The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection by Anne Peterson (review)

“If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door yards . . .” the New York Times said of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam’s casualties, “he has done something very like it.” Photography matured during the U.S. Civil War, expanding beyond the key and the commonplace participants. Nineteenth- century Americans who would not typically travel more than ten miles from their “door yards” and neighborhoods saw a broader, war-ravaged America of battlefield sites, hospitals, camp grounds, and villages through a camera lens; photographs became the basis of newspaper sketches accompanying war dispatches published in the Times and Harpers Weekly. Photographers like Brady, Alexander Gardner, G. H. Houghton, Samuel Cooley, and dozens of others amassed extensive inventories of glass plate images, which ultimately became so commonplace that all too many wound up as windowpanes in postwar greenhouses if not lost altogether.

Yet hundreds of others survived in the National Archives and in private collections of limited access. Fortunately for scholars and Civil War aficionados, Robin Stanford of Houston, Texas, spent forty years building a collection of primarily stereoscopic images based on well-known and also less familiar photographs. The Stanford Collection, the subject of this brief volume, completed its appearance in March 2013 at the DeGolyer Library on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas. Visitors saw antebellum and wartime images by less famous southern photographers, images of daily military life, slave life, and battle-site photographs from locales in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Exhibit curator Anne Peterson’s Civil War in Photographs (CWP) is an introduction to the Stanford collection. In eighteen sections, she includes various stereoscope images, sepia-toned and some hand tinted. Included in CWP are rarely (if ever) seen before views of Brownsville, Texas, during occupation and poignant images of the country in mourning following Lincoln’s murder in 1865. Captions explain the background and subject matter for most of the sample images but there are occasional errors. A Winfield Hancock photograph caption scrambles the order of those in the picture and misidentifies Union general Francis C. Barlow (a future prosecutor of New York’s Tweed Ring) as Seth M. Barton, a Confederate general unlikely to appear in the same picture alongside Hancock in 1864. Peterson’s narration throughout CWP moves quickly. The raison d’être, however, is the corpus of photographs behind the glimpses afforded in these ninety-plus pages, a sample of images compiled by a less well-known body of men whose images we did not often see.

This is not a major Civil War work but it does not purport to be. For the casual reader, CWP is an interesting commentary on our most devastating war. For the scholar, CWP is a treasure that escaped the fate of its greenhouse windowpane counterparts and made available thanks to the teamwork of the DeGolyer staff and Anne Peterson and the generosity of Robin Stanford.