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Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.This beautiful coffee-table sized (8 Zi x 10 lA in.) book accompanied a 2013-2014 joint exhibition by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Newberry Library. In six chapters, it examines issues raised by one hundred sepia-and-white or color illustrations taken from ephemera (letters, broadsides), publications (sheet music, periodical clippings, magazine engravings), photographs, and art (sculpture, oil paintings).Every American schoolchild knows that, at the war's inception, the North enjoyed industrial superiority; it also had propaganda superiority because of its art academies, galleries, publishing houses, and pictorial papers. Nowadays we are used to Matthew Brady's eloquent photographs, but, in the 1860s, most Americans got their images ofqfrom the popular press: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, New York Illustrated News, and the like. Home Front deserves credit for treating popular culture with respect.Take the evolving interrelationship of the cotton trade and slavery. An 1861 Vanity Fair political cartoon "Principle vs. Interest" shows John Bull bargaining with Jefferson Davis over a shipment of cotton; meanwhile an African slave, in the background, tries to escape from a cotton bale in which he is almost entirely encased. The economic-political puns are delicious. Although Britain officially banned and abhorred slavery on moral principle, slave-produced cotton generated insatiable consumer interest. So while John Bull hypocritically expresses his "warmest sympathy" for the slave, he evades personal responsibility for profiting by helping to continue slavery: "really, one cannot know friends in trade" (17). That same year, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper featured the illustration "Morning Mustering of the Contraband," showing the strategic wartime value of freed slaves: they deny the Confederacy the profit of slave labor, perform tasks that allow more soldiers to join the Union Army, and convey useful intelligence about Confederate troop movements. However, they are still objectified with the label contraband. By 1868, several years after the war's conclusion, Samuel Coleman's oil-on-canvas "Ships Unloading" dramatizes the new citizen status of the former slave. Stevedores, one black and two white, work for wages side by side on the docks as they handle free-labor cotton. … |
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