The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis (review)

The Civil War witnessed an outpouring of letters as well as a hunger for photographs. While the book’s primary subject is the Black Civil War soldier, and thus the experience of men, it also includes unforget-table texts by a number of women, sometimes accompanied by photographic portraits: the cross-dressing soldier, Cathay Williams (serving as William Cathay); the nurse Sister Penny described at length by a Black sergeant; and Rhoda Ann Childs, the Southern wife subjected to horrific rapes because her husband had joined the Union Army. Assertions of “the important role photography and letter writing played in [Civil War] history” (86) do not bring us closer to the major tensions permeating these explosive texts. The Civil War photographs reproduced in this book are, moreover, complex, composite objects that attest to social and financial transactions between sitters and photographers who may have held divergent assumptions about a portrait’s ultimate purpose.