The Civil War and Pop Culture: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians of Emerging Civil War

By Chris Mackowski

The American Civil War left indelible marks on America’s imagination, collectively and as individuals.

In the century and a half since the war, musicians have written songs, writers have crafted histories and literature, and filmmakers recreated scenes from the battlefield. Beyond popular media, the battle rages on during sporting events where Civil War-inspired mascots carry on old traditions. The war erupts on tabletops and computer screens as gamers fight the old fights. Elsewhere, men and women dress in uniforms and home-spun clothes to don the mantel of people long gone.

Central to “history” is the idea of “story.” Civil War history remains full of stories. They inspire us, they inform us, they educate us, they entertain us. We all have our favorite books, movies, and songs. We all marvel at the spectacle of a reenactment—and flinch with startled delight when the cannons fire.

But those stories can fool us, too. Entertainments can seduce us into forgetting the actual history in favor of a more romanticized version or whitewashed memory.

The Civil War and Pop Culture: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War explores some of the ways people have imagined and re-imaged the war, at the tension between history and art, and how those visions have left lasting marks on American culture. This collection of essays brings together the best scholarship from Emerging Civil War’s blog, symposia, and podcast—all of it revised and updated—coupled with original piece, designed to shed new light and insight on some of the most entertaining, nostalgic, and evocative connections we have to the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781611216363

Book preview

by Garry Adelman

A young man learns that a train has derailed near his office. He thinks he can be first on the scene with a camera to document the fresh destruction. With a friend in tow, he arrives at the site and shoots some photos. He selects his favorite image—one in which he appears, standing stoically. He perfects the view, provides a snappy caption, and shares it. Before long, thousands of people have seen the image.

Perhaps you picture a shaggy-haired hipster toting his smartphone to see a CSX freight disaster, but the above fictitious scenario depicts the Civil War era. Although taking a photograph was considerably more laborious, the steps toward 1860s photo virality were very much the same as today’s— create, manipulate, caption, share. With easy access to digital scans of thousands of rights-free photos and the technology to cast them about with ease, it’s no surprise that Civil War photography has gone viral again . . . this time in the forms of memes, videos, closely cropped photos and then and now pairs, comparing the site over time.

The original glass plate negatives (top) on which most Civil War documentary photos were taken could be printed and mounted (bottom left) with descriptive captions on the back, designed to sell the photo (bottom right). Library of Congress

Images of the past represent an opportune confluence of history, place, and people who, upon inspection, act very much like people of today. Grabbing attention in modern mainstream culture is difficult, but historic photos have an especially simple on-ramp—Civil War photos are as easily grasped, at least on the surface, as Instagram images. When viewers dig a bit deeper, they find that the people of the past were not only like us but managed to be ahead of us in several ways. Even as the broader Civil War subject is as controversial as it has been in decades, enthusiasm surrounding one of its most fundamental primary sources—the photographs—resurges.

A New App

Photographs have been viral ever since photography was successfully demonstrated in 1839. Inventor Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotypes were positive photographs on copper plates. But daguerreotypes, as electrifying as they were to mankind, were one of a kind, like a Polaroid photograph, which almost eliminated any level of distribution. To produce a duplicate photograph, a photographer had to take a photo of the original. Tintypes— positives on a thin piece of iron—were the same, except far more affordable. Your friends needed to be with you to see your photos because you almost certainly retained the only version of it—the original plate.

Photographers who left their studios often slept in, or next to, mobile darkrooms complete with bulky cameras, glass plates, chemicals, and many other supplies from their studios. The scene at left showing camera and subject was recorded south of Knoxville, Tennessee, and the mobile rig at right was captured on glass at Cold Harbor, Virginia. Note the sitting photographer is holding a 4″ x 10″ glass plate for stereoscopic negatives. Library of Congress

The 1850s’ proliferation of the wet plate process, however, changed the game. Now, a fixed image on plate of glass coated with a light-sensitive, sticky chemical created a dual-purpose image. If the glass plate was put against a black background, the image appeared as a positive, which was known as an ambrotype. Without the black background, however, the glass plate was a negative, which could be used to expose a print on lightsensitive paper. This could be done again and again, limitless times. Copy negatives could be made to make even more prints, faster. At length, thousands of prints of a person, place, or thing could be made and sold.

This technology was profitable for the thousands of mid-nineteenth-century photographers spread across the United States, almost all of whom made their money inside their studios by taking portraits of individuals and groups and selling plates and prints thereof. Although technology did not allow the conversion of photos into photomechanical half-tone reproductions that could be printed in newspapers and magazines until 1880, Civil War–era photos could be converted into engravings or woodcuts for printing in mass media, which allowed hundreds of thousands of people to see artistic renditions of photographs.

Photographs could not be mass-printed in Civil War newspapers and periodicals. If a publisher wanted to issue real photos, they had to be printed and issued individually. Publishers could and did, however, convert photos into woodcut engravings, allowing for mass reproduction of a facsimile, such as the photo and engraving shown here of the U.S. Army officers who later surrendered at Fort Sumter. Library of Congress

Just as today’s mainstream media and social media lock onto the biggest and most interesting stories, nineteenth-century illustrated magazines and newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s Weekly did so, too. Back then, as today, the goal was to secure more subscribers.

The Civil War reached every community, and portrait photographers were already working in most of these communities. For the most part, these photographers stayed put. The cost and rigor of toting glass or tin plates to a war zone, stockpiling and staging photo chemicals, outfitting a mobile darkroom wagon or box, making needed connections with political and military stakeholders and photograph distributors, and embarking on an ultimately speculative and dangerous venture in the name of documenting history for mass sales was beyond the means, inclination, and skills of all but a few dozen photographers. Some removed much of the risk by working in the field as camp photographers taking soldier portraits, sanctioned by army commands that also used them to make photographic maps. A few Northern firms, however, took the expensive and speculative route and began following the armies and taking shots of battlefields, camps, hospitals, and more. Who would pay for such an endeavor? Was the photographer a historian or businessman? A documentarian or photojournalist? It’s no surprise that millions of portraits were made during the Civil War compared to an estimated 10,000 outdoor, documentary