Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories.

Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories. By Ronald S. Coddington. With a foreword by Michael Fellman. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxiv, 251. $29.95, ISBN 0-8018-7876-4.)

Like many Civil War relic hunters, Ronald S. Coddington has for years collected photographs of soldiers in uniform. These are not the famous scenes taken on the battlefield to document death and carnage; rather they are the simple little cartes-de-visite portraits that the men themselves commissioned to distribute to their loved ones before departing for the front. They have long been a familiar sight at flea markets and antique shops, discarded by the soldiers' descendants, staring back at modern observers with an almost quaint anonymity, and looking not unlike stylized pictures of today's eager reenactors, only thinner.

Coddington had the ingenious idea of reconstructing the stories of those who usefully autographed their photos and, even better, listed their regiments. Armed with these valuable clues, Coddington searched military records and pension files to learn who they were when the war began and what they became when it ended--if they survived.

The result is a highly readable series of mini-biographies that puts a human face on the Union soldier. This is no attempt to define the Civil War fighting man. As Coddington acknowledges, these men are all white, mostly officers, principally easterners, and all volunteers who eagerly rushed to serve their country. There are no reluctant conscripts here. Of course, the chronicle also skews toward the wounded and sick because their subsequent pension requests provided the best resource for information.

That said, the variety of backgrounds and experiences is fascinating. Here are artists, farmers, shopkeepers, preachers, schoolmasters, lawyers, and laborers. These men left their sweethearts behind (often returning to marry them), sent money to their parents, and did their duty commendably, even heroically. Some died in major battles, others in tiny skirmishes. They suffered hideous wounds, succumbed to diarrhea or typhoid, wound up in dank prisons, and invariably suffered symptoms for their rest of their lives--skin rashes, heating loss, blindness, and worse. One veteran, shot through the lung at Gettysburg, was observed years later in a street, clinging "to the side of his meat wagon" and gasping for breath (p. 103). Another became such an abusive alcoholic that his daughter petitioned the government to "stop my father' s pension for he don't use any of it in the family. It all goes to drink" (p. 55). Other veterans lost their will to work or live--one slit his own throat--while a few simply vanished, tragically leaving their wives in pension limbo.

These are haunting stories--and so are their pictures. Whether made by the Mathew Brady studios or long-forgotten itinerants, they show eager, proud, and occasionally frightened-looking men, brandishing pistols in their belts, cradling swords, or folding their arms defiantly. A few posed before elaborate if unconvincing backdrops depicting tents and American flags. Most stared directly into the camera, many for the first time, others for the last. And for all the waxed moustaches and thick beards, readers may be haunted most by baby-faced Lieutenant Russell Dailey Babcock, all of nineteen years, clutching a saber that rises past his waist--a child going off to the war that ended America's innocence, and likely Babcock's, too. It is hard to imagine him as an old man, but he lived to be eighty-three and lives again thanks to Coddington's unique effort. Historian Michael Fellman provides an elegant foreword on the art and commerce of photography, which would have been even more useful with footnotes.

HAROLD HOLZER

Metropolitan Museum of Art