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Course: The Seeing America Project > Unit 6
Lesson 3: 1800-1900- John Wesley Jarvis, Black Hawk and His Son Whirling Thunder
- Face to face with the voters: Bingham's Country Politician
- The Little Round House at the University of Alabama
- Thomas Crawford, George Washington Equestrian Monument
- The U.S. Civil War, sharpshooters, and Winslow Homer
- Photographing the Battle of Gettysburg, O'Sullivan's Harvest of Death
- Snakes and petticoats? Making sense of politics at the end of the Civil War
- Nast and Reconstruction, understanding a political cartoon final
- Robert Mills and Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey, Washington Monument
- Martyr or murderer? Hovenden's The Last Moments of John Brown
- Monument Avenue and the Lost Cause
- Defeated, heroized, dismantled: Richmond's Robert E. Lee Monument
- Custer's Last Stand — from the Lakota perspective
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The U.S. Civil War, sharpshooters, and Winslow Homer
The artwork "The Army of the Potomac - a Sharpshooter on Picket Duty" by Winslow Homer, published in Harper's Weekly in 1862, captures a Civil War sharpshooter's suspenseful moment. The image, reflecting the new concept of snipers, was widely seen due to the magazine's popularity. Homer's composition invites viewers to imagine the unseen violence. Created by Smarthistory and Kimberly Kutz.
Want to join the conversation?
- The difference in public perception of war that occurs when the images become more immediate to the action they portray, and photographic rather than "artists' renditions", brings home the horror and subtracts from the heroism. It was the immediate nature of the war in Vietnam on television, and the faces of the dead issue of Life Magazine in June of 1969, gave energy to the anti-war movement. This picture from Harpers does not have that effect.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(swing piano music) - [Narrator 1] We're
looking at a print called "The Army of the Potomac - a
Sharpshooter on Picket Duty," published in Harper's
Weekly Illustrated magazine on November 15th, 1862 by the American artist Winslow Homer. - [Narrator 2] During the Civil
War, it wasn't yet possible to reproduce photographs at mass scale. So instead, artists went
along with the armies, sketched what they saw, and then they might have
sent back these sketches for engraving in New York, so that the northern public could get a firsthand look
at what was happening. And Homer made many of these images, showing not only individual
soldiers, but also battles. - [Narrator 1] I really wanna
know, what's a sharpshooter, and how do they factor into the Civil War? I'm also wondering if
Homer saw this himself, or did he come up with this
based on things he'd heard about or other experiences that he'd had? Who would have seen this? What
did the image mean to them? How did his compositional choices reflect what he hoped to convey to his audience? - [Narrator 2] I see a
man in uniform in a tree. He has a canteen that's
suspended in front of him, and he has a rifle. He's wearing a kepi, that's the hat that was frequently used
by Civil War soldiers. And he's staring down
what looks to be a scope. - [Narrator 1] He's balanced
in a really precarious way. His rear end seems to be shifted off the branch just a
little bit, but he's held on, with his foot lodged in
the nook of the branch. He's also holding onto the
branch just below the rifle. At the same time, that canteen
provides a counterbalance. - [Narrator 2] The soldier and the canteen almost look like the sides of a scale, with the rifle itself providing
the balance in between. And you can see that the soldier has the rifle tucked into his shoulder, which would steady it
and prevent a kickback from having pushed him out of the tree. - [Narrator 1] We don't
see who he's shooting at, we don't see anything
beyond this tight frame. We assume that he's looking
out at a target of some sort, or looking for one, but we
don't know what he's seeing. We also don't know who can see him. So there's this uncertainty about, not only his position in this tree, but what might happen in another minute. - [Narrator 2] There's
this element of suspense. At the same time, the soldier is cool. He seems calm, he seems
focused. He's not nervous. So Harper's Weekly was the most popular illustrated newspaper in this time period, I think they had about
200,000 subscribers. And that doesn't count people that might have gotten
the magazine secondhand from a friend or family. So a lot of people would have
been seeing Harper's Weekly and following the progress of the war. The war in the popular press
was a northern phenomenon, because New York City
is where, then as now, almost all of the publishing
houses were located. So they had the print
technology and the readership to share news and images of the war on a scale that really
wasn't possible in the south. - [Narrator 1] Prior to
the start of the war, Harper's appealed to an
audience across the country, readers north and south. Just as the war was breaking out, Harper's and other
publications made a shift, and acknowledged their
support for the union effort. - [Narrator 2] This is
one of the first conflicts where telescopic sites were available, and so expert marksmen
were able to hit targets at distances of greater than 200 yards. And a sharpshooter in this image is quite likely one of
those expert marksmen for a number of reasons. First, the rifle that he's
holding is not something that would have been issued
to your everyday soldier. In fact, it's probably
his own personal rifle. It is a match caliber rifle, which means that it was intended for a shooting competition,
a shooting match. And sharpshooters were
recruited through competitions to be part of these elite marksman units. And Homer noted the presence of one of these sharpshooter units called Berdan's Sharpshooters at the Siege of Yorktown. Sharpshooters were both
appreciated for their skill, but also looked at a little bit
askance during the Civil War because they were not acting
generally defensively. They were going up in
trees, going up on ridges, maybe out ahead of the main force, and trying to pick off important targets. So that might have been
officers, artillery men. And there's a sense that it
was perhaps not a fair fight. In fact, Homer himself later wrote that one of the sharpshooters
he encountered at Yorktown let him look down his telescopic sight, and he saw the target on an individual. And he said, "It's
about as close to murder as anything that I can think of." So it was very good to have these expert
marksmen on your side, but they were feared as well as loved. - [Narrator 1] And this is interesting, because Homer doesn't talk
a lot about his perceptions, and the images that he produced
for Harper's really range. The few scenes of battle that he produced are somewhat conventional. They remind us a bit of history painting, where we see significant battles. It's unlikely that he was
right there in the action, so he's maybe relying on
some of these conventions. And some of the images that
he portrayed of life in camp gave the sense of
camaraderie, even of bravery. And these images of the sharpshooter convey something a bit different. The use of this word "murder," that isn't just coming from him, there were others at the
time that were skeptical. And so this image stands in contrast to some of the other work
that we see from Homer. - [Narrator 2] But we also know that there was a general interest in sharpshooters during this period. If you look at Alexander Gardner's photographs of Gettysburg, for example, he identifies many of the slain
soldiers as sharpshooters, whether or not they actually were. This idea of a sniper was
something new in the Civil War, and people wanted to see and purchase images of sharpshooters. - [Narrator 1] There are multiple images that come up in popular literature. Some of them are humorous. Some of them show them fumbling
with loading their gun, and some of them show them in a kind of romanticized, idealized way. - [Narrator 2] And if
we go back to that idea of the composition as
reminiscent of a scale, you could think of the
sharpshooter weighing his options, weighing his decision about
whether to take a shot, and having the power of life and death. - [Narrator 1] There's also
another way to see the balance. Once they shoot, they
give themselves away. The canteen might catch the glint of light and draw attention. - [Narrator 2] The
violence that is implied is happening outside the frame, but we can't forget that something lethal is about to happen. - [Narrator 1] And I think
that's why this image is so compelling. Because we can't see it, but
we know it's going to happen. And the sharpshooter is ever patient, ever concentrated, ever focused, and that moment of violence
is always just outside, and so we must use our imagination. It brings us in every time we look at it. (swing piano music)