Earlier this spring I read The Great Bridge, David McCullough’s magnum opus about the creation of the span connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.  One reason for doing so was because, after spending so much time reading about the death and destruction of the Civil War, I wanted to turn my attention to something being built not destroyed.  The bridge is down the street from where I work and I often have my lunch there.  It is also where I took my wife after our wedding reception.  Yesterday was the one hundred and twenty eighth anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Museum Collection

I sometimes think many New Yorkers assume the bridge has always “been there,” a natural part of the landscape.  Actually it was the brainchild of German-born John Augustus Roebling, who was wounded on the construction site and died prematurely years before the bridge’s completion.

Brooklyn Museum Collection, Gift of Paul Roebling

It was up to his son, Colonel Washington Augustus Roebling, to complete the task.  He did so, but at great personal expense.  Roebling contracted caisson disease, or the bends, from his frequent trips below the water to the excavation site and suffered in horrific pain the rest of his long life.  He lived until 1926.

Roebling was an officer in the Army of the Potomac and participated in many of the war’s most important events.  He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness among other places.  He also personally witnessed the engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac in 1862.  Roebling married Emily Warren, the sister of General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, in January 1865.

Looking at the bridge today…

Harpers, 1890

…it takes a leap of faith to imagine it as it was just after its completion.

The road in the top photograph is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  Below that in the same photograph is a new park being built along the Brooklyn side of the East River.  The waterfront has not been part of the daily fabric of New York life for decades, since the collapse of the shipping industry in the mid-twentieth century.  The city has been working hard to change that in recent years with a number of adaptive reuse projects.

(Author: H. Finkelstein & Son; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The bridge has always been a favorite of painters and poets.

May 24, 1883 (Source: Brooklyn Museum Collection)

May 24, 2011

2013 Civil War commemorative stamps

In what has become a Strawfoot tradition I am here to announce that the 2013 Civil War sesquicentennial stamps have been released. In fact, they were released just today at ceremonies in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. I found out when I stepped into the Grand Central Station post office this morning on some other business. I was unable to buy them today though, because, as is the custom with all commemoratives, they will not be available nationally until tomorrow, the day after issuance in the city of release. Hearing this news today made me realize that the sesquicentennial is moving along. It is more than half over.

Last year I was speculating on which two subjects would make the cut. Vicksburg and Gettysburg really are the only logical choices, especially as Emancipation received its own seperate release a few months ago. I would strongly recommend buying a souvenir sheet, along with another set with which to make first day covers if one is so inclined.

As I posted in a comment on Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory blog awhile back, the USPS has done a great job with this series. Each year-set of two stamps obviously fits aesthetically into the larger whole, which is what you want in such a project. The stamps also have a stateliness and gravitas that, sadly, went missing in some of USPS offerings over the past 15-20 years. A little frivolity and playfulness in philately is fine; ultimately however, a nation’s postage says something about what its people find important. This is especially true when the subject is as significant as a nation’s civil war. I am glad they got the message.

Interested parties have until July 23, 2013 to get their first day of issue covers. That is twice the normal time. Here are the addresses:

Civil War: 1863 Stamp (Vicksburg, MS)
Postmaster
3415 Pemberton Blvd.
Vicksburg, MS 39180-9998

Civil War: 1863 Stamp (Gettysburg, PA)
Postmaster
115 Buford Avenue
Gettysburg, PA 17325-9998

And here is the Postal Service’s press release with more information.

I noted with pleasure earlier this week that the bibliographic information for volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s three-part history of the Beatles has just been released here in the U.S. (It had been on Amazon’s UK website for some time now.) It is titled All These Years: Tune In and brings the Fabs up to 31 December 1962, on the cusp of Beatlemania. Tune In has been in the works for nearly a decade now and is destined to be a huge deal in the Beatles’s historiography. As with Civil War historiography, there is much we have to unlearn about the Beatles before we understand their true history and significance. So much of what we “know” is simply the same self-serving narratives and folk tales told again and again until becoming accepted as fact. That will not be a problem with Tune In and the two volumes that come after it. Lewisohn is one of a handful of people who can pull off such a magnum opus. I would say Bruce Spizer and Allan Kozinn are probably the only two others.

Lewisohn has said that there will be an “official cut” and longer “author’s cut” with greater detail. Unfortunately it appears there are no plans to release the author’s cut in the United States for the time being, though the publisher is leaving its options open. The smaller version still logs in at 1,200 pages. Interested parties may want to pre-order from their online bookseller.

Another reason I was at the library was to get ready for the upcoming season at Governors Island National Monument. It reopens next Saturday, Memorial Day Weekend, and will be open to the public on weekends and holiday Mondays through the end of September. This week I re-read chunks of Barnet Schecter’s The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America. I find Schecter’s book helpful because he puts the draft riots into broad context without losing sight of the scale and human cost of the violence. It is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the idea that thousands of individuals battled in the streets of Manhattan against, not just police, but battle-conditioned American soldiers. And these weren’t just angry mobs. The rioters showed tremendous tenacity, organization, and unity of purpose, and sustained it for nearly a week before eventually succumbing to hastily-gathered greater force. The rioters also had, if not the support, at least the sympathy of many political and intellectual leaders, including important newspaper publishers. In all these ways the New York draft were similar to the fighting in Europe during the failed revolutions of 1848 and the carnage of the Paris Commune in 1871. I don’t know if it is a stretch–maybe not–but Schecter argues that Reconstruction began with the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. He carries the story into the 1870s, which is something too few “Civil War” books manage to accomplish. I wanted to re-read the book to refresh my memory and get some new insights to incorporate into my Interpretation at Governors Island this season. Much of the military response to the rioting came from the Department of the East headquarters there in the harbor. These are the types of things I am exploring as I get ready for Cooperstown and for the Governors Island season.

Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

Garden cemeteries, sometimes called rural cemeteries, were a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when American and European societies were industrializing rapidly and green space was becoming scarcer and scarcer for city dwellers. It may surprise you to know that in the late nineteenth century Green-Wood was the most-visited place in New York State after Niagara Falls. Graveyards are for the dead, final resting places for those who came before us and have now passed on; cemeteries are for the living, places to commune with nature and the past. One hundred and seventy-five years later Green-Wood is still serving this function. No matter how many times I have been there–and it is in the hundreds by now–I always see something new on each visit. It is not hard to do, whether it’s reading the many freshly-planted headstones of the 4,000 Civil War soldiers buried there, poking my head into the bars of a mausoleum to peek at the Tiffany windows, or seeing the sun hitting a familiar vista at a different angle during the change of seasons. I am looking forward to catching this show in the coming weeks, and will have more to say about it here on the blog after I do.

The Scottish – American Soldiers Monument, Edinburgh

An interesting vignette came to my in-box yesterday about the George E. Bissell statue of Lincoln that stands in Edinburgh’s Old Calton Cemetery. Bissell’s name does not carry the same weight as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, or Paul Manship, which is unfortunate because the sculptor was very much their equal. Bissell created one of my favorite statues in all of New York City, the monument to Chester Arthur that stands in Madison Square Park. Bissell’s Arthur stands adjacent to the more lauded Saint-Gaudens’s tribute to Admiral Farragut. Sadly, both are off the tourist path and stand equally unnoticed by New Yorkers themselves as they go about their daily routines.

Bissell’s Lincoln was dedicated in 1893 and was the first of many Lincolns erected outside of the United States during the era. As you can see, it fits neatly into the “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” motif described by Kirk Savage in his book of the same title. We have our own such statue, for Henry Ward Beecher, here in downtown Brooklyn. Bissell’s Lincoln is more than a tribute to the Great Emancipator, however; it was also built to pay honor to the Scots who fought for the Union. If you look closely, you will notice that it stands next to the tomb of philosopher David Hume, which could not have been coincidental. We are clearly meant to associate the two men and to think of them as equals. In the tradition of the time turnout was significant for the dedication, so much so that tickets were required despite the blustery conditions. It is lost on us today how seriously people of the period took these kinds of things. Bissell’s Lincoln is a good reminder, too, that the world was paying attention to the events in the United States during our Civil War.

(image/Ad Meskens)

Bombardment of Fort Moultrie, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina (1864)

The Civil War and American Art exhibit ended its run at the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks back and is currently under installation at the Metropolitan Museum here in the Big Apple. It will be showing all summer and is well worth the trip. Though I saw it in DC, I intend to go back–probably more than once–during its time here in Gotham. There are many great works in the show; my favorites were the landscapes of Conrad Wise Chapman, a Virginian who lived with his family in Italy prior to the war with his artist father. The Chapman works on display in this sesquicentennial show are primarily landscapes he painted for the Ordinance Bureau during the Confederate defense of Charleston Harbor. On the simplest level the paintings work as literal representations of Confederate camp life during the siege, just as Winslow Homer’s sketchings depicted the quotidian life of Union soldiers. Chapman’s works are more than that though. Whatever his thoughts on secession, slavery, and the other issues of the day, Chapman was an artist of the first order. He reminds me of the Dutch Masters in his use of natural light. He was equally adept at depth and scale.

Chapman was all but forgotten in the decades after Appomattox. Southerners, impoverished by the war’s destruction, did not have the financial resources to buy art the way their Northern counterparts did. The overt Confederate imagery was another minus in the art market of the Gilded Age. Chapman remained active throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mainly living as an expatriate in Mexico and Europe. Most of the Charleston Series ended up in the care of the Museum of the Confederacy in 1898. Chapman lived another twelve years and died in poverty in 1910. Now we may be entering something of a Chapman renaissance. First, there was his place in the Civil War and American Art exhibition. Now, Sotheby’s is auctioning one of his postwar paintings, Paisaje del Valle de Mexico con el Lago de Texcoco, later this month. The landscape is projected to sell for a cool $125,000-175,000.

(image/Gibbes Museum of Art)

Frederick Douglass, circa 1845

This daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass is believed to be the first visual image taken of the publisher/abolitionist. Note how young he looks. Upstate New York was a hotbed of abolitionism in the decades prior to the war. The region was also one of the key routes of the Underground Railroad. John Brown, of course, lived in the area.

Erie Canal plaque, 1825

The scale is difficult to make out because there is nothing beside it with which to compare, but this plaque was about 2 feet tall and three feet wide. It is from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The Erie Canal is something of a forgotten part of American history, but it was instrumental in tying the Atlantic Seaboard to the Midwest. I had never associated the two in my mind but, coincidentally or not, New York State abolished slavery two years after the canal’s opening.

Again the scale is tough to make out, but this campaign poster from 1860 measured about three by five feet. I loved the reference to Edwin Morgan, who won the New York gubernatorial race and was hugely influential in raising men and materiel for the Union cause.

Currier and Ives memorial certificate

The photograph did not come out well but this object was so moving that I had to include anyway. Currier and Ives sold such certificates to the loved ones of those killed in the war. I imagine these were common, being an inexpensive way to commemorate the loss of a son, husband, or brother. If the soldier was buried far away, as many of course were, a lithograph of a headstone hanging in the parlor would have to do.

U.S. Substitute & Volunteer Agency

“Substitutes furnished”

“Facts for Men who Do Their Own Thinking”

This was a pro-Lincoln broadside from the 1864 election versus McClellan.

Returned Volunteer/How the Fort Was Taken, 1864

Sculptor John Rogers created many works with an abolitionist and Civil War motif before, during, and after the conflict. (See here from the New-York Historical Society.) The swords into plowshares reference is easy to intuit. Like the Currier & Ives certificates, these would have been low-cost ways for people to remember the war. Returned Volunteer remained in the Rogers’s catalog until 1889, a quarter century after it was first produced.

Spring

There was so much in the museum I had to step out and recharge my batteries. The people at the museum said it was unusually slow because the weather was so nice. Having left the house at 6:00 am to get the train from Penn Station to Albany, I was quite hungry. So, taking the advice of the museum folks, I headed to Lark Street for lunch. You have to pack it in on these day trips.

Elmer E. Ellsworth, 1837-1861

Another difficult one to make out, but this handbill commemorated Elmer Ellsworth’s one hundredth birthday in 1937. I found this interesting because it shows that the Civil War was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I mean, it’s from the FDR-era for heaven’s sake.

One for the Hayfoot

. . . and the pièce de résistance: the chair from Grant’s Cottage in which he raced against the clock to finish his memoirs before he died.

All-in-all it wasn’t a bad Saturday. You can catch An Irrepressible Conflict  at the New York State Museum in Albany through September 22. It is a long train trip from the city, but then again there is only one Civil War sesquicentennial.

Reed was one of the founders, for lack of a better term, of the walking tour movement here. He led excursions of Central Park in the 1960s in which he taught people about the park and its history. Today we take Shorewalkers, Big Onion, and other organizations as a given, but in the New York of Mayor Lindsay they were anything but. It was something of an adventure in that much grittier and more crime-ridden era, and took a great deal of faith and foresight on the part of people such as Reed. Yesterday I took the train to Albany to visit the New York State Museum. The trip up the Hudson is scenic and majestic, especially when the season are changing. Near FDR’s Hyde Park one passes the Poughkeepsie Bridge, which is now the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park. Such sites, broadly speaking, were made possible by the forward thinking of people like Reed. He had some misses too. He was vehemently against concerts and events he saw as intrusions in the park. Imagine the history of New York City, however, without such defining moments as Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park. Still, Reed and people like him gave us so much to be thankful for. It’s something to think about the next time you are cutting across the Sheep Meadow.

(image courtesy NYPL)