Virginia at War, 1862

Virginians See Their War

93 VirginiansSeeTheirWar Harold Holzer On September 13, 1862, more than a year after the Confederate government established itself in Richmond, Virginia, the capital city finally welcomed its first illustrated newspaper, the Southern Illustrated News. At last, after nearly fourteen months of war, civilian readers would finally enjoy access to something Northern audiences had long taken for granted: regularly published pictures of the battles and leaders of their cause. Until the war began, Virginians, too, had surely subscribed to nonSouthern pictorial sheets like Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and even the London Illustrated News. But these picture-rich periodicals became unavailable to readers in the Confederacy once the war and the blockade cut the region off from most commerce. Understandably, the widely anticipated new Richmond weekly promised from the first to live up to the high standards set by its famous and popular predecessors. “By the aid of pen and pencil,” its first editorial vowed, the SouthernIllustratedNewswould“presentmorevividlytothereaderthegrand and imposing events that are happening before us.” The most “competent and experienced artists” would furnish only “handsomely embellished” pictures.1 Furthermore, the editors promised that, unlike Union-made prints, its illustrations would be unfailingly realistic: “We cannot engage to give pictures of victories that were never won, or to sketch the taking of capitals that never have surrendered, as have the illustrated weeklies of Yankeedom,” that first editorial asserted, in a slap at the Northern weeklies. Clearly, the war of propaganda was taken seriously—not only by publishers, but also by audiences. Even Confederate soldiers in the field worried that their Union foes had the advantage not only in “good wagons, fat horses, and . . . pontoon trains, of splendid material and construction,” but also in “illustrated papers, 94 Virginians See Their War to cheer the ‘Boys in Blue’ with sketches of the glorious deeds they did not do.” The Southern Illustrated News boasted it would never reproduce “fancy sketches originating only in the brain of our artists.”2 But the maiden issue of the Confederacy’s answer to Harper’s and Leslie’s also cautioned against overexpectation: “While we expect each week to increase the number of engravings, yet our aim shall be, not number but quality .” In fact, the woodcuts published in the Southern Illustrated News never approached the success of those published by its Northern counterparts— in either quantity or quality. It managed instead to sputter along for only a few years, publishing coarse-looking portraits of military celebrities with decreasing frequency, forced from time to time to advertise desperately on its own pages for artists and supplies. It even earned criticism from other Southern journals appalled by its amateurism, with one newspaper in Georgia assailing its artists, during that first year of publication in 1861, for producing what it called “miserable daubs.” These included early attempts to portray military heroes “Stonewall” Jackson, Turner Ashby, and Joseph E. Johnston (figures 1, 2, 3), all of whose crudely engraved and uninspiring likenesses appeared on its pages in 1862.3 Fig. 1. John W. Torsch, General “Stonewall” Jackson. Woodcut engraving, published in the Southern Illustrated News, Richmond, Virginia, September 13, 1862. Fig. 2. Probably John W. Torsch, after William H. Caskie, General Turner Ashby. Woodcut engraving, published in the Southern Illustrated News, Richmond, Virginia, October 18, 1862. Fig. 3. John W. Torsch after a photograph by Julian Vannerson, General Joseph E. Johnston. Woodcut engraving, cover of the Southern Illustrated News, Richmond, Virginia, November 1, 1862. 96 Virginians See Their War Not until the year was nearly over, in December 1862, did the Confederacy ’s sole illustrated newsweekly acknowledge, in an extraordinarily candid editorial, that “Numerous enquiries” had been pouring in from readers “in regard to the publication” of a picture of the most celebrated hero of the Army of Northern Virginia: Robert E. Lee. These “enquiries,” the paper was forced to admit, it had yet to answer. Only now could the newspaper report that its artists were at last “engaged on a magnificent full-page picture of the great Captain, which will be published in a short time. The engraving will be executed with the greatest care, and we feel warranted in saying, will be one of the most artistic pieces of work of its kind ever gotten up in the South.”4 But when the long-awaited woodcut by staff artist William B. Campbell (figure 4) appeared two weeks later, it proved nothing more than a mundane...