By Joan Brown Wettingfeld
As we approach February we are, of course, reminded of Lincoln's birthday and of the great conflict that made his presidency a legacy of mythic proportions. At the outbreak of the Civil War the North was rife with posters appealing for volunteers, for Lincoln had assumed unprecedented powers calling for recruits before receiving Congressional approval.
It is to a paper called Harper's Weekly that we owe a debt of gratitude for leaving a significant pictorial record of the great conflict.
“The war has now begun in earnest. The secession of Virginia, and the attempts of the rebels to seize the Arsenal at Harper's Ferry and the Navy Yard at Norfolk; the investment of Fort Pickens; the threatened seizure of the Federal Capital by the rebels; the murder of Massachusetts men in Baltimore – these facts explain the situation without comment.
“It is not now a question of slavery or anti-slavery. It is a not even a question of Union or disunion. The question simply is whether Northern men will fight.”
This was the way Harper's Weekly introduced the Civil War to its readers hinged on the question uppermost in most people's minds. The answer came with the news that brought the story of the firing on Fort Sumter and the president's call to arms. The outburst was enthusiastic and spontaneous. In New York City, Union Square was jammed with a mass meeting, and by nightfall 3,000 men answered the call, and the 7th regiment marched down Broadway.
The war had begun in earnest and it was from the drawing boards of newspaper artists that the story of the great conflict unfolded. Two principal northern publications, Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Weekly, sent artists like a young Winslow Homer into the lines to cover the action. The age of the camera had not yet truly dawned and Matthew Brady's work was largely unknown and difficult to reproduce. So it came to be that the North's views of the war were shaped on the drawing boards of the day's prominent weeklies.
Combat artists, Winslow Homer among them, were given amazing freedom, moving about unchallenged and uninhibited in a way no military reporter of this day and age could possibly attain. But in their initiative these early combat reporters set the standards for modern pictorial reporting. Their sketches were made under fire, and many of their final drawings were done in the hospitals, mess tents, or gunboats when day was done. They reported not only the highlights but the sidelights of the war, and through their weeklies preserved for posterity its courage and anguish, its passions and its mistakes and faults.
The technical equipment of photography in the period from 1861-65 permitted only time exposures and there was no means of reproducing a photograph directly. That is the reason so few during the war ever saw a Matthew Brady photograph. Any such photograph would have had to be made first into a drawing and reduced to a woodcut before being published in a paper.
Other than through the pictorial coverage of the two Northern weeklies, Harper's and Leslie's, it was rare for anyone to get to see what the war really looked like. However, there was a need and a desire for the public to know. It was the task of the artist-correspondent to fill that need. They were painstaking reporters, including the former lithographer who later became a famed painter, Winslow Homer. Born in Boston, Homer had moved to New York City and had attended night school at the National Academy of Design.
It appears that as these correspondents' pictorial reporting progressed, so did the realism of their work. In many instances these young men reflected the times more accurately than historians as they emphasized how the people were living through the events of the war. It is interesting to note that in the South, in Charleston, Richmond, and Montgomery, there were no comparable illustrated weeklies to play the same role.
While in the camps around Washington, D.C. men were ill-equipped and learning with difficulty the minor arts of soldiering, it was different for the “Excelsior Brigade” raised and commanded by Tammany's congressman, Daniel Sickles. Sickles had been acquitted of murder through the efforts of future Secretary of War Stanton. Despite his record it did nothing to mar Sickles' popularity, and his brigade was exceptional because it lacked for nothing. His brigade wore the prescribed uniform, was well-equipped, and when they camped in their home territory, the local citizenry watched their drills in a holiday atmosphere. An illustration in Harper's Weekly shows the bivouac of that brigade in Harlem.
Harper's Weekly was published beginning in 1857 and was launched by the famous firm known later as Harper Collins. Its founder was James Harper, who with his brother, started a printing business in 1817 at the age of 22. James Harper was born in Newtown, now a part of Queens, in 1795 and became mayor of New York in 1844, a nominee of the American Republican Party and supported by Whigs and Democrats as well. He took a leave from publishing while he served as mayor and is noted for his reform stance in politics. His greatest achievement was the formation of the Municipal Police, one of our nation's earliest organized police forces. In 1845 he returned to publishing and worked on through the Civil War. His life ended tragically in March 1869 in a carriage accident in Central Park.
Once again a Queens “worthy” links our history to that of people and events of national significance.
