Civil War Veterans Come Alive in Audio and Video Recordings
Deep in the collections of the Library of Congress are ghostly images and voices of Union and Confederate soldiers recalling the bloody battles of their youth
- By Fergus M. Bordewich
- Smithsonian.com, October 05, 2011, Subscribe
It is only a scrap of 86-year-old silent newsreel footage: an elderly black man named William Smallwood stands in threadbare clothes against a brick wall in Boston, performing the manual of arms with a wooden crutch. “Still ready if he’s needed,” declares a title card, presumably reflecting the old man’s sentiments. The clip is just one minute long. Smallwood provides no details of his life. Yet this bit of film is one of the rarest in existence. Not only does it capture one of the few moving images of an African-American Civil War veteran, but it may be the only one ever made of a soldier who fought with the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, made famous by the 1988 film Glory. (The clip inaccurately declares Smallwood to have been 109 years old at the time, proclaiming him the “oldest Civil War veteran”; he was actually about 85.)
Smallwood is just one of many Civil War veterans whose images may be seen and voices heard on reels of old film and audio recordings preserved in the collections of the Library of Congress. All are available to the public on request, although most are embedded in contemporary newsreels – for instance, a 1949 encampment of Confederate veterans in Arkansas is sandwiched disorientingly between a clip of President Harry Truman watching a staged airdrop of the 82nd Airborne Division and another clip of Don Newcombe hurling pitches to Joe DiMaggio in that year’s World Series.
To most of us, perhaps, the men who fought the Civil War may seem like the inhabitants of a sort of cinematic prehistory, quaintly memorialized in Currier & Ives prints, old newspaper engravings and the photographs of Mathew Brady. But here they are, like living ghosts in the flesh, the survivors of Bull Run and Antietam, Shiloh and Chickamauga, who saw Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee with their own eyes, and cheered their comrades into battle with these very voices that we now hear.
Thousands of Civil War veterans lived far into the 20th century. In 1913, 54,000 Union and Confederate veterans gathered at Gettysburg for the battle’s 50th anniversary, and an astonishing 2,000 were still alive to show up for the battle’s 75th anniversary in 1938. (Both events are represented in the library’s film and audio collections.) The last verified Union veteran died only in 1956, and the last Confederate in 1951. From the early 1900s through the 1940s, they were filmed, recorded and interviewed at reunions, parades and other patriotic events where, as the century advanced, they came increasingly to seem like ambulatory trophies from some distant age of heroes.
Most of the 20th century shows bent, bewhiskered and ribbon-festooned vets mingling with old comrades, visiting monuments, swapping memories and – a favorite trope of the era – shaking hands with their former enemies. By the late 1930s, faced with the looming threat of totalitarianism in Europe and Japan, Americans were more interested in national unity than they were in reliving old divisions. Typically, in a sound-only radio address at Gettysburg covered by NBC News in 1938, Overton Minette, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (the leading Union veterans’ organization) declares, to the sound of ceremonial cannon fire, “Let [us] be an example to the nations of the earth. . . that the deepest hate can be resolved into love and tolerance.” Following him, the Rev. John M. Claypool, the commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans, drawls, “I have to forgive my brother here for anything that may have occurred between us. We can’t hold anything against each other.”
Many clips are less solemn. In one newsreel, ancient but still frisky vets dance hoedown-style with a bevy of young women at a Confederate reunion in Biloxi, Mississippi. In another, also dating from the 1930s, old Confederates decked out in gray uniforms step up to a microphone and, one after another – their eyes flaring for a moment with the ferocity of their youth – let loose with the howling yelp that was once known as the fearsome “Rebel yell.” One of them, paunchy and stooped with the years, shrills, a bit unnervingly even now, “Go for ’em boys! Give ’em hell.”
First-person interviews are frustratingly few, and brief. Newsreel and radio reporters were clearly more interested in keeping things moving than they were in eliciting detailed recollections of the vets’ battlefield experiences. The often truncated fragments that survive can be tantalizing. Interviewed in 1938, one of the last survivors of Pickett’s charge, O.R. Gilette of Louisiana, declares, “We got about ten feet up the slope [of Cemetery Ridge], then we had to turn, then we run, run, run like hell.” A veteran of George Custer’s cavalry division who was present at Appomattox in the last moments before Lee’s surrender, interviewed by the same NBC reporter says, “We were about to charge, we had our sabers drawn, when a flag of truce appeared. . . ” when the reporter inexplicably cuts him off in order to move on to another subject.
Parades figure prominently in many of the film clips. One of the most remarkable shows a contingent of veterans marching briskly along a New York City street in 1905. In itself, it is not a particularly dramatic scene. But what it represents is extraordinary. The parade is actually the funeral procession for the last veteran of the War of 1812, Hiram Cronk, who had just died at age 105. A motor car brings up the rear carrying, it appears, several more infirm Civil War veterans. It is as if the 18th century were touching the fingertips of the 20th before our very eyes.
Sadly, in the eyes of the press, not all Civil War veterans were equal. No black volunteers served with the Confederacy, while African Americans contributed some 160,000 volunteers to the Union war effort. Yet they are almost never even acknowledged, much less seen or heard in the library’s films and recordings. Ironically, however, the most surprising film of African American “veterans,” a few minutes of silent footage made at a Confederate reunion in 1930, shows a dozen elderly black men wearing fragments of gray uniforms, flourishing miniature battle flags and wearing lapel buttons representing Robert E. Lee. Enslaved body servants, or perhaps laborers who had been pressed into service by Confederate armies, they were presumably served up to newsmen as “proof” that slaves were so loyal and happy in their servitude that they fought to retain it.
After Reconstruction, the role of African-American soldiers was largely airbrushed out of the war’s narrative in the name of national reconciliation. William Smallwood’s brief martial appearance against that brick wall in Boston thus stands as a powerful if all too fleeting reminder of both the sacrifice of the black volunteers who fought for the Union, and of the nation’s promises to them, so many of which would remain unfulfilled generations after the Civil War had ended.
Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for America’s Soul, and Washington: The Making of the American Capital, among other works.
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Comments (20)
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As I sat and watched the video of the old confederate soldiers with my husband and children I was suddenly overcome with emotion . It struck me in an instant that these men were REAL - not just a photograph or an image in a PBS special These men were probably just babies - young boys or men who had no idea how terrible it was going to be and how their lives would change Yet here they were...so old and happy and proud They had made it through I couldn't decide what touched more - them or the boys that didn't make it This video made it suddenly so real to me and all I could think was God bless their sweet sweet souls
Posted by Dewane Smith Pitman on November 28,2012 | 07:21 PM
Every legal citizen in the U.S.A should be required to view those civil war soldier,s . True and honest people they were.
Posted by Zane Cannon Liquor Slanger on June 20,2012 | 12:58 AM
It holds me in awe to be able to look at film footage and see moving and hear speaking images of men who actually fought in the Covil War. To hear voices that spoke on the fields of battle of that long and costly struggle makes it so much more real as to the human cost of the war I never knew such footage existed I watched the clip of the Rebel Yell and to know that I was seeing and hearing men and voices that were there at the places and events I have only read about to me is absolutely AWSOME I shall research to find more
Posted by Robert Blankenship on May 6,2012 | 10:25 AM
What a smug article. The author states regarding black confederates in the film "Enslaved body servants, or perhaps laborers....they were presumably served up to newsmen as “proof” that slaves were so loyal and happy in their servitude that they fought to retain it. The author provides absolutely no proof for his assertion. He does not even know them names of the black veterans in the film so he cannot state that they were laborers, body servants or anything else. Whatever the case the black veterans were there and accepted as such by the white confederate veterans. That is an undeniable fact.
Posted by PhilipL on April 6,2012 | 09:00 PM
I am encouraged by this defense of the South. The Constitution is very clear on the matter, and any further debate on secession is a waste of time.
What many do not know about antebellum Southern whites is that they knew the institution of slavery was a Domesday machine: they knew that this form of labor had become a moral and spiritual liability, as well as a financial one. Its days were numbered, and any number of diaries (especially the womens') will support this. Problem to many slaveholders was the loss of a rather valuable commodity, at least all at once.
Southerners wanted to be rid of it. But they wanted to emancipate at the state level, in their own time and not on the orders of a distant, Moral Majority.
Instead, the country was broken by war, habeas corpus suspended, a president assassinated, the South thrown into a virtual 3rd world state of poverty for 120 years and the blacks thrown into another type of plantation system that continues to this day.
Well done...did the end justify the means? Or have we even reached the end?
Posted by ab brown on January 8,2012 | 09:42 PM
My maternal family fought for the South. That being said, I wholeheartedly disagree with the tenor of the revisionist pro-Confederacy commentary posted here. The degree of seething bigotry and anti-Americanism steaming out from between their unapologetic words is disheartening, to say the least. Some people really will never learn.
Posted by Joe on December 29,2011 | 03:47 PM
The video image of the rebel yell is haunting. One of the fascinating things for me about the CW and the years after the war is the technological changes. When the war was fought photography was in it's infancy and all we have are grainy photographs to stir the imagination. To fast forward into the early / mid 20th century and see these men on film is really an amazing testament to the rapid advancement of technology in our lifetime. Amazing!
A couple points - there wer NOT thousands of African Americans serving in the ranks of the Confederate Army as VOLUNTEERS. These were men impressed into fatigue duty to free up the undermanned rebels to fight. There is a big difference between being impressed (slave) labor forced to work for the benefit of the rebellion than taking up arms against the union. So lets set that little bit of mythology aside.
The Union employed African Americans in much the same way - both as enlisted soldiers and as non combatant laborers.
As to whether or not the war was about states rights. Take a few minutes and read the various states declarations of secession. There is one overriding theme - the fear tha the federal government would take away the states rights .. to own slaves.
It might also be pointed out that the slaveholding states had absolutely no problems with the prosecution of FEDERAL laws such as the Fugitive Slaves Act - when it was convenient for the benefit of the slave holding states. This flies directly in the face of the theory that the seceding states were interested in states rights - they only were to the extent that slavery could continue.
Posted by doug lyons on December 23,2011 | 08:45 PM
There was a time long ago in our nations history when we had the chance to fulfill the dream of the founding fathers and become a great society. A country for the whole world to emulate and admire. We instead killed the cause of freedom when it rose up in defiance of the Lincoln administration and now our children are taught in their schoolbooks to admire the tyrant who allowed the war to take place. If the South could have won its freedom it would be a different world to live in. Federal tryanny over the rights of the people and the States would be limited and the power of huge corporations would be much more limited. I truly wish I could go back in history with nuclear weapons and instruments of modern warfare to give to Lee's army and that Lincoln would have been forced to beg for peace on terms favorable to the South and to the cause of Freedom. My only regret is that the South did not win its freedom.
Posted by Ted Reed on December 20,2011 | 07:17 PM
Read the book, The South Was Right, by the Kennedy brothers and learn why is was.
My family lines are both northern and southern....I praise the work of my gg grandfather, Joseph Wesley Crowder, for supporting and feeding from his farm (plantation) General Lee and his struggling army at Petersburg at war's end. My gg grandfather's black servant wanted to go along to help out too...the end of that war marked the end of Constituional America as created by our Founders. We have the leviathan Federal monstrosity today because of the defeat of the south and their cause of liberty....a legal, Constitutional secession, by the way.
Lynn M
Posted by lynn on November 23,2011 | 02:00 PM
There were more than 700 of Richmond's leading Confederate Citizens that would be members of the Lee Camp, and if you visit Richmond today and travel down Monument Avenue - many of the Lee Camp were the leaders that were responsible for the monuments. If you visit the VHS "Virginia Historical Society" museum on the Boulevard, the Lee Camp in 1910 granted property for the building of the "Battle Abbey" of the South of the Confederate Memorial Institute, which merged with the VHS. If you visit the VMFA, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts - in 1934, the R. E. Lee Camp No. 1 C.V. donated the land to the Virginia Arts Assoc. and provided a gallery in the Battle Abbey for the Barton Payne Collection that the Arts Assoc. received - Allowing the VMFA to build their Musuem and receive their property. The National Headquarters of the UDC now rests on the location of the Soldiers' Home Hospital. Several members of the R. E. Lee Camp were the founders, Publishers, Editors, Secretaries, and writers of the "SHSP" or the Southern Historical Society Papers.
What is significant in this narrative is that the leaders of one of the most prolific Confederate post-war groups, the Lee Camp always extended courtesies and plesantries to those Northern opponents, as evidenced by the vast volumes of correspondence in the archives of the Camp records in the Virginia Historical Society library. Post War - the Veterans of the Armies came together to Rebuild this Nation, and they didn't call each other Traitors. They set aside their differences to move on to a New Nation.
Unfortunately, the presentation of history's narrative today, simply misses the efforts of these old veterans to bring this Country together. I am afraid that this author failed in his opportunity to do so, missing the issue that the story of blacks in America is far more complicated than just merely blaming one region for the war.
Posted by Bobby Edwards on November 23,2011 | 05:48 AM
The R. E. Lee Camp No. 1 Confederate Veterans formed in 1883 (Chartered in 1884), and meeting in the Richmond 1st Virginia Armory, with the Union Veterans of the G.A.R. Post of the Phil Kearney Sub-Post of Newark. 20 years earlier these men were facing each other on various battlefields, but extending courtesies to each other - visited the battlefields and attended the memorial services at the graveyards at Seven Pines and Hollywood Cemetery.
One of the reasons for the Lee Camp forming was the creation of a Soldiers' Veterans Home in Richmond to attend to the needs of the homeless and destitute. The Phil Kearney Post adopted the Soldiers' Home Project, and a New York meeting between the Lee Camp and G.A.R. Officers resulted in a National Effort by the G.A.R., with Gen / President Grant donating $500 to the effort. One Union Veteran, who had lost both legs, appeared at a Richmond fundraising to present a speech at a Fair and Bazaar, with other Union Veterans contributing to the Soldiers Home, from around the Country. Grant wrote a letter, published in National papers endorsing the Richmond Soldiers' Home of the R. E. Lee Camp, and plays and musical productions in New York and Washington D.C. helped in the efforts. The funds raised, purchased 46 acres of land in Richmond, and by January of 1885 the Soldiers' Home was opened.
The R. E. Lee Camp Soldiers' Home project was one of their many projects and efforts, as they met many times in meetings with Union G.A.R. veterans. The Lander Post from Lynn, Mass. donated an Organ for the Soldiers' Home Chapel, and on the grounds of the Richmond Soldiers' Home - North & South came together in an Organized Fashion with Reunions, Meetings, Correspondence, and a Common Purpose - Rebuilding this Nations Unity. General Grant and the Lee Camp would correspond in the last months of his life, and it would be an "Honor Guard" from the R. E. Lee Camp No. 1 Confederate Veterans, who would attend the funeral of the General.
Posted by Bobby Edwards on November 23,2011 | 05:46 AM
Even the Carl Sandburg biography of Abraham Lincoln says that the war was about secession from the union and states' rights versus a strong and centralized federal government. Abolitionism was a side issue exploited by Lincoln to speed the end of the war.
Posted by Charlie J. Ray on November 16,2011 | 09:13 PM
The Smithsonian's denial of the brave black men who fought and died for the South, memorialized in news accounts, personal accounts, and even Union military records, is an insult to those men--and their casual dismissal at seeing those people stand and be counted (although according to the Smithsonian they don't count!) is an even more vicious one.
I suppose, after seeing what the Smithsonian did to Mark Sternberg, I shouldn't be surprised at seeing them insult and slander others--but as an American and a Southerner, allow me to still be disappointed.
Posted by Ken on November 13,2011 | 11:15 PM
I simply cannot understand why Confederates are celebrated. They fought against their own compatriots and legally elected government! And so many of their military leaders had previously been commissioned in the US army; therefore they were traitors to the country they had sworn to protect and to the constitution they had sworn to uphold.
Do we celebrate the Fort Hood soldier who decided he could not support his government's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and then expressed this dissatisfaction by killing people on the base? Of course not. Confederates did the same thing, just on a bigger scale.
If I were the descendant of someone who took up arms against the US, I would be ashamed of my ancestors' actions.
Posted by Karen H. on November 13,2011 | 08:52 AM
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