Divided We Fought: A Pictorial History of the War, 1861-1865 (review)

Book Reviews115 The publication of Last Full Measure completes a notable milestone in Lincoln biography. Here for the first time, in a multi-volumned work, is the sixteenth President as seen by two most capable historical scholars. Objective and measured throughout, the four volumes of Lincoln the President complement the four volumes of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, wherein the Chief Executive is interpreted biographically yet lyrically by America's great poet. Each of these treatments adds to our understanding of Lincoln and of his stature among the great men of the ages. Leroy H. Fischer Stillwater, Oklahoma Divided We Fought: A Pictorial History of the War, 1861-1865. Author of the text and General Editor: David Donald. Picture Editors: Hirst D. Milhollen and Milton Kaplan. Caption Editors: Milton Kaplan and Helen Stuart. (New York: The Macmillan Company. 1953. Pp. 452. $10.00.) the "standard" collection of civil war photographs is the ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War, published in 1912. Although for comprehensiveness this great collection will probably never be surpassed, it has long been out of print, it suffers from a topical arrangement and a rambling text, and its visual qualities are diminished by methods of reproduction which are, by modern standards, very inadequate. What has been needed is a selection of the best photographs, reproduced by the best modern processes, and arranged in a continuous series so as to give the reader a visual impression of the progress of the war and of the men who fought it. Divided We Fought is intended to fill that need, and it does so magnificendy. The picture editors have chosen some four hundred photographs illustrating the war in most of its phases, giving special emphasis to soldiers and officers, battlefield terrain, encampments, ordnance and trains, and naval vessels (the supply services and the whole civilian side of the war have had to be left out) . They have drawn chiefly on negatives in the Mathew Brady Collection in the Library of Congress and the collections in the National Archives, the L. C Handy Studios, and the Cook Collection in Richmond. A few pictures are included from private sources. Readers familiar with some of these negatives — even as reproduced in recent books — will be astonished at the superior clarity, detail, and tonal quality of the plates in this volume, and will find their admiration for Mathew Brady and his anonymous assistants proportionately increased. The reproductions have been handsomely mounted on large pages and excellent paper; usually there is but a single illustration on a page, and the reader's attention to the illustration is not distracted by elaborate captions, borders, or heavy typography in the accompanying text. It is hard to imagine a more skillful and tasteful job of reproduction and design. Although the Civil War probably remains the best photographed war in history, the pictures have the inescapable defect of all time-exposures—they are static. The best pictures are portraits of soldiers, shots of serene battlefields empty of men, and pictures of these battlefields with men in the motionless attitudes of death. Too much of the war seems posed, and although we know the technical reasons for this, we miss the motion and commotion of battle. 116CIVIL WAR HISTORY In a commendable effort to recapture some of the movement and confusion of war, the editors have added nearly a hundred reproductions of battlefield sketches by Alfred Waud, William Waud, Edwin Forbes, and others. These sketches were badly reproduced in contemporary magazines, their lightness and detail destroyed by the heavy hand of the engraver, but as presented here they provide a striking addition to the photographic record. They range from battlefield panoramas, showing the terrain and disposition of troops, to detailed renderings of small action scenes. Some of them are meticulously literal; others are brilliantly impressionistic. Invariably they have a vigor and an immediacy which the photographs often lack. The illustrations are arranged in fourteen chapters, which follow the progress of the fighting from Sumter to Appomattox. Continuity, and context and commentary for the pictures, are provided by Mr. Donald's accompanying text. The problems in preparing such a work are formidable. The illustrations are the...