read aloud as he or she turned the cranks that scrolled from scene to scene. Theinstruction booklet recommended that the show take place in a darkened roomwith a candle to provide dramatic backlighting for the scenes as they glided by.

One young enthusiast wrote to tell Bradley that neighbors flocked to his houseto enjoy multiple repeat performances of the show. The child wanted Bradley tosell more of the devices, so "as to make it less crowded in our parlor." So vividlyauthentic were the tableaux that an older brother who had been in the war "says itis just as your game represents it to be." The Myriopticon embodied the very theaterof war itself, scaled down to a manageable size, commodified, and packagedas parlor entertainment. It stood witness to the ways in which the far-off conflicthad infiltrated and changed daily life—even after it was over. It is difficult to imaginea more evocative representation of the war at home.

Designed to replay the war over and over again, the Myriopticon enshrined andpreserved its remembrance, which has lived on to this day. One hundred and fiftyyears after it began, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the nationalcollective memory. Our cultural productions tend first to portray the war as abattle over the future of slavery, or to focus on Lincoln's determination to save theUnion, or on brother fighting against brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us aswell. Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapesstrewn with war dead. Both North and South experienced unprecedentedsuffering. Forces for both sides described the war as a "harvest of death." Yet manydepictions have neglected the war's influence on home fronts across the dividednation. Battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Soldiers werenot the only ones who suffered. Countless individuals, whether near to the battlelines or far from them, saw their daily lives altered by the war.

While scholars in American history and literature have studied many differentaspects of the Northern home front, art historians and museum curators have,with few exceptions, focused largely on the theater of war itself, as represented inmedia ranging from painting to photography and mass-circulated wood engravingsin popular magazines. Thus, powerful images such as Timothy O'Sullivan'sHarvest of Death—a raw, grisly, and shocking photograph of corpses strewn aboutthe Gettysburg battlefield—have become canonical and authoritative, as havepaintings such as Winslow Homer's 1866 Prisoners from the Front, a now classicrepresentation of Union triumph and Confederate defeat.

The fact that such images have acquired iconic status speaks to a nagging problemthat has provoked debate since the 1860s. Writing in the latter days of the war,New York critic Clarence Cook puzzled over the fact that the war had exerted sucha "very remote and trifling influence" on American art. Only a widely scatteredfew had pictured aspects of the conflict, but the "chief body" of American artistshad "gone on painting landscapes and genre pieces and portraits as if the old peacehad never been interrupted." Cook had no ready answer to this conundrum. In ourown era, art historians have attributed that seeming escapism or elision to a "crisis"that boiled over when mechanized modern warfare starkly defied the capacityof traditional history painting to represent it: high ideals, theatrical posing, andnoble self-sacrifice no longer seemed to fit the picture. While many artists whomCook failed to credit did paint the leaders and battles of the war, only the pitilessstare of the photograph or Winslow Homer's deadpan gaze seemed capable ofconfronting the antiheroic realities of a brutal conflict with what now strike us astruly modern eyes.

By contrast, Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals another side ofthe war. This volume, companion to the exhibition mounted jointly by the NewberryLibrary and the Terra Foundation for American Art, is the first to comprehensivelyexamine the visual culture of Civil War–era home fronts in the North. Itasks whether those artists on the home front—those who, as Cook saw it, simplywent on as before—sought only to avoid the awful truth by burying their heads inthe sand of landscapes far removed from battle, or if they yearned only to take nostalgicrefuge in scenes of ordinary American life that seemed to escape war's disruption.Avoidance of the war may have been the mode of some. But the war leftits mark on many others, whose consciousness of the prolonged crisis impelledthem to rethink and reshape conventional pictorial categories in ways that subtlyor not-so-subtly referenced the war's haunting presence on home fronts ruraland urban, far-flung and close by, domestic and institutional. Just as the war intertwinedwith political and economic networks, it did so with those of fine art andvisual culture more generally of the Northern home front. Thus, paintings andother depictions that at first glance appear to have little or nothing to do with thewar reveal on further inspection telltale traces of its shadow. Others allude to itoutright but in the process betray tensions and ambiguities that hint at the war'sheavy social and historical toll.

The essays collected here closely examine the mid-nineteenth-century Americanpaintings that form the core of the exhibition. However, we also go much further,embedding these works in a dynamic visual context that illuminates, amplifies,and complicates their meanings and connotations. Frederic Church's 1861painting Our Banner in the Sky, for example, is an allegorical landscape in which asmoldering red sunrise morphs into a dramatic vision of the American flag, wavingin tatters over a dark and desolate wilderness. The trunk of a leafless treeserves as flagstaff; directly above it, an eagle soars. Spurred by the Confederatebombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 that had torn the Union flag to shreds,Church painted Our Banner in the Sky to stir patriotic fervor at the moment of nationalrupture, the dawn of war. Scholars have singled out this work as a classic illustrationof the ways in which Hudson River school painters used nature as vehicleto communicate political, national, social, and religious messages in symbolicterms. Not surprisingly, Church's work also has figured in discussions of Americanpainters' attempts to address the crisis of the war in oblique and emblematiclanguage.

One critically important visual matrix for Our Banner in the Sky has largely escapedattention, however. The New York branch of the publishing firm Goupil& Co. bought the copyright and produced a lithograph after Church's painting.Although few copies now survive, Goupil's recorded profit of $1,500 as of August18, 1861—just four months after combat began—suggests that the print was extremelypopular. Church's visionary imagery did not stand alone: viewers wouldhave perceived it as a single coordinate in a visual landscape then so thoroughlyblanketed by the patriotic image of the flag that it amounted to an epidemic of"flag mania." Indeed, Goupil's rival, Sarony, Major, and Knapp, quickly issued OurHeaven-Born Banner after a painting by one William Bauly, who flagrantly parrotedChurch's flag and sky imagery, only replacing the bare tree with a Zouave sentrystanding at attention with bayoneted rifle aloft; under the colors of the blazingfirmament lies the stricken fort. Appended beneath the print were the first linesof Joseph Rodman Drake's "The American Flag," which declaimed the identicalvision in stirring lines of verse:

    When Freedom from her mountain height
    Unfurled her standard to the air,
    She tore the azure robe of night
    And set the stars of glory there.
    She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
    The milky baldrick of the skies,
    And striped its pure celestial white
    With streakings of the morning light.

In poetry and printmaking alike, conflating elevated landscape art with patrioticpassion brought the war into many a Northern parlor.

The phenomenon extended well beyond the world of prints. Flag propaganda,often showing a soldier brandishing the banner in triumph, proliferated in newspapers,magazines, and broadsides as well—the message always one of hope andultimate triumph even during the darkest days of the war. More ubiquitous stillwas the icon of the Union flag that adorned scores, perhaps hundreds, of sheetmusic covers with titles such as Unfurl the Glorious Banner or The Bonnie Flag withthe Stripes and Stars. To reckon with Our Banner in the Sky in such a context—asopposed, say, to that of a landscape-painting exhibition, or a book on Civil War-erapainting more generally—is to gain a different, richer understanding of its relevance,its immediacy, and its enormous appeal for the contemporary home-frontaudience in the North.

As with Church's painting, the conjunction of both elite and popular home-frontartifacts shapes both this book and the exhibition upon which it is based.Throughout, we juxtapose war-era paintings from the collection of the Terra Foundationwith a wealth of material drawn from the Newberry Library's collection,including popular prints, illustrated newspapers, photographs, maps, magazines,sheet music, fashion plates, letters, diaries, advertisements, and other ephemera.This approach not only enriches our interpretation of the individual objects, but italso generates a fresh understanding of the ways in which the war per se—largelyunseen here—so profoundly affected and infiltrated the lives of all who livedthrough it. With these pictorial and textual constellations, the essays take viewersbehind the scenes, into the backstage of the war's theater and its aftermath.Together, they offer a vivid portrayal of the ways in which ordinary Northernersdealt with crisis and calamity, and—ultimately—strove for healing and renewal.

Given that thousands of books and scores of exhibitions have focused on theCivil War, the published visual record is correspondingly vast. Yet by and large,painting and popular visual culture remain segregated in different registers. Forexample, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art, the magisterial 1993survey by Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely Jr., concentrates almost exclusively onpaintings that represent every aspect of the war: generals, heroes, battles, domesticlife, North and South. In The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North(2000), those same authors survey mass-market images—as the title alone makesmanifest. On that end of the visual spectrum as well is Alice Fahs's groundbreakingThe Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature North and South, 1861–1865 (2001),which reproduces an array of popular prints, illustrations, and cartoons, and remindsreaders that wartime visual culture did not evade but engaged with therealities of war. Fahs does not interpret these prints, illustrations, and cartoons asaesthetic objects in their own right, however, nor does she discuss contemporarypaintings. Civil War photography also occupies its own niche as a specialized subfieldin the literature, from Alan Trachtenberg's now-classic "Albums of War: OnReading Civil War Photographs," originally published in Representations (1985), toWilliam C. Davis's The Civil War in Photographs (2002).

This highly interdisciplinary book stands alone in assembling an array of materialson pictorial aspects of the Civil War rarely if ever studied or interpreted indialogue with each other. Seen together, they open a new window onto a worldfar removed from the horror of war and yet intimately bound to it. We explore theNorthern Civil War home front through a number of lenses to ask, for example,how did the war influence household economies and management? What was itsimpact on production and consumption at home? How did those on the homefront contribute to the war effort—or keep the war at bay? How did the absenceof young men from the home or the presence of wounded veterans in public alterdaily life? How did the war disrupt life on fronts remote from the centers of culturalproduction? Why were Indians on the frontier pushed out of nation's consciousnessduring the war years? What did wartime and immediate postwar depictionsof landscapes communicate about the nation's past, present, and future?And finally—and most fundamentally—to what extent did the war transform theways in which people lived, thought, and worked?

Art historian Peter John Brownlee's contribution traces the implications ofwartime cotton trade in the artworks and other visual materials that came torepresent it. Opening his essay with Samuel Colman's Ships Unloading, New York(fig. 11), Brownlee examines the complex visual culture that depicted cotton,slaves, and contraband to reference the radical social, political, and economictransformations at the heart of the conflict between North and South. Literaryscholar Scott Stevens's essay studies traumatic events on the frontier, the CivilWar's forgotten backcountry, where American Indians struggled to protect anddefend their own home front, increasingly a place of lawlessness and danger inthe face of land- hungry settlers. Using a rich array of illustrations, paintings, andphoto graphs—including Eugene Benson's Indian Attack (fig. 26)—Stevens tracesthe course the Dakota War and the New Mexico Campaign to reveal their disastrousconsequences for Indian peoples. In recounting and analyzing that violentand tragic history, Stevens restores the Indian Wars to their rightful place in nationalmemory of the period from 1861 to 1865.

On another front, historian Daniel Greene writes on Chicago's deep connectionsto the war, focusing on the flow of war-related goods, information, and reliefthrough the city. In particular, he examines the work of the US Sanitary Commissionin Chicago, highlighting the gendered dimensions of war relief and detailingthe crucial roles played by such figures as E. W. Blatchford, Mary Livermore, andJane Hoge, whose tireless travels from home front to battlefront and back underscorethe physical and emotional bonds that linked those far-distant zones of action.Art historian Sarah Burns also considers the gendered dimensions of thehome front during war in her analysis of Lilly Martin Spencer's The Home of theRed, White, and Blue (fig. 58), which celebrates but at the same time questionsthe agency of women in stitching together the tattered nation, symbolized by anAmerican flag that lies in two pieces on the ground. Weaving Spencer's work intoa constellation of related images, Burns discusses how visual culture responded toand represented women and their children—their lives, their work, their traumas,their activism, their patriotism—during and after the momentous war. Finally, arthistorian Diane Dillon explores the complex meanings of autumnal imagery onthe Northern home front during the final years of the conflict and its immediateaftermath. Dillon considers a group of paintings—landscape and still life—thatat first glance appear unrelated to the war. Her essay demonstrates that, despiteappearances to the contrary, these works incorporate layers of public and privatemeaning that yoke them to the war and illuminate, once again, the war's capacityto twist and subtly alter even the most idyllic of genres.