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This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among wartime and postwar Americans, North and South, an appetite to narrate their experiences of preserving Union or achieving state sovereignty is reflected in their many accounts of the coming of the Civil War, its fighting, and its aftermath. Private letters from the home front and front line were regularly written and received; despite shortages of paper and ink, diaries and journals were diligently kept, recording experiences at both local and state levels; and memoirs and reminiscences, usually written many years after the events they describe, were produced for regional, national, and even international literary markets. These eyewitness accounts from a wide range of historical actors offer scholars, students, and general readers a remarkably detailed, intimate, and valuable glimpse of lived experience during four years of fighting that shaped a nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]