Emerging Civil War

This is the second of two posts regarding the relationship between Union soldiers and the emerging illustrated press during the Civil War. Part 1 may be found here.

Soldiers were evidently grateful to receive the illustrated weeklies. Albert O. Marshall of the 33^rd Illinois noted the receipt of a “neat box… full of Harper’s and other good and instructive magazines” from the Rockford Female Seminary. The act was described as “true, unassuming kindness… [which] will always be remembered.”[i] Whilst in camp at Whites Ford, Maryland, William Wirt Henry, an officer in the 10^th Vermont Infantry, told his wife Mary Jane to ask “King Brown [that] if he has any old pictoral papers… he might put them in to fill the box.” He noted: “we always turn over all the papers and Magazines we officers buy, after reading them to the sick boys in the Hospital, and they are very thankful for them.”[ii] The pictures allowed soldiers to better comprehend and represent their circumstances, providing them a lens through which to observe events otherwise invisible to them.

In recanting their experiences to the home-circle, the pictorial papers provided a visual accompaniment to their textual accounts. Franz Wilhelm von Schilling of the 3^rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery wrote to a friend of the innovative “revolving tower[s]” being utilised in naval combat in the war. He accompanied the letter with a personal sketch based upon an image from “an illustrated newspaper showing these vessels in fight against Charlestown and Fort Sumter.”[iii] In 1863, from Morris Island, South Carolina, Alvin Coe Voris wrote of the sight of Fort Sumter. Confident that his wife had been familiar with the images reproduced in the newspapers, he wrote “Sumter looks like a vast pile of ruins – not unlike the views given in the illustrated papers.”[iv] Others applauded the sketch artists for their illustrations in their letters home, George Oscar French wrote to his friends at home in June 1864: Continue reading →