Blog About Photography

W.C. Round, Confederate vet­eran, half-​​length por­trait, stand­ing, fac­ing slightly left, wear­ing badge dur­ing cel­e­bra­tion at Bull Run, 1911

Tonight, I searched the phrase “con­fed­er­ate vet­eran” in the Library of Con­gress Prints and Pho­tographs Online Cat­a­log. We don’t often think of for­mer Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers, or really much about the after­math of the Civil War at all, so the small trea­sure trove of pho­tographs of early old, bearded men in the early 20^th cen­tury allowed me to think about this his­tory in a dif­fer­ent way.

A cou­ple of the fol­low­ing pho­tographs are from 1911, but most of the images in the LOC data­base come from the Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans Reunion that was held in Wash­ing­ton, DC in 1917, the first time it was ever aloud to be held in the nation’s cap­i­tal. The event took place almost 60 years after the end of the war, World War I was rag­ing, and Woodrow Wil­son, a South­ern Demo­c­rat and devout racist who re-​​segregated the Army, was in the White House.  This arti­cle from a 1915 edi­tion of the New York Times explains how the Reunion came to be held in the cap­i­tal. Read the rest of this entry »