Existing comment:
Letter from Adalbert Volck, January 21, 1900:
In this letter Volck wrote in 1900, he explained the motivations for his Confederate sketches. He noted that he worked at nights and in secret and attempted to be accurate in his depictions, based on what he saw and experienced, especially when he had the chance to travel in the South. In a letter Volck wrote to the Library of Congress five years later, he made a surprising admission: that his "greatest regret ever was to have aimed ridicule at that great and good Lincoln -- outside of that the pictures represent events as truthfully as my close connection with the South enabled me to get at them." |