Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (review)

BOOK REVIEWSI73 cording to Neely, has been paid to Lincoln's early years at the expense of the more significant presidential years. Whatever made Lincoln "memorable" (vii), he insists, occurred between i860 and 1865. It is on Lincoln's presidency that Neely fixes his attention, although the relevance of Lincoln's prepresidential political role is not ignored. There is also little here on Lincoln's private life. It contains little of interest, Neely suggests, "to the modern reader [and] makes rather dull reading," besides being inaccessible to historians (31). Lincoln's professional career as a lawyer, about which much is said these days, is dismissed, again on grounds of inaccessibility. Lincoln was a "diligently successful lawyer" (34), but not much more. That leaves politics. Neely's portrait of Lincoln the politician is masterful: an enthusiastic party organizer, pragmatic in his pursuit of the politically possible , less concerned with doctrinal consistency, adept at adapting the arguments of others to his own political purposes, relying more on his eloquence than on originality. It was Lincoln's gift for politics that carried him through the war, enabled him to meet and surmount the challenges to his use of presidential power, and made possible the adoption and acceptance of an emancipation policy. His single-minded devotion to winning the war militarily and to restoring the Union was essentially a political expression. That the republic was put to the test and survived was the ultimate tribute to his political skill. As one would expect, Neely's analyses of Lincoln's role as commander in chief and his enforcement of such unpopular measures as conscription and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus are models of succinctness and insight. Lincoln had no systematic domestic program, Neely points out, nor did he develop any new ideas. Rather, he relied on the "stock of old ideas he brought with him" (124). Still, he presided over the triumph of the American System (the platform on which he had campaigned early in his career), and he laid the foundation for the industrial growth that followed the war. This richly illustrated (with selections from the exhibit) book, emphasizing what Neely regards as the "grander topics" of Lincoln's public life, politics, and war, marks a significant step toward restoring Lincoln to his times. Robert W. Johannsen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art. By Harold Hölzer and Mark E. Neely, Jr. (New York: Orion Books, 1993. Pp. xv, 336. $60.00.) For half a century after Appomattox, American artists struggled to interpret the Civil War as manifestations of personal expression, but often with an eye to a steadily growing public fascination and to dictates imposed by the sensibilities of the marketplace, mainly wealthy patrons, regimental and veterans ' organizations, and institutional repositories. Their task was compounded 174CIVIL WAR HISTORY by our lack of a tradition in military art and the difficulties inherent in adapting the artistic traditions of landscape and genre art and portraiture to our baptism in modern warfare. Disease, desertion, and carnage wrought by distant artillery are themes less amenable to canvas than idealized sentiment and heroic splendor. Matthew Brady attained immortality at Gettysburg with photographs of wagon loads of severed limbs and bodies bloating on fence rails, but painters shied away from such macabre realism. They ranged in talent and vision from unskilled hacks to the likes of Albert Bierstadt, Eastman Johnson, and the legendary Winslow Homer. Their output ran the gamut from tiny miniatures to gigantic panoramas and cycloramas longer than a football field, less traditional art than odd precursors to Cecil B. DeMiIIe or Gone With the Wind. A William DeLaney Travis panorama honoring the Army of the Cumberland measured 9 feet by 528 feet, requiring stagehands to crank it from one huge spool to another. A Paul Phillipoteaux cycloroma of Gettysburg , like others of its genre requiring a special circular building for public display, measured 25 feet by more than 400 feet. Neither rivaled the works of Rembrandt in artistic execution. This varied artistic legacy and what it can tell us about how Americans visually interpreted the Civil War is the theme of Mine Eyes...