CHAPTER 1

SARAH BURNS AND DANIEL GREENE

The Homeat War, theWar at Home

The Visual Culture ofthe Northern Home Front

Not long after the end of the Civil War, game manufacturer Milton Bradley issuedthe Myriopticon, a miniature toy panorama that unrolled the history of the "Rebellion"in some twenty-two colorful pictures copied from illustrations that hadappeared in Harper's Weekly magazine during wartime. The design of the foot-squarecardboard box mimicked a proscenium stage draped in patriotic bunting. Itcame with play tickets, a mock advertising poster, and a script for the narrator, tobe read aloud as he or she turned the cranks that scrolled from scene to scene. Theinstruction booklet recommended that the show take place in a darkened roomwith a candle to provide dramatic backlighting for the scenes as they glided by.

One young enthusiast wrote to tell Bradley that neighbors flocked to his houseto enjoy multiple repeat performances of the show. The child wanted Bradley tosell more of the devices, so "as to make it less crowded in our parlor." So vividlyauthentic were the tableaux that an older brother who had been in the war "says itis just as your game represents it to be." The Myriopticon embodied the very theaterof war itself, scaled down to a manageable size, commodified, and packagedas parlor entertainment. It stood witness to the ways in which the far-off conflicthad infiltrated and changed daily life—even after it was over. It is difficult to imaginea more evocative representation of the war at home.

Designed to replay the war over and over again, the Myriopticon enshrined andpreserved its remembrance, which has lived on to this day. One hundred and fiftyyears after it began, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the nationalcollective memory. Our cultural productions tend first to portray the war as abattle over the future of slavery, or to focus on Lincoln's determination to save theUnion, or on brother fighting against brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us aswell. Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapesstrewn with war dead. Both North and South experienced unprecedentedsuffering. Forces for both sides described the war as a "harvest of death." Yet manydepictions have neglected the war's influence on home fronts across the dividednation. Battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Soldiers werenot the only ones who suffered. Countless individuals, whether near to the battlelines or far from them, saw their daily lives altered by the war.

While scholars in American history and literature have studied many differentaspects of the Northern home front, art historians and museum curators have,with few exceptions, focused largely on the theater of war itself, as represented inmedia ranging from painting to photography and mass-circulated wood engravingsin popular magazines. Thus, powerful images such as Timothy O'Sullivan'sHarvest of Death—a raw, grisly, and shocking photograph of corpses strewn aboutthe Gettysburg battlefield—have become canonical and authoritative, as havepaintings such as Winslow Homer's 1866 Prisoners from the Front, a now classicrepresentation of Union triumph and Confederate defeat.

The fact that such images have acquired iconic status speaks to a nagging problemthat has provoked debate since the 1860s. Writing in the latter days of the war,New York critic Clarence Cook puzzled over the fact that the war had exerted sucha "very remote and trifling influence" on American art. Only a widely scatteredfew had pictured aspects of the conflict, but the "chief body" of American artistshad "gone on painting landscapes and genre pieces and portraits as if the old peacehad never been interrupted." Cook had no ready answer to this conundrum. In ourown era, art historians have attributed that seeming escapism or elision to a "crisis"that boiled over when mechanized modern warfare starkly defied the capacityof traditional history painting to represent it: high ideals, theatrical posing, andnoble self-sacrifice no longer seemed to fit the picture. While many artists whomCook failed to credit did paint the leaders and battles of the war, only the pitilessstare of the photograph or Winslow Homer's deadpan gaze seemed capable ofconfronting the antiheroic realities of a brutal conflict with what now strike us astruly modern eyes.

By contrast, Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals another side ofthe war. This volume, companion to the exhibition mounted jointly by the NewberryLibrary and the Terra Foundation for American Art, is the first to comprehensivelyexamine the visual culture of Civil War–era home fronts in the North. Itasks whether those artists on the home front—those who, as Cook saw it, simplywent on as before—sought only to avoid the awful truth by burying their heads inthe sand of landscapes far removed from battle, or if they yearned only to take nostalgicrefuge in scenes of ordinary American life that seemed to escape war's disruption.Avoidance of the war may have been the mode of some. But the war leftits mark on many others, whose consciousness of the prolonged crisis impelledthem to rethink and reshape conventional pictorial categories in ways that subtlyor not-so-subtly referenced the war's haunting presence on home...