It's Grant vs. Lee Redux @National Portrait Gallery

To showcase one of history's most memorable rivalries, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery tasked its senior historian David C. Ward with the challenge of featuring the Civil War's two most storied generals in its "One Life" gallery. 

The one-room salon is the site where the museum's scholars have previously exhibited the portraits, letters and personal artifacts of such cultural luminaries as Ronald Reagan, Katharine Hepburn, Abraham Lincoln and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Here, the rough and tumble Ulysses S. Grant from Ohio faces off with the southern patrician Robert E. Lee. The room itself seems too small for such large personalities. The photographs, drawings and paintings depicting the lives of these two men seem to pulse with a kind of tension that recalls the horrifying 19th-century era when the country was riven, yet united behind their respective generals—Grant in the North and Lee from the South.

To continue reading this post, which 1st appeared in Smithsonian.Com, click here.

Bloody Civil War Brings Walt Whitman to Washington

Welcome to this week's Friday Flashback. Each Friday in the Flashback we offer a post about some part of the past and its relationship to DC. Sometimes, we will write a new entry. Others times, we will showcase articles that previously appeared in The Prices Do DC or some other online publications. But no matter who does the writing, you can trust that you will learn something important from the Flashback.

Walt Whitman in DC

When Walt Whitman first rushed to Washington in the winter of 1862, the trip had nothing to do with poetry.

It was Dec. 16 — nearly two years into the Civil War and seven years into Whitman’s poetry career — when the New York Herald listed a “First Lieutenant G.W. Whitmore” among the troops killed or wounded in Fredericksburg, Va. The misspelled listing was referring to George Whitman, Walt’s brother, who had enlisted in the Union Army in 1861.

Walt left immediately to search Washington’s hospitals. The poet would stay in the city for the next 11 years.

To continue reading this post, which 1st appeared in Boundary Stones, click here.

150 Years Later, the Civil War Is Still in Focus at the Smithsonian

DC's Smithsonian museums (there are 17 of them here in the city) are among America's most visited and treasured places. But the Smithsonian also publishes a series of some of the most interesting, fact-filled blogs appearing anywhere on the internet. Each Sunday, The Prices Do DC re-posts an entry either about the Smithsonian or that 1st appeared in 1 of the institution's blogs. Hope you enjoy and maybe we'll see you soon at the Smithsonian.

It’s only one weapon among the 5,700 in the firearms collection of the American History 
Museum, but it speaks to the Civil War in a very personal way. 

Under the watchful eye of curator David Miller, I hoist the 1863 Springfield rifle musket to my shoulder and feel its weight, with deepening respect for those who used these muskets with deadly results. This particular weapon was owned by Pvt. Elisha Stockwell Jr., who lied about his age to sign up, at age 15, with the Union Army. He took canister shot in his arm (and a bullet in his shoulder) at Shiloh, marched with General Sherman toward Atlanta, and, at 81 and nearly blind, finally put pen to paper to write about his experience.

“I thought my arm was gone,” he wrote of the moment the grapeshot struck him, “but I rolled on my right side and...couldn’t see anything wrong with it.” Spotting ripped flesh, a lieutenant had Stockwell sit out a charge against the “Rebs,” possibly saving his life.

The musket young Elisha used also speaks volumes about the technology of the day. In a Smithsonian symposium last fall, Merritt Roe Smith of MIT argued that the creation of the technical know-how that could produce precisely tooled, interchangeable parts for hundreds of thousands of rifles, a feat the South couldn’t match, set the stage for explosive industrial growth after the war.

The Smithsonian’s observation of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial encompasses exhibitions at many of our 19 museums. For an overview of exhibitions and events and a curated collection of articles and multimedia presentations, check out Smithsonian.com/civilwar

To continue reading this post, which 1st appeared in Smithsonian.com, click here.

The Library of Congress Looks at the Civil War

The Myriopticon, A Historical Panorama of the Rebellion. Springfield, Massachusetts: Milton Bradley Company, [before 1890]. Alfred Whital Stern Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress 

Some historians say that the outcome of the Civil War was never in serious doubt from the time the 1st shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The urban North was simply too powerful and populated for the agrarian South to win. It was a mathematical question of more men, more munitions, and more mechanization. You can even see the vast difference in capabilities of the 2 regions by perusing the school texts of young students. While the 80 different textbooks published in the Confederacy during the times of the conflict were simple black and white books on cheap paper, their counterparts in the North were replete with colorful illustrations and drawings.

The Northern texts were also much better at a not-so-subtle use of propaganda to promote patriotism and the Union cause. Take, for example, the words of these 2 pages from The Union ABCs.

Q is for Quarters, guarded with care
R is for Retreat, may you never be there
S is for Sailor who respected will be
T is for Traitor, that was hung on a tree.

Samples of the textbooks are just some of the more than 200 items now on display at the Library of Congress for its exhibition The Civil War in America.

A graphic timeline, adapted from the massive companion book to the exhibition, provides a chronological framework of wartime and postwar events.  Original documents that chart the course of the war are interwoven with personal pictures and eyewitness accounts and recollections that place the war in a human perspective.

Among some of the more interesting items displayed are:

• the sheet music for "The Palmetto State," a song composed to celebrate the fact that South Carolina was the 1st state to secede from the Union
• The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal which, since medicine was in short supply in the South, offers ways to use indigenous plants, herbs, and berries for treatments
• the haversack that poet Walt Whitman carried as he visited the wounded Union soldiers in DC. Also on display is Whitman's notebook where he described "the heap of feet, legs, arms, human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening" he found at a battle site
• an 1863 broadside from the Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association headlined "To the Working Men of New York ... Stop and Think ... Stand by the Law" which was published to urge men to not riot and honor the draft for additional soldiers
• playing cards with Union emblems provided to Northern soldiers to promote "liberty and loyalty"
• a copy of Abraham Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address
• a minnie ball extracted from a wounded soldier
• a copy of CSA (the Confederate States of America) 1865 Senate Bill which was "to provide for the Raising of Two Hundred Thousand Negro Troops"
• the contents of Abraham Lincoln's pockets on the night he was assassinated which included a pocket knife, 2 pair of glasses, and a $5 Confederate bill
• an April 20, 1865 poster from the War Department offering a $100,000 reward for the murderer of President Lincoln

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips

You have plenty of time to visit the exhibition. It is scheduled to run until Jan. 4. However, if you won't be able to make it to DC or you want to get a preview of what you will see, you can do so by clicking here.