Transcript: Picturing America - Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Winslow Homer

JAMES MCPHERSON (AMERICAN HISTORY PROFESSOR, PRINCETON): Frederick Douglas issued a broadside that was pasted up at thousands of copies around the country called “Men of Color, To Arms!” and one of the passages in that said once a black man gets in a blue uniform carrying a rifle and a knapsack and a canteen and fights for his country, there is no power on Earth that can deny his citizenship in the United States.

GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW (AMERICAN ART PROFESSOR, U. OF PENNSYLVANIA): The Shaw Memorial commemorates Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the soldiers of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.

MCPHERSON: Here was a member of the Brahmin elite of New England who had accepted appointment as Colonel of the first Black regiment officially recruited in the North, a courageous act in and of itself because there were a lot of doubters in the North about whether Black soldiers would really fight, whether they would make good soldiers. Of course, Lincoln had already issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but these men and their white officers, who were mostly abolitionists, believed in this idea of fighting for freedom and freedom given to them by somebody else is not going to be real freedom.

They had marched through Boston, along Beacon Street, to embark to South Carolina in May of 1863, and it’s that march that is portrayed in the sculpture. The attack on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863 was preceded by heavy naval bombardment and also by land-based guns. And they at dusk, hoping they had softened up the defenses, they thought they could overwhelm the garrison with an infantry attack. The first wave of the attackers in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts swarmed up on the parapet. Sergeant William Carney planted the flag—he was almost immediately hit, although he survived. Many others were hit; Shaw was hit and killed. In the end, about 300 of the 600 men in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts were either killed or wounded and about 50 of them were captured. This proved that they were willing to make the kind of sacrifices that the best of the white soldiers did.

SHAW: Saint-Gaudens is one of the greatest sculptors of the late 19th century. He really brings to life the figures that he depicts. He goes through the streets of Boston and finds individual Black men to sit for him in his studios.

MCPHERSON: The day of dedication in 1897, many of their surviving veterans of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts were there, including Sergeant William Carney who had won the Medal of Honor. When Carney himself stood up with the very same flag that he had saved 34 years earlier, the whole crowd broke out into cheer and people broke down into tears.

Well, Homer’s Veteran in a New Field was painted immediately after the War in the summer of 1865. On the surface, looks like a fairly simple painting with simple composition. We know that he’s a Civil War veteran not only from the title of the painting but rather dimly in the right-hand lower corner of the painting lying on the ground is his army coat and canteen.

SHAW: Homer had been a visual reporter for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War and I think there was a lot of ambivalence that Homer had about the War. Even in his illustration he doesn’t show victory. He saw the War as this great moment of suffering.

MCPHERSON: Well, this was a time of demobilization of the huge Union army which just a few months earlier had consisted of a million men. Would they be able to make this transition back to peaceful pursuits? The scythe or sickle that this man was using was already obsolete, and most harvesting of grain was done with a scythe that was attached to a cradle. Initially he painted in the cradle, but then he decided to paint over it—it still shows through, you can see it. And clearly he had done this for a purpose, and I think the purpose was irony of this peaceful pursuit which really represents the grim reaper, the image of death. Just a few months earlier the soldier had been harvesting men.

SHAW: One of the most famous Civil War battlefield photographs is Timothy O. Sullivan’s Harvest of Death.

MCPHERSON: It’s quite likely that Homer had seen that photograph. This question of the harvest war, what is the impact of war, the death on a society.

SHAW: When you think about two such different works, it really emphasizes the impact of the Civil War on American society. How could they make sense of something so horrible and so complete?