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.
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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.
- I submitted a comment concerning the error to the commercial picture archive and included links to the correct information.
- “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/.
- This title is also wrong. At the time, Charles Town was in Virginia.
- 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.
- Clarke, Asia Booth, and Terry Alford. John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir. University of Mississippi, 1999.
- Smythe, Angela. “John Wilkes Booth’s Time in Richmond before the Civil War.” Antebellum Richmond, November 2020. http://www.antebellumrichmond.com.
- 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. - Smythe, Angela. “Chasing Shadows 150 Years Old, Part II, Conversations Through the Glass.” Antebellum Richmond, May 10, 2014. http://antebellumrichmond.com/conversations.html.
- Miller
