The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (review)

266CIVIL WAR HISTORY the most troublesome omission is that of Jeffery Rossbach's Ambivalent Conspirators : John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory ofSlave Violence (1982). Although Rossbach lacks Renehan's literary polish, he uses many of the same sources to focus on the Secret Six and offers some provocative notions about the motivations and aspirations of Brown's backers. The Secret Six would benefit, in addition, by the inclusion of at least one map to highlight locations of significant events or to diagram the wanderings of the peripatetic Brown. This is a fine book, make no mistake. The author and the publisher clearly took pains to produce a handsome publication that is laced with appropriate photographs and attractive embellishments. With its wealth of details both petty and profound, Renehan's "true tale" of John Brown and the Secret Six is unlikely to be surpassed, its merit magnified by the author's exhaustive primary research and graceful prose. Earl F. Mulderink III Southern Utah University The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War. By William F. Thompson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Pp. 248. $12.95.) This paperback reissue offers a new generation of readers the chance to enjoy a minor classic in Civil War historiography. William F. Thompson's enthusiastic but balanced examination of the art and adventures of the sketch artists for journals like Frank Leslie's, Harper's Weekly and the Illustrated News moves briskly through the major campaigns and the illustrations that brought the war home to the Northern public. Northerners ofall ages depended on the illustrated magazines to inform and entertain them. One young New Englander cut out war pictures, colored them, and pasted them togetherto form his own mini-panorama ofthe war, while many years later the muckrakingjournalist IdaTarbell recalled that she and her family counted on Harper's or Leslie 's for the best coverage of war news. One of the strengths of Thompson's work is its analysis of the ways that the sketch artists' perceptions and interests evolved. Early on, the artists drew tidy pictures of long marching columns, rows of immaculate tents, portraits of commanders and politicians, and units ofcolorfully garbed zouaves. By the end of the war, however, sketches by artists like Alfred Waud and Winslow Homer included gritty images of camp life and graphic battle scenes. Romantic, heroic images had been replaced by pictures of soldiers "who ached, swore, and sweated" (113). Another transition had occurred by 1865, as front-line sketch artists and homefront political cartoonists joined forces to promote the Republican cause. Thompson also provides just the right amount of context for his larger themes, with a section on prewar illustrated journalism, appropriately brief narratives of military campaigns, satisfying samples from soldiers' diaries book reviews267 that confirm the artists' portrayals of battlefields and campgrounds, and entertaining stories of the nuts-and-bolts of collecting these images of war. For instance, Waud scooped virtually all of his competitors at Gettysburg; although the squeamish Edwin Forbes finally arrived late on the second day, he couldn't bring himself to watch the bloody climax on Cemetery Ridge. A chapter on contemporary sketches and cartoons of Abraham Lincoln and interesting, although rather disjointed, descriptions ofphotographers' efforts to document the war are also included. Thompson clearly respects these art forms, and he succeeds in attaining his primary goal of investigating the pictures as methods of "indoctrination and propaganda," (8). But a few caveats remain. Although not quite two dozen engravings are reproduced in the book, at least twice as many would have been welcome. The sections on photographers and on Southern artists like Adalbert Volck, though interesting, distract from the book's larger themes and subjects. On the whole, however, The Image of War stands up well thirty-five years after it was first published despite—perhaps because of—the recent boomlet of lavishly illustrated books about artists' representations of the Civil War. Thompson argues that his "picturemen," as he calls them, created a "new artistic concept of war ... a new composite panorama of army life" beyond heroic battlefield exploits (127). Thompson was a teenager during World War II; perhaps these path-breaking artists remind...