Behind the Lines
By William C. Davis · Originally published March-April 2026 · pp. 4–5
Behind the Lines By William C. Davis
Iam often asked why Americans are so fascinated by the Civil War, and yet relatively few have any substantial interest in or knowledge of the American Revolution. After all, it created the nation. Certainly, the imminent 250th, or semi-quincentennial, anniversary of 1776 ought to stir interest. Still, my guess is that even after that, the Civil War will “outsell” the Founders’ era in our imaginations. Over the years, my answer has always been the same, and I believe it will stay the same. We cannot see our Revolutionary ancestors. Sure, they look at us from the stilted, and often rather crude, portraits in museums and historic houses, and there are excellent paintings of their battles and assemblies. But still, it is hard to make a personal connection. How different it is with the Civil War. By my estimate, more than a million photographs were taken during that epoch. The overwhelming majority were soldier portraits in cartes-de-visites, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and other media. Regardless of what process was used, what we see are the real faces of our Civil War forebears, warts and all. We see them at work, erecting fortifications, felling trees, building bridges. We see them at play, gambling, playing baseball, and reading newspapers. We see their leisure, smoking their pipes, napping, chatting under the shade of their “shebangs.” We see their efforts while in the armies to recreate some semblance of the life they knew at home. They held services in their winter quarters camp churches and in open fields on campaigns, they performed comedies and dramas in their makeshift theaters, they decorated their tents and huts, and they loved to pose at table with their meals. Some were even photographed—unwillingly to be sure— as they were about to end their lives at the executioners’ hands. The rest of the time they played, making faces at the camera lens, creating tableaux of drunken brawls, crooked card games, and scenes of utter chaos. Most of all, however, they stood or sat by themselves for portraits as keepsakes and to trade with fellow soldiers, or to send to family back home. Those faces are almost all stoic, trying to appear determined and soldierly, but mostly just looking young and unaware of what might lay ahead for them when they left the photographer’s studio and went forth to confront their foes. I never tire of seeing them. Which makes me all the more thankful for the increasing study and attention the old photos have attracted in recent
years, a study that has also become increasingly more professional in its treatment of the images. William A. Frassanito’s path-breaking books on the photographs of Gettysburg and Antietam are perhaps the starting point for approaching the Civil War’s massive archive of images as serious historical “documents,” studying them for what they can tell us. More works followed, including the 6-volume series The Image of War: 1861-1865, which I edited some forty years ago. Happily, others have taken the work well beyond what I did. For more than twenty years, the Center for Civil War Photography in Hanover, Pennsylvania, has published its journal Battlefield Photographer, an outstanding magazine that, with almost every issue, manages to bring to light newly discovered images. With a special interest in the three-dimensional stereo views very popular in the war’s era, editor Bob Zeller welcomes today’s best photographic historians into its pages to illuminate scenes that we have often misidentified and misinterpreted. Similarly, for forty-three years the quarterly Military Images has been presenting virtually thousands of photographs of 19th century soldiers, the vast majority of them Union and Confederate. Editor Ron Coddington has a sleuth’s nose for bringing to light previously unseen photos of men and officers, even generals, in all manner of poses. And Civil War News, while not devoted exclusively to photography, keeps multiple illustrative formats from the war era alive in each issue. I look forward to every issue of all three journals, and unreservedly recommend them to all. It is all grand work, fascinating and rewarding, eternally captivating for our imaginations, and our understanding of who these men and women were and what they did in their generation’s great moment of trial. William C. Davis was managing editor, then editor,
then publisher of Civil War Times Illustrated from 1969
to 1990. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books in Civil War and Southern history, and former director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia
Tech, where he served as professor of history until 2013. His most recent book is The Whartons’ War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865, co-edited with Sue Heth Bell.
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Photographs from the Original Article
Captions and credits appear in the article text as originally printed.