Embattled Confederates [antikvár]

Q'orewor^ As the title suggests, this is primarily a book about people. Through a combination of words and pictures the authors have attempted to portray Southerners and their activities during the period when they were striving for independence. This was a period of light and shadow, of goodness and evil, of excitement and boredom, of gayety and sorrow, of staunchness and weakness, of heroism and cowardice and of high hopes and bitter frustration. These extremes we have attempted to depict, along with the less dramatic emotions and experiences that lay in between. With the exception of some Crimean photographs taken by Roger Fenton in 1855, the CivU War was the first conflict to be recorded by the camera. Confederates had no Mathew Brady, and the South's beleaguered and impoverished condition restricted photographic activities. Nor were Southern newspapers and magazines able to employ talented artists, like the Wauds and Edwin Forbes, to sketch pictures of soldiers, camps and battlefields. But the South had some first-rate photographers, including George S. Cook and Julian Vannerson; and scores of local cameramen, whose names are lost to history, set up shop in towns and camps to make likenesses of Johnny Rebs and their loved ones. A few amateur artists sketched their impressions of persons and scenes observed behind the lines and along the battle fronts. For many years Hirst Mühollen has been collecting these photographs and drawings from libraries, museums, antique shops and private homes. In this volume, for the first tune, is expertly reproduced a substantial and representative sampling of photographs and sketches depicting Southerners at war. This is not—nor is it intended to be—a complete history of the Confederacy. No attempt is made to portray military campaigns. That phase of the story has been told many times, and well. Even if It were told again, there would be no good pictures to illustrate it because combat photography and sketching were virtually unknown until recent times. But we have tried to represent faithfully and in some detail, in both words and pictures, the people who fought the battles and the folk who stayed at home. Both the author of the narrative and the compiler of the pictures have become indebted to many individuals and institutions in executing their respective assignments. The former gratefully acknowledges grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Emory University and the Henry E. Huntington Library, which enabled him to take leave of his classroom duties for itinerant research. For information and inspiration he owes a debt of gratitude to many librarians and archivists throughout the country, to fellow historians of the Confederacy and to graduate students at Emory University. He is especially indebted to Ezra J. Warner, author of Generals in Gray, for material on the Confederacy's "High Brass"; Professor Willard E. Wight of the Georgia Institute of Technology for information on religion drawn from an unpublished dissertation at Emory University on "Churches in the Confederacy"; Professor May S. Ringold of Clemson CoUege for material on state legislatures obtained from her unpublished dissertation on that subject at Emory University; and