Browse Items (26 total)

The July 4, 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly featured three illustrations of Gordon, an escaped Mississippi plantation slave who sought refuge with the Union army. Harper’s staff based their illustration upon a photograph taken in Baton Rouge in April…

The artist responsible for this cartoon is unknown, but the sketch reflects the widely held belief that President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was wearing women’s clothing when apprehended by Union troops. General Robert E. Lee, the commander…

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln expressed antislavery sympathies and recorded his hostility to slavery's further expansion, but he opposed abolishing the institution altogether. He continued this stance once elected president. However, as the war…

Civil War legal codes define desertion as the deliberate abandonment of one’s military duty with the intention to remain absent. The earliest estimate of Confederate desertion comes from December 1862, when the fledgling army found several thousand…

On May 1, 1863 the Confederate Congress, acting on the recommendations of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, passed a series of resolutions responding to the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of black soldiers in Union forces. They declared…

Cyrus Boyd was a twenty-four-year-old Iowa farmhand when he enlisted in the Fifteenth Iowa Volunteer Infantry in October 1861. Like many white men at the beginning of the war, Boyd thought the fighting would be over fairly quickly and worried about…

Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia slaveholder, had been a strong proponent of secession. In the following excerpts from his diary, Ruffin recounted his family’s troubles with their slaves during the early years of the war on their Marlbourne plantation as…

Frank Bellew (1828-1888) was born in India but spent most of his career in New York City. He worked with notable publishers at the time such as Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Weekly, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated. In the cartoon…