Thirty Years After: An Artist's Memoir of the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWSI75 Have Seen the Glory is art history at its finest and a grand contribution to the historical literature of the Civil War. Roger A. Fischer University of Minnesota-Duluth Edwin Forbes, Thirty Years After: An Artist's Memoir of the Civil War. Introduction by William J. Cooper, Jr. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Pp. 334. $65.00.) Among the many "artist correspondents" or "special artists" dispatched to the front during the Civil War by the Northern illustrated press, Edwin Forbes, Alfred A. Waud, Theodore Russell, and Winslow Homer turned in the most distinguished work. After developing his sketches of camp scenes and battlefields into a series of paintings of lasting artistic importance, Homer moved on to other subjects; likewise, Waud, Russell, and other illustrators who had attached themselves to the Army of the Potomac took up new assignments. For Edwin Forbes, it might be said that the Civil War never really ended. Perhaps the most prolific and tireless of illustrators to cover the fighting and to chronicle the often tedious and exhausting life of "Billy Yank"—the artist was with the army continuously from First Manassas to the siege of Petersburg—Forbes used the hundreds of wartime drawings he made as the basis for two major postwar publications, Life Studies of the Great Army, a set of forty etchings published without text in 1876, and, in 1891, Thirty Years After, his Civil War memoir accompanied by about 320 illustrations, including the etchings from the Life Studies. Born in New York City in 1839, Forbes had scarcely finished his brief art training when in 1861 he was hired, without previous journalistic experience, by Frank Leslies' Illustrated Newspaper and sent to Virginia. Like Homer, Forbes directed his exceptional powers of observation to the day-to-day life of the ordinary soldier. He rarely drew officers and, although he was present at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness campaign, only occasionally sketched a battlefield scene, with the result that Leslies' editors, who would have preferred more cavalry charges, used less than half the drawings Forbes submitted. His drawings of long marches, the boring lulls between the fighting, the ingenious ad hoc architecture of winter quarters, and other aspects of the casual but important "detailed minutiae" of army life reveal a detached reporter 's attempt to assemble a comprehensive visual inventory. Frankness, an eye for the telling detail, and an aversion to sentimentality are the hallmarks of his art. Similarly, Forbes's elegantly written short essays are still good reading more than a century after their first appearance. With few exceptions, as with his stirring accounts of a night march at Chancellorsville or the artillery duel on the third day at Gettysburg, Forbes was vague about locations and times; I76CIVIL WAR HISTORY as William J. Cooper, Jr. , points out in an informative introduction, the artist took pains to express "the universality of the soldier's experience." Actually, Thirty Years After is less a memoir than an account, set down in eighty short vignettes, of how a major army functioned in the field. In "Army Bread," "The Army Herd," and "Roadside Refreshment" Forbes details the daunting task of providing bread, beef, and water for tens of thousands on the march, while in "The Drummer Boy," "The Army Blacksmith," "Crossing the Pontoons ," and "The Supply Trains" he pays his sincere respect to the ranks of specialized support personnel who helped keep the fighting man on the move. Forbes's text is always interesting and often witty, as in his characterization of the always-hungry Union soldier as "a kind of traveling human locust dressed in faded blue." One appreciates also the humorous description in both word and picture of the steps involved in shoeing a spirited mule by trussing it up and holding its ears to the ground. There are chillier moments as well: in "Re-forming the Line" infantrymen in a straight line stretching toward the horizon prepare to deliver—and take—another volley over the nearby stretched-out bodies of their dead comrades; and in "The Crime of Desertion" a firing squad is set to send another kind of volley into four blindfolded men seated on their coffins...