"The Last and Most Precious Memento": Photographic Portraiture and the Union Citizen-Soldier

Abstract

"The Last and Most Precious Memento"Photographic Portraiture and the Union Citizen-Soldier James Andrew Brookes [Erratum] In January 1863, New York volunteer Alfred Cranston wrote to his sweetheart Lizzie in Brooklyn from a picket post along the Potomac River. In closing, Cranston noted that he had included one of three photographs Lizzie had given him at his departure in 1861. He asked her to treasure it in anticipation of his return. Cranston had carried the image "in all the marches & through all the fights." It was imperative that this visual and tangible relic of his loved one be kept safe so that he could "lay claim to it" on his return. As Cranston closed the letter, he reemphasized that Lizzie must "take care of it & the original for me."1 While he retained two photographs to carry through his service, he sent the third home as a guarantee that he would return to treasure the image and the original body it represented. This he did. In 1864, his regiment disbanded and he returned to Brooklyn to marry Lizzie. Cranston was one of thousands of soldiers who ascribed a profound sentimental significance to photographic portraiture during the Civil War, extensively using photographs to better manage the traumas of conflict. An exploration of the Civil War soldier's relationship with photography is overdue. Although Civil War scholars have examined the conventional ways photography was used during the conflict and some American photographic historians have recognized the Union soldier's employment of portrait photographs, their multitude of uses by common soldiers has generally remained neglected. We cannot appreciate the popularity of the portrait photograph among the rank and file without understanding why images figured so prominently among the soldier's personal belongings. As Roland Barthes remarks, the photograph's "sovereign Contingency," its [End Page 235] Click for larger view View full resolution Private William P. Haberlin of Battery B, Pennsylvania Light Artillery in uniform with shoulder scales and greatcoat, sixth-plate ambrotype, hand-colored, 1861–64. Found with the photograph was this handwritten poem: Now to the field again I'll go, for the union to defend, until Jeff Davis is made to know, his kingdom is about to end. And now if I would not live, to hear f[r]eemen shout for joy, this miniature to you I give, in memory of a soldier boy. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010650791/. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) unique position in broader visual culture, is centered on reference. It is never "distinguished from its referent (from what it represents).2 Attempts to account for the photograph's popularity offer the undeniable point that the threat of injury and death drew soldiers to portrait studios. Curator Jeff Rosenheim notes that the threat of injury and death drew "thousands of men and their families to portrait studios" but generally disregards soldiers' personal testimonies, in which they evidence photography's uses in managing physical vulnerability.3 Ron Field echoes the point that pictures were a "source of comfort in the face of danger and possible death."4 Physical fragility in war certainly urged soldiers to commission and exchange pictures, but a gamut of previously unexplored reasons for the proliferation of photographs exist too. Scholars have not yet studied Union soldiers' visual production with the same seriousness they accord their textual records.5 These often unpretentious images occupy a peripheral position in our understanding of the war. [End Page 236] Studies of Civil War soldiers fail to acknowledge the significance of photographs. The field repeatedly examines the motivations that carried soldiers through the war. Scholars have identified the detail offered in diaries and letters, but not in the transition of photographs, in furthering our understanding of endurance in the Civil War.6 Additionally, studies of volunteers' motivations, both in sustaining them in combat and in general monotony of military service, recognize that domestic ties and moral values strengthened soldiers but give no attention to the soldier's newest talisman of endurance, portraiture.7 The recognition of domesticity's influence over the Northern soldier's understanding of the conflict should necessitate a study of the soldier's fascination...