Day 6. March 6, 1862.
6
Our people required blood….
Thursday 6=
Cool this morning. At 11oclock I got orders to pack up the medicine* to get ready to move down to Paw Paw Station to guard the commissary stores. We got in good quarters the Regiment moved down. It was very mudy this evening. This is in Morgan Co. Va. It is getting quite cold this evening
*See March 26 & May 7 for Ephraim’s duties & the things he carried. For now: In general, surgeons used chloroform the most. Ether was flammable. Some accounts hold it’s a myth the South ran out of anesthetics. However, they did run out of chemicals to process photographs due to Union blockades so European orders couldn’t get through to Southern photographers. Whoever gets control of the rivers Ohio, Mississippi, & Missouri wins the war Sherman said. McPherson writes, “One of Lincoln’s first actions as commander in chief after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was to declare a blockade of the Confederate coast, which eventually extended 3500 miles from Virginia to Texas, including 189 harbors and coves where cargo could be landed. To block all of these holes was an impossible task.”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 49
“On March 6 a Virginia artillerist posted near Yorktown described the ugly night just past: “Awakened this morning to find sleet, ice and snow…. Last night was one of the most miserable I ever spent, my limbs were nearly frozen, and to-day it is so very cold we have to keep wrapped up in our blankets all the time.”
P. 48
“7a.m. 34; 2p.m. 40; 9p.m. 40.”
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 98
“March 6, 1862: President invites Sen. Sumner (Mass.) to White House shortly after breakfast to discuss compensated emancipation. Recommends to Congress gradual, compensated emancipation. Attends funeral service for Gen. Frederick W. Lander at residence of Sec. Chase.”
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 159
“Conservative men still talked about preserving the Union, but they spoke as defeated men. There can be little doubt that the belligerent diatribes of the secessionist press were in large measure responsible for the demoralization of Unionists. One Arkansas Unionist wrote in his diary: “The Newspapers come loaded with such a howl of… denunciation, such threats of disruption of the government and such shouts of preparation against the North that it puts us to thinking where a peaceable citizen who has a family to protect can retreat to.
P. 91
The efforts of Southern-rights editors to reconcile their antisecessionist professions with their belief that the South must leave the Union in the event of Lincoln’s election inspired a good deal of illogical exposition. One Arkansas supporter of Breckinridge sounded like a Bell journal when it declared: “Secession is an unpopular phrase and tenet. It is an odious doctrine, in the narrow and ultra sense of the term…. It is so odious because hatred by a vast majority of citizens from the absolute injury, not to say destruction, it would bring upon a community.” Then, in mid-editorial, the paper began to sound more like the orthodox Southern-rights journal it was: “But the right of revolution, under oppression or where a solemn National compact is repeatedly and manifestly jeopardized, is essential to freedom. Such a separation of the South from the North could not be called secession.” A remarkable concluding sentence demonstrated the need for Southern-rights papers, at least in the Upper South, to dissociate themselves from ultra-secessionists such as Yancey and Rhett: “Revolutions in government are no trifles; they are never to be precipitated.” Most southern-rights journals neatly and logically resolved their apparent ambivalence toward the doctrine of secession by arguing that the Union could be saved only by those who were willing to risk its dissolution under certain circumstances.
Few Southern-rights editors professed to believe in secession without further provocation, but almost all contended that the South could secede if its rights were violated. In the view of Breckinridge editors, only a Union in which there was mutual respect and perfect equality among the states was worth preserving. States-rights Democratic papers thus justified and threatened secession, they said, not because they loved the Union less, but because they loved it more than did the “Union-savers.”
Only if the South stood firmly on its “rights” would the North come to its senses and mend its ways before disunion became inevitable. Those who manfully sounded the secession alarm, therefore, were the true friends of the Union as well as of the South. Conversely, those who cried: “The Union at any price!” were, in reality, the enemies of both the Union and the South.”
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 Edward Ayers P. 218-219
“Even Republicans who proclaimed emancipation a war aim had no vision of ending slavery and leaving the slaves in the United States. They could not imagine a country in which four million former slaves claimed freedom. Those former slaves were invariably pictured in the abstract, as an indiscriminate mass without purpose or home. Like Abraham Lincoln himself, most white Republicans dreamed of colonization in 1861, of ridding the United States of black people. In this regard, their vision remained constant: Republicans had never put the interests, desires, and loyalties of black people at the center of their vision. That did not change with secession.
Republicans who wanted to end slavery were continually planning for ways to dispense with the freed slaves, ways to “avoid the expense of supporting crowds of slaves in idleness.” They spoke of moving freed slaves to the lands earlier set aside for American Indians in Louisiana and Arkansas, apprenticing them to white Northern settlers there, and “leaving the question of their final disposition to be settled by Congress at the close of the war. All contrabands, as fast as they come into camp, to be promptly forwarded thither.” If not the Indian lands, Haiti, which “is naturally attracting the attention of the intelligent colored men of this country,” would do. Its “genial clime” seemed perfectly suited to black Americans. The paper printed an invitation from Haiti’s president “to the colored people of the world”: “Listen, then, all ye negroes and mulattoes who, in the vast continent of America, suffer from the prejudices of caste. The Republic calls you; she invites you to bring to her your arms and your minds.’”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 188
Note: Only 32 out of 152 wanted to leave the South:
“Responding to South Carolina’s secession ordinance, a Wilmington, North Carolina, editor asked readers, “Are you submissionists to the dictation of South Carolina… are you to be called cowards because you do not follow the crazy lead of that crazy state?” A Charlottesville, Virginia, editor declared that he “hated South Carolina for precipitating secession.” When Virginia voted for its convention to meet in mid-February, only 32 of the 152 delegates identified themselves as secessionists. Tennessee went the Old Dominion one better by voting not to call a convention at all. On February 18, as Jefferson Davis prepared to take his oath of office, Arkansas voters elected to their convention a strong majority of Unionists. North Carolinians concluded the rout at the end of the month by joining Tenneseeans in refusing to call a convention.
The border states proved even less cooperative. A special session of the Kentucky state legislature voted decisively not to call a convention and promptly adjourned. In Maryland, Governor Thomas H. Hicks did not even bother to call a special session of the legislature on the subject. A unanimous vote in Delaware’s lower house expressed “unqualified disapproval” of secession. Missouri decided to hold a convention, but voters elected nary a secessionist to serve.
P. 189
The Gulf Confederacy can count Virginia out of their little family arrangement- she will never join them.
P. 189
The optimism was misplaced. Northerners and Republicans in particular overestimated the strength of Unionist sentiment throughout the South and underestimated the attraction of slavery to a broad swath of the white population. In the Lower South, slaveholding households ranged from 49 percent of total white households in South Carolina to 27 percent in Texas. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the first two states to leave the Union, nearly half of all white households owned slaves. In those states in particular, what debate existed revolved around how best to protect the institution of slavery and avert economic disaster and racial warfare. Those who opposed secession were almost always those who held out for a constitutional settlement or compromise. Few white citizens in those states wanted to remain in the Union under Republican rule without new constitutional protections.
The second paragraph in the “Mississippi Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union”:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
Note: Further down in the Declaration:
“Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.”
On Sunday, 4/28/1861, the New York Times printed Virginia’s Secession Ordinance (the very first Sunday edition of the NYT had come out just a week earlier. This was the front page: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/insider/sunday-newspapers.html):
THE VIRGINIA SECESSION ORDINANCE; AN ORDINANCE
April 28, 1861
“The following is the ordinance of secession of Virginia, passed on the 17th inst., and which has just been made public. Accompanying the document is a long schedule, setting forth the time and manner of holding a poll for its ratification by the people, &c.A poll will be opened in each military camp of Virginia volunteers, whether in or out of the State, and the voters there suffered to vote; this will be besides the regular election precincts. The election for members of Congress for Virginia to the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, required by law to be held on the 4th Thursday in May nest, is suspended and prohibited until otherwise ordained by the Convention.
To repeal the Ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America by the State of Virginia, and to resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution.
The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whatsoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted and powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, out to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States;
Now, therefore, we, the people of Virginia, do declare and ordain that the Ordinance adopted by the people of this State, in Convention, on the 25th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was returned — and all acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying or adopting amendments the said Constitution — are hereby repeated and abrogated; that the Union between the State of Virginia and the other States under the Constitution aforesaid is hereby dissolved, and that the State of Virginia is in the full possession and exercise of all the rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State. And they do further declare that the said Constitution of the United States of America is no longer binding on any of the citizens of this State.
This ordinance shall take effect and be an act of this day when ratified by a majority of the votes of the people of this State, cast at a poll to be taken thereon on the fourth Thursday in May next, in pursuance of a schedule hereafter to be enacted.
Done in Convention, in the City of Richmond, on the seventeenth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and in the eighty-fifth year of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
A true copy. JOHN L. EUBANK,
Secretary of the Convention.”
Note: The Earl of Shrewsbury gloated a last final moment, one last chance to get rid of the “American nightmare”: “The dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.” They wished.
Note: President Davis had already claimed KY. & MO. & put a star for each on his flag like a retained placenta though those two never went for the con. So they had 13 stars, not 11. TN. seceded last, was the 11th State, despite many eastern Tennesseans being pro-Union.
Black Reconstruction in America W.E.B. DuBois P. 25
“Colonial Virginia declared its belief in natural and inalienable rights, popular sovereignty, and government for the common good, even before the Declaration of Independence. But it soon became the belief of doctrinaires, and not a single other Southern state enacted those doctrines of equality until after the Civil War. The Reconstruction constitutions incorporated them; but quite logically, South Carolina repudiated its declaration in 1895.”
The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents Henry Steele Commager P. 86 Testimony of Mrs. Mary A. Ward
“Still, while we spoke of these things we really did not think that there was going to be actual war. We had an idea that when our soldiers got upon the ground and showed, unmistakably, that they were really ready and willing to fight—an idea that then, by some sort of hocus pocus, we didn’t know what, the whole trouble would be declared at an end. Of course we were not fully conscious of that feeling at the time, but that the feeling existed was beyond doubt from the great disappointment that showed itself afterward when things turned out differently.”
The Civil War Diary Quilt Rosemary Youngs P. 193
Rebecca Loraine Richmond (June 22, 1840-Jan. 16, 1925)
June 13, 1861
“One of the saddest days in the record of Grand Rapids. Our Pet Regiment, the gallant Third, had departed at last, and left many, many, sorrowing hearts behind. They started from Cantonment Andereson at about eight o’clock, accompanied by a vast procession of carriages. Their march through the city to the depot was a continual ovation. The Star Spangled Banner floated over them from almost every building along the route, handkerchiefs wave from thousands of fair hands and young girls showered the troops with bouquets. We took our station on the brow of the beautiful hill overlooking the depot from the South, whence we had a fine view of the procession after it arrived at Sweets flouring mill on Canal Street until it reached the depot. There two trains of 10 cars each awaited them. They soon embarked in regular order, and were slowly removed from the site of mourning friends to the music of the band and the cheers of the immense assembled throng. Before the trains commenced to move, we girls went over to the eastern side of the hill, which commanded a view of the railroad from some distance. The sides of this hill are strictly wooded, with here and there an opening. In one of these we took our places, and from our elevated stand waved our adieux to the trains as they passed. The soldiers returned our salute, from the car windows and platforms, by waving of cape and handkerchief’s, bowing and cheering. In a second more – they were gone.”
Diary From Dixie Mary Boykin Chesnut P. 160
“If they do not want to be killed, they can stay at home.”
A Yankee Spy in Richmond Elizabeth Van Lew P. 35
“For once the whole idle South had something to do.”
A Yankee Spy in Richmond Elizabeth Van Lew P. 313
“Be true to your section and let your country go to the devil.”
ordinary-times.com “Of the Devil’s Side (and Knowing It)” by J.L. Wall, 6/7/11 Shelby Foote:
“There’s another good reason for fighting for the Confederacy. Life would have been intolerable if you hadn’t. The women of the South just would not allow somebody to stay home and sulk while the war was going on. It didn’t take conscription to grab him. The women made him go.”
Note: What does a man who goes out for food & is snatched owe the Confederacy? Who by merely appearing on a street puts his life in danger. What does he owe those Confederate flags of shifting designs. Born into a bad blood, & everyone smiling. This is what’s going to happen: they press it into their hands upon birth. They press it into their hands their homes are in peril, their state will be invaded. Then put the shotguns in their hands, say only they can stop it.
That said, see https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/female-soldiers-civil-war
for the female soldier estimate: 400 to 750 who “shared the same motivations as their male companions.” “Some women went to war in order to share in the trials of their loved ones. Others were stirred by a thirst for adventure, the promise of reliable wages, or ardent patriotism. In the words of Sarah Edmonds Seelye, also known as Franklin Flint Thompson of the 2nd Michigan Infantry: “I could only thank God that I was free and could go forward and work, and I was not obliged to stay at home and weep.” Seelye holds the honor of being the only woman to receive a veteran’s pension after the war.” See above link for a Frances Clayton disguised as one Frances Clalin, as well as ‘herself’ in a hoopskirt.
A Yankee Spy in Richmond Elizabeth Van Lew P. 27 1861
“The beginning of the war. There is no denying the fact our people were in a palpable state of war from the time of the John Brown* raid. Henry A. Wise was Governor of Virginia, and did everything to keep up excitement, thinking, perhaps, to use his zeal as a stepping stone to popularity and the presidential chain. There were rumors that the whole North was coming. Thousands of men marching in battle array to overwhelm us. The alarm bell would be rung; the tramp of armed men could be heard through the night, and no time was given the people for a sane breath and a perception of the truth. Such hurry, such haste, such valor, such determination betokened as a ruler either Henry A. Wise or Iron Impotte. Our people required blood, the blood of all who were of the [John] Brown party. They thirsted for it; they cried out for it. It was not enough that one old man should die. No plea of the people intellecting [sic] of misguided youth, would be listened to, and when a deputation [of loyalists] arrived and waited on the legislature to solicit mercy for young…. Look… a lady, one of the most highly respectable in the city, implored the members to steel their hearts, to let no appeal, no pity move them! What struck me most painfully in all this was the universal want of humanity towards the raiders. I hold that one spark of the love of Christ in our hearts gave us a feeling of oneness, of sympathy with all his creatures, however sunken, however sinning. I never thought John Brown right; I have always thought him one who suffered so deeply with slaves…. War, war in the heart all the while; yet the North would not believe in our… terrible secession.
During the summer of 1860 I was at the White Sulphur Springs. Mr. [James Johnston] Pettigrew of South Carolina was there, and Edmund Ruffin, the old man who went South by request to fire the first gun against Fort Sumter, and whose late tragic… suicide was a fitting commentary of this traitorous act. I remember his long gray beard and hair, his keen eye, and gentle form. The political opinions of these two gentlemen differed no more than their personnel. North men were no more but how different their places in the Nation’s memory. The illussolution [sic] and reconstruction of the Union was the daily talk at the Springs. There was a military company from Richmond also there and we had martial music, marching and music even on Sunday. People were if anything, more morbid than ever on the subject of slavery, and I heard a member of the Virginia Legislature say that anyone speaking against it, or doubting its divinity, ought to be hung. Yes, hung, as certainly and as truly as he would be for murder. Another gentleman, a state senator, told me that the members of the senate did not dare to speak as they thought and felt, that they were afraid, that is, if they did not think pro-slavery or pro-South. He was quite alarmed after making this admission, but I assured him his confidence should not be misplaced or abused. Yet during all this time and subsequently, the sense and heart of the community – the majority of it as all went was for Union. I used to attend the State Convention held in Richmond, which afterwards passed the ordinance of secession, and to which they failed to elect the bold and true John Minor Botts…. The helm of the State was already in the hands of the traitors. I remember one day seeing old John Tyler, ex President Tyler, with his voice raised for heaven, almost crying, and saying that he had “no influence and was only by courtesy permitted on that floor.” the secessionists grew bold and more imprudently daring. All things became worse and worse. Oh, the awe we feel of the coming woe!… The doctrine of secessionism seemed to gratify an innate feeling of pride. The women became its strongest advocates, unknowing and unreflecting. “Ah, ladies, when you see your husbands, brothers, and fathers brought home dead, you’ll think of this,” was said to them on every opportunity by a loyal statesman only to fall as idle words on deaf ears.
I have never yet comprehended the almost universal want of National patriotism among the women. We know very few ladies who were for their Country, very few. In conversation they would become really excited.
I cannot live over again those dark days. I have listened to words of burning eloquence in the Convention; seen the tears in the eyes of many of the members. While at the same time pretty, well dressed ladies of the highest education walk up and down the Capitol square asking, “Do you think the state will go out today for if it does not, I cannot stand it any longer?” secession flags began now to flaunt from the house tops and from the windows. God help us! Those were sorry days; but the cotton peant [sic] sown in tears was beginning to yield freedom for its harvest.
Drunk with… liberty and license our Southern leaders firmly believed in the power of cotton to rule the world. It had clothed and fed them, was it not necessary to clothe and feed all nations!
The first Secession flag, the Palmetto flag, raised by any private individual in the city was flung to the breeze by Brown & Peasley, fishmongers, near the market on 17th Street, with money furnished by negro traders. Just before the Federal army entered Richmond [April 3, 1865], this Brown was much alarmed – told me he expected to be hung for what he had done (and in expectation made over his property to some relative or friend), or that at any note he would be obliged to leave Richmond forever. He expressed contrition and said that latterly he had been doing all he could for the “other side.”
Then followed the firing at Fort Sumter. The Convention yet was still, but firm; there was no life in it, so little did this national outrage move it. Though the populace were jubilant. The Rebel flag was raised above the Capitol, and there was great ado and some military display, with music, on the square. But John Sesher had not yet signed away his soul, and he came out and ordered the flag to be taken down. The holding of the Convention at Richmond made that city the focus, the soul, the centre of treason. There was also held there what was termed an ‘Intimidation Convention,” which was determined to carry the State out of the Union at all hazards; and to this end had its agents at work throughout the country. The loyal men of the State Convention, intimidated, went over to Secession.
One gentleman, who signed the ordinance of secession, told me he thought that if he had not done so, the streets of Richmond would have run with blood. This same gentleman afterwards told me that, on returning to his constituents, men would come to him weeping and say that they could not vote for secession; that they would take their guns in their hands to the polls and vote for the Union, but he told them they “must vote for secession.” I believe if Mr. Botts had been a member of this body he would have been assassinated. This he believed, and told me so. Finally the State was surrendered, and we cried out for the blood of Sumter and Carlisle and the union members of the convention who fled for their lives. All who had been friendly to them were in danger! “We shall have war now,” said the ladies, joyfully and defiantly, “if Lincoln is not a coward.”
Alas for those with loyalty in their hearts, when treason was on every tongue, for those who had been boldly stemming the sweeping current! Many had already formed themselves into volunteer companies. These belonged to the State, and found themselves in the army before they knew it. The whole South became one great military school. We were told that it would only require six per cent of our male population to whip the Yankees, a cowardly set who had only to believe us in earnest to yield [to] all our demands.
Some went as far as to say that one Southern man could whip five hundred Yankees, a race whose extermination, even of women and children, would be a blessing. [Union] General [Winfield] Scott was the object of particular exception.
Brave men were going to Washington to take his sword. Women, ladies, our neighbors, even young girls, took to pistol shooting and firing at a mark.
Now could be seen in the streets [men] with books taking down names of men. Young men were urged to enlist; told that if they did not, they would be drafted and then they would not be…
The remainder of this page is missing.”
*John Brown with his 1,000 pikes he brought to Harpers Ferry for all the slaves he thought would fight alongside him. John Brown, of the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre, who killed five in cold blood. (see March 7)
Note: Breckinridge, the final Confederate Secretary of War, just one of thousands who fled to Cuba, Mexico, Great Britain, or Canada because they couldn’t stand to live in the South after they lost. In the 1880s, the 1890s, many Southerners will boast they were never pardoned. They thought they were more devoted to the American Way than all others. These would be the genre of film where Rock Hudson talks in a southern accent, called The Undefeated. They ended up in their very own diaspora of Confederates. Confederados. Desperado Confederados. Many ended up in Cuba, Mexico, Egypt, and what town was that in Brazil? After WWII, such Euro Trash treasures like these Anglo Old Guard got flown to undisclosed locations & set loose. A picture exists of Breckinridge posing in front of American Falls in Canada in 1866, on the run from his treason indictment, returning to Kentucky because President Johnson granted him amnesty. Johnson, in 1868, will pardon all “persons concerned in the late rebellion.” Breckinridge will live 7 years after the pardon. Oh, btw: While the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba sang “Avanza, Lincoln, Avanza! Tue res nuestra esperanza” (Onward! Onward! You are our hope).
Note: March 6, 1863: “A mob of white men rampages through the black section of Detroit, Michigan, destroying thirty-two houses, killing several black people, and leaving more than 200 homeless. A number of antiblack demonstrations occur in the north in 1863, fueled by job worries and inflammatory statements made by some leaders of the Democratic Party.” (Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference)
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getting quite cold this evening….
It was considered shameful to get conscripted so you had to enlist. All the while they could hear someone counting down. All the bands played Dixie at the depots they’d collect at in each state. Bid farewell, spit into the wind, then rush off to death.
At depots, this is a one-way trip. Entire towns lost someone in a family. That’s what they signed up for, stampeded into mass graves. They’d enlist with friends, relatives, neighbors, so it had to be death before dishonor.
They waved, then never saw each other again. Some had pictures of the dead. Most did not. And what else they don’t know yet is that red is only one of blood’s colors, dying by inches, the early red before it goes into the full red. It will not be a color of red they have seen before. And it’s only red because a star somewhere, sometime, exploded; it’s red because it contains iron. This means a star. They had that to hold onto. Something that means something beyond all this.
A sprig of green tucked in a buttonhole before boarding. Fidgeting, they wait for the steam engine whistle, withal, then lock eyes one last time with blood kin, a last long look before a pellet the size of a squirrel’s ear, or the size of a single star removed from an American flag takes them down, only to get scraped out of a shallow grave later if they can find him, but they won’t, because most men are never found or identified.
So they wave farewell like their bones are already being pulled from their bodies, already marked bodies in a downsloping wind that starts its work right there, bones separating in decomposition, bones that’ll emerge out of the forest when they’re ready but by then no one knows who they belonged to nor why.
A group of rats is called a mischief. In Virginia they’re called Allegheny Wood Rats. Found in rocky areas. They’re the ones who like to dig up the men. They carry disease to humans like bats do, but a mischief will bring you back the bones if you just wait enough time. The bones, they inch back.
While waiting on God to decide their fate, the men take their ‘likeness’ sitting in front of a future nailed to a sky that soon enough will get shot out. They pose in a chair before a painted Virginia backdrop, the background they’ll get killed to but they don’t know it yet, so they sit very still. This is the first and last picture they’ll ever make that looks like their face so better get it right for the folks back home. For all they knew it might survive generations so come in closer now, see him before he’s eating rats and blood-stained crackers off dead comrades teeming with maggots. He’s already there while he sits in front of the camera and time ticks down, so he’s already watching the trail of dust in a line straight up to the sky, and it’s a different sound on the ground coming now, watching the wildlife show signs the Yankees are on their way, they’re about 6 hours out, then it’s only a matter of time until the next man stumbles up, eats a cracker off your dead body so hurry up now y’all don’t want to miss the expression on the chap in front of you in that backdrop, and so it went.
The backdrop: make it pastoral, a land to look forward to returning to, to mail the likeness back to a farm or plantation in just such woods and skies, something to aspire to when this is all over, a sailboat atop a North Carolina lake under a cerulean sky too good to be true which was the color they’d hoped for all along in the childhoods of these final likenesses of so many soon to be corpses laying in the sideways light that Mathew Brady may or may not get on film later. For now, the men move toward or away from the camera without more reference than themselves but a distant fence and some brush to crouch behind. Faces as composites of other things before edges of the world slip off and his reflection is no longer there, can no longer walk up to meet him. We’re ready for your close-up.
But the backdrop. You get to choose. Painted seas or vases of flowers. A map or a parlor milieu, with props. An empty knife sheath trained to the sky in one hand, sword in the other you tip toward the camera. An attitude. It’s important. The final message. Make it a panoramic view of sorts, a calm, lush forest. You’re in a wood straight-backed chair. In poses. Classical Greek scenery. Books you’ll never read behind you. You might smile. Panorama of peace. There’s painted screens. Plain white screen. A red scream. Trees too thin to hide behind later, trees that can’t cover you, trees that will lift right out like matchsticks. The cannonball that will land after sailing in the sky instead of staying in the backdrop, weightless. Blankets, canteens, haversacks you’ll drop in haste running for your life. A sailboat in a breeze. Gunboats. They stay in a safe distance you’ll never traverse back in a direction that is no longer possible, the land you’ll never step onto and plow again.
Some you just look at and know they won’t be coming back. Say, a staged photo of a Kentucky infantryman sitting around a table playing cards, sitting in a chair like in your kitchen, looking at his cards green with the flower designs on the back, holding the cards, and you can see the tell on his face. The next photograph is a man starved, ribs poking out, hands over genitals, looking down to his left. This one’s identified: John Q. Rose, 8th Kentucky.
But there is more. And there is less. You go from a photograph to identify your dead except when you don’t, and they didn’t. For everything that shows, there’s always something more. It’s not so much the story as how it’s been shot. In the pictures, toward the edge of the frame, the image finally merges with the original.
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