Modern War Slide Show

Room 423

1. Portrait of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, officer of the

Federal Army.

Do you recognize the man in this photograph? Here are some clues: (Give any of these or other clues which you

feel will be helpful or appropriate for your students.)

• President Abraham Lincoln appointed him the supreme commander of the Union troops in 1864.

• He accepted the surrender of the Confederate forces from Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in

1865.• He became the eighteenth president of the

United States.• His face is on the fifty-dollar bill.

• His first two initials are the same as the first two initials of our country.

Major General Ulysses S. Grant sat for this portrait, which was taken by a photographer named Matthew Brady.

2. Portrait of Pvt. Edwin Francis Jemison, 2nd Louisiana Regiment, C.S.A.

You wouldn't know this man. He was Private Edwin Francis Jamison from a Louisiana infantry regiment. He was sixteen when this photograph was taken. The two men were different in many ways. One was middle-aged, an officer who led the Northern troops to victory, a man who lived to become President of the United States. The other was just a boy who fought for the South. He died in a battle in Virginia early in the war, not long after the picture you see here was taken.They had one curiosity of history in common. Both were soldiers in the first war ever to be photographed.

3. Group of unidentified Federal soldiers. CWP40940

Today our lives are so full of pictures that it's hard to imagine there ever was a time when people lived without them. The first time cameras were used successfully was in 1839, only twenty-two years before the Civil War broke out. In those early years, photography was used mostly by artists. The chemicals used and the cameras themselves were too slow to freeze images of moving subjects as today's cameras can. In those days, whatever you were shooting had to stay pretty still. So sometimes the artists would set up objects, like vases of flowers, and take pictures of them.By the time the Civil War began, people in America and Europe had started to have photographs taken of themselves in studios. They were very inexpensive compared to the cost of a painted portrait and so for the first time, ordinary working people could see themselves in a new and different way.

4. Portrait of New York Zouves. CWP40902

Have a look at these two pictures. The photographs were taken sometime between 1860 and 1865. See of you can figure out where each person is from and what they all have in common.

5. Portrait of a boy soldier. CWP40861

You might be surprised to learn that all of them, even the little boy, were soldiers in the American Civil War who fought on the side of the Union. How could this be?

First of all, underage boys were allowed to sign up for nonfighting jobs like musicians. This little boy was particularly young, but historians believe that over 400 thousand soldiers were underage.

7. Portrait of Lt. Edwin J. Sweet, 40th New York Infantry, USA. CWP40864

But what about those uniforms?

At the beginning of the war, the government could not make all the uniforms that were needed, so instead, they just made suggestions to the states for how the uniforms should look. Some soldiers ended up not having uniforms at all, while some proud local regiments designed and made their own. In the South, soldiers were told they needed to provide their own. As you might imagine, between the variety of uniforms and the thick gunsmoke on the battlefields, sometimes soldiers were wounded or

killed by others on their own side.

8. A Soldier’s Body Being Prepared by an Embalming Surgeon. CWP39507

Medical care was primitive. Tents served as operating rooms in the field as seen in this 1863 photograph. Unsanitary conditions and primitive medical methods resulted in a high death rate for both armies.

9. A Surgeon’s Kit Used in the Civil War

The 14 pieces of surgical instruments included a large surgical saw, surgical knife, mirror, bandage scissors, and manual drill. The field surgeon held one of the most important and demanding jobs during the war. Civil War surgeons and nurses were courageous and hard-working, often dispensing medical care on the front lines and under

heavy fire. Care was rudimentary — little thought was given to cleanliness before the theory of contagion was developed.

Historian Bruce Catton has estimated that compared to every single combat loss, two and one-half Union deaths, and three Confederate deaths, resulted from disease.

6. Portrait of musicians, Drum Corps, 93rd New York Infantry. CWP40939

10. Portrait of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, officer of the Federal Army. CWP40306

This is another kind of record, similar to the one you saw before.

Do you see the sets of three buttons on this man's uniform and the stars on his shoulders? He was a Union Major General too, as Grant was. You can compare their uniforms. This man's name was Ambrose E. Burnside. Do you see those full whiskers and the clean-shaven chin? Burnside became so famous for this style that they named

it after him. After a while, people started switching the syllables around, calling the style "sideburns." They still call it that today.

11. Gen. Burnside and his staff at 9th Corps headquarters. Cold Harbor, Va. CWP40922

Before photography, the only way people had to find out what something far away looked like was to see a drawing or painting of it. The picture you see here was made from a kind of wooden stamp called an engraving, which was made from a sketch that an artist made. Sometimes newspapers would print a wood engraving as an

illustration of an important story.

This one shows General Burnside and his staff. Do you see him with his bushy burnsides, sitting with his leg crossed in the middle?

The trouble with these engravings was that if the artist wanted to, he could change the way things really looked. You might notice that in this picture, everyone looks healthy and strong. Everything is neat and in place.

12. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside and staff; another view. Warrenton, Va. CWP40087

Here's a similar picture of General Burnside and his staff, but this time it's a photograph. The exposure on this transparency is a little unclear. In the original print, you would see that some of the men don't look as handsome or as fit as in the engraving and the camp doesn't look as orderly.

Until the Civil War, many Americans had the idea that war was a romantic event in which heroic men went off to fight for noble causes; in which gentleman officers would draw the lines of battle and regiments of brave soldiers would fire their muskets and advance on the enemy, bayonets fixed; in which the victors, our side, would return

home safe and sound.

Americans learned a lesson about war from the Civil War, and even though photography itself was just a kid, it was one of the teachers.

13. Prof. Thaddeus S. Lowe observing the battle from his balloon "Intrepid." Fair Oaks, Va. CWP39678

The Civil War is often called "the first modern war." For about a hundred years, a peaceful revolution had been changing life in the United States. A number of important inventions had led people to feel that science and invention would lead to progress, which would help the country grow. This time was called the Industrial Revolution.

Some inventions like the one you can almost see at the top of this picture, were not designed for war, but then they were used in war. The men in the field are holding ropes. If you look up in the center of the frame, you will see Professor Thaddeus S. Lowe under his lighter-than-air balloon. He's looking beyond the trees at a battle and

then reporting what he sees to the officers below. The Civil War was the first one in which balloons were used for surveillance, or watching the enemy.

14. Pontoon bridge across the Pamunkey, built by the 50th New York Engineers. Mrs. Nelson's Crossing, Va. CWP39593

Most of the battles of the Civil War were fought all over the South and as far north as Pennsylvania. One of the big problems for both sides was that soldiers had to do a lot a traveling over land and they had to take their supplies and weapons with them and then keep the paths, or supply lines, open. Corps of engineers often built heavy bridges

of logs to get across rivers or streams, but a new technology was a portable crossing called a "pontoon bridge," which you see here. Each pontoon was like a canvas and wood canoe. It was set into the water and fastened to a deck. Soldiers and their equipment could then cross. If the enemy later destroyed the bridge, it could be replaced

fairly quickly.

The Civil War also saw advancements in modes of transportation. Have you heard of the Monitor and the Merrimack? Cannonballs bounced off the sides of these ironclad battleships. And for the first time, there was even a submarine.

15. The "Dictator." a closer view. Petersburg, Va. CWP40112

By far the biggest effect the Industrial Revolution had on warfare was the development of modern weapons. For the first time, many soldiers carried short-barreled carbine rifles. They loaded at the breech, on the trigger end of the weapon as today's rifles do, rather than through the muzzle, at the other end. They were faster to load and some

of them even repeated. There were grooves or "rifling" on the inside of the barrel which made the bullet spin and go farther with greater accuracy.

There were many advances in artillery as well. This mortar, nicknamed "The Dictator," could fire shells at a very high angle, or trajectory, and could hit targets two-and-a-half miles away.

16. Interior of Fort Sumter, with gabion reinforcements. Charleston, S.C. CWP39923

You may have learned that the first battle of the Civil War was at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and it's likely you've seen some drawings or paintings of it. Here's an actual photograph of the inside of the fort. Did you picture it like this? What do you think is inside those wooden barrels?

It's dirt. Those barrels, called gabions, were stacked up to make heavy walls. In between the outside wall of the fort and the gabion wall was loose dirt. The purpose of all this padding was to strengthen the fort against attack from the new heavy siege cannons on the Charleston shore. This was the first war where forts had to be reinforced

with earth to this extent.

17. Portrait of a soldier of the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry? CWP40936

Earlier, you learned that the Civil War was called the first modern war. Now you know a little more about why it had this name. But there was a really tragic aspect to all this technological progress. The new weapons were more modern than the fighting techniques, which were pretty much the same as

the ones used in the Mexican War fifteen years earlier.

18. Portrait of Pvt. Robert Patterson, Company D, 12th Tennessee Infantry, C.S.A. CWP40929

It's one thing to stand across the field from a soldier carrying an inaccurate, slow-to-load musket, and quite another to face a man firing a repeating carbine rifle. For this reason, what made the war most modern of all was the number of deaths and injuries that resulted.

19. Spotsylvania Court House, Va. vicinity. Body of a Confederate soldier near Mrs. Alsop's house. CWP39576

In five years of fighting, about 650,000 men died. One historian calculated that it would be as if 5 million Americans were killed in a war today. Hundreds of thousands more were injured.

20. Bodies of Confederate soldiers, killed on July 1, collected near the McPherson woods. CWP39433

Dead soldiers, like the meadows in which they died, were still. The slow, clumsy cameras could photograph them, and they did.

21. Bodies of Federal soldiers, killed on July 1, near the McPherson woods. Gettysburg, Pa. CWP39432

22. Three Confederate soldiers who have been taken prisoner of war at Gettysburg. CWP39577

24. Brady the photographer, returned from Bull Run. CWP40924

During the Civil War, this man, Matthew Brady, the same man who took General Grant's photograph, along with his team of photographers, traveled with the Union army throughout the South. They took thousands of exposures, just a few of which you've seen here today.

At that time, no one had yet invented a way to print photographs in newspapers. But Brady had exhibitions of his Civil War photographs, and many Americans got their first real impressions of the gravity of war at these shows.

In 1862, a New York Times reporter went to see Brady's show entitled "The Dead of Antietam” in New York City. "Mr. Brady has done something to bring us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war," he wrote. "If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it."

25. Portrait of a group of Federal soldiers. CWP40890

Try an experiment. Tonight at home, turn on the radio news. Listen to it for five or ten minutes. Then turn on a TV news show and listen to it, but don't look at it. Then, after about ten minutes, watch for a while. Think about how much of what you learn comes to you in pictures.

Then imagine living in the United States during the Civil War. How do you think you would have felt when you saw photographs of the first modern war?

23. Fair Oaks, Va. Lt. James B. Washington, a Confederate prisoner, with Capt. George A. Custer of the 5th Cavalry, U.S.A.

Choosing sides wasn’t easy for many soldiers and their leaders. In fact, before the war many of the nation’s top military leaders – both Northern and Southern – were close friends.

It wasn’t unusual for Northern soldiers to camp in trenches facing Southern soldiers while both sides waited for orders to fight – and they could take weeks or months. At first they yelled at each other, then they talked, occasionally they even sang together.