Existing comment:
Advocate for the South:
Adalbert Volck was a believer in the Confederate cause who found himself behind Union lines. He risked prosecution and arrest for distributing his thirty "Sketches from the Civil War in North America" produced from 1861-1864 under the pseudonym V. Blada. During the war he was only able to circulate his work through the subscription of two-hundred friends and supporters. But it was the republishing of the folios beginning in 1882 that gave his work the wide exposure and iconographic status that it has today.
[Note: According to Wiktionary.org, "blada" is the feminine version of a Polish word meaning "pale".]
In his illustrations of Southern life, Volck depicts Southerners as being morally superior to the North, with God looking upon them with favor. Priests and citizens bring precious objects to be melted into cannons. The pious Stonewall Jackson leads his men in prayer before battle. Slaves are well cared for and loyal servants to their virtuous masters.
The North, on the other hand, is vilified as immoral and inhuman. Union soldiers ransack Southern homes, terrorizing women and children. The Confederate soldier returns home to find his house and livelihood destroyed, and his wife raped and murdered.
After the war, Volck defended his work as true to the Southern experience, stating that he wanted to produce images "free from falsehood and vulgary... handed down to our children as representative scenes from the great struggle in which their fathers bled and their mothers suffered." |