Snapshots of Violence

The Common Ground Virginia History Book Club focuses on approachable books focused on Virginia-centered nonfiction. Most of these books are historical narratives and biographies such as Code Girls by Liza Mundy and A Brave and Cunning Prince by James Horn, but there is not one right way to approach history and our first pick for 2023 approaches history differently. Team Photograph by Lauren Haldeman combines graphic novel, poetry, memoir and Civil War history into one slim but compelling volume.

Poetry and illustrations might not be the very first things that come to mind in regards to the Civil War but neither is uncommon to find in the archival record. In our James I Robertson Jr Civil War Sesquicentennial Legacy Collection, a crowd-sourced scanning project completed in 2015, there are several examples of sketches and drawings from soldiers. Although Matthew Brady’s Civil War photography is well-known, the overwhelming majority of men did not have access to photography other than to sit for a portrait. They recorded what they saw by drawing, sketching, and describing it in words. The Sketchbook of Vance and Maxwell, undated, includes sketches by unknown soldiers of various camps and scenes in Virginia and West Virginia. The sketchbook of William Wallace Byrd Sr., ca. 1861, even contains a sketch of General Elzey’s Headquarters at Fairfax Station, the location of Haldeman’s childhood home referenced in Team Photograph.

Poetry, meant for reading, reciting, or singing (as song lyrics) was a common way to express feelings and ideas then, as now. Newspapers for both public and military audiences printed poetry from readers. Soldier’s Journal, a paper printed in Alexandria to provide Union military news, includes poetry in almost every issue, some reprinted from other sources like Harper’s Weekly. One, titled “April 20, 1864” by Private Miles O’Reilly, is written by a soldier who remembers, as he sits with 10 others from his company, that there were originally 37 of them. While there are pieces from veterans, much of poetry doubles as propaganda. Songs and poems, during and after the war, were published extolling racist ideologies.

And of course the war produced many works of memory, not only published memoirs, the most famous being that of Ulysses S. Grant, but also the day-to-day record created in letters detailing experiences for those back at home. In Team Photograph, Haldeman reckons with the legacy of the battlefields near her childhood home in Fairfax Station and recalls her brothers finding a human femur in the woods. In April 1862, about 160 years earlier, A. L. Shadron, a Union soldier, wrote home to his sister from the same location after the First Battle at Bull Run (also called 1st and 2nd Manassas) with a similar experience, writing,

 …yesterday I walk[ed] over the battle ground at Bulls run and it is a very nice place and we saw a good deal there some of the boys found a bone out of a man[‘s] leg.

In between Shadron and Haldeman’s brothers discovery the very same location saw another bloody battle that furthered the location’s association with the Civil War, a legacy that lingers till into Haldeman’s childhood soccer games and remains today.