A new sense of professional identity as journalists and writers emerged within the brotherhood of battlefield reporters during the American Civil War. More than a few newspaper correspondents imagined and then achieved careers in literature. One of those was Charles Carleton Coffin (1823-96), who covered the major battles of the war for the Boston Journal under the penname “Carleton.” Coffin’s celebrity as a war reporter helped him secure book contracts with Ticknor & Fields, a major literary publisher in Boston and the publisher of the leading lights of the American literary renaissance, such as Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the decades leading up to his death in 1896, Coffin published a long list of titles on history, biography, and travel. Perhaps his best-known work was his 1866 Civil War memoir, Four Years of Fighting, later republished in a new edition as The Boys of ’61.

Coffin also frequently wrote books for boys and girls, both fiction and nonfiction. This book, My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field: A Book for Boys, appeared in 1864, while war was still raging. The bulk of the book is battle narrative, but the opening chapter is Coffin’s take on “How the Rebellion Came About.” For Coffin, a faithful son of Puritan New England, the root cause of the war was obvious: slavery. In a historical account that reaches back to the frugal, enterprising colonists of Massachusetts and to the indolent, tyrannical tobacco planters of Virginia, Coffin sets the scene for his young readers: “Climate, trade, commerce, common schools, and industry have made the North different from the South; but there was nothing in these to bring on the war,” he writes. “When the slaveholders saw that they had lost their power in Congress to pass laws for the extension of slavery, they determined to secede from the Union. When the North elected a President who declared himself opposed to the extension of slavery, they began the war.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Among the photographic processes available to a widening public and used by Civil War soldiers were ambrotypes. Ambrotypes became popular in the mid-1850s, due in large part to their shorter exposure times (as compared to daguerreotypes), which also made them a good choice for churning out portraits of soldiers. They consist of a collodion image fixed to a glass plate, which, when held up to light, appears negative. To create a positive image, the plate was placed against a black background. Like daguerreotypes, ambrotypes are unique objects—there is no negative, so the plate is the photograph.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger image]]> View more from AAS's ambrotype collection]]> This large broadside, printed by R. M. Edwards of Boston in 1855, features woodcuts portraying scenes from the life of Anthony Burns (1834-62), a former fugitive and then freed slave whose story sparked fierce abolitionist reaction throughout Massachusetts. The large center portrait of Burns is a woodcut engraved by John Andrews after a daguerreotype taken by Whipple & Black. Below the portrait is a facsimile of Burns’s signature. The surrounding scenes, clockwise from the lower left (and not in chronological order), show young Burns being sold at auction; a whipping post with broken shackles and baled cotton; his arrest in Boston; his escape to Boston on shipboard; a field of grain with a bucket, spade, and whip; Burns addressing crowds of eager listeners in the North after he was freed; and at the bottom, a picture of Burns in a Boston jail. The design was copyrighted by Burns in January 1855 and was most likely created to advertise his speaking tour in the North, which helped advance the abolitionist cause and became a source of funding for his own education.

The story of Anthony Burns sheds light on the fierce reaction of the North to the Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which stated that any runaway slave found in the North must be returned to his or her owner in the South. On May 24, 1854, escaped slave Anthony Burns was apprehended on the streets of Boston and brought to the courthouse, where he was imprisoned awaiting trial to determine whether he must be returned to his master, Charles F. Suttle, of Alexandria, Virginia.

On the evening of May 26, 1854, a mob of both white and black men, armed with a plank as a battering ram and two axes with which to break down the door, attacked the west side of the building in order to free Burns. Worcester, Massachusetts, minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) and another man succeeded in gaining entry, but were quickly forced back outside. Amid the chaos, a shot was fired and a deputy who had been guarding the building was stabbed. He died several minutes later. A group of eleven men, both black and white, were charged with the murder.

On June 2, 1854, the judge announced that Burns would be returned to his master. The assembled crowd was outraged, and U.S. marshals and the city police worked for over an hour to clear the crowds from the streets. Later that afternoon, under presidential authority and with a six-pound cannon in tow, a large number of armed forces escorted Burns to a waiting ship at Long Wharf, where he began his journey back to Virginia and to slavery. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets as he did so.

Although the rescue attempt of Anthony Burns was unsuccessful, within a year supporters had raised $1,300 to buy his freedom, and Burns returned to Boston. Upon his return to the North, Burns made the rounds as a speaker, telling his story in order to raise money to pay for his education at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he studied for the ministry. This broadside supported that lecture tour and his fundraising efforts. After earning his degree he moved to Upper Canada to serve as a Baptist minister. He died of tuberculosis in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, in 1862 at the age of twenty-eight.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Maps were one tool people used to make sense of the war and visualize the places where their loved ones were fighting, places most of them had never seen. Though few newspapers outside of the illustrated press carried graphics at this time, many would occasionally provide their readers with simple maps or diagrams. Outside of newspapers, lithography helped to provide more complex maps for public consumption. Louis Prang & Co. of Boston took advantage of both lithography and the immediacy of news provided by the telegraph to create this War Telegram Marking Map. The firm churned these out as quickly as possible for the Northern public to see where the troops were and to follow along and mark the map up as the action happened—this 1862 copy is already the sixth edition. As the map explains, one was to “mark the change of positions of the UNION FORCES in RED PENCIL and the REBEL FORCES in BLUE, on the receipt of EVERY TELEGRAM from the seat of war.” Plenty of room was left for marking, and the pencils, which could be erased with “a little soft bread,” were provided with the map. These “peculiarities combined with extreme cheapness will make this Map a welcome companion to every person interested in the pending struggle of our nation.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger image]]> Just as the temperance movement harnessed the power of the printed word in newspapers, periodicals, tracts, and almanacs to spread statistics and facts about the effects of alcohol, it also utilized printed images. Temperance images were pervasive throughout early nineteenth-century publications as a particularly powerful way to convey the message that alcohol was destructive and should be moderated or—as some believed—prohibited for a healthy, functioning society.

This circa 1832 lithograph by Alexander Rider, based on an original sketch by Thomas Birch (1779-1851), illustrates this trend by depicting opposing scenes of temperance and intemperance. Like many images produced by the temperance movement—which co-opted and adapted the “liberty tree” symbol familiar to many—a tree serves as the central emblem of society and liberty. The image shows the effects of temperance and intemperance on society in a single frame, with the tree providing the contrast point between a healthy society and a society approaching ruin. The right side of the tree appears healthy with strong limbs and full foliage. It sits in fertile soil where grass and other healthy trees and flowers flourish. In contrast, the left side of the tree appears dead and barren. Its limbs are broken, and its branches are nearly absent of vegetation. The surrounding ground appears dry and cracked, and nothing is growing. Something (alcohol) is sapping this environment of its vitality and its ability to produce.

This metaphor is extended in the renderings of the people and structures of the illustration, and it becomes clear that intemperance is the culprit. On the left, a dilapidated structure hosts boisterous men waving bottles on its porch. One inebriated fellow slumps under a sign featuring a pig, suggesting a correlation between the drinking men and the pigs outside the tavern. A family walks away from what was perhaps their pig farm and livelihood, the father with downcast eyes and ragged clothes, a bottle in his hand. He walks separately from his family, the wife neatly but darkly dressed and the reluctant, shoeless child weeping and rubbing its eyes.

In contrast, alcohol appears to be absent on the right side of the illustration. Friends are gathered in small groups, with men and women socializing and eating in the verdant landscape. Across the river, a factory or mill is visible, representing employment and people engaged in fruitful labor. The husband and wife hold hands as they look at each other, and their well-dressed child plays nearby collecting flowers. The absence of alcohol and even the light-colored clothing of the couple suggest that the shadow of intemperance has not fallen on them as it has the family on the left. Temperance has kept this half of society healthy and productive.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Stereography, an early form of three-dimensional photography, was a major vehicle for popular education and entertainment in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Otherwise known as the stereogram, stereopticon, or stereo view, the stereograph was a nineteenth-century form of in-home entertainment often used in social settings. Placed on cardboard were two almost identical photographs, side by side, to be viewed with a stereoscope. When viewed through a stereoscope, the photographs combined and appeared as one three-dimensional picture, an awe-inspiring illusion for anyone during that time. The author Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), who invented an affordable stereo viewer for the American market, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly of June 1859 that “the first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth as to make us almost uncomfortable.”

Stereography, from the outset, was a commercial success. Its affordability and availability made it a widespread phenomenon spanning sixty years. Many stereograph cards displayed views of faraway lands, reproducing the travel experience, through photography, for the general population. It also, unsurprisingly, became a journalistic tool, bringing parades, disasters, political events, and wars into the home.

Though much of the stereographic documentation of the Civil War was produced after the war, some was also released during the conflict. The three stereograph cards pictured here give a sense of what information those on the home front—particularly in the North—would have gathered about the war through this medium. The first, labeled “Gibson’s Battery of Horse Artillery, near Fair Oaks,” shows an army apparently on the move. The second, “Engineer Corps Making Corduroy Roads,” depicts the strategy and engineering behind the war (corduroy roads were made of logs to help make muddy and swampy roads passable). The last, “Fugitive Negroes Fording the Rappahannock, Fleeing from Jackson’s Army,” speaks to both the causes of the war and its effects on the civilian and enslaved populations.

You can view more Civil War stereographs from the AAS collections here.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more Civil War stereographs]]> The affordability of the carte-de-visite form meant that it was used in a wide variety of ways, including to reproduce works of art and photography. During and after the Civil War, this included the work of the most famous photographers of the conflict, Mathew Brady (1822-96) and his associates. This carte-de-visite, one in an “album” released by Brady, reads “Completely Silenced! Dead Confederate Artillery Men, As they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam.” Though the “authenticity” of Brady’s photography has been questioned throughout the years, due to the moving and placement of bodies and equipment to create a desired scene, there’s no doubt about the strong effect it had on viewers. Brady also knew the value of his work, putting a copyright disclaimer on the back to keep others from reproducing it. Reproduction without permission—often without even proper credit to the photographer—was a common practice in the early years of photography.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger image]]> The stereograph sensation is evident in these advertisements on the last page of the April 29, 1865, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. With the war now over, stereograph publishers began to focus on the medium’s use as documentary evidence of the history of the war, as is evident in the bottom ad: “Obtained at great expense and forming a complete PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE GREAT UNION CONTEST….Everybody is interested in these memorable scenes.” The demand is emphasized even further by the top advertisement, which notes that the Christian Commission will donate 25 percent of the revenue raised by the sale of “Albums, Stereoscopic Views and Card Photographs” within a two-week period to the “relief of our sick and wounded soldiers.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View image of full page]]> Freedom’s Journal, beginning in March 1827. Cofounded by Reverend Samuel Cornish (1795-1858) and John Russwurm (1799-1851) in New York City, Freedom’s Journal sought not only to advocate for the abolition of slavery, but also to serve the local New York community and combat negative depictions of African Americans in the New York press. Although the newspaper lasted only two years, it served as a model for other African American and abolitionist newspapers to come. The issue here discusses slavery, temperance, and the importance of education, in addition to the standard pieces of local news, poetry, advertisements, and human-interest stories.

Click the image below to browse the full issue.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> While big dailies were beginning to dominate the newspaper markets of the urban centers in the first half of the nineteenth century, smaller newspapers began to pop up in more rural areas. These small local papers carried news from around the country, clipped from other newspapers. (The U.S. Post Office allowed newspaper editors to exchange copies with one another free of postage.) These papers also gradually began to focus on more local happenings, such as marriages, stage and mail coach arrivals, politics, crime, and business news.

This paper from Somerset, Pennsylvania, a town of only about 450 people in 1820, demonstrates these trends in small-town newspapers. The front page includes an extract from a discourse by a prominent bishop in Richmond, Virginia; financial news from New Orleans; and the attack of a giant snake on a woman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The importance of the postal service is highlighted by a front-page story about the establishment of a new mail coach out of New York and New Jersey, emphasizing its amenities and the patriotic symbolism painted on the outside panels. Its first arrival in Somerset is noted, along with the observation that it “runs with great ease.”

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