I recently retrieved this mid 19th-century image from an online commercial picture archive.  Its caption there reads, “CIVIL WAR: VOLUNTEERS, 1861. Confederate volunteers posing for a Richmond photographer before the Battle of First Bull Run in 1861. Oil over a photograph.”

The caption is wrong.¹

The image is separated in both time and space from Bull Run by almost 600 days and 50 miles.

I share a lot of civil war images online.  When I came across this image and read its caption, I was pretty curious as there are very few images available online of groups of Confederate soldiers. I didn’t recall ever finding this one.

Of course, the image could be from a private collection and not widely available online.  That turns out to be the situation for the original ambrotype photograph from which this image was derived.

My search online found a black and white version at the Library of Congress.

The title is “Soldiers from Richmond Grays at execution of abolitionist John Brown in Charles Town, West Virginia.”^{2, 3}

Brown was executed December 2, 1859, 16 1/2 months before the civil war started.

The Library of Congress summary for this image says:

Photomechanical print from reproduction of sixth-plate ambrotype shows group portrait of soldiers at the execution of John Brown; most are from Richmond Grays (which became Company A, 1st Virginia Volunteers Regiment in 1861) including Robert Alexander Caskie, center with goatee; John Wilkes Booth⁴, left of Caskie’s shoulder; and Aylett Reins Woodson, bottom center; also Lieutenant Julian Alluisi of the Virginia Rifles in shako hat at top right. Tentatively identified are Louis F. Bossieux, center right; Cyrus Bossieux, top far left; Charles D. Clark, top right; David Garrick Wilson, bottom right; and William H. Caskie, behind Charles D. Clark. Photograph was previously thought to be of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War (Source: Angela Smythe, 2016).

John Wilkes Booth’s sister, Asia, likely saw a black and white print of this image. In her memoir, she writes⁵:

He acted continuously, traveled much, and accumulated a great deal of money. He bought land and speculated in oil wells. Success attended all his undertakings. He left Richmond and unsought enrolled himself as one of the party going to search for and capture John Brown. He was exposed to dangers and hardships. He was a scout, and I have been shown a picture of himself and others in their scout and sentinel dresses. He was a witness of the death of old John Brown. He acknowledged him a hero when he saw him die, and felt a throb of anguish as he beheld the old eyes straining their anxious sight for the multitude he vainly had thought would rise to rescue him.

In the summer of 2009, researcher Angela Smythe had recently finished reading the memoir and her curiosity was aroused by the single-line description of the picture.  She wondered if the photo still existed. “How could such a picture still exist and not have been already found in a field so heavily populated with established experts?” Smythe writes:⁶

I don’t remember how long I had been searching when one day I read a recollection of Booth at Charlestown left by 1859 Richmond Grays Private Philip Whitlock. Whitlock’s memoirs guided me to the above iconic photograph, which I call RG#1.  I was actually looking for Whitlock in RG#1, who as it turns out is not in there at all, when I saw John Wilkes Booth himself, standing “center rear.”

I had been trained as a fine arts artist and had supported myself as one, so I felt confident with what my trained and seasoned eye saw.  However, as an avid student of history, I said to myself, “No, not in that famous picture!  How could that be? With all the authorities on John Wilkes Booth, why had no one before me ever seen him in that picture?”

The answer was really quite simple.  As stated above, I am an artist, so Asia’s fleeting sixteen words about being shown a picture caught my attention, whereas most other researchers would gloss over them without thinking twice. Secondly, there is a difference between reading what Asia had to say about a brother she loved and scouring Asia’s manuscript for clues to support a narrative of Booth the Assassin.   Lastly, the picture’s iconic fame as a misidentified Civil War photograph obscured its true provenance and this led established researchers who had become so accustomed to seeing this famous photograph⁷ to simply run by it as a familiar object.

Booth, a supporting actor at the Richmond Theatre, had left with the Greys without informing the theatre manager, George Kunkel.  Booth had remarked to George Crutchfield, a member of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, also mobilized during the John Brown episode, that “he didn‘t know and didn‘t care” how Kunkel would fare without him.  Absent 17 days, Booth was discharged by Kunkel upon his return. Smythe writes:⁸

Richmond Gray Edward M. Alfriend, whom fellow Gray John O. Taylor observed leaving the theater with Booth to catch the outbound train for Charles Town, would recall 40 years later that Kunkel had a change of heart when a large contingent of the Virginia regiment (doubtless still in uniform) marched to the theater and demanded their comrade be reinstated.

Militia members, city newspapers, and influential citizens pressured employers over rumors that clerks and other workers would be discharged for their absence.  Like other employers, given the public and private pressure, Kunkel had little choice but to acquiesce to reinstate Booth as a concession to patriotic southern duty.

_______________

Earlier I wrote that I didn’t ever recall finding this image online.  However, I’m relatively certain that I’ve seen the image.

A little over 15 years ago, I came across Francis Trevelyan Miller’s 10 volume set, The Photographic History of the Civil War, in the Arkansas Tech University library.  I envisioned scanning in all of the images and sharing them online and actually started a project doing so, starting with Volume 7.  I started  there “simply because it was the one I was interested in when I decided to publish.”

I had checked out several of the volumes, including, I believe, Volume 1, which includes a copy of the Richmond Greys image on page 145.⁹

Interestingly, my project ended with a page that includes an image of an older John Wilkes Booth as well as images of the others implicated in the conspiracy.

1. I submitted a comment concerning the error to the commercial picture archive and included links to the correct information.
2. “Soldiers from Richmond Grays at Execution of Abolitionist John Brown in Charles Town, West Virginia.” Library of Congress. Accessed August 31, 2021. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016650150/.
3. This title is also wrong. At the time, Charles Town was in Virginia.
4. For those who might not be familiar with American and or Civil War history, John Wikes Booth was the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
5. Clarke, Asia Booth, and Terry Alford. John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir. University of Mississippi, 1999.
6. Smythe, Angela. “John Wilkes Booth’s Time in Richmond before the Civil War.” Antebellum Richmond, November 2020. http://www.antebellumrichmond.com.
7. Miller, Francis Trevelyan. The Photographic History of the Civil War, Volume 1: The Opening Battles. 1. Vol. 1. 10 vols. p. 145. New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1911.
   Young Southerners at Richmond Making Light of War.
   Skylarking before the lens of the Confederate photographer, we see the Boys in Gray just before Bull Run had taught them the meaning of a battle and elated them with the conviction of their own prowess. The young and confident troops on both sides approached this first severe lesson of the war in the same jocular spirit. There is not a serious face in the picture. The man flourishing the sword bayonet and the one with the drawn dagger are marking with mock heroics their bravado toward the coming struggle, while the one with the musket stands debonair as a comic-opera soldier. The pipe-clay cross bell and breast plate, the cock plumes in the “shapo” of the officer, indicate that the group is of a uniformed military organization already in existence at the beginning of the war. There was no such paraphernalia in the outfit of Southern troops organized later, when simplicity was the order of the day in camp.
8. Smythe, Angela. “Chasing Shadows 150 Years Old, Part II, Conversations Through the Glass.” Antebellum Richmond, May 10, 2014. http://antebellumrichmond.com/conversations.html.
9. Miller

No one expected someone who needed an iron lung to live this long.

In July 1952, a six-year-old Dallas, Texas, boy named Paul Alexander was infected with polio. Believing he had a better chance of recovering at home, the family doctor advised his parents not to take him to the hospital as there were just too many polio patients there. After five days, when he couldn’t hold a crayon, speak, swallow, or cough, his parents took him to Parkland Hospital. Though the staff there was well trained, with a dedicated polio ward, the hospital was overwhelmed, with sick people everywhere, and nowhere to treat them all.  When a doctor finally saw him, Paul’s mother was told there was nothing that could be done and he was left on a gurney in a hallway, barely breathing.  Another doctor decided to examine him, rushed him to the operating room, and performed an emergency tracheotomy to suction out the congestion in his lungs his paralyzed body couldn’t deal with.²

Three days later, Paul woke up. His body was encased in a machine that wheezed and sighed. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cough. He couldn’t see through the fogged windows of the steam tent – a vinyl hood that kept the air around his head moist and the mucus in his lungs loose. He thought he was dead.

When the tent was eventually removed, all he could see were the heads of other children, their bodies encased in metal canisters, nurses in starched white uniforms and caps floating between them. “As far as you can see, rows and rows of iron lungs. Full of children,” he recalled recently.³

In 2017, Jennings Brown, writing for Gizmodo, met three polio survivors still dependent on iron lungs.  “They are among the last few, possibly the last three in the US.”⁴

Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious disease that can cause paralysis of legs, arms, and respiratory muscles. “The polio virus is a silver bullet designed to kill specific parts of the brain,” Richard Bruno, a clinical psychophysiologist, and director of the International Centre for Polio Education said. “But parents today have no idea what polio was like, so it’s hard to convince somebody that lives are at risk if they don’t vaccinate.”

When (Martha) Lillard was a child, polio was every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about 58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and 3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,” Bruno said.

In May 2008, Dianne Odell died after a power failure due to storms shut off electricity to her residence near Jackson, Tennessee.  Odell had lived almost 60 years inside her 750-pound iron lung.  An emergency generator that was supposed to autostart didn’t and family members weren’t able to get it working. They tried operating the iron lung with a lever attached to the machine, but it wasn’t enough.⁵

1. “The Last Few Polio Survivors – Last of the Iron Lungs | Gizmodo.” YouTube, November 20, 2017. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gplA6pq9cOs.
2. McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “The Man in the Iron Lung.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, May 26, 2020. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/…polio-coronavirus
3. ibid
4. Brown, Jennings. “The Last of the Iron Lungs.” Gizmodo, November 20, 2017. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs….
5. Baird, Woody. “Dead at 61 after Life in Iron Lung.” The Seattle Times, May 28, 2008. https://www.seattletimes.com…iron-lung/.

October 26, 2018

Sometimes it’s hard not to engage.

Both—no, make that ALL—sides of every issue seem to have some people overly emotional these days.

Sometimes, I take time to write what seems to me to be a reasoned response for some of what I read on blogs and/or social media.

More often than not, I delete my response.

Engaging in the discourse, no matter how reasoned, is not going to make any difference, is not going to change any minds. In the final days leading into the first midterm election of the next president, all of this will be history.

“This too shall pass.¹”

1. “Adage reflecting on the temporary nature, or ephemerality, of the human condition. The general sentiment is often expressed in wisdom literature throughout history and across cultures, although the specific phrase seems to have originated in the writings of the medieval Persian Sufi poets.” (Wikipedia)

FiveThirtyEight¹

Since before the vaccines were even available, experts have warned that they wouldn’t be 100 percent effective at preventing infection. Luckily, the vaccines that we ended up with were actually much more effective than what early predictions suggested — Moderna and Pfizer are both better than 90 percent, and Johnson & Johnson is around 72 percent effective against the original strain of COVID-19 in the U.S. — but since they aren’t 100 percent, that means some vaccinated people can still get COVID-19. Early studies show the vaccines are less effective against the delta variant, with both Pfizer and Moderna around 90 percent effective against infection, and J&J up to 71 percent effective against hospitalization. And we’re seeing more breakthrough infections as the delta variant spreads.

Nevertheless, study after study shows that your risk of getting COVID-19 is much lower if you’re vaccinated than if you’re unvaccinated. In a study published last week that followed over 98,000 people in England from late-June to mid-July, vaccinated individuals were three times less likely to contract COVID-19 than unvaccinated individuals, even as the delta variant dominated cases. In fact, even if you do get infected after vaccination, your risks of getting seriously ill, needing to go in the hospital, needing to go in the intensive care unit or dying are reduced even further. Vaccinated Americans have accounted for less than 0.06 percent of hospitalizations, according to a review from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which looked at states that report breakthrough cases. Of the more than 166 million Americans who have been vaccinated, 1,507 have died after contracting COVID-19 — a rate of 0.0009 percent.

1. Rogers, Kaleigh. “Still Unsure about Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine? Start Here.” FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, August 11, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/.

“It’s true that compared to something like a tetanus shot, which has been in use for nearly a century, COVID-19 vaccines have a much shorter record of safety. But there are a few things to consider. One is that, due to the pandemic, billions of people have received these vaccines. Collecting data on how a medical intervention impacts billions of people would take decades in any other scenario, but we’ve been able to get it in just a few months. And because these vaccines are new, they are being carefully monitored. It’s how experts were able to identify that the AstraZeneca vaccine carries a small risk of a rare blood clot condition called thrombocytopenia syndrome. The risk is less than 10 in 1 million, yet researchers were able to identify it quickly due to intensive monitoring and the sheer number of people getting their shots.”¹

1. Rogers, Kaleigh. “Still Unsure about Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine? Start Here.” FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, August 11, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/.

Civil War Era Photographic Portraiture No. 2
Originally Published in American Civil War Chronicles

Half-plate ambrotype of Confederate officer Captain William F. McRorie of Co. A, 4th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, Richmond, Virginia.—C. R. Rees & Co.

Cased images by Rees included in the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress show a studio setting identical to this ambrotype.

According to the Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama, “Born to German immigrants in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Rees first established a photographic studio in Richmond, Virginia in 1851. After a brief attempt in the mid-1850s to open a gallery in New York City, Rees and his family returned to the area and established themselves as fixtures in Richmond and nearby Petersburg. After his studio burned in April 1865 along with the rest of Richmond, Rees reopened and continued working in the area until at least 1880.”

Recently sold at auction at Swann Galleries for $13,000 with–A Confederate States America Twenty Dollar bill, with the handwritten number 38392. Circa 1862.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9795989/william-f-mcrorie

Phase 1 trials of vaccines began in March 2020.

The available safety data to support the EUA include an analysis of 30,351 participants enrolled in an ongoing randomized, placebo-controlled study conducted in the U.S. These participants, 15,185 of whom received the vaccine and 15,166 of whom received saline placebo, were followed for a median of more than two months after receiving the second dose.

A recent study published in Jama shows that for every 1 million Americans vaccinated against COVID-19, only 60 developed heart problems. Complications were short-lived.

Long-term complications of getting COVID-19 can be severe for the unvaccinated, including intubation and death in far too many people.

The vaccines are highly effective.  Very high percentages that “get the jab” will be protected from the virus.  However, some will get the virus.  Almost none who were vaccinated will be hospitalized or die from COVID-related conditions.

Get the Jab!

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 150 of over 1200 images

Madison Zoo Flamingo, Henry Vilas Zoo, June 11, 2007

American flamingo²

The American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) is a large species of flamingo closely related to the greater flamingo and Chilean flamingo. It was formerly considered conspecific with the greater flamingo, but that treatment is now widely viewed (e.g. by the American and British Ornithologists’ Unions) as incorrect due to a lack of evidence. It is also known as the Caribbean flamingo, although it is also present in the Galápagos Islands. It is the only flamingo that naturally inhabits North America.

Flamingo³

Flamingos or flamingoes /fləˈmɪŋɡoʊz/ are a type of wading bird in the family Phoenicopteridae, the only bird family in the order Phoenicopteriformes. Four flamingo species are distributed throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean, and two species are native to Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Post Endnotes

1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
2. “American Flamingo.” Wikipedia, most recent edit, August 19, 2021. Accessed August 24, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…flamingo.
3. “Flamingo.” Wikipedia, most recent edit, August 19, 2021. Accessed August 24, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org…Flamingo.

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay,  Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

While we were on a trip to Colorado, we found out our youngest daughter, Jes, and her husband, Shane, were thinking about moving back to Arkansas.

A couple of days later, Jes told us they had made an offer on a rural home in northwest Arkansas.  She asked us not to share that information until they closed on the deal.

They closed yesterday.

Jes and Ciera, our granddaughter, will be heading to their new home early next week.  Shane has to finish out his notice at work.

Needless to say, it was good news for us. Over the last 21 years, they’ve lived in New Jersey, northern Texas, Wisconsin, and California.  A 2 1/2 hour drive is much better than the longer trips to those places.  We’ll be able to see them much more often.