Existing comment:
Illustrators and Photographers:
People wanted prints of illustrations, but producing them from lithographs, copperplate engravings, and photographs took time. Newspapers met the public's desire for pictures by hiring craftsmen to engrave illustrations and photographic images on wood blocks, using the electrotype process to transfer the wood engravings to metal printing plates, and placing the plates alongside type in the rotary presses that printed the papers.
Alfred R. Waud, 1828-1891:
Born in London, England, Alfred Waud came to the United States in 1850 and worked as an illustrator. Ten years later, he became a staff artist for New York's Illustrated News. In April 1861, the paper sent him out to cover the Army of the Potomac. At the end of the year, he joined Harper's Weekly in the same capacity. Between the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1865, he attended every battle of the Army of the Potomac. One of only two artists at the Battle of Gettysburg, he depicted Pickett's Charge, the only eyewitness to leave a visual account of the battle.
Mathew Brady, 1822-1896:
Mathew Brady was an established and popular photographer when he decided to document the Civil War. He hired 23 photographers, gave them traveling darkrooms, and sent them out to the battlefields. The resulting photographs showed many Americans for the first time the graphic realities of war, including the bodies of dead soldiers. Brady himself stayed mainly in Washington, D.C., directing the efforts of his employees and spending over $100,000 to create more than 10,000 photographic plates. After the war, when the government did not buy the photographs as he expected, he declared bankruptcy and died penniless in a New York hospital's charity ward.
Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908):
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Edmund Clarence Stedman studied for two years at Yale University and then became a reporter for various newspapers in New York City. During the first years of the Civil War, he served as a war correspondent for the New York World. For 35 years after the war, he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, he was a poet, critic, and essayist. In 1900, he edited An American Anthology, 1787-1899, a comprehensive critical study of 19th century American poetry. It contained the poem "Army Correspondent's Last Ride," by George Alfred Townsend.
Henry Watterson, 1840-1921:
Born in Washington, D.C., Henry Watterson became a newspaper reporter as a young man. During the Civil War, he fought for the South and edited a pro-Confederate journal. After the war, he edited the Louisville Courier-Journal and served as a Democratic representative in Congress, where he supported civil rights for African Americans and home rule for southern states. In 1918, he won a Pulitzer Prize for two editorials supporting United States entry into World War I.
"Headquarters Army of Potomac,
Saturday Night, July 4
Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest – the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay'
The battle of Gettysburgh! I am told that it commenced on the 1st of July, a mile north of town, between two weak brigades of infantry and some doomed artillery and the whole force of the rebel army…
... My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battle-field with his feet and reaching fraternal and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise – with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen
forms to ascend."
New York Times, Monday, July 6, 1863, p.1
Samuel Wilkeson, 1817-1889:
By the spring of 1862, Samuel Wilkeson served the New York Tribune for 12 years as a staff writer and the Washington bureau chief. After being accused of profiting by his position to help a friend get a contract, he left Washington as a Civil War correspondent and volunteer aide to a corps commander in the Peninsula campaign. Here his independent reporting sometimes contradicted the editorial position of the Tribune. He is probably best remembered for a dispatch he sent to the New York Times in 1863, reporting the action of the Battle of Gettysburg. He wrote his report soon after discovering the body of his eldest son, Lt. Bayard Wilkeson, killed in action during the battle. |