Confederate Veterans
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
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 20th 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 »
