Volume 39, No. 9 – September 2026

Website: www.CivilWarRoundTablePalmBeach.org

President’s Message

Our summer hiatus will continue in September.  There will be no meeting in September.  Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, October 14, 2026.  Our speaker will be the ever-popular Patrick Falci.  His programs are always interesting and informative.  I look forward to seeing all our members at the October meeting as we give Patrick a big welcome.

Gerridine LaRovere

Photography and Artists During the Civil, War

Many photographers during the Civil War-Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, George Baernard, and Andrew Russell- were among the most distinguished.  They followed the armies in an attempt to capture the conflict in various images.  Soldiers were photographed in camps, on the march, in the trenches, building fortifications and dead on the battlefield.  Mr. Brady was noted for photographing wounded soldiers and the fatally wounded.  “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.  If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” wrote a correspondent for the New York Times after visiting the famed photographer’s Manhattan gallery in October of 1862.  Mr. Brady was showing an exhibit called “The Dead of Antietam” which showed grisly images of the devastation.  While their bulky equipment and delicate wet-plate collodion process that their cameras employed posed challenges in the field, Civil War photographers were prolific.  By War’s end they took an estimated one million images of sights that most people had never seen.  Many of the photos were portraits that were coveted by soldiers as well as their families and friends.

While Civil War photographers could capture clear shotes of motionless soldiers, structures, and vistas with their bulky equipment, scenes of action were the specialty of wartime artists who used less sophisticated means: pencil, pen, and charcoal.  Dispatched to the front by newspaper publishers, these artists also known as special correspondents, recorded a wide variety of scenes from mundane happening in camp to gripping views of combat.

Finished sketches were forwarded to the publisher’s office where staff artists created engravings of the drawings for printing.  Within weeks the scenes would appear in one of the country’s illustrated newspapers such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

The job was taxing and dangerous as it was exhilarating.  Artist Theodore Davis was twice wounded while sketching a battle.  He described the job’s requirements as “total disregard for personal safety and comfort; an owl-like propensity to sit up all night and a hawky style of vigilance during the day; capacity for going on short food; willingness to ride any number of miles on horseback for just one sketch, which might have to be finish at night by no better light than that of a fire.”

By conflict’s end, war artist compiled an impressive volume of work which kept the public more closely apprised of the nature of the conflict.  Many artists became household names including Alfed Waud, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Nast.