In 1862, Rear Admiral Samuel F. DuPont wrote an unusual letter from on board his flagship, the USS Wabash. What inspired his correspondence was not a battle, but an artist who had just enlisted for two years' service at sea. The young man is "Corbin's clerk," wrote DuPont, "a son of Russell Smith, the artist, [who] sketches and takes ships beautifully." Predicted the admiral: "He has a collection of all our steamers that will be very curious one day."
DuPont was right about the shipboard artist. Xanthus Russell Smith proved both talented and prolific. He produced a fine watercolor sketch of his ship on 11 February 1863 (the Wabash was a onetime whaling ship converted to a floating repair station for Union blockading ships). His work would come to elicit not only curiosity, but also admiration and acclaim.
If his paintings look only vaguely familiar to modern readers, there is a reason—one that helps explain why most Civil War naval art is so little known. Smith served on board ship between 1862 and 1864. We know nothing about his shore leaves, especially whether he used them to send his drawings and sketches to publishers, agents, or galleries. Most likely, he did not.
Land-based battlefield artists such as Winslow Homer and Edwin Forbes, by comparison, easily could use the U.S. mails for this purpose, or hop aboard a train and travel to cities themselves. In this manner, they could quickly transport or hand-carry their firsthand action sketches to picture weeklies such as Harper's Weekly, or to print publishers such as Currier & Ives, which promptly adapted them while the news they portrayed was still fresh. Not so with the naval artists. If they were lucky enough to be in active service, they were, after all, stuck on board ships at sea. They amassed sketchbooks, but it would take time before land-based Americans got to see the results.
Actually, Xanthus Smith was one of the very few artists who served at sea at all. As Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter pointed out:
Naval ships did not travel with . . . sketchers. There was no room for these on board ship, and if perchance some stray . . . should get on board, the discomfort of a man of war, the exacting discipline, and the freer life in camp sent him back to shore, where in most cases he only remembered his association with the Navy as a trip without any satisfaction, and with no desire to do justice to the work of the naval service.
Even the ambitious Smith admitted: "[I] was able to keep busy with my sketchbook and pencils" only when time permitted. Like other marine artists who served in or portrayed the war, Smith was handicapped by all but insurmountable challenges.
It was not only that the Civil War's naval artists had limited access to the public while the war raged. (Only later, making good use of the connections established by his artist-father, did Smith finally win commissions from political and veterans' organizations to produce commemorative paintings.) They had to comprehend and portray, too, extraordinary changes in naval warfare itself and face challenges and obstacles that make the quality and quantity of their surviving work—popular prints and paintings alike—truly remarkable. Their success, however, is not always easy to recognize.
Looking at their work nearly 140 years after the war, we see for the most part scenes of romance and beauty. And our reactions reflect another problem with marine painting of naval warfare: it so often looks picturesque—not at all like bloody, carnage-filled land battle paintings.
Civil War-era Americans grew accustomed to seeing the ugly side of war in the work of contemporary battlefield photographers. But photographers never accompanied ships on the rivers or ocean. The decks of pitching and rolling warships were hardly ideal places for cameramen's tripods, and naval vessels steamed too far from commercial ports to attract photographers who needed to develop, print, and sell their new pictures quickly, as they did on land. Thus, land-based artists who might have offered naval portrayals from photographic models had no such models from which to work.
As for those few artists who did see the naval war firsthand, few captured the human experience in their work. There was no naval equivalent of camp artist Winslow Homer among them to depict the day-to-day-life of the common sailor. Civil War marine artists emphasized what they painted best: ships. And while landscape artists could shock the public by showing how war was ravaging the beauty of the terrain, marine painters could not: the sea inevitably swallowed up the evidence of death and destruction after battle, leaving little evidence to portray.
The dearth of naval art was especially acute in the Confederacy for yet another reason: conscription. With nearly every able-bodied man bearing arms, the population of Southern artists was quickly dissipated. So many artists joined the Confederate military, or were enlisted by the government to design stamps and currency, that the Richmond picture weeklies were forced to advertise desperately for new engravers. And one blockade-runner actually reported carrying a load of lithographic stones and 26 Scottish printmakers to design currency in Richmond. Only by a stroke of "luck"—an injury (perhaps self-inflicted) to a talented land-based soldier-artist—did the Confederacy's greatest painter, Conrad Wise Chapman, get re-assigned to Charleston Harbor in 1863. There, he made a particularly important picture of the Hunley before her demise. Finally, artists both North and South were forced to confront the changing technology of naval warfare itself and the erosion of romance from the high seas. This development may have posed the greatest challenge of all.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who observed the war closely, well understood the deeper meaning of the fabled encounter between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia in March 1862—the duel that changed naval art, not to mention naval warfare, forever. The Monitor, sneered Hawthorne, "could not be called a vessel at all; it was a machine." And he added:
All the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by. Henceforth there must come up a race of engineermen and smoke-blackened cannoneers . . . and even heroism—so deadly a grip is science laying on our noble possibilities—will become a quality of very minor importance.
Hawthorne was only partly right: Union Vice Admiral David G. Farragut would later prove that personal heroism was possible even in the machine age. But the writer was onto something. The Monitor's fight against the Virginia did not lend itself easily to the romantic aesthetic in art. The Union ironclad was an ugly little machine representing northern industrialism, not gallantry. And the Virginia was a hulking monstrosity.
That they nonetheless changed naval warfare forever was evident in the title artist W. B. Matthews gave to his painting of their encounter: "The Last of the Wooden Navy." Until then, wooden ships outfitted with billowing sails inspired artists and delighted their patrons. The black ironclads tested artistic talent and home-front taste alike.
Fortunately, many artists quickly recognized the crucial historical importance of the dawn of the iron age at sea. Xanthus Smith, among others, produced grand scenes of the four-hour Battle of Hampton Roads, typically producing panoramic views of the low-lying Union ironclad and her fortress-like Confederate rival exchanging dramatic, if inconclusive, fire at close range. Most Union artists made sure sacred-looking white smoke billowed from the Monitor, while evil-looking black smoke spewed from the Virginia. In prints, paintings, and sketches, no naval battle of the Civil War inspired so much artistic commemoration. Perhaps the only wartime event to rival it was the Battle of Gettysburg, which enjoyed the advantage of attracting many more reporters and photographers to the scene of the action. But where the Monitor and Virginia were concerned, artists made up in imagination and enterprise for what they lacked in access.
Tellingly, few works portrayed the captain of the Monitor, John Worden, who had the bad luck to be disabled during the battle. Instead, artists who considered the human side of the war's most technological battle tended to celebrate its inventor, John Ericsson, who became far more famous than the man who commanded at Hampton Roads. In a single day at sea, technology had at least equaled, and maybe surpassed, heroism as the inspiration for naval art.
But if such pictures represented a low point in the image of the individual hero in naval art, a high point was soon to come. When artist Edward E. Arnold painted Farragut's entrance into Mobile Bay, guns firing, on the morning of 5 August 1864, he captured the opening chapter of an episode that would glorify the Navy and enshrine the admiral as an icon. Here was the hero versus the machine: the viewer can just glimpse the fearsome Confederate ram Tennessee steaming forward to engage the Union vessels.
Xanthus Smith, the unsung master of Civil War marine art, portrayed the scene, too. But the great iconic image of Mobile Bay, unlike Arnold's and Smith's, emphasized not spectacle but personal heroism in the face of technology. It was William Heysham Overend's 1883 masterpiece, "An August Morning with Farragut." In this, perhaps the best naval painting of the entire Civil War, common sailors can be seen in combat, including African Americans, for unlike that in the Army, service on shipboard was truly integrated.
More important, the painting brought technology face to face with tradition—with tradition winning. The artist chose to portray not Farragut's famous "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" charge into the channel, but the moment when the Confederate ironclad Tennessee brushed against the side of the stately Hartford, where the admiral stands, fully exposed, lashed to the rigging of his flagship so he can command even if wounded.
With the hideous Rebel ram belching devilish black smoke, and the Union cannon pouring out virtuous white smoke, heroism triumphs over the machine. Individual muscle, determination, and above all courage, are shown to matter, even in a life-or-death struggle against the inhuman machine. It was the stuff of myth. And that is what it made of this aging admiral.
One more great naval event captured the attention of Civil War artists. And while the first had been a battle of new technology—the Monitor and Virginia—and the second, Mobile Bay, a test of personal heroism against technology, this third event was an archaic anachronism. But nonetheless (or maybe precisely because it was old-fashioned) it was irresistible.
The ever-alert Xanthus Smith was lucky enough to be in Boston Harbor at the outset of the drama. There he captured the USS Kearsarge as she was steaming out to sea in 1864 in search of that nagging threat to federal shipping, still operating unchallenged at sea: the notorious Confederate commerce raider Alabama. By the time the Kearsarge caught up with her prey, it had reached Cherbourg harbor, France. Not even Edouard Manet could resist the ensuing drama, painting the Union visitor at dock, and later gazing down from the heights above town to paint their epic duel. So did a number of other French artists, whose presence on the scene represents one of the great, fortuitous coincidences in the history of Civil War art. It seems a new spa had been built nearby, and its owner had invited artists and journalists for a pre-opening junket. When news of an American naval battle reached the hotel, a ready-made batch of foreign correspondents was close by the action to both report and sketch it.
So it was that this distant, strategically unimportant combat an ocean away from America wound up being depicted nearly as often as the Monitor and the Virginia. Apparently, a stong hunger lingered in picture audiences for depictions of the old style of fighting. As Confederate Rear Admiral Raphael Semmes, commanding the Alabama, recalled, the two ships faced each other "as if two men were to go out to fight or duel." Semmes did not know that his opponent, Captain John A. Winslow, had placed protective sheet chain over the sides of his sloop (an advantage Semmes later claimed was unfair). The two vessels circled each other relentlessly, firing across their wooden decks, until the Alabama finally went down.
Harper's Weekly was the first to portray the result with a full-page, engraved cover illustration on 23 July 1864. It introduced Union audiences to the small but romantic triumph with both power and timeliness. Xanthus Smith's later painting, "Engagement Between the Pirate Alabama and the U.S.S. Kearsarge," relied heavily on this model to show the dramatic moment, when, as a Union sailor recalled, the Alabama's "bow rose high in the air, as if preparatory for a suicide plunge, and then, in a moment . . . was engulfed in the uncompassionate waves of the ocean." The raider, declared another eyewitness, proved "graceful even in her death." Smith unveiled his picture to great fanfare at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, then was guest of honor when it was presented to Philadelphia's Union League 30 years later.
In contrast, British painter Edwin Hayes saw the death of the Alabama from a different perspective: her crew clinging for dear life to debris as a British yacht rushes forward from the left to pick up survivors from the sea. The title of the painting shows that its artist endorsed Admiral Semmes's argument that Captain Winslow's use of chain mail was unchivalrous. It is titled, "Destruction of the Confederate Steamer Alabama by the U.S. Ironclad Kearsarge." Only a Confederate sympathizer would call the Kearsarge an "ironclad," just as only a Union sympathizer such as Smith would call the Alabama a "pirate." In this subtle way, artists dueled for public memory no less intensely than had the vessels that faced each other at Hampton Roads in 1862, Mobile Bay in 1864, and Cherbourg that same year.
So how, in retrospect, did the image-makers in the fine and graphic arts fare in portraying the naval war? In depicting the common sailor, not very well at all. Artists seldom saw them in action and seldom portrayed them. In depicting hero officers during the war: a bit better, particularly Farragut, though they never portrayed him as often as they depicted the major heroes of the armies. In immortalizing naval battles, artists did better, both in timely prints by market-sensitive publishers such as Currier & Ives, and later, after the war, in oil paintings commissioned by veterans' organizations.
In portraying technology, marine artists did brilliantly: prints of the land war rarely if at all recognized the role of the railroad, the telegraph, or advanced weaponry. But naval artists dealt with the advent of modern warfare quickly and frankly. Like the literary giants Hawthorne and Herman Melville, marine artists recognized this military revolution immediately and fixed it into American visual memory.
Modern Americans may have lost their appreciation for the power once conveyed by such images. The proliferation of visuals in films, on television, and on the Internet, has dulled the impact pictures once exerted on audiences in the United States. And 19th-century originals have been used so promiscuously as illustrations, often lacking full explanations of their origins and inspirations, that they have evolved, sadly, into meaningless space-holders in magazines and books. There, they are often hopelessly cropped, overprinted with type, and only briefly described in caption. It has hard for us to imagine that they were once rare, bold, virtuoso icons of war.
Against tremendous odds—radically changing technology, distant and remote events, a dearth of eyewitness artists at sea, the lack of current photographs of new naval heroes, and no regular access to the publishers of prints and newspapers who operated on shore—naval art succeeded in opening windows on the Civil War at sea for Americans North and South. They deserve such recognition now.