Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (review)

With Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War, Steven R. Boyd offers a seemingly untapped lens—or perhaps more appropriately, a series of interconnected lenses—through which we might more intimately examine the values, the ideologies, and the broader cultural environments of middle-class white men and women on both sides of the Civil War. Equal parts cultural history and art history, this study involves the laborious dissection and interpretation of specially embellished envelopes printed immediately before and during the war—with designs ranging from flags, eagles, and canons to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Union president Abraham Lincoln facing off, shirtless, in an epic bare-knuckle boxing match. In the midst of all this symbolism, propaganda, sentiment, and extrapolation, Boyd attempts to piece together how such relatively small vestiges of material culture informed (and continue to inform) much larger themes of constructed nationalism, evolving identities and, ultimately, how real people reacted to, interacted with, and perceived themselves in the broader context of a war that fiercely divided friends, families, neighbors, and states alike.

Boyd illustrates the varied functions patriotic envelopes performed during the war. Aside from their most obvious roles as artistic promotions of patriotic sentiment, these envelopes also shed considerable light on the causes motivating war efforts on both sides. Acknowledging their greater importance to the Union, Boyd nonetheless argues that the envelopes charted both subtle and substantial changes in the tenor of both war efforts, as well as the degree to which citizens on both sides endorsed and internalized such intellectual and emotional shifts. As visual representations of the causes for war, Boyd essentially contends that patriotic envelopes constitute a slideshow in which symbolic imagery and consumer-approved meanings—from the Constitution itself to slaves playing active roles in their own emancipation—serve as a measuring stick for fluctuating social and political issues. In much the same way that patriotic envelopes visually chart how northerners understood and expressed their own motivations to fight, Boyd maintains that southern envelopes operate as indicators of Confederate nationalism and government efficiency. As printers rapidly designed and disseminated covers featuring the ever-evolving Confederate flag, Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, and even scenes depicting loyal slaves, the envelopes worked as a mechanism through which Confederate citizens, separated by geographic expanses and a painfully slow stream of news and information, became familiar with their new nation—its leaders, its causes, and symbols meant to ignite nationalist fervor.

Included in this analysis are women and African Americans. Their images on the envelopes, however, seem to reveal the thoughts of white men more so than those of women on the home front or slaves fleeing the plantation. On one hand, Boyd proposes that imagery designed by northern printers of rebellious or escaping slaves illustrates a wider northern awareness of the role African Americans played in their own liberation. On the other hand, he hints that patriotic covers were a way for men to issue gendered behavioral protocols to women as men marched off to war and left them to manage farms, businesses, and homes. Both assertions, though vague at times concerning scale and impact, do, at the very least, underscore the ways these envelopes could, and likely did, operate as vehicles of popular thought and cultural expression.

In many ways, the previous statement works as a microcosmic review of the book. Nearly all of the meanings and functions that Boyd extrapolates from or assigns to patriotic envelopes are well-founded and thoroughly outlined and represent very plausible conclusions. Despite an admittedly limited chronology of envelopes—as vignettes indicative of the ideals, values, political actions, and even the self-perceptions of middle-class whites, North and South—Boyd’s arguments rest on solid ground. Though questions linger regarding the socioeconomic and/or geographic characteristics of this middle class and its larger representativeness, Boyd’s otherwise pragmatic analysis constitutes...