The Graphic War
By Salvatore Cilella · Originally published July-August 2025 · pp. 48–49
The Graphic War The Army of the Potomac And the Peninsula The Graphic War highlights prints and printmakers from the Civil War discussing their meaning and the printmaker or artist’s goals.
He was destined to be an historian, and he began his life’s work as an artist. John B. Bachelder was a lithographer, a photographer, and a landscape painter, yet his legacy was cemented by the prints of his paintings, expertly copied by himself and other lithographers.
He was born September 29, 1825, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, ninety miles north of Boston. After attending military schools in Gilmanton and Pennsylvania, he returned to Gilmanton in 1853 where he married Elizabeth Barber Stevens, a niece of Benjamin Butler. Although his lifelong
The Army of the Potomac, The Peninsula. (Library of Congress)
interest was in the military, his reputation as a painter/ printmaker was solidified before the war with his Album of New England Scenery. The album was a series of city views such as Salem, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. They were painted from photographs or on the spot. “Bachelder, like Fitz Hugh Lane, Henry Walton, and Edwin Whitefield, drew his subjects as he looked at them from a distance and from nonimaginary viewpoints. We thus see thriving New England industrial communities or ports as they might have appeared to an arriving stranger on the road to town catching his first glimpse of houses, factories, and churches extending across the horizon. While only two of his views make explicit that Bachelder drew them from photographic images, most of his urban scenes possess this kind of documentary character.”1 As war clouds gathered, Bachelder was collecting materials on the Revolutionary War Battle of Bunker Hill. He had also produced large folio views of Massachusetts militia drills between 1855 and 1860. As a result of his military interest, when war broke out, he turned his attention and talents to the Army of the Potomac with the hope of witnessing a major battle. It’s unclear how he achieved acceptance by the army. Regardless, he reached the zenith of his work with his rare and coveted view of the Battle of Gettysburg, which he managed to execute the same year. Earlier, in a grand sweeping spectacle of military action, Bachelder caught the Army of the Potomac performing a strategic retreat during George B. McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsular Campaign. The action Bachelder portrays is best described by the title margin, which reads:
The Army of the Potomac/The Wagon Trains of the Army of the Potomac en Route from Chickahominy to James River VA. During the Seven Days Fight/ Fording Bear Creek One Mile below Savage Station/ June 29th, 1862. The Battle of Savage’s Station occurred on June 29, 1862, in Henrico County, Va., the fourth of the Seven Days Battles. The main body of the Union Army of the Potomac had began a general withdrawal toward the James River. Confederate Brig. Gen. John B. Magruder pursued along the railroad and the Williamsburg Road and struck Maj. Gen. Edwin Vose Sumner’s II Corps, the Union rearguard, with three brigades near Savage’s Station, while Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Divisions were stalled north of the Chickahominy River. Union forces continued to withdraw across White Oak Swamp, abandoning supplies and more than 2,500 wounded soldiers in a field hospital.2 Bachelder’s view catches the Union army headed toward the next battle, the engagement at White Oak Swamp. It is not a representation of a battle scene. It depicts the large Federal baggage train, which stretches off in many columns into the distance, where a dust cloud rises on the horizon. Once the river is reached, Bachelder depicts the difficulties of crossing with the wagons. In the foreground, soldiers who have made it to the other side are seen lounging under trees, sitting around campfires, and generally setting up camp to wait for the rest of the Army.
Print expert and historian Harry T. Peters called this a “rare and fine print.”3 Its accuracy was affirmed by Federal General John Caldwell. Leading his men in Brigadier General Israel B. Richardson’s Division of Major General Edwin V. Sumner’s II Corps, Caldwell earned high praise for his leadership in reinforcing Brigadier General Philip Kearny’s Division at the Battle of Glendale on June 30.4 In early 1863, Caldwell wrote: “At Fair Oaks, Virginia, I frequently met Mr. Bachelder, at that time making sketches of various phases of the Battle of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks. Several of the sketches were shown to me, and I think them by far the most accurate of any I have ever seen.”5 The retreat was ill-fated. According to Historian David J. Eicher, McClellan moved south “without leaving directions for corps movements during the retreat not naming a second in command.” Troops were ordered to burn anything they could not carry. The wounded were abandoned, and Union morale plummeted.6 Bachelder’s passion however was Gettysburg. He went on to distinguish himself as the authority on the battle. He devoted the rest of his life to the battle and the battlefield. He collaborated with General G.K. Warren and the army corps of engineers to produce a series of topographical maps of the battlefield. In 1870, Bachelder commissioned artist James Walker to paint a large depiction of Pickett’s charge which he then reproduced as a print accompanied by an explanatory leaflet. In 1880, he was awarded a federal stipend of $50,000 to write the history of the battle. Bachelder died in 1894 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. His widow survived him by twenty years.
Endnotes: 1.
John Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America, p. 159. The New Hampshire Historical Society has many of Bachelder’s watercolors of White Mountain scenes. See Who Was Who in American Art. Battle of Savage’s Station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_ of_Savage’s_Station. Peters, America on Stone, 82. John Caldwell. https://www.thoughtco.com/brigadier-generaljohn-c-caldwell-2360391. Product description from The Old Print Gallery, Washington DC 2011. David J. Eicher, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War, 290.
After 43 years in the museum field, Cilella devotes
his time to collecting A merican prints and maps and writing. He has written extensively on Emory Upton:
Upton’s Regulars: A History of the 121st New York Volunteers in the Civil War (Kansas, 2009); a twovolume Correspondence of Major General Emory Upton, (Tennessee, 2017), received the 2017–2018 American Civil War Museum’s Founders Award for outstanding editing of primary source materials. He edited Upton’s love letters 1868-70 to his wife–Till Death Do Us Part (Oklahoma, 2020), and The Memoirs of Dewitt Clinton Beckwith of Upton’s Regulars (McFarland, 2023).
Photographs from the Original Article
Captions and credits appear in the article text as originally printed.