BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Civil War

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Civil War:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIPGCW_150224_06.JPG: Robert Gould Shaw, 1837-1863 Born Boston, Massachusetts When Massachusetts Governor John Andrew organized the North's first regiment of African American troops, Robert Gould Shaw was offered the commission of colonel to head the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry. After a brief period of training, the novice regiment of black volunteers was thrown into action in the occupation of the Sea Islands off of South Carolina. The regiment did not perform well and its role in the subsequent burning of Darien, Georgia, aroused controversy in the North and outrage in the South. On July 18, 1863, the Fifty-Fourth made its reputation with a courageous and doomed frontal attack on Fort Wagner, outside of Charleston. Shaw was killed, one of 272 casualties. The attack validated the African American presence in the military and was a powerful propaganda tool against the South. Shaw became a legendary figure, admired for his selflessness and sacrifice. Whipple Studio, 1863
2. SIPGCW_150224_15.JPG: Clara Barton, 1821-1912 Born Oxford, Massachusetts Clara Barton considered herself foremost a relief worker, whose efforts to aid those in need consumed most of her adult life. Yet she is remembered best as a Civil War nurse and as the founder of the American Red Cross. During the war, Barton realized her true calling of service by organizing and distributing supplies to Union soldiers and visiting the fields of battle as an independent nurse. At war's end, she organized a missing soldiers office, answering thousands of inquiries from bereaved families about their loved ones. When she closed the office in 1867, she had identified the fate of some 22,000 men. Later, after attending a European meeting of the International Red Cross, Barton returned home and worked to found the American Red Cross in 1881. She served as its first president for the next twenty-three years. Mathew B. Brady, c 1865
3. SIPGCW_150224_33.JPG: Anna E. Dickinson, 1842-1932 Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Anna E. Dickinson first displayed her social conscience publicly at the age of fourteen, when she contributed an antislavery article to William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator. Four years later she delivered her first speech before the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Encouraged by Lucretia Mott and others, Dickinson began speaking regularly during the years of the Civil War on such issues as emancipation, hospital life, and Republican politics. Her youth and sex alone were enough to draw curious crowds of sometimes thousands to hear her "impassioned extempore delivery." With the return to peace in 1865, Dickinson joined the lyceum lecture circuit. Some years she averaged 150 lectures and earned as much as $20,000. Her topics ranged from women's rights to the evils of big business. In the 1870s, Dickinson became a playwright and an actor. Mathew B. Brady, c 1863
4. SIPGCW_150224_45.JPG: Carte-de-visite album of fifty Confederate leaders: Designed to preserve and display the phenomenally popular card-mounted photographs known as cartes de visite, the first American photograph albums were introduced in 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War. Although many Americans filled their albums with portraits of family members and friends, others compiled albums featuring images of people in the news. Civil War–era albums containing photographic portraits of Union generals and northern statesmen survive today in substantial numbers. But Confederate-themed albums such as this one, containing portraits of generals Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (left) and Robert E. Lee (right), are far less common.
5. SIPGCW_150224_79.JPG: Laura Keen, 1826-1873 Born London, England Actress Laura Keene had become a major theatrical attraction in New York City since her arrival in the United States in 1852. By the start of the Civil War, she had also demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for business, becoming the country's first female theater manager. Our American Cousin was one of her long-running successes, which she brought to the nation's capital in the spring of 1865. She was playing the lead role in that production the night that President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. This image shows Keene about the time she became a theater manager in 1855. Rufus Anson, c 1855
6. SIPGCW_150521_01.JPG: President Abraham Lincoln and Union generals in Frank Leslie's Portrait Pictorial, c 1862
7. SIPGCW_150521_08.JPG: Illustrated News Publications: At the start of the Civil War, the major illustrated news publications -- Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Illustrated News -- were all northern enterprises engaged in telling their side of the war. The South had no comparable news organ until September 1862, when E.W. Ayers and W.H. Wade of Richmond began publishing the Southern Illustrated News. Because paper, ink, and printing presses were just a few of the South's many scarcities, editors scrambled to produce weekly editions of the paper. Foremost was the challenge of finding good engravers to carve the illustrations into blocks of wood, which were then inked and printed on paper. The news pages on display here represent the papers of Ayres and Wade and of Frank Leslie.
8. SIPGCW_150521_21.JPG: General Robert E. Lee in the Southern Illustrated News, October 17, 1863 John W. Torsch
9. SIPGCW_150521_26.JPG: Louis Blenker
10. SIPGCW_150521_28.JPG: Ulysses S. Grant
11. SIPGCW_150521_30.JPG: George McClellan
12. SIPGCW_150521_32.JPG: Abraham Lincoln
13. SIPGCW_150521_34.JPG: W.S. Rosencranz
14. SIPGCW_150521_36.JPG: Franz Siegel
15. SIPGCW_150521_39.JPG: William Harney
16. SIPGCW_150521_42.JPG: Benjamin Butler
17. SIPGCW_150521_47.JPG: General James Longstreet in the Southern Illustrated News, February 6, 1864 John W. Torsch
18. SIPGCW_150521_60.JPG: President Lincoln and His Cabinet. Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. In spite of vocal prodding from northern abolitionists, President Lincoln steadfastly refused to make the abolition of slavery a goal of his administration in the early stages of the Civil War, lest doing so would alienate slaveholding border states that remained loyal to the Union. By mid-1862, however, Lincoln's concern for enhancing the moral weight of the United States in the eyes of the world convinced him that it was time to act. This lithograph depicts one of the most historically significant of Lincoln's cabinet meetings when, on July 22, 1862, he read a draft of his Emancipation Proclamation for the cabinet's consultation and advice. Two months later, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that on January 1, 1863, all slaves would be forever free in those regions of the South still in rebellion. This lithograph is based on a painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter and recreates the cabinet meeting Lincoln held on July 22, 1862, at which he read the first draft of his proclamation. Edwin Herline Lithography, after Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1866
19. SIPGCW_150521_64.JPG: Political "Blondins" Crossing Salt River The polarizing issue of slavery and its extension into the West is the crux of this political cartoon depicting the presidential candidates in 1860. In their attempts to cross "Salt River," Abraham Lincoln teeters on a rail balanced by the abolitionist Horace Greeley. Stephen Douglas, the champion of popular sovereignty, a doctrine that lets voters decide their region's political and economic destiny, is falling off of the "Non Intervention" rope, while President James Buchanan carries John C. Breckenridge across the rope labeled "Slavery Extension." John Bell and his running mate, Edward Everett, stand on the "Constitutional Bridge," proclaiming that it is "the only structure that connects these two shores [North and South] in an indissoluble bond of union." The name "Blondins" in the title refers to the Frenchman Charles Blondin, who created a sensation in the summer of 1859 when he crossed the Niagara River repeatedly on a tightrope. Currier & Ives Lithography Company, 1860
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Description of Subject Matter: Two of the threads running through the United States before the Civil War were the principle of union and the reality of slavery. In the North, Americans insisted on union above all else; in the South, Americans insisted on slavery above all else; and in the great American West, pioneers and sellers were left to choose between the two.
The Americans represented in this gallery felt strongly about these issues of liberty, union, and slavery. One of them, John Brown, did as much as any single person could do to push the divided nation to the brink of secession and civil war.

Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in November of 1860 enraged radical southern leaders, who fiercely defended the institution of slavery. As the Republican Party candidate, Lincoln wholly endorsed his party's platform to ban the extension of slavery into the western territories. Although he clearly stated his intention not to interfere with slavery where it already legally existed, southern extremists did not trust the new president-elect. In response, southerners enacted their doctrine of states' rights: "The Union Is Dissolved!" proclaimed the Charleston Mercury on December 20, 1860, when South Carolina became the first of eleven states to secede. A call to arms on both sides followed on the heels of secession. "Both parties deprecated war," President Lincoln reflected four years later in his second inaugural address, "but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

Lincoln and His Cabinet:
Upon entering the office of the presidency, Abraham Lincoln had every reason to feel skeptical about the ultimate success of his administration. Faced with a civil war, responsibility rested on his angular shoulders as it had done with no other American president before or since. Moreover, Lincoln had to win control over his cabinet, which at the start was at odds with him and with itself: three of the seen members had been Lincoln's rivals for the party's nomination, and four of the seven had at one time belonged t the Democratic Party. In selecting men who were his political equals, Lincoln was putting his leadership ability to an early and critical test. His successful management of this "team of rivals" for the good of the nation was a supreme test of his self-confidence and mastery of men.

Winslow Homer's Civil War Engravings:
In 1861 and 1862, Winslow Homer made sketches of camp life and skirmishes between Union and Confederate soldiers. His sketches captured the homesickness, numbing routine, and sudden violence of the conflict. The engravings made from his sketches and published in newspapers and magazines often romanticized the realities of the war, but eager readers welcomed these glimpses of the conflict. Homer also made wood engravings of events at home during the war, often focusing on absent soldiers and the war effort in New York.
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2015 photos: I retired from the US Census Bureau in god-forsaken Suitland, Maryland on my 58th birthday in May. Yee ha! Trips this year: a quick trip to Florida. two Civil War Trust conferences (Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA), and my 10th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles). Ego Strokes: Carolyn Cerbin used a Kevin Costner photo in her USA Today article. Miss DC pictures were used a few times in the Washington Post. Equipment this year: I mostly used my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: just over 550,000.
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