reviews
The vast and ever-increasing quantities of material available on the American Civil War – academic and popular, on-line and off-line, verbal and visual – can be daunting, for scholars and students alike. The Retouching History website provides a focused and fascinating case study in how the Civil War is understood – and misunderstood – today.
www.retouchinghistory.org
Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph a website by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr.
The vast and ever-increasing quantities of material available on the American Civil War—academic and popular, on-line and off-line, verbal and visual—can be daunting, for scholars and students alike. This website provides a focused and fascinating case study in how the Civil War is understood—and misunderstood—today. The website adapts a lecture given in 2005 by the authors, who are respectively Senior Scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and former Director of the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia Library. The site consists of this lecture and five photographs; it also contains a few hypertext links to relevant sites such as www.rebelstore.com.
“Retouching History” analyzes a photograph that apparently depicts black Confederate soldiers during the Civil War and is currently sold by on-line retailers of Confederate memorabilia. The authors argue that this photograph has been falsified “to promote Neo-Confederate views, to accuse Union propagandists of duplicity, and to show that black soldiers were involved in the armed defense of the Confederacy” (para. 2). The image was originally a genuine Civil War-era studio photograph of black Union soldiers, which was then made into a colored lithograph and used as a Union recruiting poster; the photograph was republished in the Civil War Times Illustrated (1983), and at some point afterwards was digitally altered. Although the authors cannot identify who the perpetrators, they decisively prove this alteration. For example, they show that the font of the caption in the current photograph, which supposedly presents the “1st Louisiana Native Guard” of 1861, is a modern one, widely available through Microsoft Word.
The site is clear and convincing, and the focus on a single photograph makes for a dramatic exemplification of issues of history, politics, and representation. The transformation of black Union soldiers into black Confederate soldiers in this image simultaneously introduces the historical question of how black people participated in Civil War armies, and the political question of why this issue is still so highly charged today, for racial and other reaons. It begins to suggest the representational issues involved in Civil War photography, as being at once the most authentic documentary evidence of the past and among the most falsifiable of cultural forms. That a single image can so economically condense these complex issues makes the website an appealing point of entry into the visual culture of the Civil War.
The site is, however, only a brief introduction to these issues, and will require additional context to be maximally useful in the classroom. Condensed as it is from a lecture, the site does not outline the actual history of black participation in the War, or the historiography of that participation, which began erasing black Union military service almost immediately. Readers should know more about the range and history of today’s Civil War commemorations, which may be more familiar from the growing subculture of Civil War reenactors and in ongoing political battles over the public display of the Confederate flag. Tracing the history of this particular photograph, the authors do not discuss the larger history of photography and the Civil War. Here, it would be importantnot only to outline the foundational role of the Civil War in photojournalism, including the importance of figures like Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, but also to alert students that controversies about the authenticity are intrinsic to Civil War photography, as in Gardner’s famously restaged images of dead soldiers at Gettysburg and Antietam. Finally, given the intimate relation between digital media and this story, students may wish for more hypertext links and other more interactive ways to enter into the robust on-line culture of the Civil War. In this on-line culture, where participants can be anyone or anywhere, cyberspace provides the most globally disembodied of battlegrounds for fighting the Civil War yet again.
Suggested additional resources:
Books
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard, 2001)
Brown, Thomas, ed. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004).
Coski, John. The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard, 2005)
Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998)
Katz, D. Mark. Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner (Viking, 1991)
Lee, Anthony W. and Elizabeth Young. On Alexander Gardner’s “Photographic Sketch Book” of the Civil War (California, 2007)
Panzer, Mary. Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Smithsonian, 1997)
Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (Hill & Wang, 1989)
Yacavone, Daniel, ed. Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War (Lawrence Hill, 2004)
Films
Yu, Jessica, dir. Men of Re-enaction (documentary about Civil War reenactors, available from Independent Television Service, 1994).
Zwick, Edward, dir. Glory (Tristar Pictures, 1989).
Websites
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml
http://www.cwc.lsu.edu
http://www.geh.org/ar/sketchbook/sketchbook-intro.html
http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/brady/
Elizabeth Young is professor of English and Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches courses on American literature, women writers and feminist theory, and film. Young is the author of Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York University Press, 2008), and the co-author of On Alexander Gardner's "Photographic Sketch Book" of the Civil War (University of California Press, 2007).
