The Photographic History of the Civil War, Volume 1: The Opening Battles, by Francis Trevelyn Miller and Robert S. Lanier
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Filled with dynamic photographs of the opening battles of the U.S. Civil War, The Photographic History of the Civil War, Volume One: The Opening Battles is a rousing, fascinating book. See pictures of commanders, troops in action and more. |
Title: The Photographic History of the Civil War, Volume One, The Opening Battles
Author: Francis Trevelyn Miller, Robert S. Lanier
Year Published: 1911
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Excerpt: EXTRAORDINARY as the fact seems, the American Civil War is the only great war of which we have an adequate history in photographs: that is to say. this is the only conflict of the first magnitude1 in the world’s history that can be really ” illustrated,” with a pictorial record which is indisputably authentic, vividly illuminating, and the final evidence in any question of detail.
Here is a much more important historical fact than the casual reader realizes. The earliest records we have of the human race are purely pictorial. History, even of the most shadowy and legendary sort, goes back hardly more than ten thousand years. But in recent years there have been recovered in certain caves of France scratched and carved bone weapons and rough wall-paintings which tell us some dramatic events in the lives of men who lived probably a hundred thousand years before the earliest of those seven strata of ancient Troy, which indefatigable archeologists have exposed to the wondering gaze of the modern world. The picture came long before the written record; nearly all our knowledge of ancient Babylonia and Assyria is gleaned from the details left by some picture-maker. And it is still infinitely more effective an appeal. How impossible it is for the average person to get any clear idea of the great struggles which altered the destinies of nations and which occupy so large a portion of world history! How can a man today really understand the siege of Troy, the battles of Thermopylae or Salamis, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the famous fight at Tours when Charles ” the Hammer ” checked the Saracens, the Norman conquest of England, the Hundred Years’ or Thirty Years’ Wars, even our own seven-year struggle for liberty, without any first-hand picture-aids to start the imagination? Take the comparatively modern Napoleonic wars where, moreover, there is an exceptional wealth of paintings, drawings, prints, and lithographs by contemporary men: in most cases the effect is simply one of keen disappointment at the painfully evident fact that most of these worthy artists never saw a battle or a camp.
So the statement that there have been gathered together thousands of photographs of scenes on land and water during those momentous years of 1861 to 1865 means that for our generation and all succeeding ones, the Civil War is on a basis different from all others, is practically an open book to old and young. For when man achieved the photograph he took almost as important a step forward as when he discovered how to make fire: he made scenes and events and personalities immortal. The greatest literary genius might write a volume without giving you so intimate a comprehension of the struggle before Petersburg as do these exact records, made by adventurous camera-men under incredible difficulties, and holding calmly before your eyes the very Reality itself.