No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2019
The Civil War marked a revolution in the use of visual culture, during which imagery became a soldier's tool. Engagement with imagery presented both an opportunity and a dilemma, forcing some soldier-artists to abandon existing artistic conventions, whilst others fortified them, in search of ways to represent both the war's violence and tedium. The visual idealization of war jarred uncomfortably with the depiction of the conflict's realities. The creation of a diverse grassroots archive ran parallel to the mainstream narrative, examination of which offers new insight into how some soldiers visualized the war in opposition to themes exhibited in popular culture.
1 Thompson emphasizes that image makers, “most of whom had never accompanied an army into the field,” established these conventions. Though soldiers and newspaper sketch artists gradually realized that these stereotyped images were meaningless and abandoned them, many home-front image makers retained heroic-war practices for propagandistic purposes throughout the duration of the war. Thompson, William F., The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 7Google Scholar.
2 Conn, Steven and Walker, Andrew, “The History in the Art: Painting the Civil War,” Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War, Museum Studies, 27, 1 (2001), 60–81Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., 66.
4 Ibid., 62.
5 Barrett, Ross, Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 105Google Scholar.
6 Neely, Mark E. and Holzer, Harold, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 70–77Google Scholar.
7 Giese, Lucretia Hoover, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Burnham, Patricia M. and Giese, Lucretia Hoover, eds., Redefining American History Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64–81, 70Google Scholar.
8 Burns, Sarah, “Cartoons in Color: David Gilmour Blythe's Very Uncivil War,” in Johnson, Patricia, ed., Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 66–83, 66–67Google Scholar.
9 Faust, Drew G., This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2008), 196Google Scholar. Faust surveys a number of American writers and their responses to the Civil War's suffering, noting that Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville also held a significant “understanding of war's destruction.” But she concedes they had little influence upon popular thought and published either late in the nineteenth century or earlier but with little success. Ibid., 193–210.
10 Burns, 66.
11 Conn, Steven, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures so Terrible?,” History and Theory, 41, 4 (Dec. 2002), 17–42, 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Harvey, Eleanor J., The Civil War and American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 113Google Scholar.
13 William Howe Downes (Homer's first biographer) observes that Homer's wartime catalogue was an immediate and often undiluted response to the war: a significant factor in his artistic training. The same was true for many soldier-artists. But they were still distinct from Homer, despite the latter's embeddedness within the army. Homer admitted as such in a letter over a quarter of a century after the war had ended. He reminisced about an episode during the Siege of Yorktown, and accompanied the vignette with a crude sketch of a Rebel soldier as seen through a telescopic sight: “I looked through one of their rifles once … this is what I saw – I was not a soldier – but a camp follower & artist, the above impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army.” Although the sharpshooters were particularly infamous, Homer's observation still recognizes a fundamental difference of perspective between the civilian-artist and the soldier-artist. Downes, William Howe, The Life and Works of Winslow Homer (New York: Dover, 1989; first published 1911), 8Google Scholar, quoted in Giese, Lucretia Hoover and Perkinson, Roy, “A Newly Discovered Drawing of Sharpshooters by Winslow Homer: Experience, Image, and Memory,” Winterthur Portfolio, 45, 1 (Spring 2011), 61–90, 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; miscellaneous Homer MSs, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; first cited by Lucretia Hoover Giese, “Winslow Homer: Painter of the Civil War,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1985, 238, quoted in Giese and Perkinson, “A Newly Discovered Drawing …,” WP, 61.
14 McPherson, James M., For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–12Google Scholar.
15 Holzer and Neely declared that they were “at war with the very idea of ‘illustration’ in Civil War history.” Though in reference to the iconic, mainstream visualizations of the conflict (which have since received the attention of scholars), soldier-artists and their images lag behind. Holzer, Harold and Neely, Mark E. Jr., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion Books, 1993), 10Google Scholar.
16 Basker, James G., “Foreword,” in Bonner, Robert E., The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 8Google Scholar.
17 Hess, Earl J., The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 154Google Scholar.
18 To Holmes, viewing Gardner's photographs “was so nearly like visiting the battle-field … that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us.” But many civilians were unable to view Gardner's exhibition and instead encountered sanitized and miniaturized engravings of the photographs in the illustrated newspapers. Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr., “Doings of the Sunbeam,” in Holmes, Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston, MA: Ticknor & Fields, 1864), 267–68Google Scholar; Holmes, “My Hunt after the Captain,” in ibid., 24–123; “Scenes on the Battlefield of Antietam: From Photographs by Mr. M. B. Brady,” Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 18 Oct. 1862, 664–65.
19 After the Civil War his son described the war experience as “incommunicable.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “The Soldier's Faith,” Memorial Day Address, Harvard University, 30 May 1895, in The Essential Holmes: Selections from Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Posner, Richard (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 93Google Scholar.
20 Wilson, Michael L., “Visual Culture: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?”, in Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 26–33, 32Google Scholar.
21 Smith, Mark M., Sensory History (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Smith, Mark M., How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2006), 2–3Google Scholar; quoted in Cook, James W., “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History, 95, 2 (Sept. 2008), 432–41, 432–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith's study of the Civil War sensory experience recognizes the interaction of the senses, but illustrates how one sense came to dominate and overwhelm others during five specific events. In doing so, he demonstrates how nonvisual senses may be elevated in importance alongside the visual. Smith, Mark M., The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
23 If the senses were jarred that might “weaken the character of man and, by extension, that of the nation.” Antebellum Americans enjoyed “an aura of sensory stability.” The Civil War shattered these refined sensibilities and effaced notions of civility. “The Cultivation of the Senses,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 6, 31 (Dec. 1852), 81, quoted in Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege, 1.
24 Mumey, Nolie, Alfred Edward Mathews (1831–1874): Union Soldier, Illustrator of Civil War Battles, Author, Traveler, Map Maker, and Delineator of Western Scenes, Especially Those of the Territories of Colorado and Montana (Boulder, CO: Johnson Publishing Company, 1961), 1, 4–5Google Scholar.
25 Taft, Robert, “The Pictorial Record of the Old West: VII – Alfred E. Mathews,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, 17, 2 (May 1949), 97–121, 104Google Scholar.
26 Alfred E. Mathews, Interesting Narrative: Being a Journal of the Flight of Alfred E. Mathews, of Stark Co., Ohio (s.n., 1861), 7–8, 33, original emphasis.
27 It is unknown what privileges Mathews enjoyed, but another volunteer, Joseph Boggs Beale of the “Blue Reserves,” was “appointed regimental artist, & relieved of all duties except drill & parade” during General Robert E. Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. Joseph Boggs Beale, “Diary Entry: 27 June, 1863,” in “Volume 6, Diary, Dec. 1862–Oct. 1864,” Arthur Colen Collection of Joseph Boggs Beale Papers (JBBP) 2007, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP); Beale, “Letter to Pa, Ma, Aunty, Sisters & Brothers, July 3, 1863,” Box 1, Folder 1, JBBP 2007, HSP; Beale, “Diary Entry: 8 July, 1863,” Vol. 6, JBBP, HSP.
28 B. B. Brashear, “Letter to the Tuscarawas Advocate Newspaper,” Tuscarawas Advocate, 28 March 1862.
29 Ulysses S. Grant, “Unidentified newspaper clipping in the Western History Department, Denver Public Library,” Daily Miner's Register, 1 Dec. 1865, 3. Robert Taft, who notes that the Grant letter is “included in the Charles H. Mathews material,” also uses the quote. Taft, 106.
30 Taft, 105, 108.
31 Ibid., 106.
32 Peake, Michael, Blood Shed in This War: Civil War Illustrations by Captain Adolph Metzner, 32nd Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010), 2Google Scholar.
33 Metzner's duties as a topographical engineer permitted him access to a range of creative resources. But even in periods of scarcity, his pharmaceutical gave him the skills to produce tints from natural materials such as berries and bark. Ibid., 2–3.
34 Ibid., 2.
35 William G. Mank, “Battlefield Near Pittsburg Landing, 9 April 1862,” Louisville Anzeiger, 19 April 1862, in Reinhart, Joseph R., ed., August Willich's Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 77Google Scholar.
36 See Metzner, Captain Hulbert Dilger at Resaca, Georgia, May 1864, watercolor, Peake, Blood Shed in this War, 104.
37 McPherson, James M., The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 579–83Google Scholar.
38 Peter Cozzens notes that “defeat would have made the Emancipation Proclamation look like the last gasp of a dying war effort and perhaps brought England and France into the war on the side of the Confederacy.” Cozzens, Peter, No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 10Google Scholar. In the debacle at Fredericksburg in Virginia, fought 11–15 December 1862, the Union suffered 12,653 casualties (1,284 dead, 9,600 wounded, 1,769 captured or missing, by the official record) whilst gaining no tactical or strategic advantage. Rable, George C., Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 288Google Scholar.
39 Ibid., 582; “Z,” “Camp near Murfreesboro, Tenn., 7 January 1863,” Louisville Anzeiger, 15 Jan. 1863, quoted in Reinhart, 127–28.
40 Weidman, Jeffrey, Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900: A Biographical Dictionary (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), 277Google Scholar.
41 Neely, Mark E. Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 13Google Scholar.
42 Engravers, with their detachment from the war as experienced by its combatants and with patriotic fervor to instill amongst the American populace, would often censor images for civilian consumption to the extent that soldiers barely recognized their depictions. The engravers would take on-the-spot sketches from soldiers and sketch artists, and by combining them with written or telegraphed reports of battles, turn them into marketable images of the war. Thompson, The Image of War, 83. Even in peacetime, editors and engravers generally directed the content of images. Simpson, Marc, Winslow Homer: The Clark Collection (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2013), 128Google Scholar.
43 In another Homer sketch, a soldier attempting to control skittish horses became an orderly procession of cavalry, and battle smoke a benign cloud formation; a foreground fence was enlivened by a curiosity-seeking civilian couple. Printmakers attempted to censor any allusions to unpleasant sensory experiences. Giese and Perkinson, “A Newly Discovered Drawing,” 62, 66, 77.
44 Daniel Wait Howe of the 7th Indiana noted that, in particular, the illustrations of Harper's Weekly exercised a powerful influence in shaping northern sentiment, which was “loyal to the Federal government” and was “zealous for a vigorous prosecution of the war.” Howe, Daniel Wait, Civil War Times, 1861–1865 (Indianapolis, IN: The Bowen-Merrill Company Publishers, 1902), 4–5Google Scholar.
45 Thompson, 83.
46 Alfred E. Mathews, letter in the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library, quoted in Nolie Mumey, Alfred Edward Mathews, 46.
47 Harvey defines history painting, in the traditional, academic sense, as the “monumental canvases depicting elaborate battle scenes and heroes” that were prominent in European art. But such imagery had gained, at best, a tenuous foothold in the US. Even grand-manner history paintings by artists such as Benjamin West and John Trumbull never garnered the same support as the wilderness aesthetic. Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 5.
48 Holloway, David and Beck, John, eds., American Visual Cultures (London: Continuum Publishing, 2005), 13Google Scholar. Other soldier-artists who had worked as landscape painters in the antebellum era included Captain James Hope of the 2nd Vermont Infantry. Harvey, 6–8.
49 Harvey, 19.
50 The soldiers in the rear regiment carry their weapons at right shoulder shift, a position often employed during hastened manoeuvres due to the additional stability it offered. “Right Shoulder Shift Arms. – No. 219,” Plate 13, in Casey, Silas, Infantry Tactics, for the Instruction, Exercise, and Manouvres of the Soldier, A Company Line, Line of Skirmishers, Battalion, Brigade, or Corps D'Armée, Volume I (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1862)Google Scholar.
51 Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 55–56.
52 Daniel, Larry J., Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of the Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 193–94Google Scholar.
53 US War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume XXV, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 193Google Scholar, quoted in Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, 76.
54 Hays, Gilbert Adams, Under the Red Patch: Story of the Sixty-Third Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–1864 (Pittsburgh: Sixty-Third Pennsylvania Volunteers Regimental Association, 1908), 422Google Scholar. Even the son of Reverend A. M. Stewart of the 102nd Pennsylvania, a visitor to the Army of the Potomac and a recent observer of the battles of Williamsburg and Fair Oaks in 1862, threw down a copy of Harper's Weekly and exclaimed, “Pshaw. It's no use, they can't picture a battle,” after seeing their published illustrations of those engagements. Stewart, Rev. A. M., Camp, March and Battle-Field; Or, Three Years and a Half with the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia, PA: Jas. B. Rodgers, Printer, 1865), 188Google Scholar.
55 Though Mathews's work differed from that of many other soldiers, his works bear resemblance to those of Robert Knox Sneden of the 40th New York, who favored panoramas. Bryan, Charles F. Jr.; Kelly, James C., and Lankford, Nelson D., Images from the Storm: Private Robert Knox Sneden (New York: The Free Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Bryan, Charles F. Jr. and Lankford, Nelson D., Eye of the Storm: Written and Illustrated by Private Robert Knox Sneden (New York: The Free Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
56 Mitchell, W. J. T., “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method,” in Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 83–101, 89 n. 9Google Scholar, quoted in Elizabeth Young, “Verbal Battlefields,” in Lee, Anthony W. and Young, Elizabeth, On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 52–94, 57Google Scholar.
57 In other works Mathews coupled his images with official reports from Union officials, further stressing the authenticity of his depictions.
58 Alfred Edward Mathews and Middleton, Strobridge, & Co., Charge of the First Brigade, Commanded by Col. M. B. Walker, on the Friday Evening of the Battle of Stones River, January 2nd, 1863; in Which the Rebels Were Repulsed with Heavy Loss, and Driven behind Their Breastworks, lithograph, 1863, LC-DIG-pga-02197, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
59 Stewart, 280.
60 Linderman, Gerald, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 157–78Google Scholar.
61 See, for example, N. Currier, lithograph, 1846, Battle of Monterey – The Americans Forcing Their Way to the Main Plaza Sept. 23th 1846, PGA – Currier & Ives – Battle of Monterey (A size), Prints and Photographs Division, LoC, or N. Currier, lithograph, 1847, Battle of Cerro Cordo April 18th 1847, PGA – Currier & Ives – Battle of Cerro Cordo April 18th 1847 (A size), Prints and Photographs Division, LoC.
62 For white southerners, battle was ennobling: the “necessity for discipline strengthened character.” Southern chivalry's fascination with the duel emphasized “the attractiveness of individualized combat.” Mathews's perspective denies the southern soldiers the foundations of their martial culture, as it renders them an irregular force, unwilling to face their northern adversaries except from the relative safety of the skirmish line or the woods. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University, 2007), 38-39Google Scholar; Linderman, 16.
63 George Oscar French, “Letter to Dear Friends, 10 June 1864,” George Oscar French Letters, Vermont Historical Society, at http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online/civil-war-transcriptions/george-oscar-french-letters, accessed 14 Sept. 2018.
64 Linderman, 240; Leif Torkelson, “Forged in Battle: The Evolution of Small Unit Cohesion in the Union Voluntary Infantry Regiments, 1861–1865,” senior thesis, Princeton University, 1991, 5.
65 Sears, Stephen W., Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 369, 251–55Google Scholar.
66 Metzner applied these words with softer brush strokes and without adequate spacing, so much so that the Library of Congress has mistakenly titled the image Stone River Rebellion.
67 The sword appears similar to a Model 1840 army non-commissioned officers’ sword or a Model 1840 musicians’ sword, but the closest subject of rank to the weapon is a commissioned officer (either a lieutenant or a captain, the subject pictured at center wearing a double-breasted frockcoat, tall boots, and what appears to be a pistol holster by his side). His frockcoat appears to include rank-defining shoulder boards, or epaulettes, but neither of these were common to the Confederate officer class.
68 Daniel, Battle of Stones River, 190; US War Department, War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Volume XX, Part 1, 786, quoted in ibid., 191.
69 Cozzens, No Better Place, 192; War Department, War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Volume XX, Part 1, 588, quoted in ibid., 194.
70 “Z,” “Camp near Murfreesboro,” quoted in Reinhart, Willich's Gallant Dutchmen, 128.
71 William Newlin, A History of the Seventy-Third Regiment of Illinois Infantry Volunteers: Its Services and Experiences in Camp, on the March, on the Picket and Skirmish Lines, and in Many Battles of the War, 1861–65 (n.p., 1890), 143–44, quoted in Cozzens, No Better Place, 171.
72 Henry Raymond, “Editors Table,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 8 (April 1864), 691; quoted in Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 62.
73 Cate, Wirt Armistead, ed., Two Soldiers: The Campaign Diaries of Thomas J. Key, C.S.A., December 7, 1863–May 17, 1865 and Robet J. Campbell, U.S.A., January 1, 1864–July 21, 1864 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 182Google Scholar.
74 Thompson, The Image of War, 86. Thompson observes that the work of Civil War printmakers established the main themes of pictorial propaganda for every American war to follow. Thompson, William F., “Pictorial Propaganda and the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 46, 1 (Autumn 1962), 21–31, 22Google Scholar.
75 Forbes, Edwin, Thirty Years After: An Artist's Memoir of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1890), 173Google Scholar.
76 Saum, Lewis O., The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1980), 94–95Google Scholar, quoted in Mitchell, Reid, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 142Google Scholar.
77 Owen, Ira S., Greene County in the War, Being a History of the Seventy-Fourth Regiment, with Sketches of the Twelfth, Ninety-Fourth, One Hundred and Tenth, Forty-Fourth, and One Hundred and Fifty-Fourth Regiments, and the Tenth Ohio Battery, Embracing Anecdotes, Incidents and Narratives of the Camp, March, and Battlefield, and the Author's Experience While in the Army (Xenia, OH: Torchlight Job Rooms, 1872), 34–35Google Scholar, quoted in Cozzens, No Better Place, 171.
78 Faust, 40.
79 Cozzens, No Better Place, 10; Daniel, Battle of Stones River, 7; letter, “2 January 1863,” in ibid.
80 Hess, The Union Soldier, 55; Faust, 41. For more on the destructive power of rifled weaponry, which caused 94% of Union casualties in the war, see Hess, Earl J., The Rifled Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008)Google Scholar.
81 Brownson, Orestes, The Works of Orestes Brownson, ed. Brownson, Henry F. (Detroit, MI: Thorndike Nourse, Publisher, 1882–87), Volume XVII, 214Google Scholar.
82 More recent estimates, based on careful statistical analysis of census data, consider the death toll to be as high as 750,000. J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, 57 (Dec. 2011), 307–48, quoted in McPherson, , The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 54Google Scholar.
83 Faust, 60.
84 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage, 115, refers to “simmering down,” noting that a “series of shocks would compel soldiers to abandon or to modify beliefs that in battle proved useless – or dangerous.” Mitchell, 10, notes that the “hardening process was painful” for soldiers: “being a man meant risking horrors that might unman a man … by making him inhuman.” McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 141–42, acknowledges the estrangement between soldiers and civilians: “the impossibility of describing what war is really like to the folks back home creates a vast gulf between those who have been in combat and those who have not,” but notes that patriotic values of duty and honor remained with soldiers on the front lines until the war's end.
85 Warren Olney, “Shiloh as Seen by a Private Soldier,” A Paper Read before California Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, May 31, 1889 (n.p., n.d.), 21, quoted in Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 154–55.
86 Bierce's “Chickamauga” describes a wounded soldier with “a face that lacked a lower jaw – from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.” This short story concerns the annihilation of a child's innocence as he happens upon the wounded of the Battle of Chickamauga. Bierce, Ambrose, The Civil War Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 56–57Google Scholar.
87 Neely and Holzer, The Union Image, 77.