Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories

Foreword

As men of North and South left home to join the army at the outbreak of the Civil War, many of them had their picture taken. “For the few days in which the military are being enrolled,” the American correspondent to an English periodical noted, “the photographic galleries are thriving: the wise soldier makes his will, and seeks the photograph as possibly the last token of affection for the dear ones at home.” And so it was off into the vast, unknown conflict, to possible maiming or death, with the image of the proud and probably fearful new soldier, uniformed and posed in the photographer’s studio, left behind. This magical representation, at once of the civilian he had been and the soldier he had become, remained with the home folks as they held their breath awaiting news of injury, death, or disappearance . Into this unusual and moving volume Ron Coddington has gathered the portraits of dozens of ordinary soldiers—junior officers and enlisted men rather than the famous generals— giving us a portrait gallery of soldiers on the brink of a war that would change their lives forever, whatever their physical fate. More than that, he has tracked down the life histories of these men and tells us about their wartime and postwar experiences, their stories often ending in death by battle and disease or from postwar wounds, or continuing in more ordinary ways until death in bed, years or decades later. Although Coddington does not speculate on the psychology of these later lives, it does seem clear from their stories that for many soldiers the wounds of war were by no means all visible. But the images were. They stemmed from a very common experience , that visit to the photographer’s studio. By coincidence, Foreword michael fellman ix just in time for the Civil War, technological and business change made possible the ready supply of cheap graven images that matched the soldiers’ great demand for some form of symbolic immortality. Democratic portraiture filled the great hunger for self-representation of a democratic and individualist soldiery. Photography was only twenty-two years old when the war started, but it had rapidly developed from an expensive and difficult technique to one readily attuned to the mass production of inexpensive prints. In January 1839, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced the discovery that bore his name. By March, the American portrait painter and inventor, Samuel F. B. Morse, who was in Europe to secure patents for his telegraph, had met Daguerre, learned the process, purchased a camera, and brought the process back home to America, where it immediately spread as a quick method of portraiture. Daguerreotypes were unique pictures, the light being impressed directly on a plate that was the picture itself, and so the price remained relatively high—around $5 at first. By 1850 there were 938 daguerreotypists distributed among the cities and many of the towns of the United States, and the price had dropped to about $2.50—still dear, but clearly low enough to feed a rapidly growing demand. Photography took a great leap forward in the early 1850s, when collodion technology developed, again mainly in France. The photographer now exposed his camera lens on chemically treated glass plate negatives, with the images then transferred onto ordinary, treated paper, making positive prints. This made possible the reproducibility of inexpensive photographs. And then, in 1854, Adolphe-Eugene Disdéri, the court photographer to Napoleon III, developed a movable plate holder, allowing eight to twelve poses to be imprinted on one negative plate. A single print from this negative could thus produce many images , and reproductions were made even cheaper by the fact that unskilled laborers could handle the printing processes. In 1857, according to legend and possibly in reality, the Duke of Parma gave Disdéri one of his business cards and asked that his phox tograph be glued onto the reverse side. As such cards were of a uniform four by two and one-half inches throughout Europe and America, this small portrait, known as the carte de visite, became the standard form of cheap photographic portraits. Technological and artistic transfer from imperial France to the democratic United States (sometimes via Britain) continued its swift pace. Such trade long had been true of many products, notably Parisian women’s clothing fashions. Then as now, Paris was the hub. Not only did wealthy Americans buy directly at...