Gods & Generals: Civil War Personalities & Collecting

Ninth plate tintype of an young Confederate soldier with a Bowie knife

Is it just me or did we once seem to be a much more interesting country? The Civil War is full of amazing personalities and it’s no wonder that cdv (carte de visite) photographs of the key players became some sort of 19th-century version of baseball cards, with people filling albums with the faces of men they’d only read about in papers. There’s Grant, the lifelong soldier, the workhorse of the Civil War (memorialized in this bust) whose perseverance won him the war and the White House, and Lee, the quintessential eloquent Southern gentleman whose devotion to his men made him a living legend and whose letters command large prices, but there are countless others like Joshua Chamberlain, George McClellan, Robert Gould Shaw, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, P.G.T. Beauregard, John Hunt Morgan, who are still telling their part of the story through the artifacts in the database.

Of course, there are so many unknowns too, men who have long since been left nameless or faceless by history, but their stories are no less compelling. The unknown Confederate soldier pictured above bravely sports a Bowie knife, while this Bowie knife belonged to a Union man who shot himself while recovering from illness in the hospital. The photographica category of the p4A database is filled not just with the cdvs of well-known officers, but also with the now-unknown rank and file, some facing the camera with good-natured bravado while others seem uncertain and huddle next to friends. Then there are the archives of letters; some, like this one, give great “battle detail,” a key factor in determining value, while others are filled with tender expressions for wives and concerns for the developing character of children. Like literary characters, these men populate my thoughts when I work with these records and never really leave. A few years ago on a cold January day, I was editing a record that included the fate of the Confederate soldier represented; he had died 145 years earlier, almost to the day, freezing to death at the Ohio State Penitentiary, which stood less than 20 miles from where I sat. War leaves ghosts everywhere….

-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com

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