Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America 9780271087542

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elevate the m a sse s

Elevate the Masses al e x a nd e r ga r dne r , photogr a phy, a n d d emo c r ac y i n ni ne t een th-​c en tu ry a m er ica

Makeda Best

The Penns y lva ni a State Univer sit y Pr e ss University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Best, Makeda, 1975– author. Title: Elevate the masses : Alexander Gardner, photography, and democracy in nineteenth-​century America / Makeda Best. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the work of the photographer Alexander Gardner and explores transatlantic dialogues in American Civil War-​era photography, demonstrating the concern over issues such as photography as a documentary form, the meaning of democracy, and the impact of industrialization on labor and social relations”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027354 | ISBN 9780271086095 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Gardner, Alexander, 1821–1882—Criticism and interpretation. | Democracy—United States—History—19th century. | Labor movement— United States—History—19th century. | Slavery—United States—History— 19th century. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Photography. Classification: LCC E468.9.B47 2020 | DDC 973.7—dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020027354 Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For Sekou

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Elevate the Masses  1 1 The Fierce Flames of Democracy  19 2 Remove the Foul Blot  52 3 Labor’s Portrait Gallery  85 4 Washington’s Promise  122 Conclusion: Convince the Understanding, Arouse the Conscience  148 Notes 159 Index 177

Illustrations

The titles of photographs and other artworks often vary, even within the same source. For images from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War and Rays of Sunlight from South

America, the title that appears printed below the image in the original texts is the one used here. Other titles of photographs and artworks derive from holding institutions.

1. William Edward Kilburn, The Great Chartist Meeting 3

12. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke 40

2. Field-​Lane Lodging-​House 9 3. Map of Glasgow  10 4. Allan and Ferguson, plate 20 from Views in Glasgow 11 5. Frontispiece from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War 21 6. W. Baritt, Hooker’s New Line of Intrenchments 27 7. John Reekie, Medical Supply Boat, Appomattox Landing, Virginia 30 8. Henry De Witt Moulton, Morin’s Hotel, Great Plaza, Lima 33 9. Henry De Witt Moulton, Depot, Lima 34 10. Henry De Witt Moulton, Side View of the Bridge of Pizarro, Lima 35 11. Henry De Witt Moulton, The Hotel, Chincha Islands 36

13. City of Washington from beyond the Navy Yard 42 14. Camp of 104th Penn’a Vol.’s Morris Island, S.C. 43 15. George Barnard and James Gibson, Fortifications at Manassas 44 16. Timothy O’Sullivan, Fredericksburg, Virginia 45 17. Timothy O’Sullivan, Guard Mount, Head-​ Quarters Army of the Potomac 47 18. James Gardner, Headquarters Christian Commission in the Field, Germantown 48 19. James Gardner, Field Hospital, Second Army Corps, Brandy Station 49 20. Timothy O’Sullivan, Poplar Grove Church 50 21. William Pywell, Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia 53

Illustr ations

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22. William Pywell, Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 54

40. Alexander Gardner, Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes 82

23. Andrew Joseph Russell, Commissary Department, Alexandria 55

41. Alexander Gardner, Slabtown, Hampton, Va. 83

24. Isaac Cruikshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade 57

42. Francis Benjamin Johnston, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute 84

25. Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” 58

43. Alexander Gardner, Father Thomas H. Mooney Preaching 87

26. Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia 59

44. Winslow Homer, Our Women and the War 88

27. Company of Secession Cavalry Surrendering to Colonel Wilcox 62 28. American Anti-​Slavery Society, Slave Market of America 63 29. Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 64 30. G. W. Peters, Exterior of Alexandria Slave Pen 67 31. Andrew Joseph Russell, Front of “Slave Pen,” Alexandria, Va. 68 32. Brady Studio, Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 69 33. Alexandria, Virginia, Slave Pen, Exterior View 70 34. James Hamlet in front of city hall in New York 72 35. War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Contraband School 77 36. David Woodbury, A Negro Family Coming into the Union Lines 78 37. Alfred Waud, Contrabands Coming into Camp 79 38. John Reekie, A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia 80 39. Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty— The Fugitive Slaves (recto)  81

45. John Carbutt, American, The Brave Defenders of Our Country 90 46. Currier and Ives, The Battle of Pittsburgh, Tenn. April 7th, 1862 91 47. Currier and Ives, Lieut. General Ulysses S. Grant 92 48. John B. Bachelder, The Army of the Potomac 93 49. Alfred Waud, Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac 94 50. Joseph Cundall, Grenadier Guards Drummer 95 51. Timothy O’Sullivan, View of the Interior of Fort Steadman 97 52. George Barnard and James Gibson, Fortifications on Heights 98 53. John Wood and James Gibson, Inspection of Troops 100 54. Alexander Gardner, Antietam, Maryland. Forge Scene 101 55. Alexander Gardner, Military Telegraphic Corps, Army of the Potomac 103 56. Alexander Gardner, Scouts and Guides of the Army of Potomac 104 57. John Leech, The Pound and the Shilling 106

Illustr ations 58. Read & Co., The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park 106

72. Titian Ramsay Peale, A Drop of Perspiration on the Portico! 134

59. The London Costermonger 107

73. John Wood, Sheet 8: Southeast View of the U.S. Capitol 134

60. Broadside  108 61. William Read, Feargus Edward O’Connor 110 62. James Gardner, Alexander Gardner 113 63. Alexander Gardner, Walt Whitman 116 64. The Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal 119 65. Alexander Gardner, A Virginia Family Coach 123 66. Alexander Gardner studio imprint, back of Longfellow carte de visite  124 67. Alexander Gardner, Washington Studio Roof 125 68. Alexander Gardner, Untitled 126 69. Alexander Gardner, Patent-​Office, Washington. From South-​West 132 70. Alexander Gardner, Executive Mansion, North Front 132 71. Alexander Gardner, Military Asylum, Washington, D.C. 133

74. Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, Washington’s Tomb, Mt. Vernon 135 75. Armory Square Hospital, Washington D.C. 137 76. John Plumbe, Old Patent Office Building 140 77. Alexander Gardner, Untitled 141 78. Alexander Gardner, Virginia. Newspaper Vendor and Cart in Camp 144 79. Alexander Gardner, Execution of Captain Henry Wirtz (i.e. Wirz) 145 80. Timothy O’Sullivan, Gettysburg, PA. Alfred R. Waud 145 81. Alexander Gardner, Massachusetts Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas 155 82. Alexander Gardner, Overlooking Lawrence and the Kansas River 156 83. Alexander Gardner, A Rare Specimen Found 157 84. Alexander Gardner, “Seal Rocks” 158

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Acknowledgments

Elevate the Masses grew out of my research as a graduate student at Harvard University. That research was made possible by a number of grants, fellowships, and assistance from curators, archivists, and librarians who shared their time, knowledge, and collections with me. My experiences working with Frank Goodyear as my mentor and within a community of young scholars as a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum fellowship program challenged me to ask new questions and to explore Alexander Gardner’s contribution from more expansive vantage points. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported key research at the postdoctoral stage. Without Robin Kelsey’s mentorship, I would have never believed in the expansive possibilities of this topic or fully understood the role of historical context. At Penn State University Press, I am grateful to Eleanor Goodman for her steady guidance and faith in my project. I also thank my anonymous readers, whose insightful comments led to the transformation of this manuscript. My interest in Gardner began over a decade ago, when, as an art student at CalArts trying to make photobooks, my wonderful teacher Allan Sekula showed me a Gardner photograph and suggested that the scholarship on Gardner had yet to be written. That ten-​minute conversation led to years’ worth of digging for me, and Allan, I wish you were here to share this moment. For this leg of the journey, I am most indebted to the unqualified support I received from my friends and family. As they pursue the arduous and unpredictable work of research and writing, a scholar is lucky to know people who will generously offer their time, to hear frustrations or every new idea, to troubleshoot, to share laughs as well as concerns, or to inspire with their own scholarly practice. In my life, those people are Miguel de Baca, David Kim, and Jacqueline Francis. I thank my aunts and cousins for celebrating my every milestone, and my uncles for every ride to the airport and for the hours they spent for me at the post office. My dear niece’s sense of wonder and curiosity

Acknowled gments

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replenished my own. My excitement at every theory was matched by that of my father and stepfather’s, no matter the twists and turns. Before I did, my brother recognized my love of art and offered me the materials to imagine. I need to thank my mother, for always being ready and for her deep respect for the work that I do. Finally, I dedicate this book to my son. You teach me, you guide me. Your grandmother carried me into this life, but through you, my sweet and generous boy, I was reborn.

Introduction Elevate the Masses

In the volatile society of mid-​nineteenth-​century Scotland new formats and platforms of criticism and dissent empowered everyday citizens to enter the public arena. Alexander Gardner (1821–1882), born in Paisley to a local grocer, was one of them. After cofounding a utopian community in Iowa in 1849, in 1851 Gardner purchased the “whole stock and copyright” of a paper known as the Glasgow Sentinel, “a liberal newspaper, having a large and increasing circulation” at auction.1 Yet most scholarship overlooks these and other facts as mere biographical detail rather than vital insights through which to understand Gardner’s worldview and the production of his photographic studio during the American Civil War, instead using his arrival in New York as a starting point from which to assess his career and the historic value of his oeuvre.2 By 1856, the thirty-​five-​year-​old Gardner had settled in lower Manhattan, identified his profession as “artist,” and probably worked for the famed photographer Mathew Brady, who was known for his business acumen and for his brilliantly intuitive understanding of how the photographic likeness could serve the young republic.3 Such a vantage point offers a convenient gap for inserting Gardner into the now-​canonical narrative of the American photographic community at midcentury, and for understanding its trends and its economic and cultural concerns as the driving forces of his career path and pictorial interests. In early 1858, he moved his family to Washington, DC, where he continued to work as a photographer for Brady and as the manager of Brady’s new satellite studio on Pennsylvania Avenue, before eventually opening a hugely successful studio in his own name.

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Gardner’s production of photographs, including images of dead soldiers following the 1862 Battle of Antietam and portraits of President Abraham Lincoln, encouraged generations of previous scholars to closely link Gardner to American cultural history in the Civil War era. I shift and widen the focus to conjoin his transatlantic reform activities and his American photographic production in order to reveal how he used photographs of the Civil War as a means by which to present nineteenth-​century social and political reform ideologies. The reform and workers’ rights community in which Gardner immersed himself in Scotland used both creative and didactic texts, visualizations, and graphics to promote its political and social platform. With this international context in mind, Gardner’s visionary Civil War–era production yields an additional and different narrative that integrates his ideological devotion to reform causes—for example, the rights of laborers—with these photographs, reassessing them in light of his reform-​minded views. I argue that we need to view his work in Scotland as a reformer and in the United States as a photographer and studio owner as continuous, rather than separate and unrelated. Gardner’s work as a Civil War documentarian was integral to his involvement with the transatlantic reform struggle on behalf of what in 1851 he called “the People’s Cause.”4 Spanning the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and the United States, a number of reform movements organized in response to economic and technical changes in the first decades of the century. The momentous events of 1848—a series of popular uprisings against monarchical rule that occurred throughout Europe, beginning in Paris and eventually erupting in cities like Munich, Vienna, Krakow, and Budapest—were major catalysts for Gardner’s political involvement. In London, at the Great Chartist Meeting in Kennington Common on April 10, 1848 (fig. 1), Parliament was expected finally to empower the working classes and agree to a series of reforms known as the People’s Charter (or the Charter). Chartists, whose supporters came from across the United Kingdom and continental Europe, identified and sought to reform specific mechanisms of government in order to bring about broader equality and economic fairness. With great hope, the working class, its leaders, and their allies turned out in Kennington Common to witness historic change. Although the movement’s main leader, Feargus O’Connor, claimed the petitions in support of the reforms contained nearly six million signatures, the clerks at the House of Commons rejected it, claiming that it contained fraudulent signatures and that the actual number was insufficient. This petition, the third in a series of attempts at Chartist reform, failed, like earlier efforts in 1839 and 1842. In the surviving daguerreotype of the event, the air of anticipation and the stillness of those who came to support the reform uncannily capture what many perceived as the end of a movement and the uncertainty its supporters felt. Despite what occurred that day, Gardner told his countrymen three years later that the cause of workers’ rights that had led marchers to Kennington Common endured.

Introduction

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figure 1 | William Edward Kilburn, The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10, 1848. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

“Civilization has, as yet, but half performed its mission,” he and his team of coeditors wrote to readers of the Sentinel on October 4, 1851, its first anniversary of publication.5 In fact, when the Sentinel was founded in 1850—in a small office above a Socialist bookshop, owned by a local activist named William Love that was also a gathering place for Chartists and followers of the Welsh industrialist-​turned-​social-​theorist Robert Owen— its founders proclaimed boldly that the Sentinel’s mission was that of the Chartist O’Connor, and they endorsed broader Owen-​inspired policies to improve the lives of working people. They believed their platform to be the most effective response to a range of social conditions that they linked to industrialization. “Our policy,” Gardner and his editors wrote, “is briefly summed up—the enfranchisement of labor, the elevation of the masses, the rendering of civilization a great fact and not a heartless fiction, to bring home to the hearth of the poor man as well as the parlor of the rich, the blessings of plenty, and soul enabling influence of knowledge.”6 Gardner and his Sentinel editorial team called on the newspaper’s growing readership to continue to address the imbalance of power achieved by “the aristocracy of land and money . . . [that] has, by exclusive laws and institutions, directed channels of distribution

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for its own benefit, and left the masses nearly as they were before.”7 Despite the setback at Kennington Common, Gardner’s editorial team asserted that “the cause of democracy, notwithstanding the difficulties and failures of its previous exertion, had still enthusiastic supporters.”8 In that same address to readers, Gardner, who would become known internationally as one of the principal visual artists of the American Civil War, described himself as a longtime supporter of the “independent Democratic voice,” indicating that his decision to purchase the newspaper the preceding spring had been impelled by that advocacy. Growing up in the major Scottish cities of Paisley and Glasgow, Gardner witnessed a government failing to address (and a nation increasingly polarized by) differing levels of income, education, and access to stable work and housing. The speedy rise of the cotton industry in Scotland distinguished its pattern of growth and its process of industrialization from those of other nations. Gardner’s parents, James Gardner and Jean Glen, were born during the Napoleonic Wars; the paths and patterns of life for their generation and the generations following bore little resemblance to the lives of those who came before them. Paisley, in western Scotland—where Gardner was born and where his ancestors had lived—felt the effects of the era early and profoundly. The textile production for which Paisley became known transformed the local economy by the early decades of the nineteenth century, upending livelihoods and community networks that had been in place for centuries. When fickle crop yields and the introduction of new specialized farm management techniques and land-​leasing systems made small farming less viable as a means of survival, many abandoned the agricultural sector for work in urban areas. Thousands of Scots moved in search of economic stability, and the Gardner family joined them in migrating to one of the nation’s growing city centers. Mobility defined Gardner’s generation. By 1828, the Gardner family had relocated to Glasgow, roughly seven miles east of Paisley, where they resumed their grocery business.9 The same year, Gardner’s younger brother, James, was born. A sister, Agnes was born in 1823, and another sister, Catherine, in 1826.10 Most migrants to Glasgow in this period came from Renfrewshire, the county seat of the city of Paisley. With the city’s new economic opportunities, the population of Glasgow—once a small rural town— grew dramatically, from 77,000 in 1801 to 275,000 in 1841.11 By the 1850s, when the city’s population surpassed three hundred thousand, Glasgow became the United Kingdom’s second-​largest population center. As was common for young middle-​class men, Gardner entered the trades as an apprentice.12 Even though the Gardner family had some economic means as shopkeepers, new forms of employment, the rise of heavy industry, economic depressions, migration, and urbanization had a broad impact on all classes of society. The Gardners’ work as grocers no doubt offered them an expansive perspective on the changes in society. Prior to purchasing the Sentinel, Gardner had his own shop through which he offered his services as a jeweler and watchmaker.13

Introduction

Outside of the growing radical agitation, the ethos of Gardner’s Glasgow celebrated the potential of its citizens. A broad spectrum of Scottish society embraced the belief—a legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment—that the intellectual growth of the citizenry was the prerequisite for a just, moral, and prosperous society. The goal of the Glasgow Athenaeum, where Gardner took classes, was to attract men “who impressed with the immoral condition of society, are anxious to do what they can in hastening its removal.”14 The core of Gardner’s socially minded beliefs were the philosophies of Chartism and Owenism. He became attracted to the movements at a pivotal moment in their history. At midcentury, both Owenites and Chartists struggled to retain followers and to assert the movements’ ongoing relevance amid internal divisions, movement failures, weariness among followers, and changing political and social realities. Chartism arose in Great Britain around 1837, during a severe economic depression. Scottish workers, already struggling with unprecedented under- and unemployment, responded forcefully, organizing and demanding political enfranchisement. The Chartists’ parliamentary platform resembled the social and moral reforms promoted by Robert Owen and his followers. Owen’s proposed alternative to the capricious free market—what he called a “moral economy”—appealed to workers’ rights advocates and critics of industrialization. Prior to the emergence of Chartism, Owen’s widely read essays predicted that rapid industrialization following the Napoleonic wars would introduce fundamental social and economic changes. In 1812, Owen published the first of his landmark works, outlining a series of practical social reforms to improve the current state of humanity.15 These writings offered a compelling critique of industrial capitalism along with a detailed plan for regenerating society. The issue of labor reform played a significant role in Owen’s theories, due to his belief in the potentially degrading powers of one’s environment— corruption that ultimately hastened the wider erosion of human capital. He advocated a “social system” that combined general benevolence and self-​love, and opposed what he called the “individual system”: a competitive structure of values that only produced greed, anger, and selfishness. Owen’s social system, based on common ownership of resources and production, made him, along with Henri de Saint-​Simon and Charles Fourier, one of the forerunners of Socialism. For Gardner, Owenism and Chartism were more than just theories; they moved him to change the course of his life. In early April, around the anniversary of the political disaster at Kennington Common, Gardner took action that demonstrated his faith in reform theories and his commitment to see the ideals of Chartists and Owenites realized. First, while still living in Scotland, he cofounded a cooperative colony in the United States. On April 4, 1849, Gardner and his younger brother James joined with others to establish the Clydesdale Joint-​Stock Agricultural and Commercial Company in Scotland,

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with the goal of acquiring land in the United States upon which to build a community that would live largely according to Owen’s ideas.16 The Clydesdale Community, as it came to be known, was located in Clayton County, Iowa, along the Mississippi River, north of Dubuque. Because of its liberal constitution, Iowa was an attractive state to immigrants who held similar beliefs. In addition to shared profits, the group sought shared government and “recognize[d] the validity only of unanimous resolutions.”17 The fertile soil and other geologic features seemed to promise an ideal location for farming, mining, and other activities. The Iowa community’s founding principles drew mainly from Owen’s writings and ideas about communitarian living. Owen had founded his own model cooperative community, New Harmony, in Indiana (1825–27), which served as the laboratory for Owen’s theory of a “new world order”—a society free of poverty and ignorance. The Clydesdale community shared his belief that communitarian living would help counteract industrialization’s debasement of society; the stated mission of the community was to “establish, by means of the united capital and industry of its partners, a comfortable home for themselves and families where they may follow a more simple, useful and rational mode of life than is found practicable in the complex and competitive state of society, from which they have been anxious to retire.”18 In his Book of the New Moral World (1836), Owen argued that human happiness was possible only through communal living. He held America in special esteem. He believed America to be ideal for experiments in collective living and labor because of the availability of land, the intellectual climate, and the republican values.19 The country’s unsettled western regions in particular offered an opportunity to design and create wholly new social institutions and financial relationships to foster a better world.20 For Owen, communal living was more than just a system of common property: it was a means to bring about social change, to restore harmony in a fractured and alienated world. Other utopian communities—Communia, Guttenberg, Community Colony, and Liberty Colony—were founded in the same lush region of northeastern Iowa where Gardner and his associates had purchased land. Gardner’s active involvement in the transatlantic reform movement, which stemmed from his Owenite and Chartist interests, was furthered by his work with the Sentinel and its leaders. Owenism and Chartism both promoted self-​learning through printed matter. Chartism in particular used its platforms to impart technical and editorial know-​how to its readers so that they might do just as Gardner did—either join an existing paper or start their own.21 The Sentinel staff included two of Owen’s eight specially chosen national “missionaries,” Robert Buchanan and Alexander Campbell, who lectured throughout the country promoting Owenism. The paper’s senior staff, forged at the moment when the two groups joined forces, also included the prominent Chartist William Pattison. Newspapers had historically played a pivotal role in shaping the movement, and Pattison

Introduction

had helped instigate a publishing revival among labor reformers when he argued that the publishing of writing that communicated the movement’s principles to a broad audience would be a service “to truth, to freedom, and to humanity.” 22 Chartist journals like the Northern Star and Chartist-​leaning papers like the Poor Man’s Guardian enjoyed circulations that rivaled that of well-​funded traditional news outlets. Between 1815 and 1848, dozens of newspapers were founded—some by only one person—in the cause of political agitation rather than for profit. The media historian Henry Weisser lists the reasons why the press became an influential vehicle: newspapers were cheap to produce, broadly accessible, and did not require a large capital investment.23 Though young, the Sentinel enjoyed a favorable reputation among reformers as the nation’s “truly democratic journal.”24 Beyond his duties as a publisher, Gardner contributed to the newspaper as a writer and as member of the editorial team. The paper served as an outlet for his “views and opinions on social problems, science, and art.”25 Introducing Gardner as the Sentinel’s new publisher on May 13, 1951, the previous publisher (who no longer had the funds to continue) assured readers that Gardner would uphold the paper’s policy of “uncompromising warfare against existing social arrangements and the political serfdom of the industrious classes.”26 Gardner himself communicated his intentions to his readers in an editorial in which he claimed to have no intention of using the paper for financial gain. He had bought it not “as a mere speculation . . . but as a means of enlightening the public on the great political, educational, and social questions of the times, and of guiding aright the popular mind of this country on all matters of state policy, whenever advice was necessary or important.”27 He promised that he and the Sentinel team would shape the newspaper’s content: “News will be copious and well digested . . . [and] no expense will be spared to obtain, for the readers of the Sentinel, early, ample, and authentic information.”28 His mission, he stated, was to support “the establishment of Democracy” and the principle that “the People is the source of all political and social power.”29 Gardner’s letter to Sentinel readers exhibits a keen awareness of the power of print media to influence audiences. He promised to introduce a “variety of contents and literary talent,” recognizing that by doing so the newspaper could effectively engage a diverse audience. He also adopted a curatorial approach to production. Instead of merely presenting the record of the day, he identified ongoing thematic concerns like education, set the paper’s presentation of the contemporary workers’ rights movement in its geographic and historical contexts, presented a variety of voices through columns written by everyday people and known authors, and used different literary styles—such as poetry—to intensify the reader’s experience of arguments. Responding to the urgency of the moment, the Sentinel rejected concessions on universal suffrage for men, demanded a national system of secular education, praised cooperative production, and called forcefully for

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labor rights.30 Alterations in the format and the addition of a section of letters to the editor humanized the dense political and economic debates in other parts of the paper. The Sentinel highlighted domestic problems and placed them in their historical and international context. For example, in his second issue, Gardner published an English translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1793) in order to provide textual evidence for the contemporary ideas printed alongside it, and he also printed a long editorial about the failings of Scottish schools, which cited the system of public education in Massachusetts as an effective model.31 As part of a new mission to present only “authentic” information, the paper increased its publication of eyewitness reports and ended the practice of printing items from other news outlets without citation. Gardner’s supervision of the Sentinel’s content and format represents his work on behalf of the core interests of Owenites and Chartists: the education and mobilization of the reading public to support the cause of human rights and the formation of a more just society. The Sentinel’s engagement with the reading public was possible because of the foresight of reformers when it came to new technologies. Most important, the steam-​powered press supported the production of cheaper print and gave reformers a means of flooding the public sphere with their messages. By 1850, the transatlantic abolitionist movement had greatly increased the volume of print material it issued, which notably included many more illustrations.32 The quality of living conditions, a frequent topic, were depicted in the coarse woodcuts of the Poor Man’s Guardian (fig. 2), which served to heighten the reformers’ portrayal of despair. Robert Perry’s illustrated report Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow (1844) exemplified the mid-​nineteenth-​century reform projects that used graphic means to relate written arguments and statistics to social ills. Perry used colors on a schematic map to convey the statistical links between poor sanitation, disease, and poverty in the city, visualizing the monumental crisis in public health (fig. 3). Instead of representing neighborhoods and districts, his maps disclosed the absence of both political will and a social safety net. These reform works presented an image of society that directly contradicted the central message of Allan and Ferguson’s Views in Glasgow (1843), which offered a triumphant depiction of the city’s historical landmarks, cultural institutions, and developing infrastructure (fig. 4). Views in Glasgow suggested a marked improvement of society brought about by industrialization. The portfolio featured historical monuments and newer structures side by side, a format that underscored the visual and philosophical continuity of the city’s origins (and its ideals as represented by its structures), its present, and its future. The prints portraying Glasgow’s rich architectural details depicted an airy and open city. Because of the predominantly low vantage points, the structures towered over human figures and trees. Medallions engraved with the name of the city framed individual engravings on the page, creating both the illusion of three-​dimensional space and a unified message.

Introduction

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figure 2 | Field-​Lane Lodging-​House, from the Poor Man’s Guardian, November 20, 1847. © British Library Board.

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figure 3 | Map of Glasgow from Robert Perry, Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow, 1844. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

Scholars of nineteenth-​century Britain have noted how social problems, as they became more visible, came to the attention of visual culture.33 According to the British cultural historian A. Susan Williams, by the mid-​nineteenth century the “astounding spectacle” of economic disparity, and landscape features such as mills, with their “huge edifices which loom like gigantic shadows in a smoky, dense atmosphere,” became the subject of both a new form of sociological journalism and the visual works that accompanied them.34 Moreover, the increase in the physical scale of urban areas and in the number of their inhabitants compounded the effects of unprecedented social challenges. British historian Asa Briggs has written that “[Victorians] were aware—either with fear or with pride—that they were living through a period of change of scale—change in the size of the industrial plant, change in the size of social organization, change, above all, in the size of towns and cities.”35 Reformers created their own change of scale by isolating and magnifying social problems in the data they presented and the visual works they produced. As they had in the eighteenth century, they targeted readers by appealing to moral and religious duty, but now added to such emotional appeals the results of their own study of social phenomena and their discussion of the statistics they had gathered. Through his work at the Sentinel, Gardner participated in the transatlantic reform community’s vast proliferation of printed matter, which included broadsides, letters,

Introduction

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figure 4 | Allan and Ferguson, Illustrated Letter Paper Comprising a Series of Views in Glasgow, 1843, plate 20. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

pamphlets, tracts, and other ephemera. Historian of visual culture and media Andrea Korda has argued persuasively that British audiences, failing to see themselves in the grand manner that characterized history painting, preferred popular media like newspapers and chapbooks, where they were the principal actors.36 In print, Gardner’s Sentinel recognized that preference in its broad audience, which included working-​class readers. The newspaper’s pages spoke to them, portraying them as actors in a grand story of the international people’s revolution. Korda writes that this new model of newspaper illustration encouraged readers to see and experience events for themselves.37 Although the Sentinel had no illustrations, Gardner replicated experiences by introducing the firsthand account to situate readers more actively in a story and an issue. Most important to this study is the fact that the British nineteenth-​century reform community, as well as Owenism and Chartism, provided Gardner with models for joining political and visual creative expression. Leaders understood that creative forms could help them reach their audience more effectively. John Harrison distinguishes Owenism from the artistic socialists of the 1880s such as the Pre-​R aphaelites as primarily a literary movement; the goal of Owenite literature was to explain and proclaim as effectively as possible Owen’s prescription for a new society.38 Owen himself favored popular platforms, including pamphlets and public meetings, for the dissemination of his ideas. As one Owenite publication stated: “Language is the vehicle by which our ideas are communicated to each other.”39 Harrison describes Owenite literature as characteristic in tone and form of the reform writing of the first half of the nineteenth century; by contrast, scholars have explored

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the literary production of Chartists as a rich and original contribution. Chartists linked political change to cultural change. “Peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must,” claimed the Chartist motto. Their chief “peaceable” tactic, contemporary scholars now recognize, was their extensive literature.40 In their creative writing in particular, Chartists developed a didactic literary form that attracted a broad audience.41 Of the Chartists, literary historian Martha Vicinus writes that, in their search to create a class-​based literature, they were “deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and art—whether literature should describe conditions in need of change, or the future brotherhood of man, resulting from changed conditions; whether it should give readers a soothing escape from this life or a foretaste of a better life.”42 Poetry was a form that allowed Chartist texts to perform these dual functions of vivid description and inspiration. Chartist poetry affirmed the movement’s principles, shaped group identity, and encouraged a sense of a common purpose.43 Distributed weekly through newspapers like the Northern Star, Chartists translated their political ideas into a radical poetic tradition. Ulrike Schwab, a scholar of Chartist literature, characterizes Chartist poetry as representing “artistic language expression as well as historical statement.”44 She further explains that it was neither “esoteric or escapist” but closely linked to the “social reality.”45 Complementing this literary culture was the Chartist attention to visual communication: Chartists frequently donned the red cap of liberty in reference to the French revolution, or green, the traditional English radical color. Exploring how Gardner’s oeuvre outlines photography’s capacity to fuse the literary, the aesthetic, and the political constitutes a driving interest of this inquiry. Photography—with its power to “seize” and give ideas “a permanent form,” as one Scottish observer noted in 184846—could aid in creating a “we-​consciousness” (that is, a merging of the individual position with that of the collective), offer an active as opposed to a passive form of communication in which speakers and addressees could communicate both rationally and emotionally, and present both immediate and long-​term objectives and issues.47 Further, photography could perform another vital and active function of Chartist poetry, which was to organize thoughts and emotions, and to create new modes of thinking or consciousness. New York may have been the center for American photography at midcentury, but the move to Washington, DC, was immeasurably beneficial to Gardner’s career. It was there that he was able to connect with and find support among a likeminded community. The District’s small but prominent and wealthy number of Scottish and European immigrants (in particular, Franklin Philp and Adolphus Simeon Solomons) quickly embraced and promoted Gardner and later his studio, and he became an active member of various local cultural and social clubs. His circle included Gilbert Cameron, the builder of the United States Military Asylum, the Smithsonian, the Washington Asylum and Workhouse, and

Introduction

Trinity Church, among other projects. Gardner eventually—and notoriously—severed ties with Mathew Brady, taking with him some of Brady’s talented photographic corps, including Timothy O’Sullivan, another important figure in nineteenth-​century American photography. General George McClellan appointed Gardner official photographer of the Army of the Potomac in 1862, and Gardner published his first studio advertisement in 1863, in the May 28 edition of the Daily National Intelligencer. The Intelligencer became the main supporter of Gardner’s work, which was not surprising, considering that copublisher William Winston Seaton was part of Gardner’s circle. Works made or produced by Gardner or his studio both before and during the Civil War years comprise portraiture, documentation, and landscape. These works include stereographs, cartes de viste, imperial photographs, several photographic and stereographic series, and three photographically illustrated books. Gardner’s name seldom appeared without the names of Philp and Solomons. The Philp & Solomons firm, already established in the District as influential members of the art and cultural scene, was involved in nearly every aspect of publishing the Gardner Studio productions, including Gardner’s photographic books, stereographs, signature photographic series “Photographic Incidents of the War,” and other special projects and portfolios. It was at their well-​known bookstore and gallery (opened by Philp in 1858) that Gardner sold his portraits of Union generals, among his other photographs. In the Civil War years, he worked mostly in and around Washington, DC, completing his war-​related projects before turning his attention exclusively to the American West and Native American subject matter. Long before contemporary scholars set about assessing Gardner’s enormous contribution, this unparalleled production resonated with his own contemporaries. As one enthusiastic reviewer wrote, Gardner “construct[ed] a truly exact and living history of our time.”48 Another wrote frankly of Gardner’s photograph of Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam battlefield, “Artistically speaking, the picture is one of the most beautiful and perfect photograph landscapes that we have ever seen.”49 This book examines how trends in Gardner’s social world expanded and informed his understanding of photography as a tool for reform, for the presentation of reform ideas, and as a documentary, communicative, and educational medium. I use Gardner’s writing as the broader “rhetorical framework” of his artistic oeuvre.50 Gardner’s prefaces to Rays of Sunlight from South America (1865) and to Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865) constitute his only direct writings on photography or aesthetics.51 Moreover, little is known about the public reception of his photographic work in the United States, except what is provided in gallery reviews in Washington, DC, newspapers. But Gardner’s editorial writing in 1850 and 1851—when he was associated with the Sentinel—and his studio reviews and advertisements once he had established himself in Washington provide additional insight, revealing that his work interacted directly with contemporary

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political and cultural life, including the various reform discussions. Sometimes Gardner expressed a wish to change the structure of society; at other times he championed the improvement of existing social, economic, and political institutions.52 The ideas that drove his advocacy also guided his photography. Locating them gives some sense of the audience he imagined for his work and its function in society. His photographs are inextricable from his professional and personal dedication to reforms to prevent the adverse effects of nondemocratic government and capitalism on the economy and the social fabric. In considering the Civil War–era photographic production of Gardner vis-​à-​vis the international reform movements for which he worked, this study is less concerned with his nuanced choice of subjects from the war, his contributions to the history of photojournalism, his distinctive formal interpretations, or his technique of photographic storytelling, in single works or in series and in his photographically illustrated books—all subjects that other scholars have considered. Unlike some published writings on Civil War–era photography, I do not treat particular photographs of dead soldiers and portraits of President Abraham Lincoln as epitomes of the conflict.53 Situating Gardner within the context of transnational reform movements expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy and the rights of citizens. Through new and original research, this book emphasizes the transnational context of American art, including Civil War photography. In the introduction to American Photography: Local and Global Contexts (2012), editors Bettina Gockel and Patrizia Munforte call for an approach to the history of photography that resurrects an “atlas of photography” and demonstrates how “photography was and continues to be a visual medium that connects, spans, and networks the spaces of our heterogeneous world.”54 My reinterpretation of Gardner’s oeuvre places Civil War photography squarely within international debates about the meaning of democracy and the role of government in the lives of its citizens. Though “American photography” does not emerge until the twentieth century, the Civil War arguably contributed to the scholarly construction of the term, and to the idea that the nation’s identity—and thus its sense of historical aspiration and memory—are uniquely entwined with the medium and expressed through its material and formal particularities. When the early twentieth-​century photography historian Robert Taft presented his influential thesis on the role of photography in America, the Civil War functioned as a significant catalyst for the socially minded documentation of the 1930s he sought to champion and to culturally distinguish. Through my study of Gardner, I take the position that social reform photography’s foundational motivations and theories of function have their origins in a transnational dialogue. With its focus on reception and the original audiences for these works, what Stott’s formulation leaves out

Introduction

(like many studies that followed) is attention to artistic community, artistic practice, and artistic formation, not to mention non-​American audiences. In calling for a history of photography that emphasizes connectivity, Gockel and Munforte inspire us to look beyond the myth of the singular artist, and to look at the communities from which artists emerged and within which they worked. These are issues I foreground. Gardner, like his contemporaries, explored the Civil War within a wide geographical frame of reference in an era when visual culture was steeped in topics of international economics and imperialism.55 The production of these artists mirrored the international sentiment that—as historian Don Doyle writes in The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the Civil War—“the American question mattered greatly to the world and to the future.”56 The meticulous scholarship on French painter Édouard Manet’s works (such as 1864’s The Battle of the USS “Kearsage” and the CSS “Alabama”), constructed largely through international media reports, provides a European example of the extent to which this was true.57 Building on the work of twenty-​first-​century scholars who have demonstrated the value of expanding the geographical context of American art, this book examines the dialogue about Civil War artistic production from that vantage point.58 Similar to new scholarship on the work of American Pre-​R aphaelites, I position Gardner as an artistic innovator whose work included a rich political subtext.59 Like painter and fellow expatriate Thomas Cole, whose experience of an industrializing England impacted his view of nature, Scotland’s own particular path of industrialization and its effects shaped Gardner’s views on social relations. Although Civil War photography was an inherently national project, the dialogues about Civil War art were also implicitly internationalist. Authors of the era’s popular literature, especially during the early years of the Civil War, repeatedly discussed it in relation to international politics and history.60 However, Civil War photography has not been considered heretofore from such an international perspective. Analyzing Gardner in an international context provides new insight into his work and brings thematic and theoretical developments in mid-​nineteenth-​century American photography into clearer focus. Technically, conceptually, and thematically, the American photographic community in which Gardner produced his work was ready for such direction. Technical improvements in paper-​based photography made possible the expansive Civil War era production of the Gardner studio. Unlike European audiences, most of its practitioners did not yet see the possibilities of paper-​based photography. One American critic, writing in a photography journal, complained about fellow Americans’ response to photography that they “neglect the higher and nobler uses it is now available for.”61 Audiences were neither accustomed to nor enthusiastic about paper-​based photography, and this new format had to establish itself in the social fabric and find ways of shaping Americans’ understanding of social realities. By exploiting formats and platforms newly available in

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the era, and by calling attention to the “photographic” aspect of their contribution to its visual culture, Gardner and his studio production promoted a changed understanding of the difference between photographic and other kinds of information. Concurrently, his work illustrated the primary knowledge to be gained from photographs and the possibilities of viewer interaction that only photographs could offer. The photograph could stimulate an “enduring interest,” as he wrote, and it could also simultaneously summarize an event.62 His imaginative photography encouraged audiences to supplement that experience with what they knew or learned from other sources. This artistic project worked synchronically with an ideological project above all others: to promote democracy as a political and social good, and the laborer as the foundation of society. Chapter 1 presents Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Philp & Solomons, 1865) as a politically motivated project, rooted in the photographer’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs and offering a visually based, modern interpretation of reform literary culture. In the Sentinel, Gardner outlines his ideas about American democracy and, like others in the transatlantic reform community (in particular Scottish intellectuals and radicals), embraces the American political model.63 Gardner first presents this vision in his Rays of Sunlight from South America (1865). Illustrated with photographs, like Sketch Book, Rays addresses political models and historical change in Peru.64 In it, Gardner lays out themes and techniques similar to those he later would refine in Sketch Book. While Peru is a case study in how countries that fail to change stagnate, Sketch Book portrays a post–Civil War America able to pursue its true destiny, now free of the corrupting force of slavery. The North has triumphed over the political, social, and economic ideas of the South. In Sketch Book Gardner expresses a political philosophy in the format of the photographic book and also references a reform literary genre: the travelogue. In his photographically illustrated work, texts and images work together to provide context, persuade viewers, and explain the distinct knowledge about the world available in photography. The form and content of both books visualize ideas Gardner and his colleagues had first elaborated more than a decade earlier in printed texts. Although slavery factors into Gardner’s Civil War narrative, African Americans themselves play no active role in his postwar landscape. Chapter 2 analyzes his treatment of the institution of chattel slavery (as opposed to his representation of individual African American figures) and demonstrates how Gardner relates slavery to the history of the United States. Gardner, in his treatment of William Pywell’s Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia (1862), the second plate in Sketch Book, condemns slavery as a social and economic corruption that undermined American ideals and weakened the nation’s status as a social and political model for the world. His presentation of Slave Pen reveals his fear that chattel slavery would do more harm to social relations and the moral economy than to the fate of any individual African American. Gardner maintained that the legacy

Introduction

of slavery would ultimately require a legislative response that would itself exemplify the triumph of American ideals and the potential of American institutions. Sketch Book and Gardner’s other photographic projects make it clear that the photographer saw no resemblance between slave labor and the labor of the white immigrant working class. A similar failure to see any connection between these populations permeated Northern society, where hard labor was deemed “nigger work.”65 Chapter 3 elaborates on Gardner’s praise for Northern labor. In his encyclopedic portrait project documenting Union personnel, he celebrates labor communities, elevates workers degraded by industrialization, and offers an alternative model to the display of nation and labor highlighted by the monumental Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (or the Crystal Palace Exhibition). The historic 1851 London event formed the core part of Gardner’s early critiques at the Sentinel. In these editorials, Gardner and his Sentinel editors demanded a correction to the presentation in Hyde Park with its promotion of wealth over labor; over a decade later, the Civil War offered him just such an opportunity. His photographs of the era, grounded in his communitarian beliefs, envision men working on behalf of a new society. He engaged this project at the time when a newly radicalized labor community was emerging in the United States, and he depicts communities and human connections in formation, in a representational project that insistently seeks to refute the philosophies behind the market forces that were dismantling such relationships and communities. In chapter 4, I return to the discussion of democracy presented in chapter 1. American political institutions and the national infrastructure they supported as organs and conduits of the federal government and its values were the foundation of Gardner’s conception of the democratic ideal and the model he sought to telegraph to the world. Democracy is achieved when “all men of sane mind and of self-​supporting means are equally respect worthy, in a political sense,” he wrote, and when each, “having an equal interest in the well-​working of the state,” does “his part, by thought and action, toward that well-w ​ orking.”66 Like the American poet and author Walt Whitman and the wartime president Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were an inspiration to him, Gardner extolled the national infrastructure because it represented the work of a nation to make manifest its vision in the physical world. Chapter 4 addresses his postwar scenes of Washington, DC, and his symbolic representation of the city (and the nation) in its infrastructure, to which, for him, photographers and photography were integral. The modern world at large, he argued, required the knowledge made available in photography and by artists attuned to modern social life. Gardner’s combination of political references and creative production suggests that the photographic dialogue between Great Britain and the United States encompassed not just technical knowledge, but also broader social interests, aesthetic tendencies, thematic trends, and pictorial concerns that remained

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current well into the twentieth century. The symbolic, narrative, didactic, and material qualities of the photographic works examined in the chapters that follow reveal the layers of transatlantic social, historical, and political meaning in Gardner’s production and add to a growing scholarly recognition of artistic transatlantic exchange.

Chapter 1

The Fierce Flames of Democracy

The lively exchange of political and religious ideas in the transatlantic reform community to which Gardner belonged was sustained by prominent intellectuals, activists, and ordinary citizens; by the texts they wrote and shared; and by the journals and affiliated societies they founded. They traded observations and compiled and disseminated facts. They identified historical texts, established their own literary canon, and actively visualized in these texts the world they sought to create. This trading contributed to the belief in a transnational community of progressives, an international brotherhood of liberal men and women. In the words of Italian politician Joseph Mazzini, whose ideas were frequently discussed in the pages of the Sentinel: “We believe in the true unity of the whole human race, and in the moral equality of all children of God.”1 American abolitionist Wendell Phillips wrote: “In moral questions, I say, there are no nations.” 2 Fellow American radical William Garrison offered a similar sentiment: “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands.”3 Nineteenth-​century social reform movements depended on print media to widely spread their ideas, which, as historian of reform literature Amanda Claybaugh demonstrates, took many different forms, from newspapers to novels to poetry. Papers like the French Le Populaire, L’Atelier, and L’Echo de la Fabrique actively reported on events across the Channel or declared allegiances with their “brothers in England.”4 The Scottish Chartist Circular could be found in France. Gardner, too, in his work at the Sentinel, sought to advance this exchange. The trade of reform ideas in print created, linked, and

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sustained a cosmopolitan radical community. Claybaugh writes that the impulse on the part of the reformers to disperse their thinking was based in the belief that one had to represent “the world as it is in order to bring about the world as it should be.”5 The reform community was guided by its faith that a wide audience, endowed with the faculties needed to choose the course of their lives and to change society through knowledge, waited, ready to hear their message. American abolitionist William Jay captured this sentiment when he wrote: “The present age is . . . an age of energy and of freedom. All the powers of mind are in full activity, and every eye and every ear is open to the reception of new truths.”6 Gardner’s commitment to print extended to his production of photographically illustrated books during the Civil War era. Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (fig. 5)—because of its subject matter, texts, scale, and ambition—has received more critical attention than his book of the same year, Rays of Sunlight from South America. Sketch Book, which is neither comprehensive nor strictly chronological, provokes questions, and its meanings and function are open to varying interpretations, depending on the reader, who can treat the texts as literature, independent of the images. The work’s malleability is due in part to the fact that, as art historian Robin Kelsey argues, the texts represent an “amalgam” of expository styles.7 Formally, Kelsey links the project to the model of the “travelogue” album, including works by European photographers such Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, and Francis Frith during the 1850s. Art historian Anthony Lee sees connections between Gardner’s Sketch Book and his professional prerogatives and pressures as a photographer in the United States at a moment when venues, platforms, and commercial and aesthetic trends were rapidly shifting. Lee’s argument acknowledges the considerable costs of Gardner’s ambitious photographic production, and the market pressures posed by war, as a subject, to an American photographic community that lacked historic visual models and was still adjusting to technical innovations in the field. Lee suggests that Gardner kept his eye on maintaining the financial stability of his studio.8 By this rationale, Gardner fits the interpretative tendency to view photography of this period as part of the dynamic commercial and technical history of the medium in America.9 Similarly, photography curator and historian Jeff Rosenheim construes Sketch Book as Gardner’s attempt to present a broad history of the war, emphasizing the commercially friendly themes of individual sacrifice and cultural memory, with the sequence of texts and images dedicated to Gettysburg at its core.10 This narrow reading of the project is similar to others that posit images of the dead, such as the infamous Harvest of Death (1862) by Timothy O’Sullivan, as efforts to satisfy cultural norms and appeal to public taste. The theories of two authors analyzing Gardner’s Sketch Book project are particularly useful to this study. In Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union, literary scholar Timothy Sweet aligns the political project of Gardner’s Sketch Book with

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figure 5 | Frontispiece from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

America’s own political goals as a nation during this unprecedented post–Civil War moment. Sweet analyzes Gardner’s use of nature and treatment of the dead in Sketch Book and the way the book participated in a project—along with contemporary poetry and literature—to legitimate the violence of the war. Sweet writes that the book’s “pastoralism was used to evade certain historical processes and conflicts and to promote an idealized image of ‘America.’ ”11 To this extent Gardner’s project was a continuation of Mathew Brady’s work of the 1840s and 1850s, which established what Sweet describes as “the ideological value of photographic history.”12 Megan Rowley Williams also approaches the book from her position as a historian of literature, elaborating on Sweet’s theory of the pastoral and adding that the project presents the pastoral mode as a path to national reunion.13 Both Sweet and Williams interpret Gardner’s project as another photographic means of building the nation in the wake of the war—a larger project to which photography had contributed significantly since the daguerreotype era and that was intimately linked to American literature. This chapter does not refute these arguments, but rather introduces a parallel interpretation that integrates the consideration of international contexts. Gardner’s

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art, I argue, frequently bears the imprint of his knowledge of American culture and history, gained through his activism in Scotland, and the convictions that inspired him to act on this knowledge; his Sketch Book is no exception. Previous scholars overlook the significance of Gardner’s particular worldview, which this interpretation foregrounds. He specifically linked democratic political models to broad human progress. At the center of this political philosophy was a democratic system of government. In the 1840s, the working-​class movement had foretold the coming of democracy. For example, the Glasgow Chartist Debating Society asserted that “democracy, though slow in its progress, is sure, and . . . must ultimately triumph . . . [b]ecause] it is in accordance with natural right; and second, because it is better adapted than any other system to the present wants and necessities of society.”14 Promoting democracy was at the core of the work of the Sentinel: in “The Organization of Democracy,” the editors declared that “inasmuch as we believe in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Association, for the individuals composing a state, we believe also in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Association of nations. Peoples are the individuals of humanity. . . . We believe that the map, the organization of Europe are to be reconstructed in accordance with these principles. We believe that a pact, a congress of representatives of all nationalities constituted and recognized, having for mission to bind closer the holy alliance of the Peoples, and to formalize the common right and duty, are at the end of all our efforts.”15 Gardner’s works communicate a similar idea. Even before Sketch Book, Gardner’s second photographically illustrated book, Rays of Sunlight from South America, presented theories on the role of government in shaping the social and economic sphere. Formally and conceptually, the book is Gardner’s experiment in photographic book production and his initial effort to lay out the ideas he would develop more fully in Sketch Book. Whereas in Rays government has failed as an economic and civic steward, in Sketch Book the democratic system triumphs. Both the photographically illustrated book as a medium and Gardner’s approach to it support a political motivation: to contribute to a transatlantic body of reform writing and to portray the United States, with the eradication of slavery, as a “true” democracy, and thus to affirm that the ideal that reformers worldwide had long envisioned had been realized. Just as the Scottish reformers and the texts they produced addressed the relation between the national and the international, so did Gardner’s Rays and Sketch Book. Like other nineteenth-​century reformers, Gardner experimented with different platforms for conveying his message. Reformers excelled at using new reproductive print technologies, such as lithography, to dramatize their message and to transform and personalize the way audiences viewed and read their texts.16 From the 1830s, reformers in America and Europe seized on new technologies that could serve their causes.17 Gardner and his Sentinel editors argued that technologies should be used for social good: “Instead

The Fierce Fl a me s of De mo cr ac y

of rising with the march of science and participating in a just ratio of its countless blessings,” they wrote, “these [blessings] have remained the helots of a higher power—the power of an aristocracy and money.”18 Formats ranged from cheaply produced tracts to more sophisticated broadsides and engravings. The same stories, narratives, and symbols would often circulate in a variety of formats. For example, a daguerreotype by the Boston firm Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Hawes of the branded hand of Captain Jonathan Walker—who was prosecuted for attempting to smuggle slaves from Florida to freedom in the Bahamas—was widely circulated in abolitionist-​themed broadsides, photogravures, periodicals, and children’s books in the 1840s.19 Reformers repeatedly emphasized the identification and presentation of information that in various ways they conceived of as evidentiary. Public health advocates printed statistics on rates of disease. Printing these statistics gave material form to the scale of injustice, and to unseen suffering and social phenomena. Abolitionist newspapers that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic frequently published lists of slave traders and details of their transactions. By preserving the wording and details of such “artifacts” of slavery such as advertisements, the newspapers implied to readers that such evidence had been taken directly from newspapers. Seeing and reading the details of actual addresses, places, and names communicated the reality of the trade. One widely circulated work that employed this evidentiary practice was Theodore Weld’s pivotal American Slavery As It Is (1839). Indeed, the subtitle of the book was “Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.” If evidence played a central role in reform literature, then photographic realism offered an even more persuasive vehicle for its arguments. Reformers, however, had yet to use the photographic book form; the print technology for producing such books was only just emerging in America when Gardner published Sketch Book. The European photographic community had been experimenting with and discussing the use of photographic illustration in books since the 1840s, with the landmark presentation of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, published in serial form between 1844 and 1846. Through its format and content, Talbot made a clear argument that the future of photography lay in its potential use in a variety of print settings. The daguerreotype excelled at portraying human beings as subjects, which paper based photography could not replicate. In this way, Talbot’s paper-​based photographic model taught practitioners to find meanings beyond people, displacing human subjects as the primary carriers of meaning as it demonstrated the plethora of uses for objects such as carts, ladders, haystacks, and books, thus laying the foundation for an aesthetic language that diverged from the daguerreotype’s.20 As paper-​based photography improved technically and came into wider use in continental Europe and the United States in the 1850s, the possibilities of photographic illustration became the subject of more critical discussion in both the international

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photographic press and general-​interest print media. Critic William Crookes foresaw many uses for the photographically illustrated book due to the way the format joined the “mathematical accuracy of form and detail possessed by the photograph” to “the permanence of the photographic book.”21 In 1863 Dr. Heinrich Mayer, evaluating recently produced photographically illustrated books in an article translated from the German photography periodical Zeitschrift für Fotografie und Stereoskopie, argued that the quality of images was still lacking, and that that drawback, among others, would need to be resolved before the production of photographically illustrated books could become more feasible.22 Other critics pointed to what they identified as the format’s conceptual limitations. Around the time Gardner published Sketch Book, an article in the British journal Gentleman’s Magazine stated that the photographically illustrated book had limited creative or interpretive capacity: “It cannot create, it can only copy; its results are descriptive rather than suggestive.”23 For various cultural and economic reasons, American practitioners lagged behind those in Europe in paper-​based photography, which facilitated the production of photographically illustrated books. The technological limitations of publishing and the conceptual constraints of existing formats meant that when Gardner made Sketch Book, few compelling American examples of the genre existed to serve as models. Because of Sketch Book’s length and its incorporation of both photographs and text, the work was a historic milestone for the American photographic community. Before Gardner produced Sketch Book, only a handful of other American books and journals had featured even one or two photographic plates. The production of a photographically illustrated book was an expensive, complex, and time-​consuming process. Despite advances since the time of Talbot’s production, paper-​based photographs were not cheap or easy to produce, nor were they the most reliable method of illustration. For example, the images were not necessarily permanent; they were still subject to fading, deterioration from faulty chemicals, or mistakes in the printing process. Also, photographic images could not be mass-​produced mechanically, and each book had to be assembled individually, its text printed separately from its images. In addition to the printing of each image (the quality of which needed to be consistent), images had to be affixed to the book pages, which were usually heavier stock than the book’s printed pages to accommodate the weight of the photograph; plus, the book itself had to be assembled by hand. Photographic books were often thick, but fragile and unwieldy. The more photographs the book included and the more pages it had, the more susceptible it was to damage. Critics complained about the accumulated thickness, bulging, and gaping—“an evil annoyance.”24 To circumvent such challenges and keep costs low, publishers commonly produced either books of photographs only or text only. If the two elements were published together in a single volume, the book (or periodical) usually included one photograph only, as a frontispiece, rather

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than illustrations throughout. Gardner’s publishing of texts and photographs in a complementary relationship—a format not previously used in America—also represented a dramatic advancement in Gardner’s own production, since his previous photographic book (Rays of Sunlight from South America) included only an introductory text. Details of Gardner’s conceptualization and development of Sketch Book are unknown, but it is clear that Gardner obtained the capital needed to produce it as a more ambitious photographically illustrated book than the one he made previously. In New York, photographers sought partnerships with large commercial publishing houses like D. W. Appleton; in Washington, DC, it was Gardner’s relationship with the prominent local booksellers Philp & Solomons that allowed him to produce his conspicuous and consequential project. Prior to Sketch Book, the firm had published Rays of Sunlight from South America and Gardner’s print series Photographic Incidents of the War. Philp and Solomons had the financial means and professional connections to underwrite the Gardner studio’s broad commercial practice year-​round. During the antebellum period, the duo became well known for their gallery and for their work in bringing European art to the District. By the 1860s, they had begun promoting local artists. According to one guidebook, “Washington artists, with whom some fine productions have originated, frequently exhibit their works in the gallery belonging to Philp & Solomons, the room having been constructed with especial view to their accommodation, and is admirably suited for its purpose.”25 By the end of the Civil War, the local stationery manufacturers constituted a significant segment of the District’s enterprise. Philp and Solomons profited from lucrative contracts with numerous government departments, such as the Department of the Treasury, that enabled them to produce projects with authors, but Gardner was the only artist that they regularly supported. The publishers used their profits in part to fund collaborations such as those with the Gardner firm. In addition to his Seventh Street gallery, Gardner maintained a working space at Philp & Solomons on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Metropolitan Gallery, a satellite bookstore near the firm’s main location. Their sponsorship of his projects helped Washington become a key city for the publishing of Civil War images. Gardner’s success in the District as a photographer is notable. Since the 1840s photographers there had struggled to obtain enough work to support a photographic studio. In early 1865, Philp & Solomons began circulating notices about the forthcoming publication of the two-​volume Sketch Book, pointing to the number of photographs— the book contained one hundred of them as well as one hundred extended captions on separate pages—and their effectiveness as illustrations, advertising it to audiences in both the North and the South. Each Sketch Book included the lithographic frontispiece created by eminent Civil War artist Alfred Waud, who was also a friend of Gardner’s. Apparently, some writers had seen advance copies. New York’s Round Table told readers

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that the volumes Photograph Sketches of the War [sic] would contain “sun-​pictures of the principal campaign of the Army of the Potomac.”26 In January and February 1866, Philp & Solomons placed Sketch Book notices in Virginia and Georgia newspapers.27 Few details about Sketch Book’s national reception are available. Favorable reviews and notices appeared in Washington’s Daily National Intelligencer, Harper’s Weekly, the Savannah Daily Herald (which told its readers that the “work is considered the finest collection ever published”), and the Art Journal, published in London, but other contemporary reactions remain unknown.28 Only a handful of American and European trade journals, such as the German Österreichische militärische Zeitschrift, mentioned Sketch Book, though they gave it only a few lines.29 The Art Journal predicted “hundreds of thousands will eagerly desire to possess the work,”30 but it is unknown how many were actually produced.31 Sketch Book was offered by subscription only. Philp & Solomons advertised the work for sale through 1868.32 Gardner’s pictorial history arrived somewhat later on the market than other illustrated Civil War accounts; the book competed for attention with an array of visual histories of the war, all illustrated by wood engravings. American publishers had begun producing illustrated histories soon after the war’s beginning, in a moment that marked a shift away from the written word as the primary force shaping the popular meaning of historical events to the production of pictorial histories that, though they included text, focused on the images (fig. 6). Lavishly bound, featuring hundreds of pages of texts and engravings, publishers marketed Civil War pictorial histories as keepsakes and also sold them through subscription services. Many books were published following the war, but the most popular pictorial histories were published as it was still being fought, and none of the pictorial histories published after 1866 achieved a success equal to that of the works created during the conflict. Sketch Book is a conceptual rejoinder to criticism positing that the photographic book format could not demonstrate a creative, nuanced relationship between texts and images. The book presents photographs in sequence and uses the subject matter as a symbolic and narrative tool. At times, Gardner sustains the momentum of the book by relating the images to railroad routes. The first images of Sketch Book illustrate the route of the Orange Alexandria railroad, but thereafter the book’s unidirectional narrative splits into multiple stories. Instead of presenting the images in chronological order, Gardner disrupts sequences with images taken years before or after the actual event the image records. At other times, multiple depictions of the same event or subject slow the momentum. Undated photographs appear throughout. Lest the viewer who begins the book think the sequencing inconsequential to its presentation, Gardner, at the end of volume 1, places an image titled The Halt, referring to a regiment’s rest stop, thus teasing readers with what seems the promise of a narrative closure that the book does not

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figure 6 | W. Baritt, Hooker’s New Line of Intrenchments, from B. J. Lossing, Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1866), 3:42. British Library Collections, 2013.

provide. Gardner achieves an integrated presentation, even though technical limitations continued to prevent printed texts from appearing on the same page as the photographic images. In other words, Gardner turned what had been perceived as a liability of the photographically illustrated book to his advantage. The inconsistent syntax produced by images pasted on to one page and text on another was often seen as a fault of photographically illustrated productions. Gardner’s ekphrastic captions extend the sense of time and space of the images that surround them. By titling the work “sketch book,” Gardner made an explicit reference to the popular work of wartime illustrators like Alfred Waud and the tool of their trade, the correspondent’s sketch book. The forerunner of Waud and others was American writer and illustrator Benson J. Lossing, who in the 1840s created a new genre of pictorial history called the pictorial field book, which combined the work of historical observation with artistic interpretation.33 Civil War–era illustrators lacked Lossing’s historical training, but publishers Frank Leslie and Fletcher Harper saw their potential allure and promoted these artists, who soon became fixtures in American popular life. Individual photographers had virtually no national following, but Leslie and Harper’s marketing efforts compellingly cast their artists as the war’s visual scribes; it was supposedly their work that would form the basis for the historical understanding of the events of the era. As Leslie wrote, “History is to be written from the materials which these laborious artists are gathering so assiduously.”34 During the war, Gardner worked alongside these pictorial artists, with the editors of the illustrated weeklies, and witnessed the re-creation of his photographs into mass media works. In his choice to use Waud’s drawing as his frontispiece and his title, Gardner situates photography within contemporary discussion about pictorial histories

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and the role of the visual journalist as a public historian. Sketch Book recognizes and responds to the way in which Americans viewed the sketch artist and the illustrator and yet also seeks to distinguish the photography from the illustration. The way in which Gardner describes the capacities of photography to educate and inform in his preface is a stark contrast to generic drawing by Waud that serves as the frontispiece. The text claims the photographic book is a new visual and literary form, and that photography is itself a new form of knowledge. Insisting on the value of photographs as sites for textual knowledge, the text addresses contemporary claims that photographic pictures play only a supporting role. Photographs are not mere embellishments, Gardner tells readers, but sources of information that provide knowledge about the world. The illustrator creates from their imagination, while the photograph draws from real life alone: In presenting the Photographic Sketch Book of the War to the attention of the public, it is designed that it shall speak for itself. The omission, therefore, of any remarks by way of preface might well be justified; and yet, perhaps a few introductory words may not be amiss. As mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that the following pages will possess an enduring interest. Localities that would scarcely have been known, and probably never remembered, save in their immediate vicinity, have become celebrated, and will ever be held sacred as memorable fields, where thousands of brave men yielded up their lives a willing sacrifice for the cause they had espoused. Verbal representations of such places, or scenes, may or may not have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith. During the four years of the war, almost every point of importance has been photographed, and the collection from which these views have been selected amounts to nearly three thousand. The preface likens photographs in the book to “mementoes”—the relics that so many flocked to the battlefields to find once the fighting there had ceased. Similar to how battlefield objects offered real information (or traces) while inviting imaginative meditation, photographs could also be open-​ended in their meaning and functions. If, as the editors of Harper’s wrote, “the pictures of Harper’s Weekly do not stand alone,” and “there is in every number an excellent summary of events, of the war, of politics, and of domestic and foreign history,” photographs required none.35 The preface maintains that photographs are images that bridge memory, imagination, and fact. As pieces of real life, Gardner writes, photographs are able to save for viewers “localities that would have been known,

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and probably never remembered.” In asserting that these photographic “presentments” will “speak for themselves” and be accepted with an “undoubting faith,” Gardner ascribes to the photograph greater rhetorical power than that of other forms of representation. It mattered to Gardner, as it did to other reformers, that his images hold up as facts. His words allude in particular to the ways that photographs can re-​create the existence of places, people, and events now lost to memory. This justification has much in common with the writings of the widely published Scottish scientist Robert Hunt, who, during the 1840s and 1850s, wrote on photography and its educational and practical applications: “The simple, single photographic picture teaches the combination of infinitely minute detail with that which we technically call breadth of effect. Although we have a thousand objects faithfully represented, there is no sense of littleness.”36 The numerous details of a photograph—too numerous for the human hand to render—offered its viewers the possibility of expansive, and not entirely predictable, learning. The idea that a photograph as a visual document continues to yield information that enables the viewer to connect the present to the past time when the photograph was made is one of the core contributions that Gardner envisions photography could make. In the caption for plate 72, Medical Supply Boat, Appomattox Landing, Virginia (fig. 7), for example, Gardner writes: “Historically connected with the closing scenes of the great rebellion, this river will forever be interesting.” The photograph, by John Reekie, depicts the supply boat Planter in the middle ground and a man posed in the foreground. The Appomattox River, a thin and placid strip (partly obscured by the boats) far in the background of the image, is implausible as the “forever interesting” river Gardner describes as the “subject” of the photograph. One would not immediately think, either, that the headquarters of a general would be near it. Instead, the man in dark clothing standing in the road in the foreground seems to demand attention. Gardner’s preface is not the first instance of his interpreting the photograph as a visual historical document. In other war-​related production, Gardner took a notable interest in distinguishing his works as “photographic,” calling attention to the photographic as a particular kind of description. The original title of the series of war images he initiated with Mathew Brady in 1862 was Incidents of the War, but in 1863 Gardner renamed the series Photographic Incidents of the War, introducing as he did so a new interpretation of the by-​then-​common phrase. Although the phrase “incidents of the war” was neither new nor unique to the Civil War, writers and memoirists adopted it during the conflict as a title for their accounts—such as Peter Fisher Reed’s Incidents of the War (or the Romance and Realities of Soldier Life) of 1862 and Alfred Burnett’s Incidents of the War of 1863, a compilation of short stories that had been published in newspapers. More frequently, general-​interest newspapers and their columnists—and even an antislavery paper like The Liberator—used “incidents of the war” or a variant such as “Anecdotes

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figure 7 | John Reekie, Medical Supply Boat, Appomattox Landing, Virginia, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 72. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

and Incidents of the War” as a heading under which to collect and to publish war stories, anecdotes, and eyewitness accounts. The Salem Register described its “incidents” pieces as providing a variety of “interesting details” about “the personal adventures, in the form of heroic energy in critical exposure, connected with the outbreak of the present civil war.”37 In the New York Commercial Advertiser, the correspondent C. W. D. produced a yearlong, semiweekly column titled “Incidents of the War.” In the popular press, the tone of other war coverage was factual, in contrast to that of “incidents,” which was more personal and interpretive. The media associated the phrase with the arts and with literary writings: the Milwaukee Sentinel wrote that “the incidents of the war, and the imaginings it gives rise to, are seized upon by the illustrated journals and are duly set forth in wood cuts for the eager thousands to see and buy.”38 The phrase came to refer to diaristic observations of wartime life, an association that could have served only to intensify the viewer’s scrutiny of Gardner’s work when it appeared collectively named under the same title.

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In his Photographic Incidents series and in Sketch Book, Gardner’s own personal interpretations, his memories, and the actual facts help save for viewers, as he writes in the preface, “localities that would have been known, and probably never remembered.” In asserting that these photographic “presentments” will “speak for themselves” and be accepted with an “undoubting faith,” Gardner attributed greater rhetorical power to the photograph than to other forms of representation. Photographs can stand alone for posterity. The artistic vision of Sketch Book as text and image links to wider debates about the role of text- and image-​based media in the nineteenth-​century transatlantic reform community. For this community, photographs and print (e.g., newspapers, journals, and magazines) served as affective, didactic, and persuasive tools. Gardner and his editors once went so far as to describe the newspaper as a “popular” schoolmaster.39 Through literary techniques such as melodrama, genres including the epic poem, and allusions to and invocations of Romantic heroes like Lord Byron, reformers heightened their appeals. In this way, reformist writing—nation-​forming in the literal sense—united virtual communities as well. The transatlantic reform community understood how images could amplify their messages. Trish Loughran, in her study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century print culture in the United States, describes the shifting strategies of abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s, as they disseminated their message worldwide by means of a “circulatory project” of print media.40 The participation in this “project” was essential to the foundational goals of the Sentinel. When American abolitionist William Wells Brown toured Glasgow, Gardner and his Sentinel editors noted that, while the lectures Brown gave were “highly interesting,” the illustrations “far surpassed the power of language in delineating the horrors of slavery.”41 Men like American abolitionist Theodore Weld used processes such as lithography to transform and personalize how audiences viewed and read their texts. Gardner’s views on employing text and photographs were most likely shaped by both his membership and participation in the reform community, and his work as an editor and writer. Rays of Sunlight from South America was a formal experiment pre-​dating Sketch Book, and it communicated similar messages and themes about historical time and democracy. Philp & Solomons published the single volume in 1865 and sold the seventy-​page book for one hundred dollars. Rays, which featured photographs made in 1863 by American photographer Henry Moulton, received favorable reviews.42 Moulton’s photographs depict scenes in Lima, Peru; the port city of Callao; and the Chincha Islands off the coast. The book credits Gardner as the printer of Moulton’s negatives, and it is probable that Gardner wrote the introduction. The editors of Harper’s Weekly praised the book

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for depicting “the manners and customs of the people, the venerable and picturesque cathedrals and other public buildings, [and] the romantic passages of famous scenery, [which] are all vividly and accurately reproduced.”43 Rays did not include individual or extended captions, but the long introductory text makes several intertwining points about the images and their subject matter. The narrator introduces himself as “the traveler” who has arrived in Lima, a city, “so unlike” what he has left behind him “that every group is a study and every incident a lesson.”44 He concludes quickly that “the march of expediency has not been very rapid in South American cities, and the mania for reform so active in other countries . . . has not yet made itself manifest.” The region, instead of modernizing, remains mired in a mysterious past: “The beautiful remains of Spanish architecture have not yet given place to modern innovation; the heavy, drooping, convoluted roofs of the fountains have not yet disappeared, to make room for light iron railings.” Instead of “light iron railings,” the buildings are made with heavy stone construction. The city’s stagnation is dreamy, intoxicating. One can even smell the past because the flowers bloom perennially, covering tombs and “breathing forth their fragrance . . . a sweet offering to the memories of the departed.” Left in this state, the region is the perfect candidate for photography: “But if it be desirable to ‘Catch the living manners as they rise,’ it can be no less so to preserve a record of the past. There is a fine moral in the representation of things that have passed away, if viewed aright.” The traveler dismisses historical and geographic specificity—likening Lima to Nineveh, Carthage, Tyre, and other cities—to “gaze on the pictured glories,” in which he finds a “salutatory” lesson. Eventually the old will be swept away, “with the unsparing besom of reform, the web which the spider of antiquity had woven.” The sites depicted no longer represent contemporary life but the past—they “constitute the pride ornament” of the city. The text implies that societies ruled by antiquated governing theories and structures eventually dissolve due to economic and social instability; new nations eventually emerge. Gardner’s Sentinel, following the statements made by Thomas Carlyle and other Chartist leaders, launched a similar discussion and predicted reform would sweep away the old: “Wherever we look, the germs of approaching struggles are perceptible. The oppressed people have but to look on, and ‘bide their time.’ ”45 In Moulton’s static scenes, an ancient society awaits such radical transformation. Early in Rays, Moulton’s photographs establish political and economic stagnation as a theme. His distanced perspective emphasizes the architecture, with structures—and the past that they represent—dominant in each frame. To underscore the current dissolution of society, Moulton’s compressed compositions place the points of interest generally in the foreground (fig. 8) and keep the viewer’s attention there. Overlooking the middle ground as a compositional feature, Moulton’s

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figure 8 | Henry De Witt Moulton, Morin’s Hotel, Great Plaza, Lima, from Alexander Gardner and Henry De Witt Moulton, Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, F3601.G35.

vantage point fixes the structures against the blank sky and enhances their graphic lines and shapes. The photographs portray no trains or signs of industrialization. The remains of the city’s dysfunctional aqueduct resemble an ancient ruin. The bottom story of the municipal building appears occupied by small merchants with stalls beneath tarps and makeshift awnings. Little commerce is evident, and the quality of life suffers (fig. 9). The massive wooden doors of the depot are closed, and a destitute figure sits cross-​legged in front of the door at right. In the second plate, ancient buildings in the background form an organic skyline (fig. 10). These structures feature domes, intricate stonework, and architectural flourishes. In the foreground, more modern apartment buildings with flat roofs and rectangular windows crowd the river bank. The apartment buildings, squat and unassuming, are less opulent than the ancient structures in the background: some of the modern balconies appear makeshift, and others sag in disrepair. Few people are visible. The shoreline

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figure 9 | Henry De Witt Moulton, Depot, Lima, from Alexander Gardner and Henry De Witt Moulton, Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, F3601.G35.

is not a commercial strip but a residential neighborhood. Figures standing along the bridge lean on its wall. The riverbed that takes up much of the composition is no thriving waterway; it has shrunk to the size of a creek. At bottom right in the image, a small group washes laundry in a trickle of water, as if to underscore the usefulness of the drying waterway, which now can support only a domestic economy. The later photographs give evidence that prosperity is unlikely to be found elsewhere in the region. A dozen or so ships wait in the waters off the Chincha Islands for shipments of guano, a manure produced by seabirds that was highly valued as a fertilizer used in agriculture. The images that follow show that the ships are waiting because there are no brokers to conduct the trade or workers to load the guano onto the ships. The main hotel is a decrepit wooden structure along a dirt road, and the workers live in equally crude shacks of wood and thatched leaves (fig. 11). Moulton’s photographs portray details that indicate to the viewer the extent of the region’s decline. The hotel sign is missing, and

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figure 10 | Henry De Witt Moulton, Side View of the Bridge of Pizarro, Lima, from Alexander Gardner and Henry De Witt Moulton, Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, F3601.G35.

its flagpole is barren. The photographic depictions of a country’s inability to harness its human and material resources implicitly indict its government. When Gardner published the book, competing factions sought to dominate access to natural resources, particularly guano, an industry that is given a significant amount of attention in the book. Though the book’s conceptual origins are unknown, it may have been commissioned by the United States Department of State, which had a particular interest in the resources of this region.46 Because the topic would have been relatively unknown among the general population, the book was most likely intended for a politically savvy audience, but not necessarily one interested in reform. Although Rays conveyed messages that had the potential to appeal to Washington leaders wanting visual evidence to support their financial interests in the region, the book also preaches a moral lesson. To Chartists and other supporters of working-​class movements, Peru was part of a broad tide of change in the course of history worldwide.

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figure 11 | Henry De Witt Moulton, The Hotel, Chincha Islands, from Alexander Gardner and Henry De Witt Moulton, Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, F3601.G35.

In Chartist literature of the 1840s, Peru (which experienced its own civil war between 1811 and 1824) was yet another example of tyrant rule. Such stories, in which tyrants were eventually defeated—as readers by the 1840s would have known—inspired reformist readers to continue their own work. From this perspective, Moulton’s “idle” mood could also have been taken as symbolic of the old rule that had been overturned. The “rays” of sunlight are the possibility that guano could support American farming in the wake of war; they may also refer to Peru’s role as an inspirational model in working-​class literature. The two possible meanings have something in common—in 1865 America throws off its own ties to an “ancient” institution, and it, too, awaited rebirth. The text in Rays, like Sketch Book, is centered on the authorial voice of a traveler. While improvements in transportation and communication contributed to the boom in travel and to the overwhelming popularity of the travel literature as a genre, travel and travel literature also had other meanings in Gardner’s world. There, movement had

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origins and consequences. It was often synonymous with hope. This kind of hope was not necessarily about one’s personal ambitions but rather about the movement of others, and what it indicated about society and the ideas those others embodied. Reform leaders traveled to learn firsthand about the models they admired from afar and to foster political exchange. The pages of the Sentinel were full of stories describing visitors from abroad, immigration, and the movement of goods and ideas. Regular columns written by emigrants detailed life in new lands. Such “economic migrants” played vital roles by establishing the communities and networks that could facilitate and sustain international liaisons. Before dismantling the colony, Gardner’s own Clydesdale group contributed stories about life in Iowa to the “Emigration News” section.47 Articles on the international speaking tours of men such as Mazzini and Louis Kossuth, a Hungarian activist and political reformer, described a favorable reception and gave hope to those who believed in their message. Meanwhile, visitors to Glasgow such as William Wells Brown offered the community their new insight into slavery and abolition. The text and images in both Rays and Sketch Book worked with each other in a way that recalls a genre popularly used by reformers: the travelogue. Reformers penned travel texts that included historical anecdotes and vividly presented contemporary observations. The early Scottish forerunner of this genre was reformer Frances Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), which featured stories, or “sketches,” of her travels in America. During the late 1830s, reform hero Harriet Martineau mixed travel writing with economic and social theory in her popular books, including Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). These influential works comfortably combined accessible prose with pointed political and cultural critique, which was supported by the evidence of firsthand observation. According to historian of the nineteenth century W. Caleb McDaniel, during the 1830s the transatlantic market for travelogues critical of American society expanded dramatically and continued to do so for decades.48 Reformers were among the authors who contributed to the large body of British travel literature in the nineteenth century, in their travelogues giving readers a broadly entertaining, colloquial narrative full of complex information and text-​based visualizations of nations abroad. Reform authors, by means of their travel and observation, refined and bolstered support for their own political and social theories (and, often, their prejudices). One of the early reformers to visit the United States and initiate this trend was Rev. E. S. Abdy, a Cambridge abolitionist who wrote Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America (1835). Abdy took time to write his observations about union activities, insane asylums, and the quality of the roads near the New York–Canada border. In upstate New York, he spoke warmly of his visit to the farm of a Mr. Wadsworth, bought for roughly sixty-​seven dollars per acre and already yielding a thirty-​dollar profit per acre from the wheat and grains grown on it.49 Ethan Allen Andrews wrote a travelogue titled

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Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States (1836) after his visit. In 1841, Joseph Sturge wrote A Visit to the United States in 1841, stating his goals for his travelogue on the first page: “In visiting the United States, the objects which preferred the chief claim[s] to my attention were the universal abolition of slavery, and the promotion of permanent international peace.”50 During his visit to Philadelphia, Sturge noted the Schuylkill Water Works, “beautifully situated on the river of that name.”51 He explained that the water not only “suffices for domestic use of the inhabitants, but is abundant for every public purpose or ornament or utility.”52 Slavery is treated as a shocking anomaly among the bucolic scenes. Shortly afterward, he arrived in Baltimore, where he “realize[d] the true nature of the system of slavery” when he visited a “market-​house for human flesh.”53 Rays’s “tour” of the historical and economic landscape of Lima—and, by extension, Peru—and Sketch Book’s observational tone and content both recall the travelogue; Gardner is keenly interested in both books in geographical details and features, contextualized in relation to contemporary events and political theory. Given the role of travel and travelogues in Gardner’s world, his use of the genre is fitting. According to Owen, reformers had to learn from their own direct experience how to effect social change. Like social scientists, they had to discover natural laws at work in society rather than conceive of reforms based on a general observation of social facts.54 This travel literature ultimately served as a political lever, as reformers sought various means to influence public opinion. Travel contributed to the production of texts, and reformers used travel as a means to interact with followers and potential followers. Gardner saw this firsthand. The job of Gardner’s esteemed Sentinel coeditors, Alexander Campbell and Robert Buchanan, as two of Owen’s eight specially designated missionaries, was to travel to inform and convert and thus to forge a national geography of reform. International travel connected far-​flung reform movements and reform ideas, helped in fundraising, and provided opportunities for believers to strategize. The travel text could offer an account of customs and social geographies personally observed to give evidentiary weight to conceptions of regional identity and could also confirm the existence of a worldwide community of believers. Interacting with travelogues had been part of Gardner’s work at the Sentinel. By publishing letters from his Clayton County group in addition to travelogues from members of cooperative colonies throughout the world, he educated readers about travel routes and farming techniques and offered, by way of comparison, a view of life lived under American laws and observations about the American economy, industry, and social and political customs. These columns expanded Gardner’s knowledge of the United States beyond abstract accounts to personal and direct stories written by family, trusted friends, and colleagues. The leader of the Iowa colony, John Craig, described life there in great detail, providing information about types of soil, recounting contemporary debates about

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creating public schools, and praising the political system, calling the place “republican to the backbone . . . [and asserting that its] laws are perhaps the best in existence for the government of a people, who acknowledge no one as master.”55 Travelogues frequently featured wood engravings, so the photography in Gardner’s books gave a new dimension to the travelogue’s foundation in vivid description by the traveler/author. Like the newspaper or the novel, the photograph could provide “affective training”: by juxtaposing evidence of multiple events and actions, and by containing multiple plots, photographs enabled viewers to connect visually, intellectually, and emotionally to lives and events unfolding elsewhere.56 Photographic details could activate the imagination, inspire users to supplement their existing knowledge with the knowledge they gained from the photograph, and suggest a real world beyond the frame; the accurate image could reach those with limited literacy, offer opportunities for communal study, and foster the intimate interactions between subjects and viewers that supported reform ideals. Amanda Claybaugh identifies the personal element as a factor that distinguishes reform from other social action: reformers identified the individual as both the agent and the site of social transformation.57 Because the realistic details in photography often mean different things to different viewers, photography could encourage intimate and personally meaningful encounters that could help facilitate that transformation. Early in the Sketch Book text, Gardner establishes the voice of the narrative as that of an informed travel guide. Using his knowledge of American history and geography, he places the photographs of Civil War sites in context. At times, Sketch Book text relates these sites to the Revolutionary War. The recent war is the immediate subject of the texts and the photographs, but the texts use tropes of the geographical tour to encourage viewers to imagine the historical past and political future beyond the immediate subject of the photograph. Anthony Lee writes that the photographs in Sketch Book “all seem so empty of incident, merely registering places of historical interest.”58 However, the observational details serve an associative function. Because reformers like Gardner, in supporting workers’ rights, were concerned with the rights of the landless and eager to promote industry based on natural resources, they focused on geography. The sites in Sketch Book, like those in Rays of Sunlight, catalog the geography—of the Civil War and of Lima, Peru—textually and visually. The text and references of Rays and Sketch Book stress the land (along with its cultivation) as the principal feature. Soils are fertile, and areas such as those around the Fairfax Courthouse are “diversified, with hill, wood, and valley, fine farms, pretty brooks—with stone bridges—and beyond all, the noble chain of the Blue Ridge.”59 Sketch Book’s catalog of natural resources establishes geography as its central feature, associating the bounty of resources with a diverse land-​based economy and the ingenuity of the people who take advantage of it. The photograph of what appears to be a flat

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figure 12 | Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908, 08.228.

landscape and a line of Confederate troops depicted in plate 34, according to Gardner’s caption, represents the area around Aldie, Virginia, which is very “diversified.” Virginia is in general described as an abundant land—a state full of waterways and of fertile and forested regions. Inland, Gardner notes the native plant species and writes of the fine oysters available in Yorktown. He mentions the flora and fauna of the landscape in some detail, calling Chickahominy Bridge the “home of almost every variety of Virginia reptiles” and describing the wild roses and honeysuckle that grow alongside groves of peach trees. These details are not random or contextual, but factual in ways that matter to those invested in rebuilding and in taking advantage of the available economic opportunities. Gardner, like the Clydesdale community members in their letters from the colony, promotes the idea that a progressive economy can prosper with a just government in place. Throughout the text, the geographic features—the rivers and mountain ranges—as well as the railroad, a human invention, unite the disparate locales depicted in the photographs and evoke a sense of boundless plenty. Gardner repeatedly directs the viewer to look beyond the immediate aftereffects of war to these features. Anthony Lee cites Sketch Book’s preference for the landscape view as representative of a new preference for landscape in the production and sale of photographs, and notes that

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this genre allowed Gardner to distinguish himself from Mathew Brady, who had gained an international reputation for portraiture.60 During this period, the popularity of landscape and landscape images represented a belief that the physical environment formed the character of its inhabitants.61 Since the 1820s, American art had successfully translated ideas about the powerful link between nature and human character into a nationalist landscape aesthetic that would instruct Americans in moral and civic behavior (fig. 12). This “moral picturesque” mode functioned as a bulwark against moral and spiritual anarchy.62 There were other influences besides painting. Gardner’s views resemble more vernacular sources, like the urban view. Booksellers sold such views alongside photographs, and Gardner used a lithograph as the frontispiece of the Sketch Book volumes. Civil War–era photographers, like graphic artists of the time, regularly recorded camp views in the style of the urban view. Northern audiences were fascinated by the mobilization of soldiers and supplies, as well as the display of military power, and were curious about how soldiers lived. Crowds formed around Washington to see the regiments and the preparations for war. Ultimately, the images of Union camps and forts portrayed the central power of the federal government. In their travels, visitors often collected city views—another mass medium that Sketch Book references, and the most popular category of such prints. In Views and Viewmakers of Urban America, urban studies historian John Reps writes about the ubiquity of the lithographic city view. Just as Americans came to equate their street plans with the moral and political behavior of American citizens, early photographic images gave those ordinary citizens a chance to have images made of themselves for the first time, as the daguerreotype portraits of the nation’s political, cultural, and intellectual elite gave Americans more generally the wherewithal to visualize the nation’s auspicious origins and distinctive promise. Gardner’s Sketch Book was less a publication for the everyday consumer than a possible accessory for business and professional offices, which had become important consumer bases for city views. Public officials promoted their cities by purchasing and displaying these views, and wealthy consumers who took pride in purchasing them could buy Sketch Book. Gardner’s and his studio’s unusual vantage points in photographing the camp scenes resemble these lithographic urban views. His preface, moreover, invites of his readers a similar scrutiny of photography. These images, which took advantage of new inexpensive and versatile lithographic printing techniques, became increasingly popular in the decades just before the Civil War. About 1850, as Reps explains, the traditional approach to the city view as a variant of a landscape (in which one recorded what one saw) changed as artists began to adopt imaginative viewpoints and to create a more comprehensive urban portrait.63 Civil War photographers faced a similar task, looking out at the camps and rows of equipment and wanting to portray the scene and not just what was before

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figure 13 | City of Washington from beyond the Navy Yard, ca. 1833. Painted by G. Cooke, engraved by W. J. Bennett, published by Lewis P. Clover, New York, ca. 1833. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​pga-00192.

them. Sketch Book’s photographs recall the lithographic images of American towns and cities avidly collected by the public (fig. 13). Artists produced and sold views of even the smallest locales, in which a dramatic, elevated vantage point presented the region below as a stage where viewers could imagine glorious narratives. But if the city view generally offered a highly detailed foreground and a background of diminishing clarity, the photograph, by comparison, offered endless details. In photographs, viewers saw the assembly of real life, like that commonly produced only in imaginatively enhanced renderings. The Edward Sachse firm of Baltimore may have produced the most distinguished city views. In some of them, Sachse included a caption in which he indicated that his work was “drawn from nature.” During the Civil War, Sasche and his firm turned their talents to producing views of Union encampments (fig. 14). Sachse added to the waterfront scene numerous detailed scenes of camp life. Among the rows of tents, for example, he left some open to create variation and add a sense of documentary realism. These views illustrate the breadth of Northern infrastructure and its effective implementation.

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figure 14 | Abram Hoffman, lithographer, Camp of 104th Penn’a Vol.’s Morris Island, S.C., 1863, published by Edward Sachse. Library Company of Philadelphia.

Scholars including art historian Angela Miller and curator and scholar Eleanor Jones Harvey have argued that American painters used meteorological phenomena to communicate the crisis at midcentury. For Gardner, these motifs belonged to a political tradition in which they symbolized the power of everyday people to effect historical change. Following the eschatological and millennial themes in Romantic poetry, Chartist writers used natural elements and cycles to ponder history, glorious utopian futures, and the end of materialism. According to Chartist poetry scholar Ulrike Schwab, poets linked the Chartist movement to nature: “The movement performs nature’s will; it is ‘willed by nature,’ ” she writes.64 Literary historian Brian Maidment notes that writers drew heavily from nature to stress the “naturalness” of the revolutionary process.65 Throughout history, tyrants never triumphed. The transformational shifts that take place between the text and image in Sketch Book are not unlike what occurs in famous poems like Ernest Jones’s “When the World is Burning” (1845), where “ere fierce flames, uprushing, / O’er all lands leap, crushing, / Till earth fall, fire-​swathed,” soon “Up amidst meadows, / Gently through shadows, / Gentle flames will glide, / Small, and blue, and golden.” The nature images in this poem and in others often imply the aspect of upheaval. Whereas the landscape photographs present visceral reminders of the horrors of war, Sketch Book’s captions meliorate the viewer’s response by presenting them in the context of a “natural” process of revolutionary change.

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figure 15 | George Barnard and James Gibson, Fortifications at Manassas, March 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 11. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

The recurrent agrarian themes of Sketch Book (complemented by the landscape photographs) represent a new nation of moral as well as fiscal tranquility and prosperity. Gardner is already looking to the future—and to who will inhabit this land now that the war is over. This was a personal dream that he had had for a long time, having cofounded the agricultural colony in Iowa nearly twenty years before. According to the captions, the “husbandman” shown is the next principal actor in this landscape. On the ill-​fated fields of Antietam, Gardner writes of the scene and subject of his own photograph that “houses and fences have been repaired, harvests have ripened over the breasts of the fallen, and the ploughshare only now and then turns up a shot, as a relic of that great struggle.”66 Again, he foresees an agricultural future. Moreover, in the photographs, the Confederate fortifications at Manassas (fig. 15) have been dismantled, but the captions tell the reader that the “farmer’s plow is already turning the furrow.”67 Another Sketch Book photograph presents the Fredericksburg Valley as a scene of the “most thrilling events of the war” but notes that despite the war that took place on its soil, its fertility

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figure 16 | Timothy O’Sullivan, Fredericksburg, Virginia, March 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 30. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

is still “unsurpassed.”68 British photographer Roger Fenton stunned viewers during the Crimean War with photographs of desolation that suggested the horrors of both war and its aftermath.69 In addition to meditating on what war has wrought, in his own narratives Gardner often uses an extended caption to replace the image left with other mental images in the aftermath of viewing the photograph. Images and details in Sketch Book collaboratively work to foreground the beauty of agrarian society, which Gardner believed would be instrumental in restoring the nation’s well-​being—both the morality of its citizens and the stability of its economy—after the war. Through such details as a row of trees (damaged but still standing) that frame a river and a mill (fig. 16), the photographs demonstrate that despite what has occurred, nature, morality, and industry persist. In the accompanying text for this particular photograph of Fredericksburg, Gardner describes fierce fighting over a number of days, though at present “business is resumed with an activity that betokens a brilliant future.” The details of the photograph offer a suggestion of just what such horrors were. The bridge in the

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center is destroyed, but the mill stands untouched. The lighting conditions in the photograph emphasize the texture of the wood, and the size of the structure draws the viewer’s attention to it as a central element. Meanwhile, several church spires form a skyline. The book’s landscape mode, which serves Gardner’s reformist vision of a moral geography born in the wake of war, is a landless immigrant’s agrarian fantasy of agriculture and industry as paths to economic success and moral regeneration. Beginning anew, the United States had the opportunity to embrace agriculture and to avoid the degrading impact of societies based on manufacturing. Like Owen, Gardner saw land as the basis for change in society; Owenites believed that the land contained sufficient wealth to sustain people and that the creation of farms was central to the formation of a new moral world.70 Owen wrote in 1815 that manufacturing created a character “formed upon a principle quite unfavorable to individual or general happiness” that will ultimately produce “the most lamentable and permanent evils.”71 As Gardner writes in the caption for plate 4, Stone Church, Centreville, Va. (1862), “[People are] turning back from uncertain wanderings to the resting place of their fathers, and, with returning peace, the husbandman finds that nature has not forgotten its fruitfulness in the years of war and devastation.” Praise for agriculture and the values of country life had been an important theme in European thought since the Renaissance.72 Gardner’s transatlantic reform community frequently invoked a vision of preindustrial bliss, governed by natural laws, in which nature was “the great teacher.”73 When Gardner writes of the husbandman and of the persistence of nature on what had been the fields of war, it is as if he sees these ideas about nature—the great teacher—coming to fruition. Agriculture was the most sustainable mode of existence because, in the analysis of reformers, the free market system did not benefit everyday people, nor was it free at all, but a “legal monopoly . . . a monstrous, self-​developed monopoly.”74 To Owen, to live the agrarian life was to live in harmony with the world; the industrial life, by contrast, lacked unity and stability and fostered only fragmentation, loneliness, and strife.75 Owenite Chartists like Gardner pointed to models of agriculturally based communities that thrived through hard work, machinery developed by Northern farmers (rather than slaves), capable management, and a small amount of capital.76 Though industrialization, compounded by slavery and the war, had the effect of deteriorating society’s morality and cohesiveness, Sketch Book’s photographs and texts show how moral rectitude and oneness with the earth could be achieved again through agriculture. As in Ernest Jones’s epic poem The New World, America would be reborn; “the stripes of slaves” would be effaced “from that proud flag where heaven’s high splendour waves!”77 Superior Northern values are responsible for this new moral society. In  Sketch Book, government and military power are emblematic of national character, conveyed through the landscape mode. Controlled compositions and vantage points highlight the

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figure 17 | Timothy O’Sullivan, Guard Mount, Head-​Quarters Army of the Potomac, 1864, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 55. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

organization and breadth of Northern military power (fig. 17). Graphic tones complement these formal choices. Sketch Book directly discusses “the government” of the United States versus the rebels whom Gardner portrays as living outside of civilized society. “Virginia families”—“decrepit” people who ride “in the oddest vehicles”—represent the retreating past.78 The Union troops are referred to as “our” troops versus the Confederates.79 The Union Army, written of as an active force, is intelligent and organized—qualities embodied in its military power, its application of innovations like the telegraph, and even in the construction of their camps. The text interprets Northern infrastructure as representative of the values of industriousness, home, and charity. For example, the Union, Gardner mentions, has an organized mail system, which allows soldiers to remain in contact with loved ones. Plate 53 (fig. 18) shows “American” patriots who created the Christian Commission in New York City in order to aid the Union cause. The image suggests that pious Union soldiers eagerly accepted the commission’s offer of hymnbooks and religious magazines.

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figure 18 | James Gardner, Headquarters Christian Commission in the Field, Germantown, 1863, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 53. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

Photographs elevate humble constructions into icons. The residence of the chief quartermaster, for example, has a fireplace “worthy of a new England mansion,” and soldiers spent time beautifying their own, temporary homes.80 Other photographs document elaborate arborways and structures built of local wood (fig. 19).81 In Poplar Grove Church (1862; fig. 20), figures stand in a clearing, framed against the sky, and viewers can see how builders used wood to create different patterns—replicating the columns, archways, and details found in monumental churches made of stone. The caption describes the character of these men, but the photographic details exceed that description by showing evidence of what these men produced, which indicates the knowledge, teamwork, and collaboration that belonged to such projects. The viewer can marvel at the proportions of the structure and understand its scale. The organic forms of the people are a contrast to the exact geometry of the structure. Sketch Book’s underlying thesis is that because of these dominating Northern characteristics, the nation will recover and fulfill the destiny imagined by its Revolutionary

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figure 19 | James Gardner, Field Hospital, Second Army Corps, Brandy Station, 1864, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 54. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

forebears. In plate 3, Fairfax Courthouse, the text describes how the town, now distinctly under “the influence of Northern enterprise,” will recover from its “misfortunes” in the war years. In fact, Gardner suggests, Northerners have practically and spiritually benefited from the war—men were trained as engineers, and military practice instilled discipline.82 According to the captions, even those who received treatment at the Camp Hospital at Brandy Station “unconsciously learned to care for each other’s welfare, and many now look back to the weary days of hospital life as the beginning of friendships which time cannot weaken nor adversity estrange.”83 In Sketch Book, Gardner envisions the postwar world as an opportunity for a farm-​based economy, like the one he had hoped to establish in Clayton County sixteen years before. His outlook is far more optimistic than the embattled position he and his Sentinel editors took in 1851 when they characterized the world as a place where no one other than the wealthy and powerful possessed power, where “far from being the first partaker of

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figure 20 | Timothy O’Sullivan, Poplar Grove Church, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 74. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

the fruit, [‘the toiler’] is the last, the shabbiest, and the meanest served.”84 Gardner, by using the new media format of the photographically illustrated book, allowed viewers to experience a more nuanced presentation of this ideal—one that engaged history, contemporary life, geography, and government. Gardner’s language, however, seems more invested in the United States as a model than in the Union per se; his text reveals

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someone who believes in the American experiment and the ideals it upheld. Even to some contemporaries, the text was nonpartisan. The reviewer for London’s Art-​Journal wrote: “We can readily understand that in America hundreds of thousands will eagerly desire to possess the work; of both sides, indeed, for it is rarely that any place pictured is not associated with the heroism of both; and it is but just to say that the compiler has not manifested the prejudice of a partisan.”85 The travel format functions as more than just an organizational tool in Sketch Book. Gardner’s war tour balanced a similar combination of objective reporting, exhortation, and optimism. Because of its capacity to render reality, photography was perhaps the ultimate form of evidence. Through Sketch Book, Gardner argued that photography could make an important contribution as a historical narrative, because of the medium’s simultaneous ability to represent the past and re-​create historical context. The photographically illustrated book allowed Gardner to reinvent the approaches reformers had already employed for decades. Gardner’s vision promoted the photographically illustrated book form as creation and copy, description and suggestion. He argued for the power of the photographic detail to educate and persuade viewers. In the twentieth century, such an idea would be taken up and more fully explored by photographers like Lewis Hine, who wrote: “The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration. For this reason, the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify.”86 Gardner’s work in Sketch Book, much like the work of the journalistic culture in which he began his career as a public intellectual, was to unite a fractured society. In the process, he contributed to the history of photography and to nineteenth-​century transatlantic Anglo-​American print culture and the public sphere of reform.

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Chapter 2

Remove the Foul Blot

The first volume of Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War opens with an image made by Gardner studio corps member William Pywell. The photograph depicts a structure Gardner’s audience would have recognized: a tavern six miles south of the White House in Alexandria, Virginia, called Marshall House, the location marking the symbolic “first shot” of the Civil War (fig. 21). On May 24, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union, and the owner of Marshall House, James Jackson, who supported secession, quickly hoisted a Confederate flag atop his inn. Union Colonel Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth, a young and dashing former colleague of President Lincoln, observed the flag from a nearby camp and angrily went to the inn, determined to remove it. Descending the stairs after cutting down the flag, Jackson confronted and killed Ellsworth and subsequently was himself shot by one of Ellsworth’s men. In the photograph, the notorious flagpole is visible because of Pywell’s elevated perspective. From this artificial vantage point, Pywell, instead of giving viewers the structure as seen from the street, points them toward the dramatic narrative associated with the structure. The martyred Ellsworth quickly became the subject of popular prints. Union troops rallied to the call “Remember Ellsworth” as they prepared for war. Pywell’s Marshall House photograph is a logical beginning for a book about the Civil War, but the photograph that follows, also by Pywell, casts the Ellsworth incident as superficial to the war’s narrative and introduces the moral dispute at the core of the conflict between the two regions. This photograph shows a two-​story structure ten blocks south of Marshall House with an adjacent single-​story wing on one side and a fenced area

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figure 21 | William Pywell, Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia, 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 1. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

on the other. This structure faces south. It is nearly back to back with the “front”-facing Marshall House (fig. 22). Gardner’s extended caption reads as follows: In many of the Southern cities the people had erected buildings of this kind for the confinement of slaves awaiting sale. The establishment represented in the photograph was situated in the western suburbs of Alexandria, near the depot of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The main building was used by the clerks of the firm and the overseers. The high brick wall enclosed a courtyard, in which were stable stand outhouses for the accommodation of planters who come in for the purpose of selling or purchasing slaves. The large building on the right was used for the confinement of negroes. It had a number of apartments, in which slaves could be kept singly or in gangs, and one large mess room, where they received their food. The establishment was essentially a prison. The doors were very strong, and were secured by large locks and bolts. Iron bars were fixed to the masonry of the

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figure 22 | William Pywell, Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 2. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

windows, and manacles were frequently placed on the limbs of those suspected of designs for escape. Auction sales were regularly held, at which Virginia farmers disposed of their servants to cotton and sugar planters from the Gulf States. If a slave-​owner needed money which he could not easily procure, he sold one of his slaves; and the threat of being sent South constantly held over the servants as security for faithful labor and good behavior. Before the war, a child three years old, would sell, in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions. Known by then as simply the “Slave Pen,” the site was the former Chesapeake headquarters of the hugely profitable slave-​trading firm of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. This building, located at 1717 Duke Street, was well known, but its relationship to the Civil War conflict reached back to the years of the brewing sectional crisis in the early

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figure 23 | Andrew Joseph Russell, Commissary Department, Alexandria, Slave Pen, Fort Ellsworth, Seminary Hospital, Camps, etc. in Distance, April 1863, no. 119. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018.234.

decades of the nineteenth century. Franklin entered the trade sometime in 1819, and on February 28, 1828, he formed a partnership with Armfield. Franklin and his nephew Armfield created their firm to serve the demand for slaves by the new markets in the expanding South. Based in Tennessee, and already the owner of such large plantations as Angola in Louisiana, Franklin knew firsthand the need for slaves to sustain the cotton industry. Duke Street was Little River Turnpike, which was constructed a few years prior to the opening of the firm and conveniently offered access to the inland plantations and farms from which the slaves came. From Duke Street, they either began their walk in overland coffles or were taken to the riverfront, traveling south from there by ship. A photograph by Union captain and photographer Andrew Joseph Russell depicts this geography (fig. 23). The main office building of the slave pen with its white wall and double chimney is visible in the center of photograph, as are the adjacent buildings that comprised the compound. Duke Street runs diagonally through the photograph. In the distance is farmland and union tent encampments in the hills. In the foreground is the train station, which ran parallel to the wharf. Franklin & Armfield skillfully assembled and sent their “packets” of slaves in ways that brought them huge profits. A letter to the

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Alexandria Gazette described a weekly ritual: “After having been confined, and sometimes manacled in a loathsome prison, they are turned out in public view to take their departure for the South. The children and some of the women are generally crowded into a cart or wagon, while others follow on foot, frequently handcuffed and chained together.”1 Franklin & Armfield gained notoriety as one of the large-​scale urban-​based interregional slave dealers. If Pywell’s photograph introduces the landscape of domestic slavery into Gardner’s Civil War narrative, this chapter demonstrates that slavery and abolition had been of interest to Gardner for more than a decade before the Civil War. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he and his Scottish cohorts argued that slavery undercut America’s exceptional potential and sullied it as an emblem of republican ideals. Sentinel texts frequently insisted that slavery contravened the nation’s principles and was a threat to the union. In his analyses, Gardner uses techniques that transatlantic reformers had employed against slavery since the late eighteenth century. He implies that slave trading required actions and a mindset outside the bounds of civil society and bluntly reminds viewers of its cruelty. In this expanded critique of slavery, Gardner links economic transactions to moral ideals and addresses the threat that slavery posed to the nation’s civic fabric and, ultimately, to the economic vision he presented throughout the rest of Sketch Book. The symbolism and rhetoric in Gardner’s caption, and in the one photograph devoted to the topic of slavery in Sketch Book, follow those of the transatlantic propaganda war led and instigated by British abolitionists during the late eighteenth century. When British politician and philanthropist William Wilberforce’s Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade convened in 1787, the group established its agenda by stating, “Our immediate aim is, by diffusing a knowledge of the subject and particularly the Modes of procuring and treating slaves, to interest men of every description in the Abolition of the Traffic; but especially those from whom any alteration must proceed—the Members of our Legislature.”2 Wilberforce and his supporters recognized that the most effective tactic for agitating against slavery was to demonstrate that the slave trade was impolitic and inhumane.3 Audiences could look to Scottish satirist Isaac Cruikshank’s print The Abolition of the Slave Trade; Or, The Inhumanity of Dealers in Human Flesh Exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virjen [sic] Modesty from 1792 (fig. 24), which portrayed an incident Wilberforce described on the floor of the House of Commons. In the print, John Kimber is shown holding a whip and standing next to a young woman suspended from a rope by her ankle. Three slave women cower in the background. Details of the print speak to the values of justice and the propriety of the viewers, Kimber fully clothed and leering beside the dark-​skinned woman, who covers her face in shame at her near-​nakedness.

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figure 24 | Isaac Cruikshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade; Or, The Inhumanity of Dealers in Human Flesh Exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virjen [sic] Modesty, 1792. Hand-​colored etching, 24.9 × 34.9 cm. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZC4-6204.

In 1788 the publication of one image in particular marked a watershed moment in abolitionist visual culture. The Society’s print of the infamous Brookes slave ship (fig. 25), as it was known, showed cutaway views of its interior decks that dramatically enacted the horrors of the notorious journey from Africa to the Americas, also known as the Middle Passage. The image was widely copied and distributed in different versions. The Brookes image, which showed the bodies of hundreds of slaves organized mathematically to achieve maximum capacity, owed its effectiveness in part to its precise drawing style, which conformed to the rules of draftsmanship and was associated with scientific exactitude. With the inclusion of such details as the British flag and the title “Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788,” this precision also alluded to British naval power and dramatically called into question the relationship between the state and the slave trade. Over the next forty years, the society used tracts, books, and petitions to influence public opinion on the slave trade; these publications also had great impact on the work of Chartists and other reformers.4 The transatlantic abolitionist community understood the need to present their ideas persuasively in order for their appeals to persuade a wide audience. In their study of

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figure 25 | Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, ca. 1788. Etching. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-44000.

abolitionist visual culture, historians Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield explore abolitionist attempts to address the challenge of “representing” slavery. “It was one thing,” they write, “to condemn slavery on philosophical or moral grounds, quite another to convey its potential to dehumanize Africans.”5 As in the Cruikshank and Brookes prints, the dehumanization of Africans was presented as symptomatic of wider moral disintegration. Kaplan and Oldfield identify prints and printed images as the most important means of creating a visual identity for abolition. These works were traded by a transatlantic audience. American contributions like the Southworth & Hawes daguerreotype of the branded hand of Captain Jonathan Walker performed an inward-​facing purpose—to galvanize the abolitionist community rather than inspire new recruits. Depictions of slave pens belong to a genre of images that also featured slave auctions. Art historian Maurie McInnis explains why the image of the slave auction became the chief American contribution to abolitionist iconography, while British audiences traded images of the Brookes ship (fig. 26). American abolitionists, she writes, “turned away from scenes of physical tortures and settled on the slave auction as the most emotionally powerful way to represent the slave trade and the destruction of African American families.”6 Recurring visual motifs included the callous auctioneer and weeping slave families.7 McInnis dates the first visual depiction of an auction to an image in William Lloyd

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figure 26 | Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, published in Illustrated London News, September 27, 1856. Wood engraving. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-15398.

Garrison’s Liberator in 1831.8 Kirk Savage, whose scholarship specializes in issues related to slavery, offers another reason why American abolitionists tended to concentrate on the body; he writes that the popularity of Josiah Wedgewood’s sculptural cameo Am I Not a Brother (1787) inspired a host of American imitators, who chose to supplement the Wedgewood image with general images of cruel masters and suffering slaves.9 Historian Elizabeth Clark links the recurring theme of “the gruesome tribulations” of the slave body to a sympathetic response inspired by religious beliefs.10 Abolitionists sought to expose the brutality of slavery, while supporters of the slave trade engaged in a practice of obscuring its contribution to the economy. As cultural historian Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “Invisibility was one way in which slavery was kept psychologically at bay.”11 Illustrations of slavery in print media carried indirectly phrased captions such as “Cotton” or “Sugar Production.” Historian Edward Baptist writes, “The transformation of slaves to easily replaced, inhuman goods was part of a process one might call the de-​animation of enslaved people: their reduction in traders’ words to virtually inanimate articles.”12 In his correspondence with his field officers, James Franklin (a nephew of Isaac’s who worked for the firm) often used the words “wool” or “ivory” to describe slaves—“wool” was a common racist term for blacks, while “ivory” referenced both African origins and the teeth that buyers inspected.13 Photographs could make a new symbolic contribution to the abolitionist cause. Antislavery photographs could provide proof of the violation of the moral and social

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contract. These images could serve abolitionists, who sought to illustrate their texts with documented reports of events or the conditions of slavery.14 Americans widely associated the photographic image with reality and with modern life: as a contemporary, time-​based instrument that captures this retrograde “institution” and seals it in the historical record as forever past. In photographs, viewers engage a double experience of the material world. The photographically illustrated book format offers an experience of the subject matter that is, as Patrizia Di Bello explains in her writing on the photo-​book genre, both conceptual and tactile.15 Di Bello suggests that the tactility of objects depicted is replaced by the tactility of the photograph, which is at once conceptual and actual. The photograph is itself a surface, “touched by the light that touched the subject,” and the experience of holding and interacting with a book is itself sensual. “Touching mechanical reproductions enables an imaginative intimacy with their originals, even as they are dislocated by differences in size or materials, or between two and three dimensions,” she writes.16 The subject of architecture invites another level of phenomenological experience. Dell Upton, whose scholarship on architecture is influenced by material culture studies, distinguishes architecture by its materiality and its link to the everyday—to the fabric and the setting of everyday life.17 Photography is a visual medium that shares these attributes. As architectural historian Iain Borden writes, the skillful photographer of architecture can communicate the way architecture is both experienced and looked at.18 Through the photograph’s realism, the viewer vicariously experiences aspects of the built environment as material and physical experience. The Slave Pen photograph forcefully links architecture to greed and cruelty in a way that resembles how the Brookes slave ship image drew on cultural associations to communicate its message. By stressing the presence of these pens within the community, architectural images questioned that community’s values. The images of the slave pen could similarly engage cultural associations with the function of buildings. More fundamentally, the slave pen violated core social beliefs about the function of architecture. Built structures do not stand alone in the landscape, but interact with all those who come into contact with them and live with them.19 The Roman architect and author Vitruvius described the first building of a house to fill a need; protohumans built homes because of a growing understanding of their vulnerability to natural elements and the threat of animals.20 Shelter provided basic comfort. The slave pen structure thwarts that purpose and violates the moral codes implicit in the human need for shelter. The “loathsome prison” did not enhance the community environment. Although the slave pen site masqueraded as regular architecture, those kept inside it endured unknown terrors. Eventually, those terrors were turned out, as in the words of the observer who wrote into the Alexandria Gazette, into “public view.”

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In the Franklin & Armfield slave pen, Gardner found an ideal subject through which to link greed, suffering, and supposed American ideals. The slave pen had a history of performing in various symbolic ways. Like Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the slave pen had also once served to unify Northerners in their cause. Because of its close proximity to what would become Northern territory, the site was captured soon after the war began. Northerners rejoiced at their side’s ironic occupation of the “Old Slave Pen,” as it had come to be known, just as they did at the capture of the Marshall House. An 1861 wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly uses the structure as a symbolic backdrop for Union military exercises (fig. 27). The officers and soldiers strike triumphant poses as they parade in front of the fenced yard that formerly held slaves. The order of the regiment is juxtaposed with the irregular architecture of the site. The title “old slave pen” helps enforce the idea that the structure was part of a bygone era. Especially during the early years, media attention to the site helped galvanize the Union cause. The Albany Evening Journal reported that an iron ring and staple taken from the site were presented to the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher.21 One sensational story reported that Union soldiers freed a lone overlooked enslaved person who was still held at the site.22 Sergeant Frederick C. Floyd of New York’s 40th Regiment wrote of his visit to the site: “My reflections were embittered by the visible evidences of the barbarity of human slavery as it existed in the South in our land of boasted freedom. The time had indeed come to wipe the foul blot from our governmental system.”23 William Cullen Bryant’s 1866 poem “The Death of Slavery” includes lines that may have been inspired by his own visit. Bryant triumphantly describes “the slave-​pen, through whose door / Thy victims pass no more.”24 Interest in the pen diminished as the war went on and audiences gravitated toward new subjects and symbols, but some still viewed the site as significant. The blatant practice of slave trading in the District of Columbia provided stark visual evidence for the abolitionist conviction that slavery was antithetical to the nation’s ideals (fig. 28). The American and British antislavery press pointed to the activities of Franklin & Armfield in order to prove the District’s centrality to the slave trading network.25 David Child of Boston’s Young Men’s Anti-​Slavery Association labeled the District “the grand mart for the sale of men.”26 Slave coffles moved openly through the District, and pens were located near the Capitol building. The District was also larger then and included Alexandria. Until 1846, when Virginia reclaimed the portion of the District of Colombia southwest of the Potomac River, the District comprised a good deal of land; in addition to the nation’s capital city included two additional municipalities, one of them Alexandria, located six miles below south of the city.27 Imagery juxtaposed references to the nation’s lofty principles as embodied in the Capitol and Franklin & Armfield’s slave pen, both officially located in the District of Columbia.

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figure 27 | Company of Secession Cavalry Surrendering to Colonel Wilcox, of the First Michigan Regiment, in Front of the Slave-​Pen at Alexandria, Virginia, from Harper’s Weekly, June 15, 1861. Photo: HarpWeek.

In the years before the war, the site offered new experiences for the abolitionist practice of “witnessing” slavery and its apparatus firsthand. These observations became the basis for sharing as a means of shaping public opinion. To witness, ideally, was to observe slavery (and/or its effects) in order to cultivate an “active oppositional conscience that works to end the crimes witnessed.”28 A visitor knocking on the door of Franklin & Armfield might be received personally by John Armfield.29 In an effort to counteract the negative perception of slave traders, firms like Franklin & Armfield sought to prove to visitors that the slave trade was humane. Joseph Sturge, one of the founders of the British and Foreign Anti-​Slavery Society, described the holding yards as “an open enclosure, with high walls which it is impossible to scale, with a strong iron-​barred door, and in which we were told that there were sometimes three to four hundred persons crowded.”30 Following his visit to the building, American author and publisher S. W. Benedict declared a personal transformation: “I have seen with my own eyes, under the jurisdiction of the Congress of the United States, the place, persons, apparatus and subjects of the american slave trade.”31 Sketch Book’s presentation of the slave pen and the extended caption resuscitate the role of the site in the narrative of the Civil War and, even further, use the site to expand the viewer’s understanding of the chronology of the war altogether. Pywell’s caption and Gardner’s text transport the viewer back to 1808, the year the intercontinental slave trade ended and slavery in America became a local operation, and firms like Franklin & Armfield seized on the new and lucrative market possibilities.32 Although the slave trade in the District of Columbia was not the largest market in the nation, it was the most notorious

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figure 28 | American Anti-​Slavery Society, Slave Market of America, 1836. Franklin & Armfield at bottom right. Broadside. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-40900.

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figure 29 | Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, photographed between 1861 and 1865, printed between 1880 and 1889. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-65306.

for nearly half a century, owing to a surplus of slaves in the Chesapeake region.33 A variety of factors contributed to the existence of numerous slave pens and “nigger jails,” as they were also called, around the District.34 “Slave pens” functioned as holding sites, where the slave traders kept slaves awaiting auction or transport. The Franklin & Armfield firm at its peak, from 1830 to 1836, led all other firms in Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and perhaps in the entire South, in slave trading (fig. 29).35 Between 1828 and 1841, nearly ten thousand slaves were held within, bought at, and shipped from the site.36 Following Franklin’s death and the firm’s dissolution, the Alexandria office then passed through a series of owners. In  1858, former Franklin  & Armfield field agent George Kephart entered a partnership with Joseph Bruin, William Price, J. C. Cook, and C. M. Price and purchased the complex, naming it Price Birch and Co.37 Kephart continued to operate the Price Birch firm until the spring of 1861, when the Union Army seized the property and turned it into a Confederate prison.38 Although Pywell’s composition is devoid of figures, it nonetheless simulates a direct and private encounter. The signage is not visible from Pywell’s vantage point, and all the viewer sees is a seemingly undistinguished townhouse with a fence, a drab adjoining structure, and an empty road. The three-​story brick house with green shutters functioned

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as the main office building. From the outside, it resembled other Alexandria commercial businesses, which usually occupied domestic structures. Unseen from the street was the three-​story rear wing. The rear structures included a receiving parlor and a large yard surrounded by several outbuildings.39 The compound included separate covered yards, two-​story living quarters for the men and the women, a kitchen, a hospital, and a tailor for making the clothes that slaves were to wear when they reached the Southern auctions.40 Given that the particular form of photographic representation is realism, the viewer of Pywell’s photograph participates in actual abolitionist witnessing. Pywell’s vantage point enacts that of someone standing at the site. This experiential approach to photographing structures contrasted with a more abstracted style that focused on rendering the texture and linearity of the structure itself.41 Pywell’s approach is characteristic of depictions of vernacular structures, which generally feature irregular lines and textures and lack architectural details.42 An abstracted approach would only amplify these aspects. In recording the vernacular structure, Pywell replicates the stance of a viewer standing at the scene. Incorporating an awareness of its environmental context, the photograph graphically isolates the compound, a maneuver that underscores the business’s exclusion from civil society. Critics, however, have faulted Pywell for his compositional decision not to address more directly on the façade of the structure itself and its startling signage, which read: “Price Birch & Co. Dealers in Slaves.”43 But, in Pywell’s image, the central feature is the road. Duke Street was a major thoroughfare, leading to the inland farms and plantations from which the slaves came. The street also led directly to the wharf. Coffles could leave by either land or by boat. The lack of a troop presence—Union soldiers or other figures—further draws scrutiny to the building and its function. The road, beginning at the bottom left of the image and articulated by the white fencing in the foreground, divides the image. Its diagonal sweep re-​creates metaphorically the traffic of slave bodies from the Virginia farms to the slave pen and out of the space of the photograph and toward the wharf, from which the slaves would begin their southward journey. By 1800, Alexandria was the fifth-​largest town south of the Potomac River, and the principal seaport between Baltimore and Norfolk. Alexandria was thus a prime location from which to begin coastal shipments and overland coffles; this distinction, added to its existing transportation infrastructure, made the city ideal for slave trading.44 In other words, Pywell’s composition is a visual enactment of Franklin & Armfield’s techniques as domestic traders. Franklin & Armfield chose the building because of its strategic Duke Street location, with its inland access and the docks on the riverfront.45 Pywell obscures the signage, but his concentration on the road introduces another way to understand the significance of this structure. Pywell, a native of Washington, DC, whose father owned a stable near a slave pen there, would have known that geography

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had long been central to how Northern audiences understood and enforced the meaning of the Franklin & Armfield slave pen. When Franklin & Armfield decided to locate its firm in the District of Columbia, it became part of an ongoing debate about slave trading in the nation’s capital. Both sides framed their arguments in relation to sectional identities. At the first session of Congress in 1800, representative John Randolph of Virginia, leader of the House, rebuked his proslavery colleagues: “You call this the land of liberty, and every day that passes things done in it at which the despotisms of Europe would be horror-​struck and disgusted.”46 In the view of proslavery politicians, Washington’s slave trade confirmed its status as a Southern city and legitimated bondage as an American institution.47 Because the area around Chesapeake Bay was part of the region known as the Border South, slavery’s defenders feared that an end to the practice in the region would mean its end in the surrounding states as well.48 Abolitionists responded in turn: the federal government, they countered, had the authority to intervene in affairs in the District.49 The road that emerges from the bottom left of the image leads to these two structures; fenced on both sides, the road constricts viewers and compels them to follow it to the space of the buildings—the very site the viewer would most likely wish to avoid. The angled vantage point activates the presence of the fenced-​in road and functions as a pictorial allusion to the real-​life slave traffic through the building. The distance from which Pywell made his photograph provides the viewer with a fuller view of the building and its immediate surroundings. Pywell’s compositional choices urge the viewer to analyze the functions of these structures while imagining the atrocities that took place inside them. On the right of the main structure is a high white fence, around the holding yards. To the left of the office structure is a one-​story structure. The trees in the darker, outlying portions of the photograph accentuate the dark portions in the interior of the photograph, such as the bars on the one-​story structure’s three cavernous windows. These bars were not original to the structure but were added when the Union army seized the site and began using it as a prison.50 The Pywell image apparently disregards the Union army’s repurposing of the structure, thus leading the viewer to believe the bars are linked to slave trading. This association forces the viewer to move beyond the evidence offered by the signage—“Dealers in Slaves”—and to pay attention to the concrete presence of the building where Pywell suggests slaves were kept. Pywell situates the viewer within the geography of slave trading, and, by drawing attention to the bars, his photograph articulates its conditions and costs. One imagines how dark it must have been inside this large building and the number of people who could have been contained there. In the visual dissimilarity between the neat three-​story office building and what looks like a squat warehouse structure with barred windows, Pywell’s photograph presents a frank image of the racialization of the

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figure 30 | G. W. Peters, Exterior of Alexandria Slave Pen, from William Cullen Bryant, Popular History of the United States, from the First Discovery of the Western Hemisphere by the Northmen to the End of the Civil War (New York: Scribner, 1876–81). New York Public Library, Digital Collections, 807836.

built environment and chattel slavery’s devaluing of human life. A correspondent for the Cleveland Herald suggested as much, describing an area where “hundreds of human beings, of both sexes, were huddled together like cattle.”51 The impact of Pywell’s composition becomes clear when certain aspects of it are altered. William Cullen Bryant, in addition to writing about the site in a poem, used an illustration of it in his book A Popular History of the United States: From the First Discovery of the Western Hemisphere by the Northmen to the End of the First Century of the Union of the States (1878). The artist G. W. Peters clearly made the drawing from Pywell’s slave pen photograph (fig. 30). Peters’s drawing crops the composition, effaces the words from the façade, and inserts a brooding man leaning on the rail of a fence in the center foreground. These changes shift the image’s emotive spotlight to the man and away from the building. The road, instead of referring to the historical context of the building and engendering a sense of movement, frames the man and his (and the viewer’s) real and perceived distance from the scene across the street. Pywell was one of several photographers to make images of the site during the first two years of the Civil War, largely because there was a surge of interest early in the war in images that would deepen Northerners’ outrage at Southern cruelty.52 As part of a larger portfolio of scenes around Alexandria, in addition to his elevated view Andrew Joseph Russell photographed the site at the ground level. He approached the structure from the right side in order to present the signage above the door (fig. 31). By cropping

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figure 31 | Andrew Joseph Russell, Front of “Slave Pen,” Alexandria, Va., 1862. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-27657.

out the side building and yard and placing the main office building in the center of the photograph, Russell reorients the pictorial dialogue away from the holding pens to the main office building and the signage. One man stands with a rifle, while other men are posed around the entrance. The composition establishes a correspondence between the signage and the Union troops; the presence of these soldiers places the activity denoted in the words “Dealers in Slaves” in the past. Russell’s portraits of living troops enforce the irrelevance of the sign: there is no slave dealing here anymore. The troops represent a “new” ownership of the establishment. Images made by other photographers demonstrate the consistent compositional and narrative interests from which Pywell diverges. Mathew Brady’s studio made a series of views of the site early in the war and sold them as stereographs. One of the outdoor photographs depicts four soldiers who stand in front of the building, each with his bayonet at his side (fig. 32). The photograph balances the presence of the soldiers on the left side of the photograph with the signage on the right side of the building. Though the Brady image used similar pictorial strategies in an effort to generate the narrative force present in Russell’s image, the message of the Brady Studio’s image as a print seems less coherent, mostly because the trees obscure the building’s signage. The soldiers may stand with a sense of purpose, but the horse and wagon parked in the road suggest that they

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figure 32 | Brady Studio, Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, ca. 1861–65. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​stereo-1s02946.

will not be there for long. In the stereograph these elements add much-​needed texture and dimension to an otherwise flat scene. Like Russell, the Brady Studio photographer was skillful in positioning figures effectively in relation to the architecture in order to enhance the narrative range of the photograph. In another photograph made in the same complex in the same location, the Brady photographer posed an African American woman leaning against a tree in a clearing, a basket on her arm (fig. 33). The open area appears to be one of the firm’s infamous enclosed yards. The architectural details recorded in the photograph allude to the place of the slave in the social hierarchy. The top floor has shutters that protect functioning windows, while the bottom story features a single barred window. The area, overgrown with weeds, appears unused, yet the woman—who clearly acknowledges the gaze of the photographer—is an oddly captivating presence in it. Two soldiers in the background peer into the open yard, focusing the viewer’s attention on the woman, who seems unaware of them. While the men look through the grated door, the viewer seems to look through trees and bushes. The three-​dimensional stereograph format would have compounded the effect of these compositional decisions, and the circuit of gazes Brady’s work creates between the soldiers, the woman, and the viewers. The gender of the “model” is important, since the treatment of female slaves was a key issue to abolitionists, and of interest to the general public.53 The Brady Studio’s image treats the woman as another relic of slavery, like the barred windows and dungeon basement visitors wrote about. The Brady Studio’s images were sold as prints and as stereographs (which did or did not include texts); Pywell’s was encountered differently in Sketch Book. The physical act of turning the pages of tipped-​in photographs mimics the journey through the war’s landscape, and the accompanying text intensifies the visual effect of Pywell’s spatial allusions, which contextualize and implicate the social terrain within and beyond the photograph. The opening sentences of the caption situate the site within a specific geography. The middle section of the text discusses both the strategic location of the site and the structural elements that support its ability to generate revenue. The final section

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figure 33 | Alexandria, Virginia, Slave Pen, Exterior View, ca. 1861–69. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​B811-2300A.

vividly enacts the brutality required to ensure profitability. The themes and rhetorical style of the caption signal Gardner’s knowledge of key issues related to the slave trade, the fugitive slave narrative genre, and transatlantic abolitionist writing. The narration adopts several techniques from the fugitive slave narrative: in particular, it stresses the cruelty and injustice of the slaves’ world, and the slave master (or trader) is the villain.54 In a diagrammatic approach similar to the representation of the Brookes slave ship broadside, the caption’s description outlines the different areas of the pen and the functions of each building—the curated scale of the slave trader’s cynical enterprise. Like the Brookes broadside, Gardner’s deadpan description is straightforward. In describing the unseen, his text resembles abolitionist texts that “exposed” the significance of the

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structure’s details. Like the abolitionist writers, Gardner recognized the power of using analytically precise language and facts in his critique. Gardner lived in Glasgow, historically a major center of abolitionist activity, and he drew on a knowledge of and familiarity with abolitionist concerns and themes.55 Britain’s 1833 Emancipation Act mobilized the British public to unite against slavery after decades of debate. Scottish intellectuals, however, had opposed the practice of slavery since early in the eighteenth century.56 Subsequent generations of Scots absorbed this debate; because of Scotland’s high literacy rate, it would have been nearly impossible to avoid exposure to antislavery ideas, and by the early nineteenth century disapproval of slavery was assumed in respectable Scottish homes.57 During this period, relatively inexpensive antislavery cameos, tokens, medals, and prints flooded the market as abolitionism became fashionable. Local organizations included the Glasgow Emancipation Society, the Glasgow Female Anti-​Slavery Society, and the Glasgow New Association for the Abolition of Slavery. In their published tracts, groups like the Glasgow Emancipation Society cited religious faith and duty to defend their “intermeddling” in so-called American “domestic institutions.”58 Their desire to hasten the “ultimate victory” and the achievement of the end of slavery was due in large part to the tireless work of their American counterparts like Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison.59 Historian David Brion Davis’s book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture contends that slavery’s emergence at a historical moment of rapid political, social, economic, and intellectual change made it a symbol that could be used broadly in the fight against the widespread corrupting forces of greed and wealth in the modern world.60 Abolitionism offered believers the opportunity to articulate and reaffirm core values of the rights of people. The Glasgow Sentinel would address the politics of American slave pens. William Love and Robert Buchanan founded the Sentinel in 1850, the year the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in the United States, and the paper’s reaction to the law served as the basis for its coverage and analysis of transatlantic abolitionist writing and activities.61 The controversial law allowed for the seizure and return of runaway slaves, a drama in which both the slave trader and the slave pen played a role, since both supported slaveholders’ efforts to retrieve runaways. Prior to Gardner’s installment as the Sentinel’s editor its staff rallied around the story of the fugitive slave James Hamlet as evidence of the ways in which the Fugitive Slave Law was a “blot on American legislation” that would incite social and political chaos and ultimately jeopardize the American political system (fig. 34).62 The argument that the act was a mechanism that would undercut the American model was starkly stated in the ominous title of an 1850 Sentinel article: “The American Union in Danger.”63 The article went on to contextualize the Fugitive Slave Act in sectional terms, arguing that it could more aptly be titled “an act to enable southerners to kidnap negroes and mulattos in the free states.”64 In the months before Gardner took over the

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figure 34 | James Hamlet, the first person returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, in front of city hall in New York. Engraving from the National Anti-​ Slavery Standard, October 17, 1850. Hamlet was returned by force to Baltimore, but “by the time this appeared in print,” Eric Foner writes in Gateway to Freedom, “New Yorkers had raised the money to purchase Hamlet’s freedom and he was back in the city.” Columbia University, New York, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

newspaper, regular advertisements on the front page informed readers that they could learn more about the injustices of the act from those impacted by it; the famous fugitive slave–turned–authors William and Ellen Craft toured the United Kingdom in 1850.65 Editors reflected a month after the Brown and Craft visit that “none of us have forgotten the feelings of indignation and disgust which were manifested . . .” by the story of the Crafts and their capture.66 The Sentinel’s critique of slavery was twofold: the trade was evidence of the ill effects of capitalism, and American policies on slavery threatened the future of the union. The slave trade’s use of new technology to perpetuate suffering rather than to foster the progress of mankind was the embodiment of what Gardner and others feared about modernity.67 Advances that should yield economic benefits for all enriched only a few. Moreover, at the expense of pain inflicted on many, the current structure posed a constitutional

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threat. “The American Union in Danger” warned that the Fugitive Slave Bill posed a threat to the nation’s future.68 Disagreements over the status of slaves would only tear the nation apart. To the Sentinel, the act was “the crowning act of sin and folly,” the institution of slavery was “more vile and repugnant to every just and honorable feeling than has been known in the history of society,” and the Compromise of 1850 was “a monstrous perversion of language.”69 Gardner took a more direct role in shaping public opinion about abolition when he became the owner and editor of the Sentinel in May 1851, building upon the arguments presented under previous Sentinel leadership. One feature, which proclaimed its goal as “assist[ing] in the necessary work of enlightening” the public, regarded slavery as tantamount to murder and argued that its existence undermined the republican principles upon which Americans based their political system. The urgent tone of the column’s title, “Now Is the Time,” is echoed in its call for direct action: “It devolves, then, on all who are in earnest seeking to destroy the horrible system of American slavery, to adopt whatever other legitimate means may be in their power, to accomplish the great object.” 70 The article went on to give details from the accounts of travelers in America, asking, “Where is the man in whose nature there is an atom of humanity, whose blood does not curdle, and whose breast does not burn with a holy indignation, as he reads this narrative?” Rather than present the path of action abstractly, the article recommended actions readers could take. Another piece from that same issue, “The Age of Principles,” described how, in North America, “Christian feelings” were “waging war with the demon which is still forging shackles for the negro.”71 As a barbaric “corruption inherited from preceding ages,” slavery had no place in modern society. Over a decade later, in his presentation of Slave Pen in Sketch Book, Gardner would continue to “assist in the necessary work of enlightening” the public. The caption pointedly identifies the building’s owners as slave traders and distinguishes their role from that of slave owners. Robert Gudmestad, a historian of the slave trade, explains that Southern slave traders were self-​conscious about their unflattering reputation for disrupting slave families and for dishonest business practices perceived as speculation in a society in which honor was paramount.72 In fact, in Southern society, being called a slave trader was a slur.73 Gudmestad details the conscious efforts that slave traders (including Isaac Franklin) made to represent themselves as decent businessmen, even as they trafficked in human beings, as Gardner would have known, because their shrewd practices were discussed in the abolitionist press and beyond. By identifying the men as slave traders, driven by the need for more money, he exposes these individuals as predatory and mendacious. The lurid details of the economics of the slave trade in the caption for Slave Pen recall discussions in the United Kingdom that had been part of the public discourse since the late eighteenth century. Scottish intellectuals viewed slavery as among the most alarming

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of social abuses, predicated on the polarization of employer and employee.74 Slavery was the manifestation of what Owen saw as detrimental to society: what he called “the individual system,” a competitive social system that only produced greed, anger, and selfishness. Southern society was based on the competing ownership of slaves and profits from slaves. Owen’s critique linked this kind of system to the environment it created, which led to physical, moral, and social deterioration for all. Throughout his description of the economics of slave trading, Gardner traces how chattel slavery transforms human beings into goods. Abolitionist texts sought to shock readers with stories and eyewitness accounts of the horrors of slavery and its institutions in order to cultivate new “witnesses,” and a key strategy was to expose how the sale of human beings was conducted as a mere business transaction. Gardner’s discussion of the prices of men, women, and children enacts for the viewer the unnumbered, unnamed individuals who passed through its doors, thus educating audiences and transforming them into witnesses. The caption’s discussion of the firm’s “storage” and sale of these individuals reveals how the slave trade not only turned humans into objects, but did so with a shrewdness that relied on the latest business techniques, such as bookkeeping and financial statements, and new means of transportation and communication.75 The generalized language of commerce permeates Gardner’s text, its details a reminder to the audience that children as young as three years old were bought and sold in these transactions, and that women were priced according to their “attractions.” In the end, Gardner boldly presents a horrible calculus: that the “cause” of the war was not just the slave system, but the greed and the extreme distortion of values of labor caused by capitalism. Another famous abolitionist work, this time a painting that was also widely distributed in print form, similarly found resonance through its economic associations. British artist J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), art historian Albert Boime writes, “folds into its visual and thematic structure the economic issues peculiar to England’s industrial development by 1840.”76 Boime explains that details such as the dismembered leg bobbing in the choppy ocean waters in the foreground also referred to the realities of the modern industrial factory.77 Chartist literature often cast the working class as “slaves,” and many Chartist poems used the term “slavery” as a general reference to labor inequality; in other words, Chartist literature deployed “slavery” as a generalized and generalizing metaphor for oppression.”78 What Gardner proposes in Slave Pen goes further—for him, society as a whole suffers from the oppression of capitalism, not just the slave. Gardner presented this claim in Sketch Book at a time when the attention of the nation was captivated by another prison scandal: the horrific experiences of white soldiers who had been prisoners of war in makeshift camps such as Andersonville and Belle Isle, as documented in images of severely emaciated former prisoners and stories about

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the inhumane conditions at Andersonville Prison. Slave Pen’s caption works at length to explain the consequences of greed and immorality when they serve as guiding forces. These forces, as implied throughout the rest of Sketch Book, threaten all that is possible under moral rule. Popular reformist writing of the early nineteenth century balanced admiration for the American model with its repugnance for slavery, which, because of its dissonance with the concept of true democracy, threatened the American economy and political system, and thus its role as a worldwide model. In surveying global history, Ernest Jones’s 1851 epic poem The New World identified slavery as a corruption that undermined America’s auspicious beginnings. Gardner and his cohorts believed that democracy was based on “the progressive development of human faculties and forces in the direction of the moral law which has been imposed upon us.”79 And, as conceived by Scottish intellectuals of the era, liberty, equality, fraternity, and association were at the core of moral law. The Sentinel team contended that in America it was possible to represent this moral law, but that the practice of slavery in the nation marred its purported ideals and gravely endangered the union.80 For example, the Chartist Thomas Cooper, a frequent contributor to the Sentinel, asked, “Who does not feel ashamed of the word ‘Republican’ when American slavery is mentioned? And who, that has a common portion of brains, does not perceive how largely it would aid in the advance of real freedom all over the world, if the land of Washington were, at once, to abolish slavery?”81 This question of living up to international expectations was important to the Scots, who looked to the American democratic model to confirm their own sense of what they might achieve if they could establish the social and political institutions they saw lacking in their own country.82 To mid-​nineteenth-​century Scottish radicals and reformers, republican theories seemed to answer the problems facing civil society: class conflict, injustice, poverty, tyranny, nationalism, and war.83 This movement for democracy was not just regional, but also distinctly transnational—“from Paris to Vienna, from Rome to Warsaw, it furrows the European soil,” as the members of the Central European Democratic Committee wrote.84 In Sketch Book, America, finally rid of slavery, is positioned as an authentic international model of democracy, and the book’s emphasis on the agricultural and industrial possibilities reflects a faith that the new nation will thrive, not on slave labor, but on “true” labor. For insight into Gardner’s argument in his account of Slave Pen, it is instructive to note how he treats the phenomenon of chattel slavery as distinct from any acknowledgment of the personhood of African Americans themselves. Though the number of images was small, the subject of African Americans in the politics and history of the Civil War emerged as one of the earliest themes in the fieldwork of Alexander Gardner and his photographic team. That African Americans contributed to their own emancipation during the war disrupted what the historian of abolitionist visual culture Marcus Wood

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calls the established visual “semiotic codes” that depicted black people as slaves.85 In studio works, African Americans remain tied to their status as enslaved people. Anthony Lee asserts that Sketch Book embraces the most demeaning images of African Americans when he writes that it “caricatured [them in] antebellum roles—as meek servants, childish entertainers, or brute laborers for their white folk.”86 Other critics have seized on the book’s failure to recognize the changing historical landscape, arguing that its images do not acknowledge African Americans’ tangible contributions to the Union side and their active efforts to achieve their own freedom by fleeing the South. Elizabeth Young argues that the photographs that feature African Americans in Sketch Book reveal how “racial metaphors” strongly shape Gardner’s work, in which he introduces themes related to African American history but identifies African Americans only as a “faceless group.”87 The images confirm Albert Boime’s observation that African Americans in Civil War art are generally depicted as unable to escape their “brute” status and attain “spiritual” enlightenment.88 To the photography historian Alan Trachtenberg, they remain faceless because of what he identifies as Gardner’s “problem”: “the sight of black people, the visible sign that slavery was what the war was insistently about, slavery the cause of secession, and ultimately the cause of battlefields and corpses unbearable to see.”89 Gardner’s problem was indeed the sight of black people—in calling himself an abolitionist and presenting an image like the slave pen, he made abolition an economic and moral issue distinct from the concept of black personhood. His eulogists wrote that Gardner was an “abolitionist, who from the earliest recollection . . . remained an enemy of slavery until it was destroyed.”90 However, in his time at the Sentinel, he published pieces that promoted theories about racial and ethnic “stocks,” and the belief that the races differed fundamentally and genetically.91 Identifying and classifying the so-​called particularities of ethnic groups was popular in Europe and in the United States.92 Many linked notions of ethnic nationalism to the belief that true democracy was only realizable by people with certain hereditary traits, which, writes historian George Frederickson, amounted to the “racialization of democracy itself.”93 In Gardner’s photography, such beliefs about the inherent incapacities of African Americans informed a position in support of Northern white paternalistic attitudes, and permitted pitiful blacks in a glorious vision of a Union free of the taint of slavery because their “traits” made them naturally susceptible to the positive influence of “more advanced” races. The theme of pity was related to conceptions of benevolence. The antislavery movement coincided with the rise of modern private philanthropy and the development of a secular basis for benevolence alongside the religious. To some, the social problems that emerged with the industrial revolution rendered prior impulsive philanthropic schemes and methodologies inapplicable. Turning to issues such as health and housing, new philanthropists—uneasy and even fearful about the changes in society and in

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figure 35 | War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Contraband School, ca. 1861–65, from the Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War–Era Personalities and Scenes, 1921–40. National Archives, Washington, DC, 529344.

economic stratification—identified and sought out those deserving of charity.94 Meanwhile, Chartists theorized their own idea of why slaves were to be pitied. According to an article in the Chartist Circular, “Slavery is the prevention of growth and development which God has ordered for man, the prevention of that self-​control and free conduct which God gave men with the gift of reason, as a means of virtue.”95 Sentiments of pity found their way into American discussions of the “poor negro slaves” during the Civil War era. In the words of one observer: “These men now, ragged and dirty, kneeling on the soil of Virginia, with a spelling book in one hand and a testament in the other, are looking imploringly toward Boston. Help these ‘poor Africans.’ ”96 So compelling were the “weary and despairing looks” one correspondent saw on the faces of the former slaves he encountered that he thought they would haunt him for life. The scene was so powerful, he continued, that he wished he “could send every Northern home of plenty a photograph of these bare footed, ragged, half naked creature[s].”97 Photographers did, in fact, translate such ideas into their work. In Contraband School (1865) (fig. 35) a long line of African American children standing with open books stretches from the front to the back of the photograph. (Creating schools was one of the activities of Northern aid societies.)98 Adults stand in the background before a long two-​story

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figure 36 | David Woodbury, A Negro Family Coming into the Union Lines, January 1, 1863. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-57031.

structure. The scene looks more like a performance for the photographer than an actual lesson: the small boy at the front of the line on the far right turns so that he faces the camera. The children are well dressed. All bow their heads over their open books. The line of books forms a rhythm that knits together an otherwise haphazard composition. The children appear “open” and waiting for the kind of salvation Northerners could offer. George Frederickson calls this kind of thinking among Northerners “romantic racialism”: the popular view that endorsed the idea of blacks as childlike, but rejected slavery, which unfairly took advantage of the blacks’ innate innocence and good nature.99 More directly, the images produced by members of Gardner’s corps were used to promote these ideas. In David Woodbury’s A Negro Family Coming into the Union Lines, January 1, 1863, a group of slaves poses with their covered wagon (fig. 36). The scene is strewn with debris and large logs, upon which some in the group sit. Alfred Waud’s streamlined translation, printed in Harper’s Weekly, reveals the function of such images in inspiring Northern pity (fig. 37).100 Waud eliminates the figures in the background and the clutter in the foreground, making the family the central feature of the composition. He maintains Woodbury’s grouping, but produces a more intimate image. The viewer can more clearly see the faces of the men, women, and children, who look out at the viewer. Unlike Woodbury’s image, viewers benefited from Waud’s text, which accompanies the drawing and further shapes the viewer’s interpretation. It reads: “There is something very touching in seeing these poor people coming into camp—giving up all the little ties that cluster about home, such as it is in slavery, and trustfully throwing themselves on the mercy of the Yankees, in the hope of getting permission to own themselves and keep their children from the auction-​block.”101

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figure 37 | Alfred Waud, Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation, 1863. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The image of the pathetic African slave had its own distinct origins. For decades, antebellum abolitionist images had portrayed Africans as a people to be pitied.102 The cultural historian Jan Nederveen Pieterse traces this tendency to the Christian pathos at the core of abolitionist iconography, as represented in the image of an oppressed black slave in Josiah Wedgewood’s popular Am I a Brother (1787) medallion.103 Abolition, with its Christian tenor, promoted new stereotypes: “The movement humanized the image of blacks but also popularized the image of blacks as victims.”104 Thus, Pieterse explains, the popular image of the kneeling slave “was more an affirmation of Christianity than of the emancipation of blacks.” Marcus Wood elaborates on this idea in Blind Memory, arguing that visual culture stressed slave suffering and slave passivity. In fact, abolitionist culture had its own set of expectations, to which blacks were expected to conform.105 In this way, the art historian John Davis argues, “stereotype . . . becomes the bedfellow of paradox, with the former serving as the tool of the uneasy dominant culture, intent on reshaping, reversing, and making more palatable the existing truths within a minority community.”106 The expectations and unease around the black figure were only compounded by a complicated war in which slaves actively contributed to the cause of their own emancipation. Northern sympathy for slaves and former slaves had little to do with support for black equality. Pieterse reminds us that abolition was not the recognition of black humanity

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figure 38 | John Reekie, A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 94. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

and civil rights: “Abolitionism itself, no matter how well intended, was not the same as victory over racism. The abolition of slavery was not the same as black emancipation.”107 Nor during the Civil War did the majority of Northerners support African American social and political equality, even though they may have supported abolition.108 This distinction is clear in Sketch Book and in Gardner’s oeuvre, where Slave Pen condemns the institution of slavery, but other images and statements perpetuate racist stereotypes. It is thus no surprise that, as Megan Rowley Williams points out, the African American figures in John Reekie’s A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia (1865; fig. 38) “look like plantation workers.”109 The static presentation of African Americans in Gardner’s studio photography contrasts with works such as the Maine-​born painter Eastman Johnson’s historic A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves (ca. 1862; fig. 39). Johnson gained fame for his depictions of African Americans with such works as Old Kentucky Home (Negro Life at the South) (1859) and The Freedom Ring (1860). By time of the Civil War, these immensely popular

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figure 39 | Eastman Johnson (American, 1824–1906), A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves (recto), ca. 1862. Oil on paperboard, 21 15/16 1× 26 1/8 in. (55.8 × 66.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Gwendolyn O. L. Conkling, 40.59a-​b.

works were widely available as photographic reproductions.110 In 1862, Johnson updated his repertoire in his epic portrayal of a contraband family. It is early morning in Johnson’s painting, and a slave family’s attempted escape. Johnson frames them in the center of the painting, on horseback, riding across uneven terrain in the early morning mist. A small boy sits up front, his head bowed sleepily. His father, behind him, looks ahead with determination. The female figure sits in the back, with her skirts billowing and her baby in her arms. By contrast, the family in Gardner’s portrait Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (“Freedmen”) by Canal is seated (1865; fig. 40). The title reminds us of their cycle of servitude. The tightly bound grouping seemingly binds them in real life to a constricted political, economic, and social position. There is no brazen predawn ride for them. Historian John Stauffer describes a common abolitionist trope: the persistent characterizing of blacks in symbolic roles.111 Even in the emancipation era, in Gardner’s images, African Americans retain the position of the supplicant slave.

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figure 40 | Alexander Gardner, Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (“Freedmen”) by Canal, 1865. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​cwpb-00468.

The African American as a subject intrinsically incapable is key to how Gardner proposes civic responsibility and national civic identity in Slave Pen. Another photograph of architecture, Slabtown, Hampton, Va. (1864; fig. 41), indicates how Gardner conceived of the role for African Americans in the postwar society. Here, African Americans are similarly treated as “goods,” as in his extended caption. In this photograph, slaves receive, not necessarily Boston charity, but far more fundamental assistance—it records a governmental initiative in action, thus reinforcing support for legislative remedies that transatlantic abolitionists had argued for half a century earlier. The village in Hampton was one example of Northern aid initiatives; aid societies engaged in a range of activities, from raising money to creating schools.112 Union officials created the village in Hampton to house the large numbers of refugees.113 Like Slave Pen, Slab Town updates the theme of pity and implicit Northern benevolence. Similar to Pywell, Gardner conveys to the viewer the context of the scene and the range of structures depicted. From an indiscernible position, it captures a large section of the town. The scene is empty, but there is evidence of life and efforts at subsistence—smaller sheds, and pens. Some homes have chimneys. The elevated vantage point suggests open farmland. There is a small body of water in the left foreground, and fields beyond; settlers here probably benefit from rich soil. In Gardner’s composition the narrow dirt road beginning at the far left of the image leads diagonally toward the body of water. Gardner’s use of morning light allows him to capture the textures and patterns of the modest structures that are organized in small plots. The maze-​like arrangement of fences distributes the visual interest of the photograph throughout the scene. Northern viewers would have noticed and approved of details like the house in the foreground with its large woodpile as indications of industriousness and self-​reliance. Wider audiences would have known the image through its translation and publication one year later in Harper’s Weekly’s edition of September 30, 1865, as a wood engraving titled “The Freedmen’s Village.” The author of the “sketch” that accompanies the image assures the reader that “as in all instances where negroes are gathered together into communities, there are in Slab Town features of curious interest.”114 The visitor notes the style

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figure 41 | Alexander Gardner, Slabtown, Hampton, Va., 1864. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Gridley W. Tarbell II Fund. Photo: Dennis Griggs.

of buildings, but also the “stagnant ponds . . . lined with old boots, bottles, and other refuse.” Overlooking the governmental efforts to support industry at the site, the visitor writes: “How all these people support themselves is a mystery.” The labor they perform is not of value: “What with fishing, doing odd jobs here and there for the farmers up the Peninsula, blacking boots, selling lemonade to soldiers, working in the quarter-​master’s department, the denizens of Slab town manage to exist and enjoy whatever there is of comfort at Old Point, which, as a watering place for white people, will not revive for many years.” The capacity of formerly enslaved people to integrate into society was debated into the turn of the century at this very location, and illustrated in, for example, turn-​ of-​the-​century photographs by the American photographer Francis Benjamin Johnston (fig. 42). Despite the Harper’s author’s observations, the photograph also serves the other position in this very debate. Gardner’s photograph encourages the view that blacks were simple-​minded folk, seekers of home and honest work.115 Slab Town seemingly realizes the ideas promoted jointly by manual labor and abolitionist activists that led to the founding of the Oneida Institute and Oberlin College. Noble work could be a source of uplift for African Americans and a pathway to their participation in society. Bathed now

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figure 42 | Francis Benjamin Johnston, Races, Negroes: United States. Virginia. Hampton. Hampton Normal and Industrial School: Agencies Promoting Assimilation of the Negro. Training for Commercial an[d Industrial Employment]. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Hampton, Va.: Primary School Garden, 1899–1900. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3.2002.118.1.

in the brilliant light of morning, these people have escaped their “darker past” through the aid of the federal government. The light suggests a peaceful scene, but the elevated vantage point announces a watchful presence. Former slaves have escaped their subjugation as slaves in the South, only to be taken in by more “enlightened” caretakers—the North. As art historian Dana Byrd notes in her study of the images and maps related to the freedmen’s town called Mitchellville, such representations of “villageness” were compelling and comforting for Northern viewers.116 For Gardner, the immigrant Scot, the image spoke to something beyond the compelling and the comforting. Like other Scottish intellectuals, he and his circle regularly connected the international slave trade with domestic problems by arguing that both were symptomatic of the breakdown of basic moral, social, and religious obligations.117 The Union’s creation of freedmen’s villages, therefore, was proof of the restoration of the commitment to fulfilling those obligations. The correspondence between the two photographs reveals the wider legacy of abolitionist benevolence and its interpretation in the photography of Gardner and his studio. Stronger than the inherent racism in Gardner’s images—which was prevalent among white abolitionists—is both the statement Gardner builds through his portrayals of a population in “need,” and the link he enforces between victims and immoral unchecked economic forces. If the broad subject of Slave Pen is society’s helplessness, then Slab Town, a pendant image that also communicates through architectural metaphor, portrays the moral role of good government as protector of those who have suffered. Unlike in sculpture and other visual works that engaged a similar theme, this photography lays the foundation for a social documentary tradition whose emergence is most often identified with the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 3

Labor’s Portrait Gallery

The premise of Gardner’s Slave Pen presentation is that the corruption of the debased economy of slavery and its disregard for virtuous labor relationships differs diametrically from the primary focus of Gardner’s studio production: the dignity of the white laborer. The Gardner studio’s documentation of laboring soldiers is an extension of Gardner’s advocacy for the public recognition of labor and the representation of the laborer, a project Gardner once described as representing “the social condition and status of the artisan,” and a concern of his since the early 1850s.1 He himself was a member of this community; he had completed an apprenticeship and eventually opened his own shop as a jewelry maker.2 He made his journalistic debut critiquing what was arguably the most dazzling production of labor the world had ever seen—the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in London (or the Crystal Palace Exhibition). Labor, as he and his Chartist and Owenite counterparts theorized it, was both a cultural and an economic activity. The art historian Tim Barringer writes that labor in the early nineteenth century was “quintessentially performative”—that is, “an expressive act of doing or making; the purposeful exercise of body and mind; the overcoming of obstacles with a particular end in sight.”3 To Gardner, labor was also intrinsically political. Gardner’s Chartist affiliations in particular introduced this element into his conception of labor. Chartist culture celebrated the creative potential of the everyday laborer and even the manual laborer and considered their creative expression through labor an effective political tool.4 This visual and cultural response offered an alternative vision to that of the stereotypical uneducated, volatile, anonymous laborer who became a key figure in British visual culture at midcentury.

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In America, Gardner transposed the Chartist conception of noble labor to the anonymous Union soldiers who harnessed their labor backgrounds to support the Union cause. In May 1863 he opened his studio—“Alexander Gardner, Photographic Artist”— in a space above Shepherd & Riley’s bookstore on Seventh Street in Washington, across from the Daily National Intelligencer building. The studio photographs, unlike popular prints, portray the Civil War at a historical moment when a call went out for the labor of everyday men, and the response showed the bonds between men fostered by their labor and its products. In his photographs, Gardner portrays core beliefs of Chartists and Owenites regarding the potential of the individual everyday man. Following Gardner’s communitarian beliefs, the photographic production of his studio cast the war as revealing the potential of virtuous labor and recognized its individual, communal contribution to broad economic progress. The photographs eschew the generically patriotic themes of popular images and offer a broad portrait of a Northern labor community whose economic position had been slowly eroding but whose experience led it to a parallel radicalization. Supporting a transnational representational project to elevate the voice of the laborer to counter the dominant rhetoric of industrial capitalism, Gardner’s studio production presents the Civil War as more than a triumph over forces corrupting the union of the states, but also of labor and labor values. A review of the Gardner gallery shortly after it opened in May 1863 praised the studio’s offerings of the “striking likenesses” of the “more prominent actors” in the war, but noted that a substantial portion of the firm’s practice was dedicated to the everyday soldier.5 This was a representational project that Gardner had in common with his muse, the celebrated American author and poet Walt Whitman, who declared himself devoted to “what is real about America—the laboring persons, ploughmen, men with axes, spades, scythes, flails . . . carpenters, masons, machinists, drivers of horses, workmen in factories.”6 Whitman praised the lower classes, the laborers, as emblems of the nation’s character.7 Similarly, the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star addressed his weekly letter to the “Fustian Jackets, Blistered Hands and Unshorn Chins.”8 Like the common laborers that he, too, advocated for in the pages of the Sentinel, the common soldiers that Gardner and his studio corps members photographed were known as the army “roughs”—a broad term that was used to refer to lower-​class soldiers.9 Contemporaries viewed these men, unlike enlisted men of property and social standing, as having little stake in the war, let alone society, and an interest in neither. Gardner and his corps worked to imbue these soldiers with intellectual and emotional depth. With the exception of President Lincoln and group studio portraits of select figures, military leaders make up only a small portion of the studio’s military depictions; subjects were often underrecognized military personnel. The pictures of repair shops, hospitals, cavalries, depot staffs, horse artilleries, and

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figure 43 | Alexander Gardner and Brady Studio, Father Thomas H. Mooney Preaching to the 69th New York State Volunteers, 1861. Albumen print, 10 3/8 × 14 3/4 in. (26.4 × 37.5 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of David L. Hack and Museum purchase, with funds from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., by exchange, 98.32.8.

field officers communicated the vast material and human infrastructure of the modern army and celebrated the labor power of the North. Gardner pictures common soldiers as religious and patriotic—for example, in his Father Thomas H. Mooney Preaching to the 69th New York State Volunteers (fig. 43). Mooney had been the pastor of St. Brigid’s Church, located in New York’s East Village; the church had been built by immigrant Irish carpenters as a place of worship for newcomers and those with nowhere else to go. The 69th, which claimed more than a thousand men in its ranks, was one of the first regiments to organize and arrive in Washington in 1861 following President Lincoln’s call. To fight for the Union cause was meaningful to these men, who, in the homelands they had fled, had long “contended against landlord tyranny and feudal oppression, under which they groaned and suffered.”10 In the portrait, men line up on either side of Mooney and his makeshift altar; from their expressions and poses, it is clear they are listening intently to him. The photograph counters the reputation of these men as incurious, fickle, and morally unmoored. The crowding of the scene suggests there are more of them, unseen.

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figure 44 | Winslow Homer, Our Women and the War, published in Harper’s Weekly, September 6, 1862. Art Institute of Chicago.

Although Winslow Homer, in his illustration Our Women and the War (fig. 44), recognized the contribution of women, in the Gardner studio production the world of the army is explicitly male. Like Whitman, Gardner praises these men as new figures on the world’s stage—men who, unlike the soldiers in Europe who had defined the soldier identity for centuries, were fighting, not for money or for the interests of a ruler, but for a noble cause.11 Union soldiers themselves seemed to recognize the historical significance of their war and their effort. As the soldier Augustus Buell wrote: “When a boy I had always been fond of reading the histories of European wars, but after Gettysburg and Spotsylvania and Petersburg all that sort of literature lost its interest for me.”12 The Gardner firm’s attention to and documentation of the labor of Union servicemen is linked to the contemporary photographic occupational portrait, which had been extraordinarily popular since the daguerreotype era and had gained in popularity with the introduction of cheaper paper-​based formats. Though the genre dates back to sixteenth-​century Europe, in the mid-​nineteenth century cheaper photographic practices led American men in large numbers to have portraits of themselves made, to project their identities as productive members of a trade, to claim the status that their work and contribution to the war enabled them to make.13 In representing labor identities, occupational

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portraits symbolically recorded and conveyed such principles as independence, virtue, and citizenship, achieved through one’s labor. According to historian of photography Ben Mattison, these portraits, usually made in a studio setting with the sitter wearing the particular clothing of his profession and holding the tools related to it, are distinguished from genre paintings by the subjects’ full awareness of the photographer, and the pride with which they confront the viewer.14 Historian Michael Carlebach calls on us to think of even the self-​portraits made by soldiers as occupational portraits. Soldiering was labor, Carlebach points out, and soldiers sought to present themselves in their self-​portraits in a way that conveyed their military vocation.15 The photographs that are the subjects of Mattison’s and Carlebach’s observations are studio-​based portraits. The Gardner corps, working in the field rather than in the studio, portrayed these men as part of an actual community that was also implied through grouping within the frame. These portraits were made at the locations where the men worked instead of in an artificial studio setting. Moreover, unlike the studio-​based occupational portraits, those that Gardner and his corps produced were made not for private reflection and sharing, but to make a public statement about labor and identity. As it did in Europe, to represent oneself to the public as a laborer had particular meaning in America at this time. As the labor historian Harry Rubenstein describes it, occupational portraiture arose in America at a time when industrial capitalism threatened working-​class and artisan identities.16 More goods were mass produced, and produced cheaply. Bruce Laurie, a historian of American labor in nineteenth-​century America, underscores the fact that no one could survive without underselling rivals at every turn.17 Even small workshops expanded in the new market economy, adopting the work patterns and attitudes of the factories to nonmechanized assembly lines. New market practices such as the large-​scale purchase materials and objectives for distribution and sale disrupted local economies and relationships built on personal interaction and barter practices. Concurrently, a radicalized working community had also begun to emerge in the Northeast as journeymen, mechanics, and artisans in New York organized, issued platforms, went on strike, called for higher wages, protested increases in work hours, and organized public meetings.18 A portrait of oneself in uniform or with the tools of one’s trade could both preserve that working identity and empower the sitter. The Gardner studio occupational portraits that attended to lesser-​known military personnel were also distinct from the heavily marketed print portrayals of the era’s military figures and military life that stressed more official figures and more patriotic and overtly moral themes and were eagerly consumed by Northern audiences.19 At the beginning of the war, prints commemorating the actions of common soldiers might also appear in sentimental photographic genre studies (fig. 45). More commonly, in colorful and melodramatic images, Union military leaders bravely lead, often on horseback (fig. 46).

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figure 45 | John Carbutt, American (b. England, 1832–1905), The Brave Defenders of Our Country, l863. Albumen carte de visite, 3 9/16 × 2 5/16 in. (9.1 × 5.9 cm). Nelson-​ Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, 2005.27.260. Image: Thomas Palmer.

Such images, including prints of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, energized the North; aside from these, however, consumers had less exposure to the everyday life and work of the common soldier. Although the common soldier is the subject of Winslow Homer’s lithographic portfolio Campaign Sketches (1863), as Mark Neely and Harold Holzer write, their perspective is that of the unaffiliated observer.20 Homer’s Our Women and the War, for example, included an elegantly dramatized scene with a volunteer nurse penning a letter for a recuperating soldier in a hospital ward. It was not unusual to fabricate or embellish the scene with details and explicit facial expressions, or to add narrative or allegorical elements. With market considerations in mind, printers like the New York firm Currier & Ives produced works that directly responded to the public mood. Many of the works were creative re-​creations of specific events.

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figure 46 | Currier and Ives, The Battle of Pittsburgh, Tenn. April 7th, 1862, 1862. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZC2-1964.

Popular prints were part of a long lineage of history painting and classical sculpture depicting heroic males from which artists drew motifs and themes. Using symbolic elements and references to history painting and historical battle scenes, these works catered to public attitudes toward military figures and contributed to the public personas of figures like Union General George McClellan, who preceded the more popular and more successful General Ulysses S. Grant (fig. 47). Artists employed established formal techniques like making principal figures slightly larger than lesser actors and heroicizing the primary figures by placing them at the apex of a pyramidal composition. To keep costs low, figures could be swapped into different settings, and works reprinted, in order to meet market demands and to track the course of the war and the fate of its leaders, whose leadership positions were often unstable. Established themes and tropes were a necessity in a fast and competitive print market that struggled with the war’s unpredictable timeline, market forces, and high production costs. When embellishing battle scenes and borrowing motifs from history paintings, popular prints depicting military life in the camp worked to reassure audiences at home.21 Scenes of soldiers at leisure or performing basic domestic duties communicated that camp life was not depriving soldiers of everyday comforts and joys. When labor is shown,

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figure 47 | Currier and Ives, Lieut. General Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, ca. 1856–1907. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZC2-2755.

the tone is generally merry rather than arduous. The Army of the Potomac (ca. 1862; fig. 48), for example, shows a clear sky under which a scene, classically framed by tall trees on either side, features hundreds of figures engaged in various activities. Natural elements dominate the picture: the trees are massive, the foliage is thick, the sky is expansive, and the hill in the background is bright and golden. Nature is the subject in this print as much as the humans. The scene, normalizing the work the men perform, resembles that of a small village instead of a war zone. There is little sense of threat or urgency in the men’s movements, let alone moral imperative—the figures are energetic and the colors are vibrant. In the foreground, a superior on horseback appears to reprimand a group lounging on the ground near a fire. Long wagon trains ford a river and climb a hill rising in the background of the drawing. The lines of wagon trains seem to stretch as far as the eye can see. Some of the figures pointing or observing are clearly men of higher rank who are directing this effort. The print emphasizes organization and coordination and downplays the difficult conditions, the actual labor, and the physical exertion involved.

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figure 48 | John B. Bachelder, The Army of the Potomac, ca. 1862. Lithograph by J. H. Bufford, published by John B. Bachelder. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZC4-1033, LC-​USZ62-1144.

Similarly, Alfred Waud’s Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac (1862; fig. 49) diminishes the labor of soldiers. In the bottom right corner, one figure directs others to move logs for the construction of a bridge. The scene, which includes only a few men, takes place in a dense natural setting. Labor is presented as another activity of army life. Waud records these working scenes in small side panels, and the products of labor absorb the pictorial energies due to Waud’s placement of a larger vignette featuring a bridge in the upper central portion. The matter-​of-​fact treatment of labor contrasts with the emotion of the burial scene at the far right. Photographers in Gardner’s corps had to rely on other means than Waud’s to suggest narrative and on their skills as photographic portrait artists in grouping, pose, and lighting. Because of technical limitations they were unable to portray movement, and as a result their works are essentially composed portraits. In the photographic community, the challenge of constructing portraits of multiple figures was a frequent topic of discussion. The well-​respected daguerreotypist and author Marcus Aurelius Root complained in his 1864 treatise The Camera and the Pencil that “the group studio portrait is often very much abused, and has shown the worst results of any kinds of portraits. If it be so difficult to produce a good likeness of one person, how much more to represent many, and these

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figure 49 | Alfred Waud, Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac, July 26, 1862. Morgan collection of Civil War drawings, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​ppmsca-21022.

of different ages, sexes, and characters!”22 Adapting a simple approach, the portraits are relatively plain—that is, the images rely on setting and groupings of sitters rather than on props and retouching to communicate. Root cautioned against the use of too many props because they threatened to “impair” the likeness and “interfere” with the “effect of the face.”23 Props and painted backdrops could make viewers more aware of the manufactured setting and, in them, the lack of relation between individuals. Furthermore, because objects in and of themselves carried symbolic meanings and narrative associations, they were aesthetically distracting and disrupted the photographer’s presumably careful efforts to use the sitters themselves as means to communicate with viewers.24 The inanimate tools and props are not the central feature of these portraits; the works instead present social relations and social formations through labor. The fine arts promoted a heroic and idealized laboring male body, using formal devices that were not necessarily available to Gardner and his corps.25 The Gardner studio’s portrayal of the common solider can be viewed as part of a new trend in visual culture in the United States. Since the Crimean War of 1855–56, wartime mass-​media artists and photographers had begun to seek out new perspectives and war-​ related subjects of study. Factors such as changing attitudes toward the aristocracy and warfare, a growing middle class, and the illustrated press led to the introduction of new historical actors and artistic subjects in visual culture related to the Crimean conflict. The portrait project of the rank and file produced by the British photographers Joseph Cundall and John Howlett (fig. 50) serves as a photographic precedent for the Gardner studio’s studies of Union soldiers. The two photographers framed their subjects in simple studio settings; the direct gaze and the posed hands activate the composition. The Crimean war leader’s straight posture, despite his heavily embellished uniform, backpack, large hat, and drum, support the serious mood. Compared with popular prints, the photograph is sparse and communicates through emotion rather than symbol.

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figure 50 | Joseph Cundall, Grenadier Guards Drummer, ca. 1856. Salted paper print from glass negative, 23.1 × 17.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The choice of labor as a subject accurately recognized a major aspect of the armed conflict in the United States. Within a year of the war’s beginning, military officials were reporting about the “immense amount of labor” and the “very severe labor”: “Entrenching, building redoubts, felling timber, and building roads and more.”26 In his memoir, Captain Francis Adams Donaldson of the Union Army wrote of soldiering as if it were a trade: “I firmly believe a good organizer, a good planner, and a good officer and soldier could be made of me, or in other words, I take to the trade and like it.”27 Taking to the trade of soldiering meant learning skills. If individuals had had no training, working with vigor and ingenuity could make up for the lack.28 Augustus C. Buell boasted: “The army contain[s] within itself abundant skilled labor to meet all these requirement[s]. . . . There was never an army in the world like the grand old Army of the Potomac. History does not afford a parallel to the siege of Petersburg with regard to the amount of work done, the extent and quality of ingenuity displayed, the volume of national resources called into play, or the skill and vigor with which they were employed.”29 The majority of the labor entailed the construction of housing, hospitals, and battlefield structures. Prefabrication in wood and iron existed during the Civil War era, but military officials could not afford

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the high costs, and transportation posed logistical challenges.30 Although officials tightly regulated most aspects of military life, as the architectural historian Dean Nelson notes, they curiously neglected to regulate the construction of camp structures.31 Servicemen had to draw on their own skills and vernacular building practices to create them, working without a full range of tools. The ranks of the Union Army included men with a diversity of labor backgrounds who could contribute to this effort. Regiments (sometimes comprised of hundreds of men) included masons, housewrights, teamsters, boilermakers, mechanics, lumberjacks, and carpenters. Gardner, arriving in New York City in the mid-1850s and later moving to Washington, was among the wave of immigrant workers in East Coast cities that transformed the landscape of labor, many of whom eventually went on to populate the ranks of the Union Army.32 One theme of the Gardner corps’s studio photography was the Union soldiers’ construction of basic arbors and decorative arborways made of evergreen, walled bowers, tents, shanties, brick chimneys, log walls, and canvas roofs. They made other functional and ornamental structures designed to show respect for superiors and to seal the bond of interdependence.33 Soldiers took pride in the imaginative use of available resources and repurposing of army issued materials.34 In the Gardner corps’s photographs, these structures frame subjects and create areas of interest in the compositions. Because building them called for particular knowledge and skills and played a large role in both the war effort and the social life of the army, they can be termed unique cultural and aesthetic displays of the Union Army as a labor force.35 Architectural historian Martin C. Perdue asserts that the Civil War not only represented vernacular building traditions but, beyond that, contributed to a revival of vernacular techniques.36 Soldiers learned the techniques from one another, sourced materials, and made these structures together. The sustained attention of Gardner and his team of photographers to these structures and the approach to documenting them highlight their value as physical and aesthetic presences rather than mere backdrops for more significant human actors, indicating that the photographers understood the importance of these structures to the social landscape of the war. Gardner demonstrated this in, for example, the caption for plate 57, Timothy O’Sullivan’s Camp Architecture, Brandy Station, Virginia (1864): “The forests are ransacked for the brightest foliage, branches of pine, cedar and holly are laboriously collected, and the work of beautifying the quarters is continued as long as material can be procured.”37 He praised the Poplar Grove Church (see fig. 20) for its display of “taste, genius, and energy,” and, in support of his statement, he notes the proposals to have it permanently installed in New York’s Central Park after the war.38 O’Sullivan’s View of the Interior of Fort Steadman (1862; fig. 51) is another study of vernacular architecture. The title calls attention to this image’s perspective. Viewers, from a perspective inside the fort, see from the viewpoint of the soldiers who lived and fought

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figure 51 | Timothy O’Sullivan, View of the Interior of Fort Steadman, 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 84. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

there. The fort showcases various kinds of construction: the entryway is marked by a brick column attached to a log fence, another wall at the back of the photograph is constructed of smaller branches woven together, and at right is an earthen fort, in which wall supports, platforms, and other objects made of wood can be seen. Photographs of the arbor, foliate, and wood structures directly link the human and physical infrastructure of the army, and the relationships the infrastructure supported and recognized. James Gardner’s documentation of the Field Hospital Division (fig. 19) features different log structures, foliage archways, and fences. Gardner’s perspective on the scene helps show how soldiers used natural elements to demarcate space. An elegant archway or fence of foliage shows how soldiers applied their labor in different ways. As in the officers’ quarters, their labor here supports the provision of comfort and an attractive setting for their comrades who require the hospital’s services. Even decorative structures and flourishes served a social function: they were emblems of group success and markers of sites of communal ritual and celebration.

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figure 52 | George Barnard and James Gibson, Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia, 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 5. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

The study of labor practices sometimes supplants the story of war in Gardner’s text. Gardner describes “a dense thicket of vines, underbrush, and thorn bushes” five hundred yards from where Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia was made in 1862 (fig. 52).39 A long bower wall, as the title indicates, is the most prominent feature of the photograph. Running diagonally through the image, it is thick, roughly four feet tall, made of sticks and foliage woven together across posts in an intricate horizontal pattern. The men leaning on and sitting near it provide a sense of its length and scale and provide a barrier of physical presence. They remind the viewer of the labor that built the wall, and the caption’s reference to the geography extends the viewer’s awareness of the site. Early in the war, the Gardner studio began to assemble an exhaustive portrayal of the various divisions and regiments. These group portraits represent fighting regiments and document the range of labor these regiments performed. The scale of this representational inventory indicates the massive coordination and management the war effort required; large group portraits allude to the number of different roles and duties required.

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The project reminds viewers that the Army of the Potomac was a laboring body. Each photograph portrays a unit and a community of men with common interests and skill sets brought together to work on designated projects. These soldiers engage the work completely; for them it is far from being detached, tedious, mindless, or repetitive. Instead of being identified by name or associated with a particular event, these soldiers are identified and known by the division to which they belong—each has its own headquarters, structures, tools, and skill sets associated. Portraying combat, noncombat regiments, and military support personnel in the same taxonomical project collapses artificial hierarchies of the “value” and “sacrifice” of laborers. Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding [sic; Cumberland Landing], Pamunkey, Virginia (1862; fig. 53), by John Wood and James Gibson, makes a direct statement about the skills of the men of the Northern Army. Gardner’s caption begins by marveling at the labor required to create army camps: At Cumberland Landing, one of the most magnificent spectacles ever seen in the army was presented, when the combined forces, massed upon the bank of the river, converted the barren fields, as if by magic, into an immense city of tents. From the hill above Toller’s house the scene was truly grand. Division after division, closely compacted, they stretched away, until, in the distance, the white tents were mere specks against the dark frame of woods. Our picture, interesting as it is, gives but a small portion of the gorgeous whole.40 The caption describes the unseen labor of the men who constructed these tents and marvels at the volume of their production, and the photograph offers ample evidence of the manpower expended. At the back of the image is a long stretch of white tents, at the right a large pile of cleared brush. Men sit in the clearing in groups alongside supplies, while hundreds of men drill. The caption even recognizes the work of the animals: “In the middle-​ground are some mules picketed around the wagons, hard-​working, much-​ abused creatures.” But the photograph singles out the labor of one particular division of the army. The most “prominent” object, Gardner notes, is the “mud-​bespattered forge, the knapsacks and blankets of the furriers carelessly thrown on the ground beneath.” The forge occupies its own space, apart, in a clearing; its position in the immediate foreground nearly blocks the scene. Beside it on the ground is an anvil, which adds formal balance, introducing the human element to this otherwise static scene. The vantage point of the photograph mimics that of someone standing near the forge, which is distinctively placed in the foreground and enhanced by the compressed background and the foregrounded clearing. The effect of the abrupt cropping at the bottom of the photograph is the immersion of the viewer in the composition.

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figure 53 | John Wood and James Gibson, Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding [sic; Cumberland Landing], Pamunkey, Virginia, 1862, from Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, [1865–66]), plate 16. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, E468.7.G2.

The photograph places the viewer in the position of the laborers whose work makes possible the movement of the men and equipment depicted. Their material “product” is not portrayed, nor is their labor reduced to its products. Instead, the portrait attempts a more complex picture of the contribution these workers make to the army and to the war effort. Gardner’s caption and the photograph connect the organization of the army and its divisions to the figures who literally labor on its “bottom” to create and maintain the shoes for the army horses. The forge and anvil in the foreground and the massive display of people and activities in the background demonstrate the scale of the contribution of the forge and the people who work at it. Although the blacksmiths are unseen, the composition implies that these laborers and the work they perform are the most important. The details and perspective of this photograph can be compared to those of the generic prints in The Army of the Potomac, which portrays nearly the same subject of army movement but includes human figures. Men converse, wrangle horses, instruct

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figure 54 | Alexander Gardner, Antietam, Maryland. Forge Scene at General McClellan’s Headquarters, September 22, 1862. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​cwpb-01124.

one another. The figures do not appear to perform labor. In fact, in the foreground men appear to be sleeping or resting in the shade under the trees. The men and the wagon trains seem to move effortlessly, and there is a sense of buoyancy to the figures. The impression of effortlessness in The Army of the Potomac contrasts with the ideas foregrounded in the Gardner studio’s multiple portrayals of the blacksmith. Gardner’s own Antietam forge scene (1862; fig. 54) is consciously posed, much as an illustrator might arrange a scene. Blacksmiths attended to hundreds of army horses; their job required considerable strength, especially given the volume and pace the real-​time war required. The photograph is a large tableau in which figures engage in various tasks and horses are arranged in a line across the composition: a portrait of a community within a community. Gardner unifies the scene by drawing the viewer into a directional reading that exposes the internal hierarchies of this workplace. The arrangement recalls the past venerable era of the master craftsman and his apprentices. The tools they use and the

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techniques they demonstrate are those that were used by their grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them. The figures on the right side of the composition all turn to the left, thus driving the viewer’s attention toward the figures in the center of the composition. The central figure in the scene is the bent-​over man with the hammer and anvil, looking up at another man standing on the anvil’s other side. The strong shadows throughout the image allow the viewer to see the different tools and implements. The men standing by with horses refer to activities and people beyond the frame of the photograph who depend on the forge, extending the viewer’s sense of time and space in the image. The charges stand by, ready for transport. By making this portrait, Gardner tells viewers of their work, which expedites the transportation of men and material vital to the war effort. The men do not wear special uniforms; they are identified visually by their labor. The studio photographs portray labor as a source of communion. Members of the telegraphic corps were responsible for stringing telegraph lines. The 1862 portrait of over a dozen members of this corps shows them as workers and as a community (fig. 55). Manuals advising photographers on the production of group portraits recommended that a photographer know the biographies of the sitters, which would allow them to avoid the stilted appearance so common in group portraiture and aid them in constructing lifelike and engaging arrangements.41 (Photography manuals identified natural poses as key aspects of group portraits; “inartistic” photographers approached every model with a preestablished system or formula.)42 Through diverse poses, gestures, and placement of hands, Gardner’s portrayal makes the men appear to be interacting. Each figure adopts a different pose, but the tightly controlled composition manages the blank space, creating a sense of fluidity between figures and presenting the sitters as active and natural despite the artificial setting. Only a few of the men look directly at the camera; although bunched together for the portrait, the figures also appear to engage with one another. One man sits on the ground, while another poses with an axe. A man standing on the ground looking up at the man posed on the pole creates a relational and compositional connection between these two areas. By stressing relationships and the production of a vital service, such portraits resisted the forces of industrial capitalism that threatened the relationship between laborers and cheapened their work. This studio production documents the labor groups that emerged from the war, and portraits like this one suggest that these new groups, through their labor, shared a social bond. In early 1862, Gardner made the large group portrait Scouts and Guides of the Potomac, Berlin, Maryland, October 1862 (1862; fig. 56). Technological improvements, including better cameras and lenses and the new negative-​based collodion process, made the mass production of such portraits feasible. For the first time, American photographers were mobile, working largely outside the controlled confines of the studio and

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figure 55 | Alexander Gardner, Military Telegraphic Corps, Army of the Potomac, Berlin, October 1862, 1862. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970.537.7.

consistently making, instead of daguerreotypes, negatives to be printed on paper. The war’s expansive infrastructure included a range of personnel, like scouts and guides, whom the public might already know through print media, but who could be recorded only by photography, because of its realism. Scouts and Guides is an image of a labor community that developed from the circumstances of the Civil War. Operating under the direction of the army’s Secret Service Department, the twelve men in the photograph undertook work that was dangerous because it involved obtaining information on enemy movements. Gardner clearly admired these men. He wrote, “The scouts of an army undergo more hardship and brave greater peril than any other class. Secrecy being their only safety, their heroic deeds pass unrecorded, and when the necessity for their services has ceased to exist, with rare exceptions the brave men are altogether forgotten.”43 Other photographers made portraits of scouts and guides, but Gardner’s treatment of them in Scouts and Guides was unusual; his technical skill in managing the tones and lighting the composition and his placement of individual subjects and the interactions between them reveal the difference between a portrait that suggests inner character and human connections and a mere resemblance. The composition effectively employs background elements of the landscape to stage the scene: tools and domestic objects arranged on the ground convey the subject’s familiarity with their surroundings, while the slope that rises upward in the background gently compresses the space. The men all wear dark garments, which contrast with the large white tent before which they pose. Though the portrait compositionally defines the group as a unit, individualized details suggest idiosyncrasies. Each person in this ragtag army of sorts adopts a different pose, indicating how he sees himself in relation to his work and to the others. At the

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figure 56 | Alexander Gardner, Scouts and Guides of the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, Maryland, October 1862, 1862. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​B8184-7599.

far left, a man leans on one leg; on the far right, another man sits calmly with both his arms and legs crossed. His colleague beside him is the only one who has removed his hat for the photograph, suggesting deference to or respect for the photographer or the occasion. The man in the center is nattily dressed in pinstripe trousers, vest, and bow tie, a sword in a scabbard beside him. There is an ease about their poses that disguises the bravery with which they conducted their professional duties. Though not formally members of the military, these men pose in a way that communicates their pride in their work to support the war effort. Individually, they were not especially well known, but their group contribution to the Union was widely recognized. Their poses, which maintain each man’s identity while also conveying the coherence of the group, emphasize that they were brought together by personal circumstances and are now linked forever through their shared experience. As an article of the period on photographic aesthetics theorized: “In truth, to make a portrait it is not necessary to reproduce that proportion or form of the individuals with mathematical exactitude; but it is requisite, above all, to represent them according to the character of the individual, with the modifications

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and developments which have been given to him by habit, opinion, or social life.”44 The scouts and guides may be a motley crew, but they are also, like the blacksmith, part of a community able to make a vital contribution to the war effort. By choosing to promote and heroicize the common soldier-​laborer, Gardner and his studio rejected the visual image of the laborer that had become common in their native Europe—an image that, in their view, seemed broadly symbolic of decline: of the common laborer and the role of labor in society. The anonymous laborer emerged in mid-​ nineteenth-​century European mass visual culture as social and economic stratification yielded an interest in social typologies. Differing levels of income, education, and access to stable work and housing had polarized Great Britain. Vigorous debates about the potential and efficacy of legislative versus social and community-​based solutions created an interest in identifying and visualizing the populations most affected by increasingly visible social problems like poverty, income inequality, and economically inspired social unrest. Discussions of these problems inevitably turned to questions of labor. In the wake of years of strife in response to the conditions produced by rapid industrialization and urbanization, the rise of Chartism, and the European revolutions of 1848, planners hoped the exhibition would improve class relations; the manufacturer and Liberal Party leader Richard Cobden predicted it would “make all the classes better known to each other.”45 When the exhibition opened, navvies (a term for those who did hard manual labor that was also used more broadly to describe laborers) frequently appeared in cartoons related to the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition—in which they served as uncomfortable reminders of ongoing class tensions that the palace display sought to stifle (fig. 57). To the dismay of the working classes and their advocates, the exhibition did not include manual labor in its celebration. The only suggestion of labor’s involvement in making the products on display was a section that featured objects like slabs of marble called “Raw Materials.” The monumental objects exhibited there functioned merely as spectacles and did little to suggest the labor required to produce the objects on display elsewhere in the exhibition. Numerous commercial items tied to the exhibition, including a lavish portfolio with scenes from each section, furthered the enshrinement of objects of industry at the expense of a fuller presentation that acknowledged the labor and laborers that produced them. Vividly detailed color lithographs depicted the historic and innovative glass structure (fig. 58). In them, wealthy visitors stroll the grounds and contemplate the massive structure. Contemporaneously, as indicated by the title, Henry Mayhew’s taxonomy in London Labor and the London Poor: A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work (1851) is organized around labor. Mayhew’s illustrated text featured engravings (based on daguerreotypes by the British portraitist James Beard) of isolated figures whose identities are reduced to their

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figure 57 | John Leech, The Pound and the Shilling, published in Punch, June 14, 1850.

figure 58 | Read & Co, Engravers & Printers, The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for Grand International Exhibition of 1851, ca. 1851. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, M22958.

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figure 59 | The London Costermonger, in Henry Mayhew, London Labor and the London Poor: A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1851).

clothing, props, wares, or tools, and the caption that indicated their occupation (fig. 59). Mayhew’s street people were not skilled laborers but peddlers of various sorts, whose existence signaled a changing economy that forced people into marginalized subsistence labor. Workers’ rights groups at this time engaged in their own representational project. The broadside that served as a call to action at Kennington Common in 1848 reminded supporters that they needed to represent themselves because the press had “misrepresented” them and “vilified us and our attentions.” This was not new. Since Chartism first emerged in the 1830s, Chartists were often portrayed as threats (fig. 60). Papers referred to them as “deluded men” and described their uprisings as “outbreaks.”46 To challenge the perception that supporters were disruptive and violent hooligans, the Chartists produced a broadside offering a different representation: “We and our families are pining in misery, want, and starvation! We are the slaves of capital!” The repeated use of “we”

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figure 60 | Broadside, 1839. Courtesy of Gwent Archives.

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signals to critics that protesters are not random individuals but people united in a just cause. Similarly, the word calls out to supporters. The text articulates a stark polarization between the first-​person plural pronoun “we”—the working people and their families—and those who exploit them. Those who constitute the “we” of the broadside are anonymous and disparate, but the broadside consolidates and assigns them a social and emotional identity. Chartist leaders also conceived of their crowds as performative displays. Feargus O’Connor, in calling followers to Kennington Common, recognized that the sight of a large crowd could have a strong visual impact and intended that the mass meeting of supporters on April 10, 1848, be visually symbolic. He meant for it to include other performative actions as well: a series of the fiery speeches for which Chartists were known, a procession to Kennington Common, and the presentation of the petition. More than Owenites, Chartists relied on the visual to gain and address supporters, combining mass group meetings with the production of prints—especially portraits—and broadsides. In Gardner’s Chartist culture, the anonymous worker who read and participated in that political movement held powerful potential. Chartists believed that simple and rudimentary creative forms produced by ordinary people could affect major changes in consciousness.47 These self-​taught worker-​poets produced hundreds of poems for the Chartist press; as a means of representing the common man and in absence of a visual print culture, they transformed existing literary traditions in a way that would speak to working-​class subjects, embody working-​class ideals, and support Chartist goals to educate, move, and enlighten.48 As the Scottish inventor and photographer Sir John Herschel noted, “There is scarcely any well informed person who, if he has but the will, has not also the power, to add something essential to the general stock of knowledge if only he will observe, regularly and methodically, some particular class of facts which may excite his attention.”49 This “representational” poetry affirmed the movement’s principles, shaped group identity and experience, and encouraged a sense of a common purpose.50 Literary historian Anne Janowitz, calling Chartist poetry a “people’s poetic tradition,”51 writes, “Poetry was both a flattering mirror to a movement-​in-​formation, offering conventions for group identity, and a social matrix within which people could discover themselves as belonging to an ongoing set of traditions, goals, and expectations. The work of Chartist poetry was both to excavate and invent that sense of tradition.”52 When possible, Chartists took advantage of cheap reproductive technologies to present an alternative image of their movement. This alternative pictorial tradition inverted the established genres of visual art to elevate the position of the working class and its leaders. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star produced and distributed portrait engravings of movement leaders, often placing them in classical settings. Feargus O’Connor, in William Read’s stipple and line engraving,

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figure 61 | William Read, after unknown artist, Feargus Edward O’Connor, 1840. Stipple and line engraving. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

wears his preferred fustian suit like the working-​class men to whom he dedicated his work (fig. 61). Drapery, a desk with a quill pen, and an expensive-​looking chair complete the refined setting. The Northern Star circulated these engravings as a way to raise money and establish a visual historiography of Chartism. Gardner participated in this activity. The Sentinel produced and circulated its own portrait project titled “The People’s Portrait Gallery of the Most Distinguished Social and Political Reformers in the World,” each issue consisting of an engraved portrait and a biographical sketch.53 The title directly references the People’s Charter and serves the creation of a visual history of the people’s movement. When Gardner took over the paper, he continued the portrait project.54 He offered his subscribers images of the Hungarian reformer Louis Kossuth in 1851.55 In this way, he learned to infiltrate contemporary culture with images that offered alternative faces and histories to counter those then being more widely disseminated and consumed.

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Gardner and his firm embodied the idea of the worker-​poet. Gardner himself hailed from an artisan background, and John Reekie, David Knox, and Timothy O’Sullivan had been everyday laborers, not artists. According to census data, thirty-​one-​year-​old Reekie, a stonecutter by trade, had emigrated from Scotland.56 Pywell’s father owned a livery in the District, where he also worked. But as recent immigrants to the United States, they shared a common experience. David Knox was a skilled machinist.57 It is conceivable that, like the worker and artisan communities to which they had previously belonged, they learned photography from each other. They shared the same subject matter and adopted similar motifs. Gardner, in advertising his firm, identified corps members as “contributors” who were among “the most distinguished photographers in the country.”58 Gardner’s claims aimed to promote the visual art of everyday men; his studio boldly presented these unknown figures as the visual scribes of this national and historic conflict. This characterization stood in opposition to the minimally competent cameramen employed by the so-​called picture factories and their assembly-​line production of photographs.59 Gardner’s books represented another divergence in production technique: Sketch Book in particular was produced collaboratively, the collective work of the corps members that supported the book’s vision of history. The Catalog of Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of Alexander Gardner (1863) identifies twelve photographers of the firm, most of whom are represented in Sketch Book, but the exact number of studio employees is unknown, and some corps members made only a few photographs.60 Not long after opening his firm, Gardner attended a party held by the St. Andrew’s Society, a fraternal club in which he and a few of his team (including John Reekie and David Knox) were active. At the end of the evening a leading member offered one last toast—this one to Gardner. He asked Gardner to rise and address the group, but Gardner demurred, claiming that he was merely “another member of the working corps.”61 The men of the firm were more than just coworkers. Together, they maintained relationships that extended beyond their business obligations and into their personal lives. David Knox and John Reekie had met in Washington, DC, prior to working for Gardner, through their participation in local fraternal clubs. Corps member Timothy O’Sullivan married William Pywell’s sister. In addition to the St. Andrew’s Society, Gardner and his corps took part in activities beyond their work—for instance, Freemasonry and the Robert Burns Club. These organizations were all part of the same “moral geography” that centered on business and democratic politics.62 The St. Andrew’s Society events exemplify what James Epstein, a historian of nineteenth-​century political culture, calls the tradition of “radical political dining,” “ritual performances” to “enact—to define by means of social drama—certain roles and meanings.”63 At one of these events, John Reekie characterized and addressed the meaning of friendship: “Mysterious current of

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the soul, we owe thee much.”64 The agenda for events of the organizations included toasts, speeches, and songs. When Gardner declared himself “another member of the working corps,” he was not simply being modest; he was making a political statement and declaring his personal allegiance to the collective. Epstein’s tracing of the dining and toasting tradition back to the 1790s demonstrates its significance to the radicals’ enactment of their version of history. These performances were a means of claiming their role in the public sphere: calculated gestures directed at opponents and linked to other public activities, like political demonstrations. Though Gardner’s participation was not meant as a contrarian gesture, the ritual of identifying and naming figures—of pledging one’s affiliation through gestures, songs, and symbols, as Epstein analyzes it—is relevant to understanding Gardner’s photographic practice and his attraction to specific subject matter. For Gardner, the production of portraiture was another form of “ritual performance”; in other words, as the art historian Richard Brilliant observes, Gardner’s production of portraits can be read as an intention, in part, “to think about oneself, of oneself, of oneself in relation to others, and of others in apparent relation to themselves and to others.”65 Gardner’s activities beyond photography consistently highlighted and modeled versions of male communion. The radical Scottish poet Robert Burns represented another model of male community for Gardner. To Burns, “brotherhoods,” both real and virtual, were united by political and humanitarian ideals.66 Burns’s civic political ideology elevated the members of the lower and middle classes, whom he saw as a fraternity of equals, their leisure time limited by their labor, who were nonetheless united by a selfless devotion to “public pursuits.”67 This theory, which held common people as models of virtue, inverted the established civic hierarchy and condemned supposed leaders by their own standards.68 Burns asserted that fulfilling one’s civic duty by promoting nonmaterial values such as fellowship amounted to political action and served as buffers against the corrupting forces of power and wealth.69 Gardner’s participation in these activities meant that he was constantly exposed to forms of political action and community, and to models for how to address the splintering of community and society through one’s own work and behavior. Gardner pictured himself as a worker in one of the few portraits made of him by his brother James in the studio in 1862 (fig. 62). It is curious that a man who would become famous for his compositional skills and for his enthralling photographs of the nation’s political elite would sit for such a remarkably uncomposed photograph. The vantage point is somewhat too high, and Gardner appears to slide from his chair, as if pulled by his foot, which hangs halfway outside the frame. Someone who spent as much time behind the camera as Gardner did would have had a sense of what such a portrait would look like when finished. The photograph is blurry in some areas and poorly cropped.

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figure 62 | James Gardner, Alexander Gardner, 1863. Albumen silver print. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Larry J. West.

Gardner’s carefully crossed hands display the discolored fingernails of a photographer, an association that his ragged work smock, with its chemical stains, reinforces. His pant leg, extended toward the viewer, is covered with holes, and his hair and beard are long and unkempt. He does not portray himself in the act of making, as a mediator between the potential subject and the pictorial tool; in this portrait, Gardner is an active subject, adopting a particular persona. A contemporary viewer of the photograph would perhaps have recognized the chair as the one in which Gardner sat such celebrated figures as Abraham Lincoln for their own portraits. Like O’Connor, who himself rejected the trappings of his privileged upbringing and aligned himself with the causes of the working classes, posing in the clothing of the men whose lives he sought to reform, Gardner takes his place as a worker among others who “work” on behalf of the Union and its ideals.

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Moreover, the portrait presents him as a worker; the photographic studio is a place of the kind of labor that he held in esteem. The portrait is even made by his brother, recalling an era when family members worked in their shops together. Plus, the Gardner studio was a family of sorts. In positioning himself as a studio worker—another member of the working corps—Gardner distinguished his self-​presentation from the one with which his peers aligned and marketed themselves. His former employer, Mathew Brady, for example, promoted an intuitive kind of artistic skill, as opposed to artisanship and labor. The big photographic firms, like many small workshops, adopted a system of nonmechanized assembly to keep up with business. By 1860, photographs could be produced more rapidly than ever before; a “new and marvelous process” could supposedly produce reproductions from a single negative at a rate of twelve thousand per hour.70 Early daguerreotype production also resembled the small workshop/master craftsman model. In small academic and scientific circles in cities like Philadelphia and New York, scientists such as the physician Paul Beck Goddard and the chemist Robert Cornelius at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia learned and improved the process and shared their work with others. Mathew Brady famously studied the daguerreotype process from the inventor and painter Samuel F. B. Morse. As photographic images became popular and studios began to attract visitors to see their likenesses as much as to have their likenesses made, studio owners became celebrities. By the late 1850s, they were often mere figureheads who performed little of the studio work itself. Instead, the studio owner’s role was to promote the business, secure contracts, establish collaborations, and cultivate clients. Their contribution to the work in the studio might be to arrange a sitter. Indeed, Brady’s failing eyesight diminished his involvement even further.71 It was not uncommon for a major studio to be run not by its namesake, but by another photographer, who also acted as a studio manager.72 (Indeed, as Brady’s studio manager, Gardner was described as being “very intelligent and obliging.”)73 Chemistry and printing might be assigned to other individuals. The names of most of these men and the works they made have been lost to history, because by custom they did not receive credit for their work, which instead bore the name of the studio owner.74 The Gardner portrait is thus reminiscent of an era of photography when the labor and the technical knowledge of lenses, cameras, and chemistry were viewed as essential to the product. But, as his life in Scotland as an apprentice and later a shopkeeper suggests, this ethos had shaped Gardner’s life long before he opened his photography studio. Gardner established his reputation with his technical craft. As late as 1858, the District’s photographic community remained virtually nonexistent, but those photographers who did make work there—John Plumbe, William and Frederick Langenheim, and Edward H. T. Anthony—were conceptual and technical innovators. The lack of a steady client base, the unfinished federal infrastructure, and the small role of Washington on the

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national stage in the antebellum era meant that practitioners had to be creative in their approach. The photographer John Werge, Gardner’s fellow Glaswegian, visiting Washington from Scotland as part of his survey of the American photographic scene, observed that “mammoth” photographs were “the ambition of all photographers,” but he singled out Gardner among them: “The first full length photograph I ever saw was in Washington, and was the work of Mr. Gardner.”75 Technical skill was recognized. The large-​scale works produced under Gardner’s management of the Brady Studio in Washington before the Civil War provoked one reviewer to meditate on “the adequacy of human understanding, unaided by science, to realize the nature of things.”76 Such achievements, the writer continued, “elevate our ideas of the expansive power and character of human faculties in approaching the most subtle and hidden elements of nature.” Gardner’s friend Whitman called him “a real artist . . . [who] had the feel of his work—the inner feel, if I may say it so: he was not a workman—only a workman . . . but he was also beyond his craft.”77 In the language he used for his advertisements, Gardner took pride in the skilled labor of his staff and boasted of the attentiveness extended even to those formats that were far quicker and cheaper to produce than others. The advertisement text differentiated the work of the studio from the work of “tyros” who “mutilate the image of God in humanity”; since “we are not all beauties,” the average sitter “cannot endure a caricature.”78 Here, Gardner not only calls attention to the artistry of the firm’s work but also pledges that this standard of artistry would apply even to work done for the “average” sitter, who may lack the financial and social standing of some of the firm’s other patrons. If there was one format that showcased technical skill and aesthetic beauty, it was the studio’s production of what were known as “plain” portraits, in which no retouching was used. Critics who visited the studio noted how the unretouched photograph allowed viewers to observe such aspects as the creation of the softness of the face and the outline of the figure, which ultimately contribute to the “fidelity of resemblance—the first essential in a portrait nature seems to resent any attempt, with whatever skill it may be made, to improve upon her wonderful effects in photography; and the perfect development of the photographic portrait will result, not from the application of artistic skill in retouching, and coloring, but . . . from the improvement of those means, chemical and other, by which the sun picture is wrought.”79 The reviewer, in writing that retouching will not further the art of photography but technical improvements (which required technical knowledge) will, distinguishes between those photographers for whom the art was merely aesthetic and those who truly understood the craft. The “plain” 1864 carte de visite of Walt Whitman (fig. 63) demonstrates Gardner’s own skill at manipulating these small, uniformly produced photographs to produce compelling portrayals. The portrait of Whitman, a cropped view of the poet sitting in a plain chair, balances the expanse of the plain backdrop above Whitman’s head with his body,

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figure 63 | Alexander Gardner, Walt Whitman, Three-​quarter-​length Portrait, Seated, Facing Slightly Right, Wearing Heavy Coat with Right Hand in Pocket, Left Hand at Cheek, 1864. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-82786.

clothed in a dark pea coat and pants. Though he is seated close on the picture plane, Whitman seems small in his ill-​fitting coat; its folds bunch around his waist, and his legs appear thin. He wears his trademark white shirt, but the collar is squashed under the large coat. His short hair lies flat against his head, hardly the mane that often fills the frame in other portraits. His beard is uneven. With no retouching, the portrait communicates rather than disguises Whitman’s physical characteristics, and these characteristics carry meaning. The poet’s somewhat disheveled appearance suggests the impact of his experiences in wartime Washington, where he spent his days as a volunteer nurse tending to soldiers at crowded makeshift hospitals. The commitment to craft and artistic excellence that Gardner advertised was not necessarily the aspiration of other District firms and operators. By the time of the

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Civil War, the field of photography had already begun to shift away from the stress on knowledge and technical mastery. The American author and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his third installment of his “Doings of the Sunbeam,” a series of essays on photography published in the Atlantic Monthly, describes his tour of the stereoscope production factory and his observation of the steam-​powered machines there, of the “rows of young women” using assembly-​line methods, and “one forlorn individual who will pass his days in the single work of cleaning the glass plates for negatives.”80 Holmes praises these new techniques and attributes lower production costs and cheaper products to their introduction. The influx of practitioners, introduction of cheap formats, and mania for pictures in the broader visual culture profoundly transformed the medium, its production, and its markets. By 1861, several hundred printers were operating in America—selling prints, pictorial envelopes, musical scores, cartoons, portraits, and more, for as little as five cents apiece.81 These developments led to calls for professionalization, the creation of journals, and the organization of such groups as the American Photographical Society. Photographic production grew alongside a burgeoning market for print material. The war’s economic impact on photography and changing tastes meant financial concerns preoccupied the photographic community. Even with the introduction of popular new formats such as the carte de visite, the pages of the American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts and Humphrey’s Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts and Sciences described the state of the business of photography during the early years of the war as anything but stable.82 Business fluctuated monthly. In October 1861, the editor of Humphrey’s declared confidently: “War, or no war, photography is bound to go ahead.”83 The American Journal of Photography was optimistic by early 1863: “We [photography] will always have the power of recalling the features of those that are dear to us wherever they may be; and those who have gone to the spirit land—we will keep their memory green.”84 Gardner’s own work was judged on market-​oriented terms: a columnist for the National Intelligencer observed Gardner’s gallery in action shortly after it opened, marveling in June 1863 “that so much skill and labor could afford to dispense its products at so cheap a rate as to place them equally within reach of all.”85 But the market was still volatile in the months following Gardner’s opening. As Humphrey’s reported in August 1863, “Our dealers have had a very dull time of it for the past three to four weeks; nothing doing of any account. The galleries also complain of dull times, and say they never done so little at this season of the year.”86 The Gardner studio investigated labor and presented images of labor at a historical juncture when artisan identities—including his own as a photographic artist—came under threat from factory labor. The antebellum years had already seen the introduction of larger shops and a greater division of labor. Handicraft labor had already begun to

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disappear. The woodworkers-​turned-​soldiers of the Union Army probably worked on a premodern version of the assembly line, rather than in a small shop. This investigation is in keeping with Chartism, which imagined just such a return to a preindustrial society. The masthead of the Chartist Northern Star was a woodcut that depicted a blissful scene of rolling hills and small farms (fig. 64). Like Chartists, Robert Owen saw the condition of the laborer as key to the well-​being of the rest of society: “The far greater part of the population belong to or have risen from the laboring classes; and by them the happiness and comfort of all ranks, not excluding the highest, are very essentially influenced.”87 At the Sentinel, Gardner and his editors honed the paper’s message to advocate for the working classes. Inspired by the French Revolution and critical of industrialization, the Sentinel called for popular control of economic power in order to serve the public good, which required the political organization of the working classes. They spoke against the free market system as “a monstrous, self-​developed monopoly.”88 Gardner’s Oweniteand Chartist-​inspired editorial agenda informed the paper’s coverage of specific problems facing Scotland’s working class, while other features positioned the problems facing Scotland as part of a historic worldwide progressive movement. The Sentinel’s stance in favor of creating alliances across classes became one of the paper’s important contributions to Scotland’s labor movement.89 American radicals approved of the Sentinel’s work; as one American critic observed, the Sentinel “has a way of going straight to the core of public questions, and standing always on the side of thorough Reform.”90 Gardner’s communitarian beliefs ran counter to industrialization and opposed its impact on the laborer. Communitarians like Gardner and Owen rejected the competitiveness of industry and its devaluing of labor. The labor of soldiers fit the high ideal: it was not driven by profit and consumer desires, but served a cause determined and sanctioned by the larger community to which these soldiers belonged. Decades earlier, when Gardner founded his cooperative community, he acted as a soldier of sorts by creating an alternative society with a mission to serve the majority. He proved his commitment to the community as a unit of social change in the pages of the Sentinel by publishing the details of how communitarian communities were formed and functioned.91 In historian Arthur Bestor’s interpretation, it represented above all a faith that a voluntary segment of the population was capable of instigating profound change in the political and social order.92 In their production of various structures for practical, strategic, ceremonial, and ritual needs, Gardner must have seen the possibility of a community united in labor and in their beliefs. As in the communitarian ideal, the labor of soldiers was not oriented to the market or to personal gain but determined by the needs of the community for the greater good. In addition to his response to the events on Kennington Common, Gardner reveals in his other writing how he continued to think through labor and the politics of

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figure 64 | The Northern Star, and National Trades’ Journal, August 22, 1846.

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representation. The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 had prompted him to call attention to the lack of representation of common men and to relate this neglect to broader social and legislative failures. Though the Sentinel’s editors initially supported the exhibition, the editorial was the first of many to explore its failure to represent the motto under which it was convened: “The workers, all types, stand forth as really great men.”93 The editorial in the May 3, 1851, edition concluded that the display of objects was dazzling, but “the maker was absent.” The event as a great display of workers of all types as great men failed to live up to its promise. The exhibition ignored the “toil-​worn man” who had “raised the altar of Industry to its brilliant temple.” While the images in the popular press disproportionately stressed the lower-​income status of some of the attendees, the Sentinel presented its own vivid image. The text portrayed the upper classes as vacuous and materialistic, gazing with “vulgar gaping curiosity” at such wonders as the largest known diamond in the world, the Koh-​i-​Noor. The editors demanded, “If the condition of industry is considered of such great importance, why not the state of the industrious?” In this critique, Gardner and his editors echoed the words of critics like Charles Dickens, who also asked, “How much of that glory [of the exhibition] was shared by the workman, pale with sickness and grim with want’?”94 They differentiated their argument by issuing a call for another kind of representation and explaining what it might entail. This alternative representation might include “how they [workers] are remunerated, how their labor affects their physical powers and longevity, their moral and social condition, their degree of education, and their manner of living.”95 Throughout the summer and early fall, Sentinel features and editorials continued to reiterate the position that the exhibition, to be complete, had to be less narrow and should “be a measure not only of the state of industry and art among us, but also of the social condition and status of the artisan.”96 Following the widespread dissolution among the worker’s rights movement after the events at Kennington Common, the Sentinel’s editors seized on the exhibition as a topic to rally supporters. During the Civil War, Gardner turned his camera to just such men, whose labor served as the foundation of the war effort. Through his wartime works, he persuasively argued that America could not understand the war without understanding those whose labor supported it, or “how their labor affects their physical powers and longevity, their moral and social condition, their degree of education, and their manner of living.”97 Gardner’s own attempt at a compendium of labor provided a representation that contrasted with the exhibition, which Tim Barringer describes as “the nemesis, not the apotheosis of human labor.”98 While worldwide it seemed to radicals like Gardner that divisions caused by industrialization and social strife were dividing labor communities, in the Civil War he witnessed the social, ideological, practical power of labor communities. Amid a changing field of photography, he includes himself as a worker impacted by the market

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economy. This image replaces the typologies of depravation of Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor and the Crystal Palace exhibition’s display of machine and capital-​based ideology and iconography with an enfranchised worker-​based community striving to resurrect the world’s true democracy and the recognition of their own human worth.

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Chapter 4

Washington’s Promise

While the pages of Sketch Book glorified Northern labor, geography, material resources, and its civic and commercial infrastructure, Alexander Gardner’s documentation of the South—embodied in its capital, Richmond, Virginia—described only the complete destruction of the region. In his series of bleak photographs and stereographs of Richmond, the fires that erupted as a result of the fighting have ravaged parts of the city; piles of rubble illustrate how war destroyed the rest. In one photograph an abandoned stagecoach sits in an open field, in tatters, its leaning back wheel evidence of its dysfunction (fig. 65). The photograph, titled A Virginia Family Coach, was taken from a vantage point that frames the frayed cloth of the coach’s canopy against the sky. The placement of the coach in relation to the tents deepens the narrative implicit in the photograph’s title; symbolically, the coach, which would have been drawn by horses, represents a retrograde society and wealth gained dishonorably by means of chattel slavery. Its opulence, still detectable despite its current state, seems anachronistic. A relic of a slow and cumbersome method of travel, and a technological relic as well, the coach stands in contrast to the rapidly expanding railroads that audiences in the Northern regions would have known. The image portrays a scene of aftermath—a landscape swept up in the “fierce flames” of progressivism Ernest Jones once described—and represents Gardner’s ideological, pictorial, and conceptual approach to the subject of the war, which he always examined in a broad metaphorical and international context. He conceived of it as a dismantling of the South and its infrastructure, and the resurrection of the North and its values, which were implicitly those shared with other progressives worldwide.

Wa shington ’s Promise figure 65 | Alexander Gardner, A Virginia Family Coach. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York, GLC05111.01.0929.

This chapter examines how Gardner, working in the built environment of Washington, DC, portrayed the federal government, as constituted by its real and conceptual infrastructure, as a model for postwar America. He presents the government as the essence of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a free society that depended on access and circulation. For both the poet and the president, effective means of movement and communication were part of the infrastructure on which good government was founded. Gardner supplements this vision by demonstrating that photography, as a communicative art, was integral to this infrastructure and the modern era. Beyond the ideas of Whitman and Lincoln, he portrays the city’s survival as a symbol of the triumph of democracy and progressive values. At war’s end, Gardner was not the only artist in search of meaning after the war. Initial subject matter included celebrations in the streets of Washington and scenes related to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and around Richmond. Soon, visual artists turned to the personal side of war, in images that showed its effect on the veteran. One of the most common postwar literary and pictorial subjects was the Union soldier’s return to civilian life. It had many versions—often stories told sequentially—including joyous hometown crowd scenes and depictions of the transition of the soldier from the labor of the battlefield back to the labor of the farm, as well as of changing gender roles. Scholars have noted that these themes were culturally appropriate because they characterized the events and social phenomena that occurred throughout the war, and they took up ideas found in the literature of the era.1 Winslow Homer’s painting Veteran in a New Field

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figure 66 | Alexander Gardner studio imprint, back of carte de visite of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, n.d. James Wadsworth Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

(1865), for example, widely distributed in print form, powerfully synthesized anxieties around social relations in the world after the war. Gardner shared with artists like Homer an interest in creating a postwar national visual culture. While nationalistic perspectives and subjects were new to other artists, from the beginning Gardner aligned his work and his vision with the capital. As a photographer and Brady’s studio manager, he spent the prewar years documenting the District’s leading figures and momentous events. In his production of photographs of historians George Bancroft and others in the late 1850s, or in portraits of the first delegation of Japanese ambassadors to the states, he contributed to the canonization of the nation’s leading historians (as opposed to its contemporary celebrities) and the creation of a historical record of events that demonstrated the nation’s ambitions for international recognition. When

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figure 67 | Alexander Gardner, Washington Studio Roof, ca. 1866. Albumen print, 13 × 18 9/16 in. (33 × 47.2 cm). Nelson-​Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2011.7.5. Image: Tiffany Matson.

Gardner opened his firm in the middle of the war, he adopted the Capitol Building as the emblem for his studio (fig. 66). In various forms, the capitol returned as a direct and indirect subject in his work (fig. 67). District art critics took pride in the production of historically relevant photographs of high quality in their city.2 The local Daily Constitutional Union encouraged its readers to visit the new space and described it as “one of the most extensive in the city” and Gardner as “one of the greatest and most scientific photographers in the world.”3 The studio was “a favorite place for local art enthusiasts.”4 The Intelligencer would write that Gardner’s photographs “surpass in finish anything of photographic achievement that we have seen in the country.”5 Beyond Washington, Harper’s editors credited Gardner with the “present perfection of the art of photography.”6 By the end of the war, he had gone from being an unknown studio manager to being the District’s (and, by extension, the nation’s) photographer.7 Union officials ordered all of the generals to have their portraits made at Gardner’s studio, while the American Annual reported that the National Academy of Design petitioned officials to have photographs produced during the war preserved and held at an institution such as the New York Historical Society.8 Gardner, unlike his contemporaries, anchored his vision in the built environment of the nation’s capital and, in this way, continued to telegraph to transnational audiences his democratic ideal. His works foreground Washington as the site of, rather than a backdrop

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figure 68 | Alexander Gardner, Untitled (Washington, DC, soldier springing the trap; men in trees and Capitol dome beyond), 1865. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​B8171-7754.

for, events related to the end of the war. He contextualized events in postwar Washington by offering varying perspectives of federal power. The composition of his group portrait of the Supreme Court locates its central motivation in the presence of Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who developed the thesis of the slave power conspiracy and its threat to the federal government. When documenting the hanging of the notorious Andersonville prison official Captain Henry Wirz, Gardner centered the dome of the Capitol in the image so that it looms—or presides in judgment—in the foreground, treating the built surroundings not as a setting, but as a contributor to, and participant in, the narrative (fig. 68). The story of the hanging is told over several images. As Wirz is led up to the scaffold and placed in the apparatus, and as the death warrant is read, Gardner maintains the position of his camera, but in the images where the trap is sprung and Wirz’s hooded body hangs below, he shifts position dramatically to show the Capitol in the background. It is as if the nation itself, through the “eye” of the dome, looks on, along with the men perched in the trees surrounding the yard.

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Sketch Book was just one of many of Gardner’s works on the themes of democracy, nationhood, infrastructure, and postwar society. Sketch Book’s cost made it prohibitive to everyday consumers. For that wider audience, Gardner displayed at his studio other collaborations and projects, making them available in different formats and as single images and pricing them for the general public. He also partnered with Harper’s Weekly, which featured nearly one hundred images based on photographs produced by the studio, the bulk of which were published between 1864 and 1865. As in the Sentinel, he curated his subjects and offered viewers multiple subjects and formats through which they could connect with history and he could present his core messages. In Sketch Book Gardner interpreted the war as having effectively restored the model of America as a democracy, but this book was just one project of Gardner’s that addressed the function of a democratic government and its institutions. Harper’s Weekly editors called attention to the breadth of his production in the period immediately following the war: “Mr. Gardner’s photographic operations are not limited to the war, and its scenes and soldiers.”9 Sketch Book condensed the wide geography of war by collapsing events into a national narrative. Other projects similarly presented the local as nationally and internationally significant. During a productive period, from 1865 to 1868, that assessments of his work generally overlook, Gardner turned to collaborative works that supported the District as an emblem of democratic triumph and as the nation’s spiritual and moral center at a moment of confusion, tension, and mourning. The documentation of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators was a serialized project, but he also produced individual works, including a photograph of the historian George Bancroft in the hall of the House of Representatives as he delivered his “Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln.”10 While other photographic artists returned to their home markets or moved on to other places in the postwar era, Gardner continued to use District life and architecture as subjects. The city had evolved dramatically since Gardner arrived in the late 1850s. District of Columbia historian Margaret Leech describes antebellum Washington as “a mere ambitious beginning, a baby among the world’s capitals. Its defects were those of youth and energy and inexperience.”11 Early visitors found little evidence of the vision proposed by the French engineer Pierre-​Charles L’Enfant; instead they encountered swampland, bugs, and rickety brick and wooden structures.12 In the antebellum era, international visitors were shocked at the open trading of slaves. As the Union’s headquarters during the Civil War, Washington was the center for war-​related activities. It was upon its streets that the great army organized and drilled. Its buildings served as makeshift hospitals to serve the wounded. Its residents led the nation and crafted historic legislation. After the war, with its newly completed structures, the District finally began to realize the majestic plan laid out by L’Enfant. If antebellum Washington epitomized the unfulfilled

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expectations of the nation, whose grandeur existed more as a vision and a plan on paper than as a place, by the end of the war its institutions had emerged triumphant. Before construction in the District was complete, America lacked a visual tradition of documenting the national built environment. The photographic urban view thrived in cities where photography had a market. The nation’s capital had neither a community of photographers nor a market, let alone grand structures to document. As late as 1860, a well-​known photographer who visited concluded that there was “nothing in the city of photographic interest,” nothing “worth a plate, photographically speaking, unless the landlords wish to illustrate their bar bills.”13 Instead of brick-​and-​mortar structures, the British artist Thomas Cole identified the “natural churches” of the American wilderness as the nation’s spiritual and philosophical structures. In the early 1840s, while Cole was developing his visual vocabulary, the French daguerreotypist Joseph-​Philbert Girault de Prangey was traveling in Italy, Greece, and the Middle East, producing hundreds of architectural views. Europeans had been practicing architectural photography before Americans.14 Americans lacked historical monumental architecture and thus did not possess an extensive background in this kind of photography. Cole presented the American promise by painting a spiritualized nature; Gardner presented it in photographs of the nation’s core institutions and values as represented in architecture. Photographic images of civic structures failed to interest American audiences, whose tastes instead favored depictions of the civic body. It was Brady’s Gallery of Illustrious Americans Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-​Four of the Most Eminent Citizens of the American Republic, Since the Death of Washington (1850) that captured the imagination of both national and international audiences.15 Between 1842 and 1847, Brady’s forerunner, Edward H. T. Anthony, led a team of daguerreotypists in Washington, DC, in making portraits of all available statesmen.16 He published his daguerreotypes as engravings in the newly established Washington-​based journal the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. While not featuring architecture, these projects shared with Gardner’s a vision for collaborating with publishers and authors to produce innovative projects with a national scope. Gardner came of age as a young man in Scotland, when democracy was doubted, when aristocracies and monarchies remained powerful, and when political and economic power was often displayed in the built environment and in landscape. The visual culture to which he was exposed used concepts of civic space and the built environment in their critique of modern society. As depicted in the images in the Poor Man’s Guardian, society’s spiritual and moral infrastructure disintegrated along with the health and well-​being of the lower classes while wealth gathered in property and factories replaced farms. The desire for visibility and representation led the vocal opposition to call the public to the streets for meetings, demonstrations, and marches—a display of the populace to counter

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the images of wealth and industry—in order to demand the very kinds of institutions Gardner photographed. Many Chartists left for America, where they imagined their political and social dreams could be realized. For Gardner to witness America develop as a true democratic model was momentous. His portrait of the triumph of democracy was implicitly a portrait of Washington, DC, as the seat of the federal government. Although the city, traumatized by the war, faced a precarious future as the nation’s capital, the photographs contend it to be prepared to function as the nation’s administrative and moral center. Gardner’s photographic portrayal of Washington, DC, is grounded in his immigrant experience. Because of the esteem in which Scots, and especially Gardner’s circle, held the United States, Washington, as the American capital, was an ideal location for him to work as a photographer. During the Revolutionary period, the Scottish reading public closely followed events in the colonies.17 In the post-​Revolutionary period, the nation’s founding documents bear evidence of the tremendous influence of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.18 As historian Daniel Walker Howe points out, it was in America that the Scottish Enlightenment achieved fulfillment in ways it did not at home.19 To Chartists the success of the American model confirmed that their democratic ideals could exist in reality.20 Robert Owen’s beliefs about America as a site for cooperative experiments inspired Gardner’s Clydesdale colony.21 Freemasons like Gardner admired the city’s namesake, George Washington, as a model of Masonic principles. St. Andrew’s Society events often began with toasts to the American president, and to American values and institutions. To “the free press and the ballot box: the grand safety valve of our glorious Republic,” was the toast one evening.22 The United States—and, therefore, Washington as its seat of government—played a special role in Scottish thought and culture. Labor activists, citing the principles of government that were intended to benefit the many rather than the few, praised the United States for institutionalizing the very policies they hoped to implement in Great Britain.23 While, early on, Walt Whitman was critical of Washington and its political interests, by the end of the war, he, too, saw Washington’s structures as expressing the character of America itself.24 The collaborative projects that occupied Gardner in the postwar years included his partnership with the District author and journalist Samuel Douglas Wyeth on Wyeth’s illustrated books The Federal City: or, Ins and Abouts of Washington (1865) and The Rotunda and Dome of the U.S. Capitol (1868).25 For copies of these books with Gardner’s “admirable photographs,” Wyeth charged a premium of twenty-​five cents (beyond the basic fifty-​cent price). As with other projects, these pamphlets designed for popular audiences gave Gardner a platform for showcasing his social and political theories, as well as his ideas about photography’s potential contributions to historical study. Wyeth sought in his text to rally the country, and the photographs allowed readers to engage more deeply

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with his words. The size, length, and portability of these works meant that they were relatively inexpensive.26 Their potential audience was not the same as the one he addressed in Rays of Sunlight or Sketch Book; in The Federal City, Wyeth positioned Washington as the site around which both sides could unify. Wyeth intended the work to support the reconciliatory mood of the country when he dedicated the works “to my countrymen, north, south, east, west, who love ‘the old flag.’ ” Gardner may have been drawn to Wyeth’s projects because Wyeth was, like him, committed to the District’s ideals. In his text, Wyeth predicted the special function of the District as the nation’s capital in the immediate postwar years: “The city of Washington is far dearer to the nation’s heart now than it was before the breaking out of the Rebellion. . . . The treasure expended, and the blood spilled, in its defense, have made it seem to patriots sacred as a shrine.”27 Wyeth’s implicit argument is that knowledge of Washington is a duty of citizenship. Wyeth derides the rebel states for rejecting federal values as abhorrent: “Years of war, blood, and tears. The ‘stars and bars’ the symbol of rebel arrogance, which with lurid glare affrighted Freedom, has faded out forever, and over one wide Republic now waves undisputed, and with vivifying power, the ‘Stripes and Stars.’ ” In titling the work The Federal City, Wyeth reminded readers that the federal government functioned as the unifying feature of the democracy, and the nation’s capital as the symbolic and administrative center of the country. The title refutes those who felt the District was handicapped by the events of the war and unable to continue to serve the nation as the capital. Walt Whitman captured the nation’s sense of ambivalence toward city in a section of his “Battle of Bull Run”: “Perhaps proud America will never again know such an hour. / She must pack and fly—/ no time to spare. / Those white palaces—/—the dome crown’d capitol there on the hill, so stately over the trees—shall they be left—or destroy’d first?”28 But the title also shows that Wyeth is aware that some citizens do not know their capital city, and so the project The Federal City is a work of persuasion. In his inexpensive pamphlets, accessible to most citizens, the federal city could reenact its power despite its fragile image; the photographs could “prove” that the nation, as embodied in the federal government, was “alive.” The project was yet another way for Gardner to address photography’s capacity to yield information about the world, just as its association with democracy and its ability to copy and replicate details suited Wyeth’s message. The tipped-​in photographic reproductions of the paintings in the US Capitol’s rotunda were Gardner’s contribution to the illustrated versions of Wyeth’s Federal City. Viewers today might interpret Wyeth’s add-​on price for the photographs as a gimmick, but Wyeth understood that the photographs did not merely illustrate but added conceptual depth to his project. By accompanying the text with photographic reproductions of paintings like John Vanderlyn’s Landing of Christopher Columbus (1846), Wyeth, using the modern technique of photographic reproduction, presented a romantic

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conceptualization of the nation’s historical past while simultaneously asserting the contemporary relevance of the nation’s artistic and technical skill and democratic ideals. Such reproductions did not simply circulate as a cheaper method of copying but were associated with close historical knowledge unseen by the naked eye. Wyeth recognized that the platform for his ideas was as significant to the viewer’s understanding as the subject matter itself. He wrote that “an earnest endeavor has been made to obtain true information” to support the historical discussion, and he identified “authenticity” as the cornerstone of his project, which the photographs also support.29 In fact, to Wyeth the texts were so authentic that he called them “war-​photographs of past events.”30 Wyeth’s association of his texts with war photography recalls the function of war photographs at this time; unable to document movement, they functioned like a summary rather than a live documentary. Audiences viewed war photographs as sources of authentic information for historical reflection, whereas illustrations functioned as subjective records. By the end of the war, the photographs produced by the Gardner Studio in particular had established a presence in American culture. In the future, as the editors of Harper’s Weekly predicted, the studio’s production would support “a truly exact and living history of our time.”31 The second body of work Gardner pursued in the postwar years was exclusively his own. These images present the viewer with an actualized vision of government, not an imaginary one. Gardner’s 1865–66 series included views of the Capitol from the east, the Patent Office, the Treasury Department, the Executive Mansion, the Military Asylum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (figs. 69–71). The studio presented the government building projects in portfolios.32 The inclusion of William Winston’s new Corcoran gallery reminded viewers of the city’s broad ambition to become, as one writer put it the year Gardner moved to the District, “the seat of national art, science, learning, and elegance, as well as the center of national political power and influence.”33 Gardner’s photographs for Wyeth’s projects enlivened the inanimate drawings and paintings that defined the visual culture of the capital; in his own ambitious project from this period, Gardner planned to communicate the real-​life and symbolic significance of Washington’s architecture. He photographed government buildings, exhibiting the works at his studio for general audiences and in portfolios for sale.34 The structures and their symbolism form the core composition and narrative of the images. Gardner’s portraits of these institutions suggest his support for the central role of the nation-​state as the force that promotes economic well-​being and guarantees liberty.35 As the core institutions of democratic government, these structures were representative of Gardner’s own French Revolution– inspired dictum that the “people is the source of all political and social power.”36 With their dramatic views and commanding compositions, Gardner’s Washington photographs bear little resemblance to the diffuse and intimate studies by photographers

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figure 69 | Alexander Gardner, Patent-​Office, Washington. From South-​West, 1865. Albumen print, 13 × 18 3/4 in. (33 × 47.6 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of David L. Hack and Museum purchase, with funds from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., by exchange, 98.32.307. figure 70 | Alexander Gardner, Executive Mansion, North Front, 1865. Albumen print, 13 × 18 1/2 in. (33 × 47 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of David L. Hack and Museum purchase, with funds from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., by exchange, 98.32.305.

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figure 71 | Alexander Gardner, Military Asylum, Washington, D.C., 1868. Albumen print, 13 × 18 1/2 in. (33 × 47 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of David L. Hack and Museum purchase, with funds from Walter P. Chrysler Jr., by exchange, 98.32.306.

like Titian Ramsay Peale. Peale made photographs of the topography, architecture, and monuments of Washington and the surrounding area during the 1850s and 1860s (fig. 72). They have a romantic quality and lack the muscular presentation one might expect in images of a capital city. John Wood, the capital’s first official photographer, documented some of the same structures between 1856 and 1861, but his images were intended to record the construction, and they lack the palpability and drama of Gardner’s views (fig. 73). Wood included documentation of specific details, such as the capitals on the columns, to argue for its aesthetic merit. These photographs were used in part to demonstrate to Europeans the technical skill of American engineers. Gardner’s photographs are interested only in the totality of the structures, and, although his photographs were praised for their attention to exterior ornamentation and design, Gardner was not interested in these elements. Whereas the German brothers William and Frederick Langenheim produced a series of views of District architecture titled The Capitol at Washington (1850), which favored partial views and included retouching because the structures were incomplete, Gardner uses lighting and vantage point to create a sense of dominance of the entire structure in the physical environment and in the picture plane. To the Langenheims, the subject matter was a marketing tool; their real interest was promoting

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figure 72 | Titian Ramsay Peale, A Drop of Perspiration on the Portico!, July 21, 1856. Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. figure 73 | John Wood, Sheet 8: Southeast View of the U.S. Capitol from Photographs of the U.S. Capitol, 1857– 58. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge Massachusetts, P1997.36.9.

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figure 74 | Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, Washington’s Tomb, Mt. Vernon, 1862. DeGoyler Library, Southern Methodist University, Civil War: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints, University Park, Texas.

paper-​based photography. Gardner, taking advantage of the technical developments in paper-​based photography, drew on its potential qualities and capacities to promote the structures. This was not the first time the Gardner Studio devoted artistic study to federal architecture. Gardner photographed the tomb of George Washington both before (1862) and after (1867) the war—reminding his viewers of the enduring legacy of Washington. The early example is notable because it established the theme Gardner returned to in the postwar era: the intersection of local geography, nationhood, and history. The photograph Gardner and James Gibson made in 1862, a carte de visite, depicts a man standing beside the tomb (fig. 74). The small format encourages a composition that enables viewers to recognize the subject matter quickly, and it also requires the photographer to formally manage numerous elements without muddling the restricted pictorial space. The composition, which resembles that of a larger-​format photograph, reveals artistic ambitions as it meets the formal challenges. The Gardner and Gibson photograph introduces a nuanced historical narrative that moves beyond its immediately recognizable metaphors. The melancholy scene features an unidentified man wearing a top hat and suit, as if to honor Washington and the site itself. Gardner and Gibson manage the pictorial space of the closely cropped photograph by means of textures and shapes. The human figure partly obscures the graphic forms that

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surround him. Tree limbs frame the brick tomb in the foreground, with its steel grates. In front of the tomb stands an obelisk surrounded by wrought-​iron fencing. Aesthetically, in such paper-​based photographs, mass rather than line, and contrasts between light and shade, are essential considerations to a degree different from those that apply to the daguerreotype.37 The image operates as much by narrative suggestion as by its symbolic associations. The photograph’s mood of solemn nationalism presents the site not just as a memorial but as a place for meditation, promoting an imagined relationship between viewers and Washington—the place and the man. Its mood is echoed in the writing of poet E. Norman Gunnison in 1863. Reflecting on his own visit to the grassy knoll near the tomb, he wrote: “Feeble efforts of my poor pen”—“ ’Tis but a name—a mere word of three syllables—and yet what memories are awakened by the repetition of that name! It wafts us back to the days of ’76—the severely contested battle fields of Bunker Hill and Trenton.”38 Just as Gunnison links the past and present and recalls the heroic events that led to the founding of America, in returning to the same subject through his work with Wyeth and his own work Gardner insists that the American model both has evolved and endured. The subjects of Gardner’s postwar portfolio offer little indication of the massive military presence and infrastructural chaos of the Civil War years. Strong natural lighting dramatically highlights the light stonework of the structures. The depictions of clean streets and elegant stonework suggest nothing of the mud for which Washington was known, nor the unfinished structures. Pennsylvania Avenue had come a long way from the days when residents complained about the “canal” of mud flowing down the street, the “yawning” furrows, and the pigs that “squealed in mud rooting glee.”39 Early visitors to the nation’s capital were disappointed to find rough fields, swampland, and rickety brick and wooden structures.40 Not until the 1830s, when more of the Capitol Building was complete and political figures began to develop reputations, did Washington begin to attract visitors.41 It is not surprising that early images of the capital, which then lacked structures and a history that could connect it to viewers, exploited the aspirations of L’Enfant’s plan and presented his layout of the city as the most extraordinary feature. The reception of the portfolio reveals how the works shaped the capital city’s image pictorially and conceptually. A critic described the 1865–66 series as “veritable portraits.”42 In referring to them as “portraits,” the author illustrates how the images make the viewer aware of the structures as three-​dimensional entities; earlier imagery of the capital had taken an abstracted approach. During the war, Washington’s structures were transformed to serve the war, a change that no doubt personalized the sites to viewers (fig. 75). Gardner, always considering his American subject in the context of world history, promoted this image of Washington abroad when he exhibited the views in 1867 at the Paris Exhibition.43 In the wake of the Civil War, Gardner showed the world pictures

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figure 75 | Armory Square Hospital, Washington D.C., 1861. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​ppmsca-33635.

of a nation resurrected from the destruction of war. By doing so in Paris—a city that captivated the world with its own reconstruction and demonstrated how a capital city could embody a nation’s values and politics—was to proclaim Washington an equally grand and visionary city. Gardner’s photographs would also advertise the beauty of American architecture, a project that Gardner’s own corps member John Wood had begun in the prewar era. Yet he still maintained other ambitions for the project. Gardner conceived of a touring exhibition of select works from the original series. The centerpiece was to be the physical embodiment of democracy itself—the Capitol Building.44 Since accessibility was important to Gardner, he made his work available in multiple formats. Drawing on size, the representational value of the subject, and aesthetic beauty, he ambitiously printed an image of the Capitol as a four-​by-​three-​foot print, and he intended to reprint the other photographs of the original Washington buildings series in the same size.45 Reviewers responded to the large print of the Capitol as an image and a material object. The Intelligencer called it a “surpassing work of photographic art, which in its amazing dimensions, was thought by scientific men to be an impossibility of accomplishment.”46 The studio planned to send the photograph of “majestic portions” on tour around the country.47 The plan called for the picture—“a triumph of art and enterprise”—to be displayed in the lobbies of hotels in the United States and Canada. Gardner commissioned a specially designed seven-​by-​five-​and-​a-​half-​foot frame made of gilt over black walnut, but it is not known whether the work toured as planned.

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Gardner’s plans for the series are significant to the analysis of the approach and composition of the images. These images were intended for wall display, and Gardner adopted an effective strategy in producing them. He was aware of the varied audiences that viewed his work and their differing experience of it, and his studio had a prior commitment to offering works in various formats and at varying price points. These are not photographs that encourage the examination of photographic detail, as in Sketch Book; the contrasty images even suppress detail, though at the same time the contrast enhances the structures’ graphic lines and in this way supports viewing from a distance, while the bright spaces emphasize their newness. After the great conflict, the Capitol survived. As Whitman would later write in “This Day, O Soul” (1865–66): “Long in the dark, in tarnish and cloud it lay—But the cloud has pass’d, and / the tarnish gone; / Behold, O Soul! It is now a clean and bright mirror / Faithfully showing you all the things of the world.”48 Photographs of District structures and agencies like the Patent Office were particularly germane to Gardner’s representation of his political philosophy as a member of the transatlantic reform community. In Europe, such institutions were by law organized around the exclusion of the majority of its citizens. To Gardner and his cohort, freedom of access and inquiry were defining principles of good government. In this formulation, the American government was a morally good government. Weary of historical rule by a monarchy, the founders followed the idea that power was always concentrated at the expense of others; the division of power in the American system of government was the foundation for the moral health of society.49 The Patent Office made possible all of the American innovations Gardner chronicled in the pages of the Sentinel. The provision under which the Constitution established the Patent Office brought together two of Gardner’s passions: “That Congress shall have the power . . . to promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts by securing for limited Times to authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”50 The Patent Office spoke to an essential element of American egalitarianism: anyone could apply for a patent. Appointed officials would consider the proposed ideas, and thus all individuals could potentially chart an economic path with their ideas as well as contribute to national progress. This system had the potential to do more than support the national economy; it was a lever for individual and collective advancement. Gardner’s Sentinel had once explained the link between personal well-​being, industry, and national progress: “Industry is the most important occupation of the human mind. Without it, man would not be a progressive being. The industrious thinker, and the industrious worker are the authors and maintainers of civilized society.”51 The photograph of the Patent Office is another display of Gardner’s skill in photographing architecture. Photography historian Peter Bacon Hales describes how difficult

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it was for photographers to establish vantage points in early American cities, and he analyzes the impact of vantage point on the mood of the image and, thus, its interpretation.52 Gardner’s elevated vantage point in the Patent Office photograph, which followed the convention of the city view, activates the lines of the structure and the sculptural presence of the columned façades. The marble was a striking feature of the capital’s buildings. Whitman responded to it with awe: “Everything so white, so marblely [sic] pure and dazzling, yet soft.”53 Whitman’s description both projects the monumentality of the structures as contemporary objects and recalls their immediate past as the sites where the nation’s fighting men were nurtured back to health. The brightness of the photograph would highlight its presence on a wall as well as the marble of the structure; these effects were its prized features. Though the structure is built on a flat area, Gardner’s vantage point makes it appear to be built on a slope; it seems to rise at the back of the composition. Because the image has no human figures, the scale of the structure is effectively distorted. It seems quite large, but not imposing. Shadows call attention to the graphic details in the stonework and introduce texture. The empty street enhances the structure’s dramatic presence. Unlike John Plumbe’s daguerreotype of the building made nearly twenty years before (fig. 76), Gardner’s structure is not depicted as part of an eclectic urban fabric; instead, it dominates the photograph as a formal (and metaphorical) force. The photograph, as it extols the architecture, calls attention to the exclusive function of the Patent Office. Robert Mills, who designed the building, included a large hall on the second floor that was meant to be used as a national gallery of the industrial arts and manufactures, which would display models of patented and unpatented inventions; in other words, the very architecture of the building performed the function of the Patent Office. Designated the National Gallery of American Manufacturers and Agriculture, it would be a “perpetual exhibition of the progress and improvement of the arts in the United States.”54 Photographers were among the most vigorous contributors to this repository. In the 1850s, as America began to emerge as a formidable industrial and economic power, interest in the development of photography led to thousands of patents and inventions of photographic “types”: ferrotypes, ambrotypes, melainotypes, and more.55 In Scotland, thinkers already linked photography’s uses to science, education, and technology. 56 Gardner—a man who in 1850 wrote withering critiques of another national display with a similar mission—proudly presents the Patent Office, which was devoted to the work of the everyday man, as an integral part of the nation’s progress and innovation. The Patent Office’s library of patents and free display of information and machinery fulfilled a significant goal for labor reformers: increasing access to new technology as another mechanism for bringing about social change. Among labor advocates in Scotland, there was an extended debate about how to foster the fairer distribution of the benefits of new technologies, and how technologies could contribute to alleviating the

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figure 76 | John Plumbe, Old Patent Office Building, 1846. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZC4-3596.

challenges facing the poor and the working class, as well as serve society as a whole.57 Robert Owen, for example, saw machinery as both the greatest cause of social ills, and as the most significant potential remedy for the ills of industrialized labor. 58 Gardner and his Sentinel editors expanded Owen’s critique when they questioned who had access to technology—“the helots of higher power”—and those who did not.59 The Patent Office could be read in tandem with the Military Asylum, which was also included in the series. Established following the Mexican War, the Military Asylum cared for the wounded during the Civil War and, later, for veterans. The Patent Office was another resource for the veteran hoping to secure his economic future. In his Veteran in a New Field, Homer looked to the somber yeoman farmer returning to his fields and picking up the tools he had used before the war, ambivalent about the shift from regional and local economies to a national one. The Washington portfolio does not reflect such ambivalence, but expresses faith in a nation’s ideals and institutions to support the everyday citizen. Gardner’s image foregrounds a nation, not of simple farmers seeking to maintain old ways of living with old tools, but curious and vibrant inventors seeking to improve their work through technology. This was the nation, as Gardner’s friend John

Wa shington ’s Promise figure 77 | Alexander Gardner, Untitled (Richmond, VA, “burnt” district), 1865. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​DIG-​cwpb-00404.

Craig had once assured him from Iowa, where “the laws are perhaps the best in existence for the government of a people—who own no one as master.”60 Through Craig’s letters, which detailed his geological findings and assessments of soil quality, Gardner learned about the vast resources that the land offered to potential farmers and entrepreneurs. Unlike in Europe, land and government resources were not just available to those with economic and social standing, but to all. Gardner’s was a vision of historical time: the image promotes economic independence that, because of the system of American government created by the founders, was still possible in the modern era. Technological development and innovation were central to the modern American democracy. In “The American-​ness of American Technology,” historian Eugene Ferguson explains that American technological tools had larger cultural meanings.61 Inanimate objects like farm implements stood for American labor and the American pioneering spirit. Americans transformed creations like the sailing ship into the faster-​moving clipper ship—a distinctly American take on technology that fit the nation’s cultural and geographic reality. Photography was one of these technologies. When it emerged in 1839, its inventors detailed in an application for a patent such uses as documenting the great monuments of the world, and Americans adapted it to their own needs. Photographic portraiture and technological progress in its production excelled in America and developed at a more rapid pace than in any other country. Thinkers of the era imagined photography as part of the process of validating the nation’s providential origins and divine mission.62 The architectural portraits Gardner made in the destroyed former capital of the Confederacy, shortly after its fall in 1865, differ greatly from his photographs of Washington’s architecture, with their clean lines and brightness (fig. 77). In these images, the skyline that was once distinguished by structures of industry, is jagged. The citywide fires in Richmond had given a dark cast to its structures, and the amount and variety of debris strengthen the photographs’ evocation of the chaos of the recent past events of the war. In documenting specific structures, Gardner makes the point that Richmond’s infrastructure is no more: the ironworks, flour and paper mills, and railroads are all depicted as decimated. The skyline in the Richmond photographs is jagged and hollow, while that of

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Washington is noble and robust. The Gardner Studio sold the Richmond photographs as stereoviews, but sold the Washington series in portfolios, certain works of which were printed in especially large sizes. In each case, the presentation format suggests something of Gardner’s attitude toward the subject. The images of destruction would immerse viewers in their details; those of Washington would serve monumentally, as representations of the nation’s grand aspirations. In the “burnt” district, Gardner skillfully positions his camera to draw attention to the presence of blocks and blocks of ruins. The photograph mixes layers of architectural features that run both across the image and move further into it. A fence and road run across the foreground, and another road leads into the background. These roads point viewers in different directions, while structures seen through what remains of a window (its frame)—and sometimes through more than one—emphasize the extent of the destruction. The remainders of brick, seen against the backdrop of the sky, form different shapes, suggesting the varied former uses of the buildings. Some of them look like former warehouses, with clean lines and large windows; others appear to have columns, as if they had served a civic function. Such photographs of ruins function, as photography historian Miles Orvell writes, as portraits of “what’s broken and can’t be fixed.”63 As portraits of a kind of general “condition,” the photographs of Richmond portray more than physical structures. They show the collapse of something far more fundamental: a Southern society that cannot rise again. George Washington had once written of how the commerce made possible by the nation’s major rivers and waterways linked the East to the interior portions of the country, binding citizens by “a chain which can never be broken.”64 At war’s end, however, the future of Washington as the capital city was uncertain.65 Some sought a new start for the nation, one that involved a new capital city, less affected by the memories of secession and the Civil War. The city’s antebellum reputation for economic stagnation and for inadequate attendance to its own administration and infrastructure instilled little confidence that it could direct the rest of the country. There were questions about even the desirability of a national union, and in the post–Civil War era this issue emerged in a new context. Gardner’s photographs suggest that the nation is already bound together by its institutions, as represented by the architecture of the District of Columbia. Gardner’s photographs use these structures as tools to unify the nation, and he planned to tour with his photographs to bring audiences together around them. In this way, he performed the Chartists’ strategy of connecting dispersed and likeminded people through shared ideals, revealing and affirming the connections among them. Gardner’s celebration of infrastructure links him to his muses, Walt Whitman and President Lincoln. For both, “internal improvements” represented a spiritual project. The term

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is more commonly understood to simply refer to the development and construction of American infrastructure. In Scotland the Sentinel used it in this sense, while portraying the United States as a thriving, modern and egalitarian society. Historian John Lauritz Larson defines “internal improvements” as programs to encourage the security, prosperity, and enlightenment of American citizens.66 Linking citizens was of paramount importance because, as Larson writes, “nothing threatened the mutual interest of citizens like geographical isolation.”67 The implementation of internal improvements in the years after the American Revolution were an effort to fulfill the promise of revolutionary ideals, to which self-​creation was key. In their time, writes DC historian Sarah Luria, Whitman’s and Lincoln’s rhetoric also praised internal improvements, as a testament to the Union’s “sublimity and depth.”68 Whitman and Lincoln believed that infrastructure improved movement and communication, thus strengthening the bonds between people, a project in which photography played a role. The photograph, as material object and image, portrayed and supported connections between the people of the nation. If the core of the union of states was communication, photography spoke to one of the nation’s essential qualities. For Gardner the reformer, the idea of a nation dedicated to systematic improvements signaled a historic and progressive commitment to the needs not just of those in population centers that were deemed important or whose residents were powerful, but of the broader populace. This would, as in the words of Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor often described it (echoing Washington), forge the “great chain” of society held together by the people.”69 In America, photography was discussed in rhetoric similar to that used with reference to the phenomena that revolutionized communication: the telegraph, the railroad, and the postal exchange. According to media historian Simone Natale, “Photography was conceived of as a medium that put images in movement, allowing pictures taken from reality to be carried, marketed and transported.”70 Like other inventions of the communication revolution, photography could mediate the geographic distance between families and communities. In the antebellum era, thinkers looked to works such as John Adam Whipple’s daguerreotypes of the moon (1849) and Seth Eastman’s images of Dighton Rock (ca. 1840), the site of ancient petroglyphs, as vital to the effort to recover the proof and promote the validity of the nation’s providential origins. In the postwar era, photography itself was increasingly considered a productive force in science, government, business, and popular culture. Gardner’s studio photographers crafted their photographs to embody an image of a new and modern artist for the communication era. In particular, they singled out the media artists of their era as special historical actors, born at this moment out of a social climate hungry for new interactions with the world around them, and of the war’s pictorial possibilities and new media environment. They repeatedly made depictions of other

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figure 78 | Alexander Gardner, Virginia. Newspaper Vendor and Cart in Camp, 1863. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​B8171-617.

mass media artists like themselves who interacted with daily life. Gardner himself made portraits of news reporters and of newspaper wagons (figs. 78–79). Studio friend and fellow immigrant Alfred Waud was a frequent sitter, and each portrait explored his identity as an artist and visual reporter. At Gettysburg, Timothy O’Sullivan depicted Waud with a serious expression, sitting atop a rock, pencil poised, a thick sketchbook balanced on one leg (fig. 80). The visibility of the tops of the rocky area in the background allows O’Sullivan to suggest Waud has climbed to an elevated position. He often made the battlefield sketches he published in Harper’s from such a perspective; here, the viewer sees the artist himself and can imagine from his facial expression and his perch that he is in the midst of working on a battle sketch. He is clearly alone, as he moves into position and creates the sketch, basing his decisions on his own intuition and

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145 figure 79 | Alexander Gardner, Execution of Captain Henry Wirtz (i.e. Wirz), C.S.A. Newspaper Reporters Viewing the Execution, 1865. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​B8184-7756. figure 80 | Timothy O’Sullivan, Gettysburg, PA. Alfred R. Waud, Artist of Harper’s Weekly, Sketching on Battlefield, 1863. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-533.

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drive. The direction of his gaze suggests that Waud is watching action move across his field of vision. The viewer understands from the location of the photograph that Waud is working to draw scenes from a historic event. His gaze is intense, though his pose appears relaxed. The setting, the facial expression, and the pose function together, presenting a brave individual who works with confidence. The artists of Gardner’s circle identified with and defined their experience of the war through their distinct perspectives as eyewitness artists. Alfred Waud once wrote: “To tell the truth, no amount of money can pay a man for going through what we have had to suffer lately, and being to my great astonishment alive, I feel a good deal like leaving myself.”71 Unlike visual journalism, portrait photography could be lucrative. As such, portrait photographers followed the armies. A correspondent for the Photographic News reported: “A camp is hardly pitched before one of the omnipresent artists in collodion and amber varnish drives up his two-​horse wagon, pitches his canvas gallery, and unpacks his chemicals . . . the amount of business they find is remarkable. The tents are thronged from morning to night, and ‘while the day lasteth’ their golden harvest runs on.”72 Gardner corps member Eli Whitney noted this commercialization of war-​related imagery and differentiated the journalistic fieldwork he and others did from that of photographers merely in search of commercial gain. He told the British Journal of Photography: “We endured the hardships of the camp, the difficulties of getting transportation, the sickening sights of the dead and dying, the danger of capture—and for what? To perpetuate for history the scenes of war, refusing to stop by the way to make portraits for money, which many were doing.”73 Like the soldiers they documented, these men developed an identity that was shaped by the war experience, forging a new visual art of eyewitness. The kind of image production that emerged from the Gardner Studio during and after the Civil War was far different from what the American photographic establishment had imagined when the war first began. Months into the Civil War, members of the American Photographical Society met for their regular meeting and discussed the role photography might play in the conflict. The future of American photography had preoccupied the community’s leaders during the years before the war. Since the 1850s, the appearance of trade publications like the Photographic Art-​Journal signaled the American photographic community’s desire to professionalize; many of these journals wanted to differentiate photographic artists from photographic entrepreneurs and technicians, while revising the popular associations of photographers as hucksters and swindlers. The war seemed the opportune moment to introduce the public to a new nationalist model of photographic production. To the leaders of the American Photographical Society, the photographer scientist model was most promising. Dr. Henry Draper, an early leader in the field famous for his lunar photographs, made a presentation before the elite society to assure the audience

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and readers of the society’s journal, the American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts, of the thriving American photographic community. As evidence of progress, Draper described a long list of achievements in American photographic production and research for the year, including Professor Charles Seely’s improved negatives and Draper’s own lunar photographs. He spurred on pioneers and would-​be inventors alike: “There are a thousand discoveries to be made, promising to those who love science for its own sake a bountiful harvest of reputation, and to those who desire a more tangible reward, abundant riches. Indeed, there is probably no other branch of knowledge which can equal photography in these respects.” Despite the state of the country, Draper concluded, American practitioners must call on their curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit and work to further the field of photography. Conscious of an audience of inventors and practitioners who were concerned that Americans lagged behind Europe in innovation, he ended by describing photography as “a special branch of knowledge . . . which it is our business to cultivate.”74 To Draper and others, the war offered the opportunity for Americans to contribute to the history and progress of the medium, and to gain the kind of distinction within the transatlantic community that seemed to be asymmetrically dominated by Europeans. The vision put forth that winter evening was a specialized definition of photography, as science, and of the photographer, as a scientist-​inventor, that nonetheless overlooked America’s burgeoning assortment of photographic practices. Alexander Gardner and his studio provided an alternative to the model of the photographer-​ scientist: the social scientist photographer. This photographer was a part of the nation’s infrastructure as a communicator of the nation’s social life, and a distinguished actor within and contributor to the democracy.

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Foregrounding Alexander Gardner’s commitment to social and labor reform and his work within a transnational community as a critic of industrialization and capitalism, as well as drawing on details of his own actions inspired by these commitments and his texts that address these topics, this book offers a wider context for interpreting the Civil War–era photographic projects that Gardner conceived, produced, and oversaw. The interpretation moves beyond their significance to American audiences and to American cultural memory. His photographs and photographic projects propose that slavery was morally incompatible with, and undermined, the American political and social model; that the Northern side had not been corrupted by slavery and possessed the values needed for societies to survive and thrive; and that the democratic system was designed to provide more support to small artisans and farmers. His friend Walt Whitman similarly identified the war with the effort to secure an authentic democracy and believed Northerners would learn the meaning of democracy in the process of defending it.1 Like Gardner, other nineteenth-​century American observers also believed that the art of the war could serve its memory but could also promote American democracy. While discussing the art of Winslow Homer in 1867, a critic for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News wrote: One of the most conclusive evidences of the strengths of a republican form of government is the way in which our army has disbanded, each man seeking again the sphere of usefulness which he left temporarily, to aid the Government in its need. The taunts of our enemies in Europe, and the predictions

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they kept constantly uttering, that even if we escaped the danger of drifting into military despotism, we would find, when the army was disbanded, that the country would be filled with men who had been demoralized by years spent in its service, shook the faith of even many thoughtful persons who believed in the republic system. Now, however, the war is over, and all such fears are shown to be groundless, we can well congratulate ourselves upon the manner in which the veterans have returned to their old fields, or sought for new ones, since in this we find one of the surest proofs of the stability of our political system.2 To this observer, the nation’s shared political foundation made reconciliation possible, and the process of achieving that reconciliation peacefully proved the superiority of the American political model. Gardner’s work can similarly be interpreted as an extended statement on the strength of the republic’s principles and ideals. Gardner’s beliefs, which implicitly compared the societies and governments of his native Europe with those of America, came directly from his own observation, experience, and political beliefs as an immigrant from Scotland. Coming from Europe, Gardner lived and witnessed the years known as the great Age of Reform. From around 1815 until the Crimean War, individuals and the organizations they created, along with their followers, aiming to create a new egalitarian reality, attacked existing political and social hierarchies. This was a particularly radical period in Scotland’s history, when the transformations wrought by industrialization instigated protest on a nationwide scale and a search for answers to the material, physical, and psychological distress suffered by the working classes.3 When Gardner’s eulogist, his fellow Mason Joseph Wilson, described how Gardner’s chief interest was “to convince the understanding, arouse the conscience, and affect the heart,” he was referring to Gardner’s unwavering belief in, and promotion of, the principles of democracy.4 Leading reformists approached the contentious topics of the era—world peace, temperance, abolitionism, and suffrage—as interrelated moral issues. Scottish reformers, in particular, saw these causes as intrinsically linked. All of them stood as barriers to salvation, and all barriers would ultimately stand or fall together.5 Moreover, everyone could contribute to the course of their lives and affect the course of history; even if they did not have wealth and status, these reformers argued, all were endowed with the intellectual faculties needed for the task. The reform movement was open to those who considered themselves, as Gardner’s coeditor Robert Buchanan expressed it, “Bold pioneers of truth and human happiness!,” “The benevolent and good . . . ,” and “Lovers of human kind—friends of true liberty!”6 The rhetoric of this era, beyond the theoretical and conceptual, was linked to and informed by efforts to apply these ideas in society. Ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic joined likeminded communities, as Gardner did, and worked to design mechanisms for and to practice these ideas in

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their everyday lives. Gardner brought an ability to manage multiple contemporary and interconnected narratives, and to understand their historical context and his conception of public opinion and different media, to his practice of photography. For Gardner and many other nineteenth-​century reformers, the causes they championed were a means to examine, understand, and perfect the meaning of democracy. Indeed, as historian of slavery, abolitionism, and transatlantic abolitionism W. Caleb McDaniel underscores, this discussion about the nature of democracy was the defining topic of the nineteenth-​ century Atlantic World.7 Radicals argued that monopolies of power fostered oppression and could only be eradicated in a democracy. This commitment was expressed in such pieces as “Organization of Democracy,” a manifesto written by a group of reformers and exiles that was quoted in the Sentinel: “The forces of Democracy are immense. God, his providential law, the aspirations of thinkers, the instincts and the wants of the masses, the crimes and the faults of its adversaries combat for it. At every instant, it gains a new hearth; it rises like the tide. From Paris to Vienna, from Rome to Warsaw, it furrows the European soil.”8 The ideas of the Scottish reformers were not far from others in the international reform community, such as American William Jay, who declared a new era in which public opinion would triumph over the old voices of “ancient institutions.”9 In America at least, reformers struggled to maintain the relevance of the vision as the practical difficulties of governance became real during and after the Civil War. Gardner, although he revered the architecture and the founding vision of the District of Columbia and the nation more broadly, failed to comprehend fundamental issues like the meaning of emancipation in the unfolding postwar drama, and the questions it posed to the very institutions he documented. Gardner’s ideas, which served a smaller country at a moment of crisis, did not serve investigations into complex human psychologies, or, more generally, a nation of expanding economies, geographies, and diversifying peoples. Civil War historian Eric Foner asks: “Did freedom mean simply the absence of slavery, or did it imply other rights for the emancipated slaves, and if so, which ones: civil equality, the suffrage, ownership of property?”10 The question of how to represent African Americans as full citizens, and the dynamics between ethnic identity and class politics, remained open in documentary photography into the twentieth century. Gardner’s lack of recognition of his own class difference and privilege, as well as his romantic perspective of labor and laborers, would also become problematic to the future producers of social reform documentary. Moving beyond conceptual notions of a “public,” and portraying the marginalized beyond abstract idealizations, collective identities, and impersonal economic structures, would become one of the key differentiating pursuits and features of more contemporary reform and documentary practices. Reform causes presented Gardner with new visions for society. At the Sentinel, Gardner was immersed in a group of internationally known writers and activists and introduced

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to a social circle that included Glasgow and Scotland’s political and cultural intelligentsia. Through the reform community, Gardner learned to understand the United States as a political and social model, and to analyze it within a global context and alongside histories of democratic ideals and institutions. He also gained an understanding of public opinion and of the ways broad access to media could powerfully contribute to social discourse. Broadly, Chartism encouraged collective experiences that could help to forge a collective consciousness. It was his exposure to reform literary culture, specifically Chartist, that shaped his conception of creative expression as political action. Playing a central ideological and unifying role in the British movement for the rights of the working class, Chartist literary culture introduced audiences to new ideas, and helped to foster emotional bonds and common beliefs that were foundational to the movement’s infrastructure.11 Gardner joined the Sentinel at a formative moment in the history of journalism, and he devoted himself to photography when paper-​based formats expanded the medium’s possibilities for art, documentation, presentation, and distribution. Photography’s collective viewing possibilities, realism, and capacity for detail presented Gardner with new ways to convey reform messages and influence public opinion. In a lengthy statement, Gardner and his Sentinel editors once wrote that their goal was to “supply a void in the newspaper press of Scotland, an independent and energetic organ of Democracy and popular freedom.”12 The subjects Gardner pursued in America also filled a void in American visual culture. He attended to telling stories visually in photography as an extension of a reform community belief that esteemed poetry as the highest medium of personal thought that could also connect with readers spiritually and intellectually.13 Instead of considering solely artistic innovation, this interpretation simultaneously calls attention to the political messages that were equally as important to Gardner himself. If, according to Robert Owen, knowledge about how to change society necessarily had to come from direct experience and reformers had to operate as social scientists, photography allowed Gardner to practice his work as a social scientist and offered his viewers the ability to act as social scientists themselves.14 As opposed to Mathew Brady, who claimed celebrity for himself and artistic vision as solely his own, Gardner promoted and demonstrated the possibilities of collective production for the collective good. The international context for interpreting Gardner’s work poses a way of understanding the Civil War as a new era of American photography. Gardner’s vision, at a transitional moment between the era of the daguerreotype and of paper-​based photography, offered a path for American photography as a new narrative form. If the portrait-​based daguerreotype—“cultural force as well as emblem,” as Alan Trachtenberg describes it—introduced to American audiences empirical proof of themselves and of the national body, paper-​based photography used visual information about a massively expanding variety of subjects to construct and contextualize the rapidly changing world.15 Gardner’s practice operated at

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this historical juncture, a moment whose significance his practice underscores. During the Mexican War, the daguerreotype’s technical limitations meant that photographers could not answer the public’s desire for both visual accuracy and narrative sentiment.16 The Civil War era presented photographers with a commercial and cultural environment in which media of all sorts played a greater role. Further, the time-​consuming methods of the 1840s and 1850s for producing multimedia daguerreotypes to engage audiences with contemporary history and its figures—what the art historian Michael Leja describes as “transmedial fortification and consolidation”—could not keep up with the pace or the cultural tastes of the period, even though such art was needed at the time more than ever.17 As an article in Continental Monthly explained: “The immense military operations of our Civil War have familiarized, to a considerable extent, not only those connected with the armies, but the people generally with the systems on which military forces are organized the methods of conducting war.”18 The writer also conceded that objects and artworks played a significant role in acquainting Americans with the war—the exhibition of objects and the looking at artworks offered the public “actual information”—and that such representational practices were “now understood among the leading civilized nations.”19 Gardner’s paper-​based photography pioneered a dynamic function unavailable to the daguerreotype: the use of visual information to construct and to contextualize historical narratives.20 In The Camera and the Press, art historian Marcy Dinius describes how, by the mid-​nineteenth century, “daguerreotype” came to be used as a shorthand for mechanical objectivity, symbolically associated with morality, democracy, and progress. The daguerreotype portrait formula—with its props and careful compositions—was an effort to transmit an elusive beauty that men like Marcus Aurelius Root equated with a kind of sympathetic transference, even telepathy. Daguerreotype studios—or “operating rooms,” as they were reverentially called—elite subjects, and the preciousness of the photographic object were unsuited to the pace and volume of a wartime information culture that demanded the translation and dissemination of an image across formats. The war demanded photographers seek the meaning of likeness beyond the visible material facts. Mathew Brady’s problem was not just marketing, as photography historian Barbara McCandless argues; it was his failure to understand the emerging media culture, and how photographs could function beyond the iconic.21 Brady faced challenges in adapting his practice before the war even began. When he opened his studio in 1858, Brady’s contemporaries noted that he had not introduced anything truly innovative to the Washington community: Brady “made a fine display,” wrote one critic, but was showing “nothing but what he has exhibited in his specimen gallery in New York.” 22 Outside of local audiences, the Washington studio never received the kind of lengthy and effusive praise he received for his New York studio. Brady did not claim Washington as a residence and only visited occasionally for social affairs and some high-​profile

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assignments.23 These facts do not diminish Brady’s contribution. They do suggest that Gardner and Brady possessed different conceptions of how photography could serve the nation at this transition, and Gardner as a Scottish immigrant—connected with the wealthy immigrant community and as a resident himself—was especially positioned in Washington to leverage connections and obtain support for his vision. Finally, with his flaws, Gardner the reformer laid the foundation for reform photography in America. He had been exposed to a British visual culture of reform that innovated the portrayal of broad social problems and transformed the facts about those problems into compelling literature, displays, and images. Gardner’s political community pursued creative forms to connect supporters and inspire new followers. In America, his photography engaged the definition of what would become known as reform photography: his focus on elevating underrecognized segments of society, addressing social divisions, humanizing the marginalized, and realizing America’s democratic and founding ideals are themes future photographic practitioners would also embrace. This work, influenced by the politics, research, and theories of contemporary reform movements, educated and informed its audiences.24 Gardner’s generation was a forerunner of socially minded American photography. Similarly, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographers worked on behalf of social institutions and in support of federal programs, but it was Gardner’s work that effectively demonstrated how photography in the postdaguerreotype era could provide a visual reference for and support American values and ideals. In the years before the war, there was the sense that this service to the public would be the District’s contribution to the history of American photography. When local papers announced William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention, columnists speculated about how photography could be of service to the government.25 When photographers did begin to work in the District, observers stressed that these projects were less for profit than to support the mission in producing a historical portrait collection for the public record.26 They hoped the government would collect photographs of national interest and preserve it for future generations.27 Though in the prewar years observers were confident that photography would thrive in the District as “the great social and political center of the Union, to which all intellect, talent and beauty of the country are attracted,” it was not until the Civil War era that the photographic community managed to establish a distinct identity.28 It was then that Washington emerged as the center for a new era of public photographic projects because of Gardner’s production. This kind of government-​sponsored and socially driven inquiry would come to be a distinguishing feature of American photography in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The stage for Gardner’s last commentary on the American experiment was the West. Gardner embarked on what would be his last field project in 1867, setting out with

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William Pywell to document the development of the eventually defunct Kansas Pacific Railway, Eastern Division. The rail line was to begin in Kansas City, Missouri, and eventually end in San Francisco. But even this specific choice of subject matter resonated especially with Gardner’s project to contextualize the Civil War. In the Western territories, Gardner found himself photographing the landscape where the war began. A conflict that presaged it, “Bleeding Kansas,” as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley named it, took place on the then-​frontier of the Kansas Territory and Missouri between 1854 and 1859, in reaction to specific political events. “Bleeding Kansas” was precipitated by the Kansas-​Nebraska Act of 1854, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and allowed settlers in those territories to determine if they would allow slavery within their boundaries. The Kansas-​Nebraska Act led to violent confrontations between antislavery “Free-​Staters” and proslavery “Border Ruffians,” who clashed over the question of whether or not the region would be a free or slaveholding territory. The violence and turmoil the conflict elicited over nearly six years would severely impact the nation’s psyche. Not only was the struggle over control of the region, but it seemed to encapsulate a range of events during the tumultuous 1850s: the Dred Scott decision, Harper’s Ferry, the Lincoln-​Douglas debates, the reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and various incidents concerning enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.29 In his photographs, Gardner demonstrates his consciousness of the history of the region. The town of Lawrence (fig. 81) is the subject of many of the photographs. Audiences would have known Lawrence because of the Lawrence Massacre, also known as Quantrill’s Raid, a rebel guerrilla attack during the Civil War by Quantrill’s Men, led by William Clarke Quantrill, on the pro-​Union town. Gardner’s Lawrence has been rebuilt, purged of the memories of the past twenty years. Gardner records storefronts and street signage that shows evidence of economic activity. He poses people along the wide and long main street with various props—animals, wheel barrels. Other photographs depict the various colleges and universities in Kansas, referencing the state’s progressive history of public education. These structures are centered in the photograph, framed against blank skies (fig. 82). The sense of historical time is marked in these structures, which project the changes in this region. When Gardner began work on the project, the owner of the railroad, John D. Perry, had yet to obtain the government funding for its completion. Arguing that a southern route to the West Coast would be more advantageous than the northern route being built by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, Perry claimed that his railroad would pacify the Native American population and provide access to the lucrative markets of the Mexican Empire. The pursuit of transforming the desert prairie, and of Western settlement as an antidote to the wounds of the Civil War, took on a kind of religious zeal. Wrote

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figure 81 | Alexander Gardner, Massachusetts Avenue, Lawrence, Kansas, from Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad: Route of the 35th Parallel (Alexander Gardner, 1868). Boston Public Library.

booster Josiah Crosby, “Under the operation of the forces now in action, this long talk of ‘desert’ will soon blossom as the rose . . . let John D. Perry, a modest American citizen, send his army of peaceful laborers and tracklayers across the borders of that unhappy country, and order, peace, and true empire will result at once.”30 In 1868, however, the company only had rights to the land across Kansas, and the rest of the route was yet to be planned. Gardner’s photographs, crafted into a sequential narrative of the journey that differentiated it from the scientific detail of the surveys, were ostensibly meant to be used in support of this message and in securing the required funding. But, as with his other projects, Gardner infused this commission with his own ideas about American history and landscape. The photographs, showcasing fertile fields, working men, and schools, reflect his own lifelong interest in land and resources, fair treatment

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figure 82 | Alexander Gardner, Overlooking Lawrence and the Kansas River, from Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad: Route of the 35th Parallel (Alexander Gardner, 1868). Boston Public Library.

and fair labor, and a photographic practice that both inspires and captures these reforms. If one compares Gardner’s work to his contemporaries who also worked on railroad projects, such as Andrew Joseph Russell, John Carbutt, and Alfred Hart, one can observe how Gardner’s visual vocabulary almost uniformly avoids the sweeping views, cliffs, and drama that so characterizes their work. Gardner’s photographs seem more expressly interested in portraying the historical and social landscape of this space than with the physical one. For the first time, in the Kansas photographs, Gardner includes himself in the photographs. These images suggest the ways in which this story—the story of the nineteenth century, the story of what historians have called the “Long Civil War”—was personally meaningful. In an image titled A Rare Specimen Found, Gardner sits on a piece

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figure 83 | Alexander Gardner, A Rare Specimen Found on Hill above Fort Riley, Kansas, 420 Miles West of St. Louis, Mo., from Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific, Eastern Division (Alexander Gardner, 1867). Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-​USZ62-11000.

of equipment and looks up at a man standing holding a plant (fig. 83). Gardner’s hat obscures his face, and he turns toward the man, with one hand on his hip. His traveling photographic wagon is in the background. In his other hand he holds a camera in his hand, the lens pointed out toward the viewer. The large eye of the lens is the focal point of the composition. The photographs in this final project are metaphoric images of a landscape reborn following the tumultuous and bitter years of Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. As the project wore on into the 1870s, however, the dream of the new era of harmony Gardner and others had imagined quickly began to fade. Gardner retired from photography just as the hopes for national reconstruction met a violent backlash. Following 1872, Gardner returned to Washington, retired from photography, and worked in insurance. Gardner’s last photograph, made in 1872, depicts Seal Rocks, just off the coast of San Francisco (fig. 84). The photograph’s caption, “Last scene of all in this strange, eventful history,” references the words of Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances”); Jacques’s meditation on life’s stages ends with: “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history / Is second childishness and mere oblivion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Thirty years earlier, working-​class radicals enlisted Shakespeare as an ally, and his writing inspired their movement for freedom, equality, and representation.31 This particular quote reads as Gardner’s acknowledgment of the end of an era of reform. Ironically, around the time of the making of this photograph, back in

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figure 84 | Alexander Gardner, “Seal Rocks,” in Pacific Ocean, near San Francisco, from Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad: Route of the 35th Parallel (Alexander Gardner, 1868). Boston Public Library.

Scotland the Sentinel published its last issue. The editors wrote, “A generation that knew us have passed away and with the new have come perhaps new habits of thoughts and desires in the journals they will favor.”32 In his eulogy of Gardner, Joseph Wilson said that “there are always men who seem to be made for the times in which they live; men who are generic forces, who originate thought, create circumstances and stamp their own impress upon the community.”33 Seal Rocks was recognized as the long-​dreamt-​of terminus, the gateway from the United States to the world. For Gardner, this was more than a fantasy of economic power, but a dream of the American promise as a model for the world and of the ages—a promise that the circumstances of his life and epoch uniquely inspired him to imagine.

Notes

introduction

1. Glasgow Herald, April 14, 1851, and Glasgow Herald, April 18, 1851. 2. Without providing citations, scholars generally use 1856 as the year he emigrated from Glasgow. See, for example, Josephine Cobb, “Alexander Gardner,” Image Magazine 6 (1957): 124–36, and William F. Stapp, “To . . . Arouse the Conscience and Affect the Heart,” in Brooks Johnson, An Enduring Interest: The Photographs of Alexander Gardner (Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum, 1991), 21. However, available evidence suggests that Gardner may have arrived in the United States prior to 1856. According to ship manifests, on July 28, 1854, Margaret Gardner (Gardner’s wife); Gardner’s mother, Jean; Jean’s nineteen-​year-​old daughter from her second marriage to Alexander Forrest; and the Gardners’ children, Lawrence and Eliza, arrived via the ship Glasgow in New York. See “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, 1820–1897,” National Archives Microfilm Publication M237, Records of the US Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives, Washington, DC. 3. Trow’s New York City Directory, comp. H. Wilson (New York: John F. Trow, 1857–58), 306. 4. “To Our Readers,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 4, 1851, 2. The paper was active from 1850 to 1877. 5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. See The Glasgow Directory (Glasgow: W. Lang, 1828). 10. Birth certificates list two daughters born to James and Jean Gardner. Agnes Gardner was born March 30, 1823, and Catherine Gardner was born April 16, 1826. Agnes and Catherine are listed in the family household in the Scotland Census of 1841. 11. John F. McCaffrey, Scotland in the Nineteenth Century (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 2. 12. See 1841 Scotland Census. 13. Gardner opened his own jewelry and silver shop in Hutchesontown, a district of Glasgow, around 1844. See Post Office Annual Glasgow Directory, 1844–1845 (Glasgow: Edward Khull, 1845). Gardner is listed in the directory at a Thistle Street address through 1847. Between 1850 and 1852, Gardner worked as a manager for the Clydesdale Discount and Loan Company, bill broker and money lenders, in Glasgow. See Glasgow Post-​Office Annual Directory for 1850–1851 (Glasgow: William Mackenzie, 1850). The 1851 Scotland census lists his occupation as “bill broker.” 14. James Lauder, The Glasgow Athenaeum: A Sketch of Fifty Years’ Work (Glasgow: St. Mungo Press, 1897), 2.

Note s to page s 5–13

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15. See Robert Owen, A New View of Society (London, 1812), and Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1970). 16. James T. Hair, Iowa State Gazetteer (Iowa City: Bailey & Hair, 1865), 135. See also transcript of Judge James Crosby’s notes, made in 1966 by former director of the Garnavillo Historical Society, Arnold Roggman, File M-15, Garnavillo Public Library, Garnavillo, Iowa. 17. “Co-​operative,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 14, 1851, 3. 18. Transcript of Judge James Crosby’s notes, 1966, File M-15, Garnavillo Public Library, Garnavillo, Iowa. 19. Jeff Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owe­ nites in Britain and America: The Quest for a New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 54–55. 20. Ibid. 21. Ulrike Schwab, The Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 27. 22. William Thompson, ed., The Chartist Circular (Glasgow: W. W. Miller, 1840), v. 23. Henry Weisser, British Working-​Class Movements and Europe, 1815–48 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1975), 2. 24. “Chartist Intelligence,” Northern Star and National Trades’ Journal, June 7, 1851, 1. 25. Joseph M. Wilson, A Eulogy on the Life and Character of Alexander Gardner: Delivered at the State Communication of Lebanon Lodge, No. 7, F.A.A.M, January 19, 1883 (Washington, DC: R. Beresford, 1883), 8. 26. Glasgow Sentinel, as quoted in W. Hamish Fraser, “A Newspaper for Its Generation: The Glasgow Sentinel,” Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 4 ( July 1971): 20. 27. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, May 31, 1851, 2. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Fraser, “Newspaper for Its Generation,” 20. 31. See Glasgow Sentinel, May 5, 1851, 6. 32. Phillip Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Messages,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political

Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 203–4. 33. See Celina Fox, “Géricault’s Lithographs of the London Poor,” Print Quarterly 5 (March 1988): 62–66. 34. A. Susan Williams, The Rich Man and the Diseased Poor in Early Victorian Literature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), 1, 6. 35. Asa Briggs, “The Human Aggregate,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 1:84. 36. Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: “The Graphic” and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 31. 37. Ibid., 48. 38. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 254. 39. Crisis (National Co-​operative Trades’ Union and Equitable Labor Exchange Gazette), September 7, 1833, 2. 40. See, for example, Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 41. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 107. 42. Ibid., 95. 43. Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-​Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (New York: Carcanet, 1987), 14. 44. Schwab, Poetry of the Chartist Movement, 15. 45. Ibid., 21. 46. Robert Hunt, “The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: Photography,” Art-​ Union, May 1848, 133. 47. Schwab, Poetry of the Chartist Movement, 64–69. 48. “Gardner’s Photographs,” Harper’s Weekly, July 22, 1865, 451. 49. “Photographs of War Scenes,” Humphrey’s Journal, October 15, 1862, 143, and “The Battle at Antietam,” Harper’s Weekly, October 18, 1862, 664–65.

Note s to page s 13–20 50. I borrow the phrase “rhetorical framework” from Maren Stange, who describes Jacob Riis’s social reform photography as existing in such a framework of the “captions, texts, and . . . his authority as an author and narrator [that] made each image a carrier of specific ideological messages.” See Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2. 51. Though they were unsigned, a few surviving articles from the Sentinel highlighted the activities of local photographers. See, for example, “Local Intelligence,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 12, 1850, 9. 52. Ronald Walters’s general distinction between radicalism and reform is useful here. See Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), xvi. 53. I am borrowing a phrase from Caroline Brothers, who writes that her own work is an effort to avoid “heroicizing particular photographers, or elevating them as privileged communicators.” See Brothers, War and Photography (London: Routledge, 1997), xxii. 54. Bettina Gockel with Patrizia Munforte, American Photography: Global and Local Contexts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), viii. 55. See Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Green, and Scott Manning Stevens, Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 56. Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 3. 57. See Juliet Wilson-​Bureau and David C. Degener, Manet and the American Civil War (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). 58. See Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, with Dorothy Mahon, Christopher Riopelle, and Shannon Vittoria, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018).

59. See Linda S. Ferber et al., The American Pre-​Raphaelites: Radical Realists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 60. See chapter 1, “Popular Literary Culture in Wartime,” in Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861– 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 17–41. 61. “Editorial Miscellany,” American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts 1 ( July 1, 1858): 48. 62. Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865), preface, n.p. 63. See Alan Rogers, “American Democracy: The View From Scotland, 1776–1832,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 6 (Spring 1974): 63–71. Following the American Revolution, Scots of all political persuasions praised the Americans, seeing their own stand against the monarchy mirrored. Poets like Robert Burns saw the events even more broadly— as symbolic of a universal struggle for liberty. 64. Alexander Gardner, Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865). 65. Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 27. 66. “True Democracy and False,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 7, 1851. chapter 1

1. Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-​American Aspects, 1790–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 3. 2. Ibid., 109. 3. Ibid. 4. Fabrice Bensimon, “British Workers in France, 1815–1848,” Past and Present 213, no. 1 (2001): 171. 5. Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-​ American World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2. 6. William Jay, “On the Folly and Evils of War, and Means of Preserving Peace,” as quoted

161

Note s to page s 20–29

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in Joseph Sturge, Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1842), appendix F, lx. 7. Robin Kelsey, “Conditions of Repose,” in A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 340. 8. Anthony Lee, “The Image of War,” in On Alexander Gardner’s Sketch Book of the Civil War, ed. Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. 9. Most recently, Keith Davis cites Gardner’s commercial vision in The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-​Plate, 1839–1885 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 177. 10. Jeff Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 81–99. 11. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 78. 12. Ibid., 79. 13. Megan Rowley Williams, Through the Negative: The Relationship Between the Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-​Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 39. 14. “The Progress of Democracy,” Chartist Circular, September 4, 1841, 425. 15. “The Organization of Democracy,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 19, 1850, 14. 16. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 355–56. 17. John Stauffer, “Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 256. 18. “To Our Readers,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 4, 1851, 4. 19. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 247–49.

20. Mike Weaver, “Henry Fox Talbot: Conversation Pieces,” in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15. 21. William Crookes, “Photographic Printing and Engraving,” Photographic News 7, no. 266 (October 9, 1863): 483. 22. Dr. Heinrich Mayer, “Photography as a Medium of Illustration,” Humphrey’s Journal 14 (March 15, 1863): 293. 23. “Photography Applied to Book Illustration,” Gentleman’s Magazine 3 (February 1867): 174. 24. Photographic News, February 27, 1863, 234. 25. William D’Arcy Haley, James Philp’s Washington Described (New York: R. Rudd Carleton, 1861), 217. 26. Round Table 1 (September 30, 1865): 59. 27. “Personal,” Richmond Examiner, January 24, 1866, 4, and “In General,” Savannah Daily Herald, February 6, 1866, 2. 28. “In General,” 2. 29. For example, see Trübner’s American and Oriental Literary Record, March 26, 1866, and Valentin Ritter von Streffleur, ed., Österreichische militärische Zeitschrift (Vienna: Verlag der Redaction, 1867). 30. “Reviews,” Art Journal 52 (April 1866): 128. 31. D. Mark Katz, Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner (New York: Viking, 1991), 87. 32. See advertisement, Daily National Intelligencer, December 21, 1868, 2. 33. Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 41. 34. As quoted in Andrea Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-​Century American Pictorial Reporting,” Journal of Popular Culture 23, no. 4 (1990): 90. 35. “Publisher’s Notice,” Harper’s Weekly, June, 15, 1861, 369. 36. Robert Hunt, “Photography Considered in Relation to Its Educational and Practical Value,” Photographic News, July 29, 1859, 242.

Note s to page s 30–41 37. “Incidents of the War,” Salem Register, April 29, 1861, 2. 38. “City Matters,” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 3, 1861, 2. 39. “A Liberal Newspaper: A Power for the People,” Glasgow Sentinel, May 10, 1851. 40. Loughran, Republic in Print, 333. 41. “Lectures on American Slavery,” Glasgow Sentinel, January 11, 1851, 1. 42. See “Literature and Literary Progress in 1865,” American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1865, vol. 5, Embracing Political, Civil, Military, and Social Affairs (New York: D. Appleton, 1865), 491. 43. “Gardner’s Photographs,” Harper’s Weekly, July 22, 1865, 451. 44. Rays of Sunlight from South America (Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1865), preface, n.p. 45. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, October 12, 1850, 8. 46. In 1856, the Congress passed the Guano Act, which authorized the United States to take control of guano-​rich regions. The State Department continued to be actively involved with the region in the 1860s, when Spain attempted an incursion. 47. Why the colony dissolved (before Gardner himself could arrive) is unknown, but the cholera epidemic—reported in the region since 1848—may have been a factor. The gradual spread of the disease correlated with the steamboat traffic up the Mississippi. The group had arrived in the midst of the worst years of cholera in Iowa, between 1848 and 1851. Letters indicate that the group knew of cases nearby. According to one source, the group broke up because of “dissatisfaction and petty jealousies” among the members, and the decision to disband was unanimous. Records provide a dissolution date of March 1852. Local attorneys sold the land by the fall, reportedly at a loss to the founding investors. See “Letter from the Far West,” Glasgow Sentinel, August 2, 1851; Hair, Iowa State Gazetteer, 135; and transcript of Judge James Crosby’s notes, 1966, File M-15, Garnavillo Public Library, Garnavillo, Iowa. File M-15 states the group dissolved on

March 29, while the Gazetteer dates the dissolution to March 20. 48. W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 60. 49. Edward Strutt Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834 (London: J. Murray, 1835), 1:276. 50. Sturge, Visit to the United States, v. 51. Ibid., 21. 52. Ibid., 22. 53. Ibid., 32. 54. Jeff Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owe­ nites in Britain and America: The Quest for a New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 84. 55. “Clydesdale Settlement,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 21, 1851, 6. 56. “Affective training” is Claybaugh’s term; see Novel of Purpose, 17. 57. Ibid., 23. 58. Anthony Lee, “The Image of War,” in On Alexander Gardner’s Sketch Book of the Civil War, ed. Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 26. 59. Caption, plate 34, Group of Confederate Prisoners at Fairfax Court-​House, June 1863, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 60. Lee, “Image of War,” 14. 61. Jens Jäger, “Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 117. 62. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10. 63. John W. Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America: Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work,

163

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1825–1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 17. 64. Ulrike Schwab, The Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 127. 65. Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-​Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (New York: Carcanet, 1987), 38. 66. Caption, plate 19, Alexander Gardner, Antietam Bridge, Maryland, September 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 67. Caption, plate 11, Fortifications at Manassas, March 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 68. Caption, plate 30, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 69. Sarah Greenough, “ ‘A New Starting Point’: Roger Fenton’s Life,” in All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 24. 70. Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 157. 71. Owen in ibid., 25. 72. Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 36. 73. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 1147. 74. “The Cat out of the Bag,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 7, 1851, 4. 75. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 50. 76. Royle, Robert Owen, 164. 77. Ernest Jones, The New World, in Notes to the People: A Democratic Poem, Dedicated to the People of the United Queendom and to the United States, May 1851 (London: J. Pavey, 1851), 1–15. 78. Caption, plate 61, Commissary Department, Headquarters Army of the Potomac, February 1864, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 79. Caption, plate 29, Lacey House, Falmouth, Virginia, December 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 80. Captions, plate 52, Residence Chief Quartermaster, Third Army Corps, 1863, and plate 57,

Camp Architecture, 1864, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 81. This is discussed in chapter 3. 82. See caption, plate 13, Wood & Gibson, Battery No. 1, Near Yorktown, Virginia, May 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 83. Caption, plate 54, Field Hospital, Second Army Corps, Brandy Station, February 1864, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 84. “The Crystal Palace Exhibition,” Glasgow Sentinel, May 10, 1851, 6. 85. “Reviews,” Art-​Journal 52 (April 1866): 128. 86. Lewis Hine, “Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift (1909),” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trach­ tenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 111. chapter 2

1. As quoted in Janice Artemel, The Alexandria “Slave Pen”: The Archaeology of Urban Captivity (Washington, DC: Engineering Science, 1988), 27. 2. As in Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 255. 3. Ibid., 260. 4. See John Oldfield, Popular Politics and British-​Anti-​Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995). 5. Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield, eds., Imagining Transatlantic Slavery (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 6. Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 43. 7. Ibid., 45. 8. Ibid., 43. 9. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-​ Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 23. 10. Elizabeth B. Clark, “ ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 465.

Note s to page s 59–64 11. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 53. 12. Edward Baptist, “ ‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-​Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1633. 13. Ibid. 14. Phillip Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 204. 15. Patrizia Di Bello, “Sculpture, Photograph, Book: The Sculpture of Picasso (1949),” in The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, and Shamoon Zamir (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 97. 16. Ibid. 17. See, for example, Dell Upton, “Architecture and Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002): 707–23. 18. Iain Borden, “Imaging Architecture: The Uses of Photography in the Practice of Architectural History,” Journal of Architecture 12 (2007): 58. 19. Jane Collier, “The Art of Moral Imagination: Ethics and the Practice of Architecture,” Journal of Business Ethics 66 ( June/July 2006): 308. 20. Karsten Harries, “The Ethical Function of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 29, no. 1 (1975): 137. 21. “News and Opinion,” Albany Evening Journal, June 5, 186, 3. The Commercial Advertiser (New York) 3 printed a more detailed version of the story on June 5, 1861. Moncure Conway claimed in his Testimonies Concerning Slavery (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864), 3, that the ring and staple sent to Beecher had been used to bind the last remaining slave at the pen. 22. “Martial Law In Alexandria!,” Daily Commercial Register (Ohio), May 28, 1861; a similar story was repeated in “The Capture of Alexandria,” Massachusetts Spy, May 29, 1861, 3.

23. Frederick Clark Floyd, History of the Fortieth (Mozart) Regiment, New York Volunteers, Which Was Composed of Four Companies from New York, Four Companies from Massachusetts, and Two Companies from Pennsylvania (Boston: F. H. Gilson, 1909), 94. 24. William Cullen Bryant, “The Death of Slavery,” Atlantic, July 1866, 18. 25. See, for example, “The American Slave Trade,” Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, no. 398 (September 1839): 266–67, and John G. Whittier, “United States: The Internal Slave Trade,” British and Foreign Anti-​Slavery Reporter and Aborigine’s Friend 5 (March 1844): 34–35. 26. David Little, The Despotism of Freedom: or, The Tyranny and Cruelty of American Republican Slave-​masters: Shown to Be the Worst in the World: In a Speech, Delivered at the First Anniversary of the New England Anti-​Slavery Society (Boston: Boston Young Men’s Anti-​Slavery Association, 1833), 14. 27. Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 45. 28. Joe Lockard, Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), xxv. 29. E. A. Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave-​Trade in the United States: A Series of Letters Addressed to the Executive Committee of the American Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race (Boston: Light & Stearns, 1836), 136. 30. Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1842), 85. 31. “The American Slave Trade,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, March 1834, 39. In 1831, the Genius celebrated the wreckage of the brig Comet off of the coast of Nassau, freeing nearly one hundred slaves by British law (“Liberation of 164 Slaves,” April 1831, 193). 32. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 41. 33. Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Columbia: University of South Carolina

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Press, 1996), 45. The surplus of slaves in the District of Columbia was the result of a number of factors, among them the decline of tobacco farming in favor of grains, which relied less on slave labor, and the increasing use of white immigrants and free blacks as domestics in local households. See Steven Deyle, “The Irony of Liberty: Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Spring 1992): 3762. 34. The surplus of slaves in the District of Columbia was the result of a number of factors, among them the decline of tobacco farming in favor of grains, which relied less on slave labor, and the increasing use of white immigrants and free blacks as domestics in local households. See Deyle, “Irony of Liberty.” 35. Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 100. 36. Deidre Murphy and Sarah Sidman, From Slavery to War: The History of 1315 Duke Street (McClean, VA: n.p., 1988), 1. 37. Artemel, Alexandria “Slave Pen,” 26–36. 38. Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 92. 39. Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade, 135–43. 40. Ibid. 41. Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present (New York: Architectural League of New York, 1988), 6–16. Robinson and Herschman trace the two approaches to the techniques used in architectural drawings. 42. Ibid., 18. 43. Jeff Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 85. 44. Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 49. 45. Artemel, Alexandria “Slave Pen,” 27. 46. As quoted in Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 46. 47. Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 5. 48. Ibid. 49. Gudmestad, Troublesome Commerce, 186.

50. The bars were added when the structure was converted into a Confederate prison by the Union army sometime in 1862. Other photographs of the site were made before this conversion. 51. “The Alexandria Slave Pen,” Cleveland Herald, April 8, 1862, 2. 52. William Fletcher Thompson, “Pictorial Images of the Negro During the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48, no. 4 (1965): 288. 53. The treatment of female slaves and families was a frequent topic in abolitionist journals. 54. Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 85–86. 55. C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 16. 56. Ibid., 19. 57. Ibid., 21. 58. Address by the Committee of the Glasgow Emancipation Society to the Ministers of Religion in Particular, and the Friends of Negro Emancipation in General, on American Slavery (Glasgow: Aird & Russell, 1836), 5. 59. Ibid., 5. 60. See the chapter “The Historical Problem: Slavery and the Meaning of America,” in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 3–27. 61. “Slavery in America,” Glasgow Sentinel, November 2, 1850, 15. 62. Ibid. 63. “The American Union in Danger,” Glasgow Sentinel, November 30, 1850, 15. 64. “Slavery in America,” Glasgow Sentinel, November 30, 1850, 15. 65. Advertisement, Glasgow Sentinel, January 4, 1851, 1. 66. Editorial page, Glasgow Sentinel, February 1, 1851, 8. 67. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 129–31. 68. “American Union in Danger.” 69. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, February 1, 1851, 8.

Note s to page s 73– 79 70. “Now Is the Time,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 14, 1851, 7. 71. Ibid. 72. Gudmestad, Troublesome Commerce, 160–68. 73. Ibid., 164. 74. Rice, Scots Abolitionists, 30. 75. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 129–31. 76. Albert Boime, “Turner’s Slave Ship, The Victim of Empire,” Turner Studies 10, no. 1 (1990): 41. 77. Ibid., 39–40. 78. Kelly J. Mays, “Slaves in Heaven, Laborers in Hell: Chartist Poets’ Ambivalent Identification with the (Black) Slave,” Victorian Poetry 39 (Summer 2001): 140. 79. “The Organization of Democracy,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 19, 1850. 80. Alan Rogers, “American Democracy: The View From Scotland, 1776–1832,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 6 (Spring 1974): 67. 81. “Negro Slavery,” Glasgow Sentinel, November 9, 1850. 82. Rogers, “American Democracy,” 65. 83. Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-​American Aspects, 1790–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 46. 84. “Organization of Democracy.” 85. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 10. 86. Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young, eds., On Alexander Gardner’s Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 47. 87. Ibid., 78. 88. Albert Boime, Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), xiv. 89. Alan Trachtenberg, “Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory,” Social Research 75, no. 1 (2008): 129. 90. Joseph M. Wilson, A Eulogy on the Life and Character of Alexander Gardner: Delivered at the State Communication of Lebanon Lodge, No. 7, F.A.A.M, January 19, 1883 (Washington, DC: R. Beresford, 1883), 9.

91. See, for example, “Progress of the Anglo-​ Saxon Race,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 28, 1851, 7. 92. George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-​American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 97. 93. Ibid., 100. 94. David Owen analyzes this shift in English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); see chapters 2 and 3. 95. “Slavery,” Chartist Circular, June 4, 1842, 582. 96. “War Events of the Week,” Boston Recorder, February 13, 1862, 2. 97. “The Contrabands,” Daily National Intelligencer, March 26, 1864, 2. 98. Kate Masur, “ ‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation,’ The Word ‘Contraband,’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (2007): 1059. 99. Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 102. 100. Waud’s image was published in Harper’s with the title Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation, on January 31, 1865. Many sketch artists made similar scenes— for example, Edwin Forbes, “African American Refugees Coming into the Union lines near Culpeper Court House, V.A.,” November 8, 1863, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 101. “Contrabands Coming In,” Harper’s Weekly, January 31, 1863, 78. 102. Kirk Savage and others make the link between Civil War–era imagery and abolitionist prints—for example, Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s ‘The Freedman’ and the Meaning of the Civil War,” in “Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 28–32, and McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 29. 103. Pieterse, White on Black, 58. 104. Ibid., 58. 105. Holly Gale Milette, “Exchanging Fugitive Identity: William and Ellen Craft’s Transatlantic Reinvention (1850–1869),” in Kaplan and Oldfield, Imagining Transatlantic Slavery, 61–76.

167

Note s to page s 79–8 9

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106. John Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life in the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 80. 107. Pieterse, White on Black, 60. 108. George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper, 1965), 115. In his chapter “The Meaning of Emancipation,” Frederickson charts the often contradictory attitudes toward the issue of emancipation. More recently, Chandra Manning in What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), has addressed the topic, but in a manner that more directly focuses on Union soldiers rather than sentiments among the broader Northern populace. 109. Megan Rowley Williams, Through the Negative: The Relationship Between the Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-​Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 89. 110. Advertisements for photographic reproductions appeared in the Crayon. 111. John Stauffer, “In the Shadow of a Dream: White Abolitionists and Race,” presented at Collective Degradation: Slavery and the Construction of Race, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 2013, 3. 112. Masur, “ ‘Rare Phenomenon,’ ” 1059. 113. Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 27. 114. “A Freedmen’s Village,” Harper’s Weekly, September 30, 1865, 613. 115. Masur, “ ‘Rare Phenomenon,’ ” 1065. 116. Dana E. Byrd, “Northern Vision, Southern Land: Designs for Freedom on Hilton Head Island, 1862–1880,” in The Civil War in Art and Memory, ed. Kirk Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 23. 117. Rice, Scots Abolitionists, 34. chapter 3

1. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, October 18, 1851, 4.

2. As of 1841, he was working as an apprentice. See 1841 Scotland Census. Gardner opened his own jewelry and silver shop in Hutcheson­ town, a district of Glasgow around 1844. See Post Office Annual Glasgow Directory, 1844–1845 (Glasgow: Edward Khull, 1845). Gardner is listed in the directory at the Thistle Street address though 1847. 3. Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 26. 4. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 95. 5. “Beautiful Pictures,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 20, 1863, 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Donald D. Kummings, A Companion to Walt Whitman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 465. 8. See, for example, “To the Fustian Jackets, the Blistered Hands, and Unshorn Chins,” Northern Star, March 16, 1850, 3. 9. Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 71–72. 10. “Notes on the New York Regiments,” New York Herald, May 24, 1861, 1. 11. M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 191. 12. Augustus C. Buell, “The Cannoneer”: Recollections of Service in the Army of the Potomac (Washington, DC: The National Tribune, 1890), 252. 13. Harry R. Rubenstein, “With Hammer in Hand: Working-​Class Occupational Portraits,” in American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750–1850, ed. Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 191. 14. Ben Mattison, “The Social Construction of the American Daguerreotype Portrait, 1839– 1860,” American Daguerrotypes, 1995, http:// www.americandaguerreotypes​.com/ch4.html (accessed January 17, 2020).

Note s to page s 8 9–9 9 15. Michael Carlebach, Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 33–34. 16. See Rubenstein, “With Hammer in Hand,” 176–98. 17. Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 40. 18. See, for example, the discussion in Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 190– 201, and Laurie, Artisans into Workers, chapter 2, “Free Labor and Radical Labor.” 19. Mark Neely and Harold Holzer discuss the themes and market appeal of these prints in chapter 4, “In Camp and On Campaign,” of The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North, ed. Mark E. Neely Jr. and Harold Holzer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 53–78. 20. Ibid., 70. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), 442. 23. Ibid., 108. 24. A painted backdrop, for example, could communicate wealth, position, or culture. William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth-​ Century Photography (Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah, 1981), 31. 25. Barringer, Men at Work, 29. 26. Testimony of Colonel Gilman Marston, July 16, 1862, in Report: Army of the Potomac, including Journal of the Committee (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1863), 300. 27. Francis Adams Donaldson, Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Donaldson (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 66. 28. This is implied, for example, in the words of a Union cavalryman: “Nearly every man has suddenly become a mason or a carpenter, and the hammer, the axe and the trowel are being applied with the utmost vigor, if not with the highest skill. Many of us, however, are astonished

at the ingenuity that is displayed within this department.” Quoted in Nelson, “ ‘Right Nice Little House[s]’: Impermanent Camp Architecture of the American Civil War,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 1 (1982): 83. 29. Buell, “Cannoneer,” 252. 30. Nelson, “ ‘Right Nice Little House[s],’ ” 79. 31. Ibid. 32. For various reasons, the District of Columbia was home to a strong Scottish labor community. In the 1790s, when the District began its federal building effort, its board of commissioners began to recruit skilled workers from Europe, and many who heeded the call were Scottish. See Margaret H. McAleer, “The Green Streets of Washington: The Experience of Irish Mechanics in Antebellum Washington,” in Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, DC, ed. Francine Curro Cary (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 43. See Look Before You Leap: Or, A Few Hints to Such Artisans, Mechanics, Labourers, Farmers, and Husbandmen, As Are Desirous of Emigrating to America (London: W. Row, 1796), ii. 33. Martin C. Perdue, “Hiding Behind Trees and Building Shelter Without Walls: Stick and Foliate Structures in the Civil War Landscape,” in Constructing Image, Identity, and Place: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, ed. Alison K. Hoagland and Kenneth A. Breisch (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 110. 34. Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015), 104. 35. Perdue, “Hiding Behind Trees,” 102. 36. Ibid., 103. 37. Caption, plate 57, Camp Architecture, Brandy Station, Virginia, January 1864, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 38. Caption, plate 74, Poplar Grove Church, 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 39. Caption, plate 5, Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia, March 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 40. Caption, plate 16, Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding [sic; Cumberland Landing],

169

Note s to page s 102 –112

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Pamunkey, Virginia, May 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 41. One of the ways to attain more than outward appearance, the manual recommended, was that “the photographer should be acquainted with the character, the disposition, and the standing of the person.” L. M. Dornbach, “Applied Photography: Grouping and Artistic Expression,” Humphrey’s Journal 7 (December 1, 1860): 226. 42. M. de Valicourt, “Photographic Portraiture Continued,” Humphrey’s Journal 8 (March 15, 1862): 348. 43. Caption, plate 28, Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, 1862, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book. 44. Disdéri, “The Aesthetics of Photography,” Humphrey’s Journal 15 (August 1, 1863): 110. 45. Jan Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 28. 46. “Alarming Chartist Riots at Newport,” Ipswich Journal, November 9, 1839, n.p. 47. Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-​Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (New York: Carcanet, 1987), 15. 48. Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96–97. 49. “The Age We Live In,” Herschel in the frontispiece of Practical Mechanics Journal 6 (April 1853–March 1854): 273. 50. Maidment, Poorhouse Fugitives, 14. 51. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, 136. 52. Ibid., 135. 53. Advertisement, Glasgow Sentinel, November 30, 1850, 1. 54. Advertisement, Glasgow Sentinel, September 6, 1851, 1. 55. The format of these portraits is unknown. 56. US Federal Census of 1860, Washington Ward 6, Washington, DC, roll M653_104, page 933, image 371, Family History Library Film 803104, http://​www​.ancestry​.com (accessed 2010). Reekie is listed in the 1858 Boyd’s Washington and Georgetown Directory as a stonecutter.

57. Craig Heberton and Keith B. C. Bracy, “Singing the Praises of David Knox,” Battlefield Photographer, August 2018, 10. 58. Advertisement, Daily National Intelligencer, May 30, 1863, 2. 59. Jennifer Todd, “The Rigors of Business: Mathew Brady’s Photography in Political Perspective,” Afterimage, November 1979, 8. 60. These are the men who are identified as authors of the photographs listed in the catalog: Timothy O’Sullivan (1840–1882), James Gibson (b. 1828), George Barnard (1819–1902), David Knox, William Frank Browne, William Reddish Pywell (1843–1886), William Morris Smith, John Reekie (b. 1828), David B. Woodbury, C. O. Bostwick, John Wood (it is not clear if this is the same John Wood who worked for the quartermaster’s department), and Silas A. Holmes. 61. “St. Andrew’s Society,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 9, 1863, 2. 62. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 23. 63. James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790– 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 149. 64. “Saint Andrew’s Day in Washington,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 3, 1858, 2. 65. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 14. 66. Robert Crawford writes of Burns’s celebration of a Scottish male culture in which “brotherhood” referred to both virtual and real communities: the brotherhood of the shared philosophy of liberté, egalité, fraternité, and various brotherhoods (e.g., masons, fraternal societies, social clubs) to which men belonged. See Robert Crawford, Robert Burns as Cultural Authority (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 13. 67. Liam McIlvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002), 199. 68. Ibid., 117–19. 69. Ibid., 119.

Note s to page s 114–125 70. “Summary of Daily Intelligence,” North American and United States Gazette, August 15, 1860, n.p. 71. Mary Panzer notes his failing eyesight as early as 1844. See Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, DC.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 9. Josephine Cobb writes that, later, Brady, who did not claim Washington as a residence, left the studio to Gardner and visited occasionally for social affairs. See Josephine Cobb, Mathew B. Brady’s Photographic Gallery in Washington (Washington, DC: Columbia Historical Society, 1955), 14. 72. “New York Photographic Galleries,” Photographic and Fine Art Journal 11 ( January 1858): 24. 73. William Howard Russell, Diary of William Howard Russell (New York: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863). 74. See “Washington Galleries,” Photographic and Fine Art Journal 10 (October 1857): 206–7, and Photographic and Fine Art Journal 11 (April 1858): 98. 75. John Werge, “Pictures of the Potomac in Peace and War,” Photographic News 10 ( January 12, 1866): 16, and The Evolution of Photography with a Chronological Review of Discoveries, Inventions, etc. (London: Piper & Carter, 1890), 193. 76. “Photography,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 6, 1858, 3. 77. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 3 (New York: Mitchell Kennedy, 1915), 346. 78. “The Photograph,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 30, 1863, 2. 79. “Gardner’s Photographs,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 2, 1864, 3. 80. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12, no. 69 ( July 1863): 3. 81. William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York, 1959), 16. 82. Editors assessed the health of the profession through information obtained by word of mouth and by monitoring the sales of supplies like albumen, photograph cases, and albums.

83. “Improvement in Business,” Humphrey’s Journal 11 (October 1, 1861): 176. 84. “Editorial Department,” American Journal of Photography ( January 1, 1863): 312. 85. “Local Matters,” Daily National Intelligencer, June 5, 1863, 3. 86. Humphrey’s Journal 9 (August 1, 1863): 46. 87. Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings (New York: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1970), 297. 88. “The Cat out of the Bag,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 7, 1851, 4. 89. W. Hamish Fraser, “The Working Class,” Glasgow, vol. 2, 1830–1912, ed. W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 314. 90. “An American’s Impression of Scotland,” Glasgow Sentinel, September 6, 1851, 7. 91. This regular column was titled “Co-operative” and featured letters from the Iowa colony, among others. 92. Arthur Bestor, “The Communitarian Point of View,” in Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 1–19. 93. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, May 3, 1851, 2. 94. Dickens as quoted in Barringer, Men at Work, 10. 95. Ibid. 96. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, October 18, 1851, 4. 97. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, May 3, 1851, 2. 98. Barringer, Men at Work, 8. chapter 4

1. See Christopher Kent Williams, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art Journal 17, no. 4 (1985): 2–27. 2. “The Photograph,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 30, 1863, 3. 3. Daily Constitutional Union, March 24, 1864. 4. “Local Matters,” Daily National Intelligencer, January 2, 1865.

171

Note s to page s 125–136

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5. “Gardner’s Photographic Pictures,” Daily National Intelligencer, August 21, 1868. 6. “Gardner’s Photographs,” Harper’s Weekly, July 22, 1865, 451. 7. “Multiple News Items,” Daily National Intelligencer, January 25, 1865. 8. “Fine Arts,” The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1865, vol. 5 (New York: D. Appleton, 1865), 312. 9. Review as reprinted in American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts, July 15, 1865. 10. “Mr. Alexander Gardner,” Daily National Intelligencer, February 13, 1866, 3. 11. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Random House, 1941), 13. 12. Diane K. Skvarla, “Nineteenth-​Century Visitors,” Washington History 1, no. 1 (1989): 7. 13. John Werge, The Evolution of Photography with a Chronological Review of Discoveries, Inventions, etc. (London: Piper & Carter, 1890), 184. 14. Gordon Baldwin, Architecture in Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 7. 15. “Gossip: Gallery of Illustrious Americans,” Photographic Art-​Journal 1 ( June 1851): 62. 16. William Marder, Anthony: The Man, the Company, the Cameras; An American Pioneer; 140 Year History of a Company from Anthony to Ansco (Plantation, FL: Pine Ridge, 1982), 24–25. 17. See Dalphy Fagerstorm, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 2 (April 1954): 252–75. 18. See Daniel Walker Howe, “European Sources of Political Ideas in Jeffersonian America,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 28–44, and Howe, “Why the Scottish Enlightenment Was Useful to the Framers of the American Constitution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 ( July 1989): 572–87. 19. Howe, “Why the Scottish Enlightenment,” 580. 20. Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 14. 21. Jeff Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for a

New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 54–55. 22. “Saint Andrew’s Day in Washington,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 3, 1858, 2. 23. Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-​American Aspects, 1790–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 43. 24. M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 188. 25. William Henry Egle, Pennsylvania: Genealogies Chiefly Scotch-​Irish and German (Harrisburg, PA: Clearfield Press, 1886), 764. 26. Originally, Wyeth and his publishers had planned to feature photographs by Gardner of each of the rotunda paintings in all eight issues. 27. Samuel Douglas Wyeth, The Federal City: or, Ins and Abouts of Washington (Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers, 1865), v. 28. Whitman, “Battle of Bull Run,” quoted in Thomas, Lunar Light, 187. 29. Wyeth, Federal City, v. 30. Ibid., vi. 31. “Gardner’s Photographs,” 451. 32. “Our Royal Guest,” Daily National Intelligencer, August 18, 1866, 2, and “Our Public Buildings Photographed,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 8, 1866, 3. 33. “The City of Washington,” Daily National Intelligencer, January 26, 1858, 3. 34. “Our Public Buildings Photographed,” 3. 35. Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Topeka: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 161. 36. Editorial, Glasgow Sentinel, May 1, 1851, 6. 37. Nancy Keeler, “The Calotype and Aesthetics in Early Photography,” in Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839–1870, ed. Richard R. Brettell (Boston: David R. Godine, 1984), 11. 38. E. Norman Gunnison, Our Stars for the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia: Ringwalt & Brown, 1863), 27. 39. Carol M. Highsmith, Pennsylvania Avenue (Washington, DC: American Institute of Architects Press, 1989), 53.

Note s to page s 136–146 40. Skvarla, “Nineteenth-​Century Visitors,” 7. 41. Ibid., 7. 42. “Our Public Buildings Photographed,” 3. The reviewer urged Gardner to continue with the project, suggesting it was incomplete. 43. “Dr. Vogel on the Paris Exhibition,” British Journal of Photography 14 ( June 28, 1867): 305. 44. Copies of the print have yet to be located. 45. “Washington Items,” Daily Constitutional Union, June 5, 1867, 4. 46. “Gardner’s Great Photographic Picture of the Capitol,” Daily National Intelligencer, May 11, 1867, 2. 47. Ibid. 48. Walt Whitman, The Works of Walt Whitman (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), 527. 49. George Lillibridge, Beacon of Freedom: The Impact of American Democracy upon Great Britain, 1830–1870 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961), 47. 50. As quoted in George Evans, “The Birth and Growth of the Patent Office,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 22 (1919): 106. 51. “Industry Versus Idleness,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 5, 1850, 7. 52. Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 136–37. 53. Whitman, as quoted in Thomas, Lunar Light, 188. 54. Douglas Evelyn, “Exhibiting America: The Patent Office as Cultural Artifact,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 3 (1989): 31. 55. For a sense of the activity in America, see Janice Gayle Schimmelman, American Photographic Patents, 1840–1880: The Daguerreotype and Wet Plate Era (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz, 2002), and Reese Jenkins, Image and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839–1925, Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 41. 56. Jens Jäger, “Discourses on Photography in Mid-​Victorian Britain,” History of Photography 19, no. 4 (1995): 316.

57. Fraser, “Working Class,” 310. 58. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-​politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 146. 59. “To Our Readers,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 4, 1851, 4. 60. “Clydesdale Settlement,” Glasgow Sentinel, June 21, 1851, 6. 61. Eugene Ferguson, “The American-​ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (1979): 3–24. 62. Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 89. 63. Miles Orvell, “America in Ruins: Photography as Cultural Narrative,” American Art 29, no. 1 (2015): 9. 64. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 366. 65. Frederick Albert Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, DC, from L’Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 77. 66. Larson, Internal Improvement, 3. 67. Ibid. 68. Sarah Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, DC (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), 43. 69. As in quoted in Humphrey Southall, “Agitate! Agitate! Organize! Political Travelers and the Construction of a National Politics, 1839–1860,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, no. 1 (1996): 181–82. 70. Simone Natale, “Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Photography 36 (November 2012): 452. 71. Harry L. Katz and Vincent Virga, Civil War Sketch Book: Drawings from the Battlefront (New York: Norton, 2012), 61. 72. “Photography at the Seat of War,” Photographic News 2 (February 20, 1863): 96.

173

Note s to page s 146–15 3

174

73. British Journal of Photography 10, no. 182 ( January 15, 1863): 42. Whitney also said: “All honor should be given to Barnard and Gibson, Holmes, Gardiner [Gardner], Coonley, and Sullivan [O’Sullivan].” 74. “President Draper’s Address Before the Photographical Society,” American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts 4, no. 19 (March 1, 1862): 439. conclusion

1. M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 185. 2. Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art Journal 17, no. 4 (1985): 11. 3. Ulrike Schwab, The Poetry of the Chartist Movement: A Literary and Historical Study (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 1. 4. Joseph M. Wilson, A Eulogy on the Life and Character of Alexander Gardner: Delivered at the State Communication of Lebanon Lodge, No. 7, F.A.A.M, January 19, 1883 (Washington, DC: R. Beresford, 1883), 6. 5. C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 30. 6. Robert Buchanan, Socialism Vindicated (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1840), frontispiece. 7. See W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). 8. “The Organization of Democracy,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 19, 1850. 9. William Jay, “On the Folly and Evils of War, and Means of Preserving Peace,” as quoted in Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1842), appendix f, lx. 10. Eric Foner, “The Civil War and the Story of American Freedom,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 12.

11. Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13 and 21. 12. “To Our Readers,” Glasgow Sentinel, October 4, 1851, 4. 13. Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), 140. 14. Jeff Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owe­ nites in Britain and America: The Quest for a New Moral World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 84. 15. Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography: Emergence of a Key Word,” in Photography in Nineteenth-​Century America, ed. Martha Sandweiss (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), 25. 16. Martha A. Sandweiss, “Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War,” in Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846– 1848, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1989), 64. 17. Michael Leja, “Fortified Images for the Masses,” Art Journal, Winter 2011, 82. 18. “An Army: Its Organization and Movements,” Continental Monthly, June 1, 1864, 223. 19. Ibid. 20. Trachtenberg, “Photography,” 25. 21. Barbara McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” in Sandweiss, Photography in Nineteenth-​Century America, 53–63. 22. “Photography in Washington,” Photographic and Fine Art Journal 11, no. 4 (April 1858): 98. 23. Josephine Cobb, Mathew B. Brady’s Photographic Gallery in Washington (Washington, DC: Columbia Historical Society, 1955), 14. 24. This is Michael Carlebach’s definition of social reform photography. See Carlebach, American Photojournalism Comes of Age (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 114. 25. See, for example, “New Expedition to the South Seas,” Daily National Intelligencer, June 1, 1852, 3; “Exploration of the Java and Other Seas,”

Note s to page s 15 3–15 8 Daily National Intelligencer, August 6, 1852, 1; and “The North Pacific Expedition,” Daily National Intelligencer, June 4, 1853, 2. 26. “The Fine Arts in Washington: Brady’s New Gallery,” New York Herald, January 13, 1858, 4. 27. “Brady’s Gallery,” National Era (Washington, DC), March 24, 1859, 46. 28. “Fine Arts in Washington: Brady’s New Gallery,” 4. 29. Craig Miner, Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854–1858 (Topeka: University of Kansas, 2008), 3.

30. See Josiah Copley, Kansas and the Country Beyond, on the Line of the Union Pacific, Eastern Division (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867). 31. Peter Holbrook, “Shakespeare, ‘The Cause of the People,’ and The Chartist Circular, 1839– 1842,” Textual Practice 20, no. 2 (2006): 205. 32. As quoted in W. Hamish Fraser, “A Newspaper for Its Generation: The Glasgow Sentinel,” Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 4 ( July 1971): 30. 33. Wilson, Eulogy, 1.

175

Index

Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. Abdy, E. S., 37 abolition and black social and political equality, 79–80 and conceptions of benevolence and pity, 76–79 and depictions of slave auctions, 58–59 Gardner on, 75–76 Gardner’s interest in, 56 photography’s contribution to cause of, 55–60 Scottish support for, 71, 73–74 treatment in Glasgow Sentinel, 71–73 Abolition of the Slave Trade, The (Cruikshank), 56, 57 African Americans personhood of, 75–76 in postwar society, 82 See also abolition; slavery Age of Reform, 149 agrarian themes, in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 44–46 Alexander Gardner ( J. Gardner), 112–14 Alexandria, Virginia, 65 Alexandria, Virginia, Slave Pen, Exterior View (Brady Studio), 69, 70 Allan and Ferguson, Illustrated Letter Paper Comprising Views in Glasgow, 8, 11 American infrastructure, 142–43 American Photographical Society, 146–47 American photography as new narrative form, 151–52 transnational context of, 14–15 American Revolution, 161n63 Am I Not a Brother (Wedgewood), 59

Andrews, Ethan Allen, 37–38 anonymous laborer, 105 Anthony, Edward H. T., 128 Antietam, Maryland (Gardner), 101–2 arbors, 96 architecture and architectural photography, 60, 128 Armfield, John, 54–56 Armory Square Hospital, Washington D.C., 137 Army of the Potomac, The (Bachelder), 92, 93, 100–101 Bachelder, John B., The Army of the Potomac, 92, 93, 100–101 Bancroft, George, 127 Baptist, Edward, 59 Baritt, W., Hooker’s New Line of Intrenchments, 27 Barnard, George Fortifications at Manassas, 44 Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia, 98 Barringer, Tim, 85, 120 Battle of Pittsburgh, Tenn, The (Currier and Ives), 91 Benedict, S. W., 62 benevolence, 76–79, 82–84 Bestor, Arthur, 118 black personhood, Gardner’s treatment of abolition versus, 75–76 “Bleeding Kansas,” 154 Boime, Albert, 74, 76 Borden, Iain, 60 Brady, Mathew, 1, 13, 21, 114, 151, 152–53, 171n71 Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 128 Brady Studio Alexandria, Virginia, Slave Pen, Exterior View, 69, 70 Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, 64, 68–69

In de x

178

Brave Defenders of Our Country, The (Carbutt), 90 Briggs, Asa, 10 Brilliant, Richard, 112 brotherhood, 112, 170n66 Brothers, Caroline, 161n53 Brown, William Wells, 31, 37 Bryant, William Cullen, 61, 67 Buchanan, Robert, 38, 71, 149 Buell, Augustus, 88, 95 building, and laboring soldiers, 96–97 Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, A (Reekie), 80 Burns, Robert, 112, 161n63, 170n66 Burnside’s Bridge, 13 Byrd, Dana, 84 Cameron, Gilbert, 12–13 Camp Architecture, Brandy Station, Virginia (O’Sullivan), 96 Campbell, Alexander, 38 Camp of 104th Penn’a Vol.’s Morris Island, S. C. (Hoffman), 43 camp views, 41–42 Capitol at Washington, The (Langenheim and Langenheim), 133 Capitol Building, 124, 125, 126, 133, 134, 137–38 Carbutt, John, The Brave Defenders of Our Country, 90 Carlebach, Michael, 89 Catalog of Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of Alexander Gardner, 111 Chartism Great Chartist Meeting (Kennington Common, 1848), 2, 3, 107–9 impact on Gardner, 5–6, 151 and labor reform, 107–10 literary production of, 11–12 nature and, 43 and return to preindustrial society, 118 and self-​learning through printed matter, 6–7 and US democracy, 129 views on labor, 85 views on Peru, 35–36 views on slavery, 74, 77 Chase, Salmon, 126 Child, David, 61 cholera epidemic, 163n47 City of Washington from Beyond the Navy Yard (Cooke), 42 city views, 41–42 Clark, Elizabeth, 59 Claybaugh, Amanda, 19, 20, 39

Clydesdale Joint-​Stock Agricultural and Commercial Company, 5–6, 37 Cobb, Josephine, 171n71 Cobden, Richard, 105 Cole, Thomas, 15, 128 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, 40 Commissary Department, Alexandria, Slave Pen (Russell), 55 common laborer, 86, 105 communal living, 5–6 Company of Secession Cavalry Surrendering to Colonel Wilcox, of the First Michigan Regiment, in Front of the Slave-​Pen at Alexandria, Virginia, 61, 62 Contraband School, 77–78 Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation (Waud), 78, 79 Cooke, G., City of Washington from Beyond the Navy Yard, 42 Cooper, Thomas, 75 Craft, Ellen, 71 Craft, William, 71 Craig, John, 38–39, 140–41 Crawford, Robert, 170n66 Crimean War of 1855–56, 94 Crookes, William, 24 Crosby, Josiah, 154–55 Cruikshank, Isaac, The Abolition of the Slave Trade, 56, 57 Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851), 105, 120 Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for Grand International Exhibition of 1851, The (Read & Co.), 106 Cundall, Joseph, Grenadier Guards Drummer, 94, 95 Currier & Ives, 90 The Battle of Pittsburgh, Tenn, 91 Lieut. General Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, 92 daguerreotype, 114, 151, 152 Daily National Intelligencer, 13 Davis, David Brion, 71 Davis, John, 79 democracy addressed in Sketch Book, 127 art and promotion of, 148–49 Gardner on progress and, 22 and Gardner’s background, 128–29 Gardner’s belief in and promotion of, 149–50 reformers’ examination and understanding of, 149–50 Depot, Lima (Moulton), 33, 34

Inde x Di Bello, Patrizia, 60 Dickens, Charles, 120 Dinius, Marcy, 152 Donaldson, Francis Adams, 95 Doyle, Don, 15 Draper, Henry, 146–47 Drop of Perspiration on the Portico!, A (Peale), 134 Ellsworth, Ephraim Elmer, 52, 90 Emancipation Act (Britain, 1833), 71 Epstein, James, 111, 112 ethnic nationalism, 76 Execution of Captain Henry Wirtz (Gardner), 145 Executive Mansion, North Front (Gardner), 132 Exterior of Alexandria Slave Pen (Peters), 67 Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow (Perry), 8, 10 Father Thomas H Mooney Preaching to the 69th New York State Volunteers (Gardner), 87 Feargus Edward O’Connor (Read), 109–10 Federal City, The: or, Ins and Outs of Washington (Wyeth), 129–31 federal government Gardner’s portrayal of, 123 Wyeth on, 130 Fenton, Roger, 45 Ferguson, Eugene, 141 Field Hospital, Second Army Corps, Brandy Station (Gardner), 49, 97 Floyd, Frederick C., 61 Foner, Eric, 150 Fortifications at Manassas (Barnard and Gibson), 44 Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia (Gibson), 98 Franklin, Isaac, 54–56 Franklin, James, 59 Franklin & Armfield, 61–62, 64, 65–66 Fredericksburg, Virginia (O’Sullivan), 45–46 Fredericksburg Valley, 44–46 Frederickson, George, 76, 78 “Freedmen’s Village, The,” 82–83 Freedom Ring, The ( Johnson), 80–81 Front of “Slave Pen,” Alexandria (Russell), 67–68 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 71–73 Gallery of Illustrious Americans (Brady), 128 Gardner, Agnes, 4, 159n10 Gardner, Alexander and American cultural history and political reform ideologies, 2–4, 5

and American photography as new narrative form, 151–52 background of, 1, 4–6, 128–29 belief and promotion of democracy, 149–50 and Clydesdale Joint-​Stock Agricultural and Commercial Company, 5–6 as embodiment of worker-​poet, 111 emigration of, 159n2 employment in Glasgow, 159n13, 168n2 field project in West, 153–57 and Glasgow Sentinel, 7–8, 73 interest in slavery and abolition, 56 on labor, 85–86 on labor and politics of representation, 118–20 large-​scale works of, 115 moves to Washington, DC, 12–13 new visions for society, 150–51 personal allegiance to collective, 111, 112 portrait of, 112–14 praise for, 125 and reform photography, 153 reputation of, 114 retirement of, 157 skill at “plain” cartes de visit, 115–16 on slavery, 75–76 studio works of, 13 and technological improvements in photography, 15–16, 22–24, 151 and travelogues, 38–39 works Antietam, Maryland, 101–2 Execution of Captain Henry Wirtz, 145 Executive Mansion, North Front, 132 Military Asylum, Washington, D.C., 133 Military Telegraphic Corps, Army of the Potomac, Berlin, 102, 103 Overlooking Lawrence and the Kansas River, 156 Patent-​Office, Washington. From South-​West, 132 Photographic Incidents of the War, 29, 31 A Rare Specimen Found, 156–57 Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (“Freedmen”) by Canal, 81, 82 Scouts and Guides of the Potomac, Berlin, Maryland, October 1862, 102–5 “Seal Rocks,” in Pacific Ocean, near San Francisco, 158, 158 Slabtown, Hampton, Va., 82–84 Untitled (Richmond), 141 Untitled (Washington), 126 A Virginia Family Coach, 122, 123 Virginia. Newspaper Vendor and Cart in Camp, 144

179

In de x

180

Gardner, Alexander (continued) Walt Whitman, Three-​quarter-​length Portrait, 115–16 Washington’s Tomb, Mt. Vernon, 135–36 works and vision of, as aligned with Washington, DC, 124–26 writings of, 5, 13–14 See also Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Gardner); Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) Gardner, Catherine, 4, 159n10 Gardner, Eliza, 159n2 Gardner, James Alexander Gardner, 112–14 birth of, 4 Field Hospital, Second Army Corps, Brandy Station, 49, 97 Headquarters Christian Commission In the Field, Germantown, 48 Gardner (Glen), Jean, 4, 159n2 Gardner, Lawrence, 159n2 Gardner, Margaret, 159n2 Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Gardner), 21 agrarian themes in, 44–46 camp views in, 41–42 conceptualization and development of, 25–26 content of, 26–27 critical attention for, 20 democracy addressed in, 127 geography as central feature of, 39–41 government and military power and national character in, 46–49 impact of Gardner’s worldview on, 21–22 Marshall House photograph in, 52 outlook on postwar world in, 49–51 perpetuation of racial stereotypes in, 80, 81 political project of, 20–21 production of, 111 as recalling travelogue, 38–39 reception of, 26 and rhetorical power of photographs, 27–31 and role of text- and image-​based media in reform community, 31 significance of, 24–25 slave pen photograph in, 52–56, 62–67, 69–71, 73, 74–75 treatment of slavery in, 69–71, 73, 74–76 Gardner Studio relationship of corps members, 111–12 technical skill of, 114–16

Garrison, William Lloyd, 19, 58–59 Gettysburg, PA. Alfred R. Waud, Artist of Harper’s Weekly, Sketching on Battlefield (O’Sullivan), 144–46 Gibson, James Fortifications at Manassas, 44 Fortifications on Heights of Centreville, Virginia, 98 Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding, Pamunkey, Virginia, 99–100 Washington’s Tomb, Mt. Vernon, 135–36 Glasgow, Scotland, 4–5, 8 Glasgow Chartist Debating Society, 22 Glasgow Emancipation Society, 71 Glasgow Sentinel as advocate for working classes, 118 content of, 7–8 editorial on Crystal Palace Exhibition, 120 messages on reform in, 32 mission of, 3–4, 151 and new technologies, 8 Owenism and Chartism’s impact on, 6–7 “The People’s Portrait Gallery of the Most Distinguished Social and Political Reformers in the World,” 110 as promoter of democracy, 22 and transatlantic reform movement, 10–11 travel columns in, 37 treatment of slavery in, 56, 71–73, 75 Glen, Jean. See Jean Gardner Gockel, Bettina, 14, 15 government power, conveyed in Sketch Book, 46–47 Great Chartist Meeting (Kennington Common, 1848), 2, 3, 107–9 Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, The (Kilburn), 3 Grenadier Guards Drummer (Cundall), 95 group portraits, 93–94, 98–99, 102, 103–5 Guano Act (1856), 163n46 guano industry, 34–35, 36, 163n46 Guard Mount, Head-​Quarters Army of the Potomac (O’Sullivan), 47 Gudmestad, Robert, 73 Gunnison, E. Norman, 136 Hales, Peter Bacon, 138–39 Hamlet, James, 71 Harper, Fletcher, 27 Harrison, John, 11 Harvey, Eleanor Jones, 43

Inde x Headquarters Christian Commission In the Field, Germantown (Gardner), 48 Herschel, John, 109 Hine, Lewis, 51 Hoffman, Abram, Camp of 104th Penn’a Vol.’s Morris Island, S. C., 43 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 117 Holzer, Harold, 90 Homer, Winslow, 148–49 Our Women and the War, 88, 90 Veteran in a New Field, 123–24, 140 Hooker’s New Line of Intrenchments (Baritt), 27 Hotel, Chincha Islands, The (Moulton), 34–35, 36 Howe, Daniel Walker, 129 Howlett, John, 94 Hunt, Robert, 29 Illustrated Letter Paper Comprising Views in Glasgow (Allan and Ferguson), 8, 11 “incidents of war,” 29–30 industrialism, 46, 139–41, 149 infrastructure, American, 142–43 Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding, Pamunkey, Virginia (Wood and Gibson), 99–100 internal improvements, 142–43 Jackson, James, 52 Janowitz, Anne, 109 Jay, William, 20, 150 Johnson, Eastman, 80–81 Johnston, Francis Benjamin, Races, Negroes: United States. Virginia. Hampton., 83, 84 Jones, Ernest, 43, 46, 75 Kansas-​Nebraska Act of 1854, 154 Kansas Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, 154–55 Kaplan, Cora, 58 Kelsey, Robin, 20 Kephart, George, 64 Kilburn, William Edward, The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, 3 Knox, David, 111 Korda, Andrea, 11 Kossuth, Louis, 37 labor, 85–86 and Crystal Palace Exhibition, 105 emergence of, groups, 102–3 factory labor’s threat to handicraft, 117–18 and portrait of Gardner, 112–14 rejection of industry and devaluing of, 118

writings on, 105–7 See also soldiers, laboring labor reform, 5, 107–10, 139–40 land, as basis for societal change, 46 landscapes and landscape images, 40–41, 43, 46–47 Langenheim, Frederick, 133 Langenheim, William, 133 Laurie, Bruce, 89 Lauritz, John, 143 Lawrence, Kansas, 154, 155, 156 Lee, Anthony, 20, 39, 40–41, 76 Leech, John, The Pound and the Shilling, 106 Leech, Margaret, 127–28 Leja, Michael, 152 Leslie, Frank, 27 Lieut. General Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Armies of the United States (Currier and Ives), 92 Lincoln, Abraham, 123, 142–43 London Costermonger, The (Mayhew), 107 London Labor and the London Poor (Mayhew), 105–7 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, back of carte de visite of, 124 Lossing, Benson J., 27 Loughran, Trish, 31 Love, William, 3, 71 Maidment, Brian, 43 male communion, 112 Manet, Édouard, 15 manufacturing, 46 See also industrialism Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia (Pywell), 52, 53 Martineau, Harriet, 37 Mattison, Ben, 89 Mayer, Heinrich, 24 Mayhew, Henry, London Labor and the London Poor, 105–7 Mazzini, Joseph, 19, 37 McClellan, George, 13 McDaniel, W. Caleb, 37, 150 McInnis, Maurie, 58 Medical Supply Boat, Appomattox Landing, Virginia (Reekie), 29, 30 meteorological phenomena, 43 Military Asylum, 133, 140 Military Asylum, Washington, D.C. (Gardner), 133 Military Telegraphic Corps, Army of the Potomac, Berlin (Gardner), 102, 103

181

In de x

182

Miller, Angela, 43 Mills, Robert, 139 Mooney, Thomas H., 87 moral economy, 5, 16 Morin’s Hotel, Great Plaza, Lima (Moulton), 32, 33 Moulton, Henry De Witt, 31, 32–33 Depot, Lima, 33, 34 The Hotel, Chincha Islands, 34–35, 36 Morin’s Hotel, Great Plaza, Lima, 32, 33 Side View of the Bridge of Pizarro, Lima, 33–34, 35 See also Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) Munforte, Patrizia, 14, 15 Natale, Simone, 143 national character, 46–49 National Gallery of American Manufacturers and Agriculture, 139 nature images, 43, 44–46 Neely, Mark, 90 Negro Family Coming into the Union Lines, January 1, 1863, A (Woodbury), 78 Nelson, Dean, 96 occupational portraits, 88–90 O’Connor, Feargus, 2, 3, 86, 109–10, 143 Oldfield, John, 58 Old Kentucky Home (Negro Life at the South) ( Johnson), 80–81 Old Patent Office Building (Plumb), 139, 140 “Organization of Democracy” manifesto, 150 Orvell, Miles, 142 O’Sullivan, Timothy background of, 111 Camp Architecture, Brandy Station, Virginia, 96 Fredericksburg, Virginia, 45–46 Gettysburg, PA. Alfred R. Waud, Artist of Harper’s Weekly, Sketching on Battlefield, 144–46 Guard Mount, Head-​Quarters Army of the Potomac, 47 Poplar Grove Church, 48, 50 relationship with other corps members, 111 View of the Interior of Fort Steadman, 96–97 Our Women and the War (Homer), 88, 90 Overlooking Lawrence and the Kansas River (Gardner), 156 Owen, Robert, 3, 6, 38, 46, 74, 118, 140 Owenism, 5–7, 11, 46 Paisley, Scotland, 4 Patent Office, 138–40

Patent-​Office, Washington. From South-​West (Gardner), 132 Pattison, William, 6–7 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 133 A Drop of Perspiration on the Portico!, 134 Pencil of Nature (Talbot), 23 People’s Charter, 2, 110 “People’s Portrait Gallery of the Most Distinguished Social and Political Reformers in the World, The,” 110 Perdue, Martin C., 96 Perry, John D., 154–55 Perry, Robert, Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow, 8, 10 Peru, 35–36 See also Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) Peters, G. W., Exterior of Alexandria Slave Pen, 67 philanthropy, 76–77 Phillips, Wendell, 19 Philp & Solomons and Gardner Studio productions, 13 and publication of Sketch Book, 25–26 photographer scientist model, 146–47 photographic books, 23–25, 26–27, 60 See also Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (Gardner); Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) Photographic Incidents of the War (Gardner), 29, 31 photography American, as new narrative form, 151–52 in books, 24–25 contribution as historical narrative, 51 and evidentiary information in print media, 23 and factory labor’s threat to handicraft labor, 117–18 and fusing of literary, aesthetic, and political, 12–13 increased interest in, 139 increased production in, 116–17 market for, 117 perception of, 143 portrait photography, 144–46 possibilities of, 23–24 power of, 39 reform, 14, 153, 161n50 rhetorical power of, 27–31 role in Civil War, 146–47 role of studio owner, 114 Sketch Book’s significance for photographic community, 24–25

Inde x tactility of, 60 technical skill in, 114–15 technological improvements in, 15–16, 102–3, 114, 151 transnational context of American, 14–15 pictorial field book, 27 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 59, 79–80 pity, 76–79, 82–84 “plain” portraits, 115–16 Plumb, John, Old Patent Office Building, 139, 140 poetry, Chartist, 12, 109 political reform ideologies, 2, 19–20, 149 Poor Man’s Guardian, 8, 9 Poplar Grove Church, 48, 50, 96 Poplar Grove Church (O’Sullivan), 48, 50 popular prints, 91–93 portrait photography, 144–46 postwar national culture, 123–24 Pound and the Shilling, The (Leech), 106 press and print media influence of, 6–7 photography in, 24–25 reform movements and new technologies in, 22–24 reform movements’ dependence on, 19–20 See also Glasgow Sentinel Price Birch and Co., 64, 65 prisoners of war, 74–75 props, 94 Pywell, William background of, 111 field project in West, 153–54 Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia, 52, 53 Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, 52–54, 60–61, 62–67, 69–71, 73, 74–75 Races, Negroes: United States. Virginia. Hampton. ( Johnston), 84 racist stereotypes, 79–80, 81 Randolph, John, 66 Rare Specimen Found, A (Gardner), 156–57 Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) conceptual origins of, 35 content of, 32–35 geography as central feature of, 39 moral lesson of, 35–36 political project of, 22 publication and reception of, 31–32 as recalling travelogue, 38–39 Read, William, Feargus Edward O’Connor, 109–10

Read & Co., The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for Grand International Exhibition of 1851, 106 Reekie, John background of, 111 A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, 80 Medical Supply Boat, Appomattox Landing, Virginia, 29, 30 relationship with other corps members, 111–12 reform movements, 2 dependence on print media, 19–20 and Gardner’s new visions for society, 150–51 and new print technologies, 22–23 role of text- and image-​based media in, 31 and travelogues, 37–38 reform photography, 14, 153, 161n50 Reps, John, 41 Richmond, Virginia postwar architectural portraits in, 141–42 Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (“Freedmen”) by Canal, 81, 82 Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, 59 Untitled, 141 Richmond, Virginia. Group of Negroes (“Freedmen”) by Canal (Gardner), 81, 82 Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, A ( Johnson), 80–81 Riis, Jacob, 161n50 romantic racialism, 78 Root, Marcus Aurelius, 93–94, 152 Rosenheim, Jeff, 20 Rotunda and Dome of the U.S. Capitol, The (Wyeth), 129–30 Rubenstein, Harry, 89 ruins, photographs of, 141–42 Russell, Andrew Joseph Commissary Department, Alexandria, Slave Pen, 55 Front of “Slave Pen,” Alexandria, 67–68 Sachse, Edward, 42 Savage, Kirk, 59 Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac (Waud), 93, 94 Schwab, Ulrike, 12, 43 Scouts and Guides of the Potomac, Berlin, Maryland, October 1862 (Gardner), 102–5 “Seal Rocks,” in Pacific Ocean, near San Francisco (Gardner), 157, 158 Seaton, William Winston, 13 Shakespeare, William, 157 Side View of the Bridge of Pizarro, Lima (Moulton), 33–34, 35

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Slabtown, Hampton, Va. (Gardner), 82–84 Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, 59 slave auctions, 58–59 Slave Market of America, 64 Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, 64 Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia (Brady Studio), 68–69 Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia (Pywell), 52–54, 60–61, 62–67, 69–71, 73, 74–75 slave pens, 52–56, 60–69, 71 slavery and abolitionist visual culture, 55–60 arguments supporting, 59 and black social and political equality, 79–80 and conceptions of benevolence, 76–79, 82–84 and evidentiary information in print media, 23 Gardner on, 75–76 Gardner’s interest in, 56 in reformer travelogues, 38 Scottish opposition to, 71, 73–74 slave trading in Washington, DC, 61–63, 65–66 surplus of slaves in Washington, DC, 166nn33–34 treatment in Glasgow Sentinel, 56, 71–73, 75 treatment in Sketch Book, 69–71, 73, 74–76 Slave Ship (Turner), 74 social problems, visibility of, 10 social reform ideologies, 2, 5, 149 social scientist photographer, 147 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 56, 57 soldiers return of Union, 123–24 training of, 95–96 soldiers, laboring, 85–86 depictions of, 96–102 Gardner’s depiction of, 87–88 group portraits of, 93–94, 98–99, 102, 103–5 and labor as source of communion, 102 and occupational portraits, 88–90 and popular prints, 91–93 and rejection of common image of laborer, 105 scouts and guides, 102–5 training and background of, 95–96, 169n28 and trends in US visual culture, 94 understanding Civil War through, 120–21 Southeast View of the U.S. Capitol from Photographs of the U.S. Capitol (Wood), 134 St. Andrew’s Society, 111, 129 Stange, Maren, 161n50 Stauffer, John, 81

Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, 57, 58 Sturge, Joseph, 38, 62 Sweet, Timothy, 20–21 Taft, Robert, 14 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 23 technological development and innovation, 15–16, 102–3, 114, 139–41, 151 Trachtenberg, Alan, 76, 151 travel and travel literature, 36–39, 51 See also Rays of Sunlight from South America (Gardner and Moulton) travelogues, 37–39 Turner, J. M W., 74 Untitled (1865, Gardner), 141 Untitled (Washington, Gardner), 126 Upton, Dell, 60 urban view, 41–42 vantage point, establishing, in early American cities, 138–39 Veteran in a New Field (Homer), 123–24, 140 Vicinus, Martha, 12 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts (Cole), 40 View of the Interior of Fort Steadman (O’Sullivan), 96–97 Views of Society and Manners in America (Wright), 37 Virginia Family Coach, A (Gardner), 122, 123 Virginia. Newspaper Vendor and Cart in Camp (Gardner), 144 Vitruvius, 60 Walker, Jonathan, 23 Walt Whitman, Three-​quarter-​length Portrait (Gardner), 115–16 Washington, DC ambitions for Gardner’s portfolio on, 137–42 description of antebellum, 127 as emblem of democratic triumph, 127 Gardner moves to, 12–13 Gardner’s portrayal of, 123, 129, 131–35 Gardner’s work and vision as aligned with, 124–26 Peale’s photographs of, 133 reception of Gardner’s portfolio on, 136–37 Scottish labor community in, 169n32 slave trading in, 61–63, 65–66, 166nn33–34 Wyeth’s illustrated books on, 129–31

Inde x Washington, George, 129, 142 Washington’s Tomb, Mt. Vernon (Gardner and Gibson), 135–36 Waud, Alfred Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation, 78, 79 portrait of, 144–46 Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac, 93, 94 on witnessing war, 146 Wedgewood, Josiah, Am I Not a Brother, 59 Weisser, Henry, 7 Weld, Theodore, 31 Werge, John, 115 Whitman, Walt, 86, 115–16, 123, 129, 130, 138, 139, 142–43, 148 Whitney, Eli, 146, 174n73 Wilberforce, William, 56 Williams, A. Susan, 10

Williams, Megan Rowley, 21, 80 Wilson, Joseph, 149, 158 Winston, William, 131 Wirz, Henry, 126, 145 Wood, John, 133 Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding, Pamunkey, Virginia, 99–100 Southeast View of the U.S. Capitol from Photographs of the U.S. Capitol, 134 Wood, Marcus, 75–76, 79 Woodbury, David, A Negro Family Coming into the Union Lines, January 1, 1863, 78 worker-​poet, 111 workers’ rights, 107–10 Wright, Frances, 37 Wyeth, Samuel Douglas, 129–31 Young, Elizabeth, 76

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