Portraits of War: Identity, Intimacy, and Memory in American Civil War Culture
Portraits of War: Identity, Intimacy, and Memory in American Civil War Culture
by Diane Irby
Between 1861 and 1865, more than three million Americans fought in the bloodiest war our nation has known. Fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons came from both North and South, willing to die in service to their country. They were real people with real lives, real families, and real emotions. Though many have been shocked by the horrors of the Civil War, as seen through the lens of documentary photographers such as Matthew Brady, it is through the examination of portraiture produced at the time that an even more riveting story unfolds. The most personal of photographs, the portrait, which was not meant to be seen by a wide audience, but were rather best suited for close keeping in one's pocket or held between praying hands, gave soldiers and their families a sense of control in an out-of-control situation. Serving as mediators of time, distance, and memory, the intimacy and realism of portraiture helped Civil War men and their loved ones manage the anxieties of the anticipation of death and the inherent suffering of war and served as reliquaries of their new personal identities.
Though invented decades earlier, photography remained in its infancy. From its start, Americans received photography with enthusiasm. Through its early marriage with death, mourning, and memorial, even before the war, Americans had already established a means of utilizing photography to manage detachment and grief. Portraits of the living and the dead served not only as talismans of memory and tokens of affection, but also to create and preserve identities, narratives, and personal relationships.
In 1860, a year before the war began, there were more than three thousand professional photography businesses operating within the United States, and, according to the New York Daily Tribune, a decade earlier saw more than three million photographs being produced annually. Portraiture did not first emerge at the time of the Civil War; however, American soldiers and their families commissioned portraits on an unprecedented scale and drastically altered the way in which they functioned. By the time the war began, photographic portraiture had long replaced the painted portrait and, though it often required travel to a studio, many could afford to commission a likeness of themselves and family members. Portrait photography was primed for the outbreak of the war. Having already been established as emotional currency, portraits became a critical component to coping with separation, fear, and the essential torment of war, and revolutionized methods of mourning.
The American Civil War was the first to be widely photographed. Still an emerging medium, the Civil War put photography to the test. It served many purposes during the war. It was utilized for documentation, in reconnaissance and tactical observation, and as propaganda. Portraiture, however, provides us a different lens with which to examine the Civil War than the widely circulated images of those captured by photojournalists. Already a growing market, the business of portrait photography saw a boom immediately at the war’s outset. Families were scrambling to have portraits taken before a soldier would leave home for the war. Only two weeks after its beginning, Charles Seely, editor of the American Journal of Photography wrote, “The military are being enrolled… The photographic galleries are thriving; the wise soldier makes his will and seeks the photograph as possibly the last token of affection for the dear ones at home.” For loved ones, portraits would ensure the preservation of the soldier and serve to maintain their presence at home. For soldiers, portraits of loved ones would function as tangible visual fragments of the people and places for which they longed, as reassurance and comfort while they were separated from home. The photographic portrait became a powerful object of emotion, intimacy, and memory in the American Civil War culture.
The American Civil War has been described as the first ‘living room war,’ a war delivered to the home front in the form of images previously unfathomable. Photographs captured by Brady and his team of photographers of battlefield corpses from Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in America’s history still to this day, where more than 20,000 soldiers were killed, marked the first time most people had seen the carnage of war. After their public exhibition in 1862, The New York Times remarked that “Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
Despite the shock of battlefield imagery, everyone craved information, soldiers and civilians alike. Corps of photographers were established to follow troops into the field and stereographs were produced by the thousands. However, photography had limitations. For one, though processing time had been greatly reduced, action shots were still not yet possible. Likewise, it was not yet possible to reproduce photographic images in newspapers or publications. Not everyone was able to attend an exhibition and so, relied on widely distributed weekly publications, such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, which featured illustrations produced by block prints of engraved sketches created by artists the publications employed and dispatched to the camps and battlefields. These idealized images became central to people’s understanding of the events of the war.
Winslow Homer, News from the War, from Harper's Weekly, June 14, 1862, 1862, wood engraving on paper, image: 13 1/4 x 20 3/8 in. (33.7 x 51.8 cm) irregular, Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/news-war-harpers-weekly-june-14-1862-37061
As publications responded to the public’s desire for news and imagery of the war, there was demand for a more intimate way to bridge the distance between the martial and domestic spheres. This demand brought portrait photographers and their studios to the camps, where they would set up shop and, by war’s end, produce portraits by the hundreds of thousands. It is in these images, created as keepsakes and to be sent home to loved ones, that the observer can truly witness the emergence of the identity of the American Civil War soldier.
“Recent calls for 600,000 more troops have given a prodigious impetus to the photographic business. One photographer took 160 pictures in a day, and another requested 3,144 photographic cases from a factory in a single order,” reported Scientific American Magazine in its October 1862 issue. The unprecedented demand for portraiture galvanized a rapid advancement in photography technology that allowed for faster, easier, and more affordable photographs. The collodion process was an improvement on earlier processes; however, it still required the use of chemicals and an environment suitable for developing the images. This meant that itinerant photographers had to have with them their entire set-up, including a darkroom. There were other technicalities to sort out as well. Though daguerreotypes, having a more refined aesthetic than ferrotypes (popularly known as tintypes), had become more affordable to produce, their shiny surface made them difficult to view in the chaotic battlefield environment. Ambrotypes, which had also become favored, posed a problem as well; their fragility made them prone to frequent cracking and even being smashed to the point of unrecognition in the rigors of combat.
Tintypes, however, despite their lower image quality, became preferred among soldiers due to their durability and among photographers due to their effectiveness in cost and quick processing time. These mass-produced small images were kept in often elaborately designed cases that fit easily in one’s hand or pocket and dually provided a portable container for personal relics, such as a lock of hair, jewelry, a letter, or poem. Cartes-de-visites, small paper photographs that were mounted on card, were also a popular choice. Though delicate, they were lightweight and easy to carry or slip into an envelope with a letter to home. Photographers could also create many copies from a single negative, making them a favorite for distributing among family and trading with friends.
Drawing its conventions from painted portraiture, photographic portraiture frequently indulged in idealized representations of its subjects, granting a certain degree of agency to photographers to dictate how their sitter would be portrayed. Backdrops, interior arrangements, props, and the staging of iconographical objects, motifs, and symbols had always been commonly employed in memorial photography, as its primary goal is to create and preserve memory, perhaps, in some cases, even more so than to produce a completely convincing likeness. Unlike other methods of capturing someone’s image, portraits are, above all, representations of identity.
Despite its seeming realism, photography can be manipulated in many ways through simple adjustments of lighting and positioning of the subject. Through experimentation, as development processes were being improved, photographers also discovered ways in which to enhance or alter their images chemically. Likewise, although most are convinced it is a more contemporary tool, retouching of developed photographs has often been part of the typical process of portraiture from its earliest days.
Tents and structures designated as Civil War camp portrait studios featured roofs with roll-away sections to allow the natural light to pour in from above. Though it is likely there was not much retouching applied to camp portraiture, precise chemical finishing and the distribution of natural light from above onto the soldiers posed in simple, straight forward positions, strongly captured the contrast between light and shadow, giving the images a dramatic and valiant quality, and their subjects a sublime-like aura. Backdrops and props were important as well, for creating the idealized representation of the American soldier. Patriotic and masculine virtues were evoked in thematic compositions created by the inclusion of iconography, most importantly flags, as well as weapons and other objects associated with bravery and battle.
In May of 1863, Asst. Surg. Bragg of Crawford’s Battalion of Arkansas Infantry wrote to his wife describing long lines of soldiers waiting to be photographed and donning uniforms and taking up weapons which were props belonging to the photographer.
“There were fifteen soldiers ahead of us, who were going to have their picture took… All these men had their ambrotypes taken in the same jacket – a black one, with blue collar. Eleven of the number had a large old rusty ‘Navy six shooter’ in their hands, which made the warriors look very sanguinary. No doubt their friends will think they are well uniformed and all armed with pistols.”
Library of Congress. "Two unidentified soldiers in Union artillery shell jackets with shoulder scales and slouch hats in front of painted backdrop showing military camp." Civil War Collection, ca. 1861–1865. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010650463/
These portraits provide a way for us to observe the rite of passage that it was. Sitting for their portrait, to be depicted as a proud and brave soldier, affirmed their newly adopted martial identity, expressed their motivation, and communicated their conviction. And it was in this image that they would attempt to maintain their connection to the civilian sphere and portray who they now were to their loved ones back home. Private Anderson of the 21st Indiana Infantry wrote about his experience in a letter to home saying,
“As soon as I donned my soldier suit, I made, like the rest, for the artist [who] was alive to his business, and who kept some guns and swords to place in the hands of the soldiers who wished to get their pictures. He was an expert in showing us how to take the position of a soldier. When I went to get my picture taken and he saw that I was a private, he took a musket with the bayonet fixed and knelt and showed me how to form a hollow square out of myself and resist a cavalry charge. I at once took to his idea and down on one knee I went, and with the gun and bayonet, as directed, my picture was taken.”
The portrait as a memento of the absent soldier was significant in the ways in which Civil War soldiers’ loved ones were able to immortalize them, and as a means of preserving their presence within the domestic space. Likewise, family portraits of those who had the opportunity to be photographed together prior to a soldier’s deployment further intensified the home as materialized memory. Home, in the minds of the soldiers and their loved ones alike, was where they belonged. Patriotic portraits also memorialized the soldiers who did not return. Combined with letters they may have sent – which were delivered through the postal service by the hundreds of thousands – these portraits also served as family history.
The self-identities of women were challenged during this time as well. They were becoming soldier’s wives, and many were becoming widows. Civil War Americans were innovative in their utilization of portraiture, however, not only as surrogates for loved ones and for use in creating and inciting memory, but also as a way to attempt to defy the notions of time and distance. Often in Civil War portraiture one can observe particularly heartrending images of both soldiers and civilians attempting to keep their loved one close to them by holding or displaying photographs of them in their own portraits. When wives would hear of their husband’s passing, they would commission mourning portraits of themselves holding a portrait of their lost beloved. Civil War Americans seemed to understand that memories are not ready-made, nor are they always perfect reflections of the past, but rather, they are selective reconstructions created in order to influence the perception of both our past and current realities and to symbolize and classify our world and who we are in it. These narrative scenes created through portraiture announced their changing identities, reinforced their relationships to one another, demonstrated their sacrifice to the cause of the war, and brought some closure to the many who were unable to recover the bodies of the deceased.
Library of Congress. "Two unidentified soldiers in Union artillery shell jackets with shoulder scales and slouch hats in front of painted backdrop showing military camp." Civil War Collection, ca. 1861–1865. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010650463/
Changes in identity were paralleled by sudden and severe shifts in culture. A further affront to the reality that Civil War Americans had known prior to the war was an interruption in their ritualistic grieving and mourning processes, along with the inability to provide many fallen soldiers with a proper burial. Initially, soldiers were buried where they fell, though recovery of the dead from bloodied battlefields sometimes took place under a temporary truce. Often it was the victors who remained that were tasked with the disposal of the dead bodies, which led to the suspicion that the fallen were being treated disrespectfully. Sometimes a rapid retreat prevented any kind of burial at all. Even when there was no disrespect meant, many of the dead were not accorded the dignity in death that their families would have preferred. Likewise, Christian Civil War Americans were needing to forego traditions which indicated that peace was granted to the dying only after having finished all their Earthly business, which included being at peace with one’s own death, as well as the acceptance of their death by loved ones. “The Good Death” required that the hour of death must be witnessed, especially if you were a sinner trying to demonstrate your worthiness of salvation. This concept was a major contributor to the purpose of deathbed and postmortem portraits. Author of the book The Sacred Remains explains that “The war forced all those involved to reassess their approach to the dead. In the context of war, the dead body began to reflect a range of wartime significations and to assume a series of novel meanings far removed from what they had known.” The experience of a sudden and massive loss of life, especially caused by violent means, as well as an interruption in critically important rituals meant to aid in coping with such atrocities can have long lasting implications, and can result in a permanent deviation in the culture of a society as a whole. The portrait provided some reassurance by immortalizing the body of the soldier, one of very few mechanisms available to Americans to assist them in managing the prominence of Civil War death.
Even when soldiers’ bodies were recovered and buried in one of the newly conceived national cemeteries, it was not the same as before. Mourning, once a quiet and intimate interlude, had shifted from something personal and domestic to something communal and public. In his diary, Union Private Elisha Hunt Rhodes described a typical funeral at the front of the Autumn of 1862, less than a year and a half into the war:
“Sunday last, a soldier of Co. ‘A’ died and was buried with military honors. It was not an unusual scene for us, yet it is always solemn. First came the muffled drums playing the ‘Dead March’ then the usual escort for a Private. Eight Privates, commanded by a Corporal, with arms reversed. Then an ambulance with the body in a common board coffin covered with the Stars and Stripes. Co. ‘A’ with side arms only followed while the Company officers brought up the rear.
On arriving at the grave, the Chaplain offered prayer and made some remarks. The coffin was then lowered into the grave, and three volleys were fired by the guard, and then the grave was filled up. The procession returned to camp with the drums playing ‘Quick March.’ Everything went on as usual after, as if nothing had happened, for death is so common that little sentiment is wasted. It is not like death at home.”
In the absence of any useful precedent, Civil War Americans struggled to come to terms with and make sense of the scale of death they were experiencing. Families who were unable to bring their dead home might have been comforted to know that, although they had been laid to rest at some distance to most, at least some degree of solemnity was afforded to them. Though, some recognized the need for what would become a swiftly growing market, and so, the commodification and commercialization of death brought about even more new cultural sensibilities in the ways of dealing with the rapidly changing relationships between life, death, time, place, and memorialization. For those who could afford it – mostly Northerners – private contractors were hired to provide for the need of recovering and returning bodies to their families when possible. This, however, was no easy task in the midst of conflict, often in the heat of the Southern Summer. The metal coffins that were common prior to the war had to now include a mechanism for keeping bodies cool. But a surer way of returning dead bodies home intact was by way of embalming, which, prior to the war, was not a common procedure. The government, however, did not provide for embalming, but the desperate times called for new opportunities for some, and so private embalming services were offered for a charge. Dr. Thomas Holmes, now renowned for his embalming services during the Civil War, is said to have treated more than 4,000 cadavers at the rate of $100 each. Dr. F.A. Hutton, his competition, advertised in the 1863 Washington City Directory that ‘Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK! But retain their natural color and appearance… so as to admit of contemplation of the person Embalmed, with the countenance of one asleep.’ David E. Stannard, author of The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change states that hundreds of patents related to funerary were taken out in the era of the American Civil War.
At the camps, soldiers were lining up at any opportunity to sit for a portrait to send home, spending what little money they had for the prized images they could include in their correspondence through the post. Sending images and letters to one another in the mail was really the only way soldiers and their loved ones had to attempt to narrow the gap caused by their absence from home. Receiving mail from home raised soldiers’ morale, helped see them through the most grueling days and lonely nights, and relieved them of some of their suffering from homesickness. Sending their portraits back home through the mail helped to stabilize soldiers’ domestic identities, as husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons; it was a way to escape being a soldier, who was maybe not really so tough, and who was experiencing a living hell, if only symbolically. Transmitting one’s image across time and distance also did not require literacy, which meant that even soldiers from a range of social, economic, and racial backgrounds had a means of staying in touch with friends and family back home. The only real barrier, however, was expense, and the cost was much higher for soldiers in the South, due to the scarcity of necessary chemicals for developing caused by the Union blockade of Confederate ports, employed in efforts to prevent the export of cotton and the smuggling in of war-related supplies, including weapons. Reflecting the unfortunate situation this caused for the Southern troops, in Asst. Surg. Bragg’s letter to home, which included his portrait, he explained, “I only paid forty dollars for it.” At today’s rate, Bragg’s portrait would have cost him $1,083.43.
But it was no matter; soldiers valued portraits over their weapons and knew the ones they sent home were of equal value to their distant loved ones. In testimony to the portrait’s significance in preserving the bonds between loved ones, prominent American engineer Coleman Sellers stated in his 1863 letter to the editor of British Journal of Photography, “What a blessing it is that they who go to war can not only leave behind them their images but take with them a semblance of those they leave at home!” So valuable that a great many accounts can be found in letters sent home of soldiers habitually, at times obsessively, looking at their loved ones’ portraits before sleeping and holding them as they wept. Also not uncommon were accounts of finding dead soldiers on battlefields clutching portraits close to their bodies. In his personal recollections, Private James M. Stone of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry recalls finding a fallen soldier after the Battle of Antietam. Upon inspection he says that he noticed that the dead man was “holding in his hand a photograph of a group of children,” and presumed that he “evidently found himself mortally wounded, had thought of his family at home, and had taken it out from his pocket to take a last look at the likeness of those he loved so dearly and had died with the picture in his hand.” That a deadly wounded soldier would, in his last living moments, reach for the portrait in his pocket to view the image one last time illustrates the yearning to, if only, imagine being with that person and to bid them a final farewell. In this way, Civil War soldiers, on their battlefield deathbeds, surrounded themselves with the ones they loved; portraiture became the emotional vessel that would provide soldiers with “The Good Death.”
Memory itself is a battlefield, in the way it is open to interpretation. Citizens of nations typically do not go to war against each other, but rather, join together to fight against a common enemy. The complexities of the American Civil War further complicated remembrance, memorialization, and identity, as memory is constructed in order to solidify a certain version of identity and the past, especially in the case of tragedies, to create new and favorable narratives. Despite the abject horror that actually took place, in the pages of history books, we remember only bravery and valor, making these portraits even that much more valuable and important still today, in the efforts to piece together the history of a broken nation. Though history and memory share a distinct relationship, we must not overlook their distinct differences.
The mass amount of imagery we encounter in today’s world clouds our complete comprehension of the significance these portraits held in the minds and hearts of Civil War soldiers and their loved ones. The field of photography contributed to both public and private perception of war in ways no other medium could, but portraiture challenged the images of field photographers. As Harvard physician and amateur photographer Oliver Wendell Holmes so eloquently put it, portraits confronted the “wrecks of manhood, thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial” that characterized the aftermath of battles captured by photojournalists. “These representations superseded the horrific casualty lists that filled the newspapers.” The graphic images of the battlefield shocked its audience but simultaneously rendered them powerless. Portraits possessed a power they knew how to wield.
The portrait, according to American writer and philosopher Susan Sontag, “is both pseudo-presence and a token of absence; it is an ‘incitement to reverie’ that becomes a talisman.” Civil War soldiers and their loved ones employed these objects as a way to lay claim on their changing identities and to exercise some authority in the way those who would become casualties to the war would be remembered. In having their portraits commissioned, Civil War soldiers and their loved ones recognized their mortality and they confronted it. Portraiture helped compose a sense of time, distance, and memory that was a bit more palatable. It did not cure the pain, but it helped them manage a new prominence of death.
“All portraits, thus, are memento mori, with their ability to slice a moment from the subject’s life and attest to its morality, vulnerability, and mutability.”
-Susan Sontag
© 2025 Diane Irby. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
Citation:
Diane Irby, "Portraits of War: Identity, Intimacy, and Memory in American Civil War Culture," Victorian Hairwork by dirby.art (victorianhairwork.art), 2025. https://www.victorianhairwork.art/journal-research/portraits-of-war-identity-intimacy-and-memory-in-american-civil-war-culture.
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