The Engraved Illustration as a Vehicle for News in the mid-19th century

The engraved newspaper illustration attempted — or, perhaps better, pretended — to take its aesthetic cues from the canons of classical painting, but it was a decidedly second-class art: produced on a tight schedule, middle-brow at best, and often as stuffy and staged as the prose of FLIN (see the captions below). Nonetheless, the illustration was in fact not only more well suited to the popular tastes of mid-19th century America but also much more versatile than the contemporary photograph, whose relative novelty was simply not yet prepared to manage, let alone to match, the ability of a well composed illustration to recapitulate neatly the drama of a battle, a startling or noteworthy event, etc. The following illustrations (and their associated captions) drawn from FLIN provide instances of the sort of image that would easily have escaped the contemporary camera.

It is interesting to consider that, with the advent of digital photography, both the still and the moving image, fully reproduced mechanically, have at last become fully as arbitrary and potentially mendacious as the engraved illustration, in which the pictorial elements were obviously able to be deployed as the artist (and the editor and his “finishers”) saw fit in order to create a mood or an impression.

EXPLOSION OF 3,000 MUSKET CARTIRDGES IN A TENT AT FORT TOTTEN, NEW BERNE, N.C.,

THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE THIRD NEW YORK ARTILLERY

Our correspondent wrote: “There is a great carelessness in the handling of munitions of war, of which we have just had proof in our camp. Thinking to blow the flies from the tent by flashing powder — a common practice — a spark caught a box of three thousand musket cartridges, thereby causing a tremendous explosion, which wounded four men (two dangerously) and blew the tent to atoms.”

TOWING THE WOUNDED FEDERAL SOLDIERS DOWN THE BAYOU ON A RAFT

ON THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 14TH, 1863, AFTER THE BATTLE OF BAYOU TECHE, LA.

General Banks had arranged to stop the depredations which the Confederate steamer J. A. Cotton had been long committing along the Bayou Teche. He had advanced from Labadieville on January 11th with four gunboats, ten reginients of infantry and one of artillery, reaching Carney’s Bridge, near Pattersonville, early on the 14th. Their progress here was stopped by several earthworks, under whose guns lay the J. A. Cotton. Early on the 15th Commander McKean Buchanan opened fire from the Calhoun, and was joined in it by the other gunboats, while the troops were advancing on shore to engage the Confederate vessels and batteries from the rear. The troops were not long in subjecting their enemy to a fierce enfilading musketry and artillery fire from the woods; and such was its destructive effect that the J. A. Cotton had finally to retire toward an upper battefy at Butte La Rose, on the Atchafalaya. Early on the following morning the J. A. Cotton was seen floating down the bayou in a sheet of flame, having been set afire and abandoned by the Confederates. The troops, therefore, returned to Brashear City, the Federal wounded having been meanwhile placed on a raft and towed down the river.

INFERNAL MACHINE DESIGNED BY THE CONFEDERATES TO DESTROY THE FEDERAL FLOTILLA

IN THE POTOMAC DISCOVERED BY CAPTAIN BUDD OF THE STEAMER “RESOLUTE.”

An infernal machine designed by the Confederates to blow up the Pawnee and the vessels of the Potomac flotilla, which was set adrift near Aquia Creek, was picked up on the 7th of July, 1861, floating toward the Pawnee. The following description of the article was sent to the Navy Department: “Two large eighty-gallon oil casks, perfectly watertight, acting as buoys, connected bv twenty-five fathoms of three-and-a-half-inch rope, buoyed with large squares of cork, every two feet secured to casks by iron handles. A heavy bomb of boiler iron, fitted with a brass tap and filled with powder, was suspended to the casks six feet under water. On top of the cask was a wooden box, with fuse in a gutta-percha tube. In the centre of the cork was a platform with a great length of fuse coiled away, occupying the middle of the cask.”

BATTLE OF SHILOH, OR PITTSBURG LANDING–

COLONEL JOHNSON ENDEAVORING TO CAPTURE A CONFEDERATE OFFICER,

BUT ONLY GETS A WIG

Colonel A. K. Johnson of the Twenty-eighth Illinois Regiment has, during the late war, shared in the dangers of many a daring adventure. On the last day of the action at Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, and while the confederates were flying in confusion from their works, three of the officers in their flight passed very near the place where Colonel Johnson was stationed. The colonel instantly started in pursuit. Coming within pistol range, he fired at the nearest of his flying foes. This brought the Confederate officer down on his horse’s neck. Colonel Johnson, believing this to be a feint to avoid a second shot, determined to drag him from his saddle by main force. Riding up to his side for this purpose, he seized him by the hair of his head, but to his astonishment and disgust, he only brought off the Confederate major’s wig. Instantly recovering his headway, he again started for the delinquent, but his pistol had done its work, and before the colonel reached him his lifeless body had fallen from the saddle.