# Flag envelopes, prison photographs and a forged abolitionist tract Case studies Flag envelopes, prison photographs and a forged abolitionist tract Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Case studies - Flag envelopes, prison photographs and a forged abolitionist tract At a glance From 1861 to 1865 both sections sold the war on cheap paper. Northern Democrats invented a pamphlet in their opponents' voice to coin "miscegenation." When1861–1865ActorUnion side: Northern envelope and print publishers, Harper's Weekly and Thomas Nast, Republican…Full record at propagandaarchive.org ## What it said Begin with what the Confederacy's founders said the war was about, in their own words. On 21 March 1861 Vice-President Alexander Stephens told a Savannah audience that the new government rested on the principle that the Black man is not the white man's equal and that slavery is his natural condition. Mississippi's secession declaration that January was shorter: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union (January 1861), as recorded on the FRAME case study. Everything else in this case was persuasion layered on top of that. After Fort Sumter, pictorial "patriotic envelopes" became a craze in both sections. Northern covers carried slogans such as Our Union forever and Union forever. Separation never. A Confederate cover addressed to Youngville, Alabama, called its flag Emblem of liberty, symbol of truth. Each side claimed George Washington: Union envelopes set him above the word "Union," and the Confederate seal adopted on 30 April 1863 put him on horseback over the motto Deo Vindice. In 1864 the paper turned to the presidential race. The Democratic convention in Chicago, 29 to 31 August, called for a cessation of hostilities after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war. Atlanta fell on 2 and 3 September, and Harper's Weekly of 3 September ran Thomas Nast's Compromise with the South, "Dedicated to the Chicago Convention": a crippled Union soldier shaking a swaggering Confederate's hand over a grave for heroes of "a useless war." Martin W. Siebert's Union and Liberty! And Union and Slavery! put Lincoln with a workman before a schoolhouse and McClellan with Jefferson Davis beside a slave auction. Currier & Ives answered with The True Issue, McClellan holding the map together while Lincoln and Davis tear it apart. G. W. Bromley & Co. sold a numbered run of anti-Lincoln "Political caricature" prints, including Miscegenation or the millennium of abolitionism and The abolition catastrophe, the second showing a Democratic train bound for the White House past a Republican wreck on rocks marked "Emancipation" and "Confiscation." Nast's broadside The Chicago platform paired each Democratic resolution with a scene the Library of Congress reads as supporting its opposite. ## Who made it and why Most of it was private and commercial, signed by the firms that printed it. The North had the presses, paper, and engravers, which is why Steven R. Boyd's study counts thousands of Union envelope designs against a much smaller Confederate output, and why the Southern Illustrated News in Richmond struggled to fill its pages. Currier & Ives sold to both parties. Bromley worked for the Democrats and Siebert for the Republicans. Two makers hid who they were. Adalbert J. Volck, a German-born Baltimore dentist who sided with the Confederacy while living in Union-held Maryland, issued his etchings as "V. Blada" under an imprint the Library of Congress catalogues as "London [i.e. Baltimore], 1864." His Emancipation Proclamation puts a devil on Lincoln's desk holding the ink, a haloed John Brown on the wall as "St. Ossawotamie," and a Haitian massacre labelled "St. Domingo" beside him. Neely, Holzer, and Boritt note its small, private circulation. The bigger concealment came from New York. Late in 1863 an anonymous pamphlet appeared, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, title page dated 1864. It read as a sincere Republican-abolitionist call for intermarriage. Its authors were David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman of the Democratic New York World. They mailed it to prominent abolitionists hoping for endorsements to quote, and Democratic speakers and papers then cited it as the Republican plan. The authorship was not admitted during the campaign. By Jowett and O'Donnell's scheme, a message with a falsified source is black propaganda, and that is what this was. Government was in the business too. Congress's Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War published Returned Prisoners in 1864, and the U.S. Sanitary Commission issued its Narrative of Privations and Sufferings the same year, both with photographs of starved Union men released from Belle Isle and other Richmond prisons, taken at the U.S. General Hospital in Annapolis. A Confederate congressional committee replied in March 1865. ## What it got right or wrong The Annapolis photographs are true pictures of real men. Private Isaiah G. Bowker of the 9th Maine is one of them. What made them messaging was the caption they were issued under: proof of deliberate rebel cruelty, published in the months when exchanges had stopped. The exchange cartel broke down in 1863, partly because the Confederacy refused to treat captured Black soldiers as prisoners of war, and in 1864 Grant kept exchanges suspended. The Northern books left that, and the Union's own camps, mostly out. The Confederate reply did the mirror image, dwelling on Elmira and Camp Douglas and blaming Southern prison deaths on shortages rather than policy. The counts the archive cites (Speer) put Union deaths in Confederate prisons on the order of 30,000 and Confederate deaths in Union prisons around 26,000. Andersonville held some 45,000 men over its life and nearly 13,000 died there. Elmira, a camp of about 12,000, lost close to a quarter. The totals are comparable. The worst single camp was Confederate. Each side photographed only the other's dead, and each was accurate about what it chose to show. The 1864 campaign prints each reduced the other candidate to his worst sentence. Siebert's print leaves out McClellan's acceptance letter of 8 September, which rejected an armistice without Union. The True Issue boils Lincoln down to abolition, though his July 1864 "To Whom It May Concern" letter named restoring the Union and abandoning slavery together as his terms. The Bromley caricatures staged racial equality as a catastrophe for white voters. They were racist, and their argument was a fear, not a claim. Name-calling ran in every direction: "Copperhead" for anti-war Democrats, some of whom wore copper Liberty-head pennies to take the word back; "Black Republican" for their opponents; "Yankee" and "Hessian" from Richmond; "rebel" and "traitor" from New York. ## The Union fought for the right ends The Union fought to keep a constitutional government whole, and from 1863 it fought to end slavery as well. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863, and the 1864 Republican platform called for an amendment abolishing slavery. Those are the right ends, and the record shows the Confederacy fighting for the opposite one. The liberty record inside the North is mixed, and it should be reported as it was. In May 1863 Clement Vallandigham, an Ohio Peace Democrat, was arrested, and Democrats made the arrest a rallying cry against "military despotism." In June 1863 General Ambrose Burnside suspended the Chicago Times for disloyal publication. Lincoln revoked that order within days. A general shutting a newspaper is the thing the First Amendment forbids. A president reversing him quickly is the system correcting itself, late but real. And the North voted. In the middle of a war for national survival, with an opposition party calling the war a failure and opposition printers selling racist caricatures of the president, the election was held on schedule on 8 November 1864. Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to McClellan's 21. Mark Neely's work, which the archive cites, stresses that two-party competition and a loud opposition press continued in the North throughout. Most historians credit the news from Atlanta, not campaign prints, for the result. That an election happened at all, under those conditions, is the most important fact on this page. ## Its legacy The Miscegenation pamphlet left a word in the language and a technique in the toolkit: write in your opponent's voice, seed it to his allies, then quote it back as his program. The test it leaves is to ask who wrote an unsigned tract before asking what it says. The prison photographs leave a second test: whether the suffering is real, and whether the picture shows who is responsible and what was left out, are two separate questions. After the war Henry Wirz, Andersonville's commandant, was hanged after a military trial on 10 November 1865. From 1876 the Southern Historical Society Papers kept the Confederate prison case in print. The pamphlet fights of the antebellum slavery debate and the Revolution used the same forms at a smaller scale. The penny press of 1898 would use them at a larger one. ## Sources - FRAME case study "Union and Confederate print, 1861-1865," for the dates, objects, quotations, prison figures, and readings above. It cites Library of Congress Prints and Photographs records and Bernard F. Reilly, American Political Prints, 1766-1876 (1991); the Miscegenation pamphlet (H. Dexter, Hamilton & Co., 1864); V. Blada's War Sketches (1864); Harper's Weekly, 3 September 1864, p. 572; Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Returned Prisoners (1864); U.S. Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings (1864); the Confederate Congress's 1865 prisoner report; the 1864 Democratic platform and McClellan's acceptance letter; Stephens's Savannah speech and the Mississippi declaration (1861); Sidney Kaplan (1949); Elise Lemire (2002); Steven R. Boyd (2010); Neely, Holzer and Boritt (1987); Mark E. Neely Jr., The Union Divided (2002); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads (2006); Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell (1997); Jowett and O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion. - FRAME archive records "Political caricature. No. 3, The abolition catastrophe" (G. W. Bromley & Co., 1864), "The Chicago platform" (Thomas Nast, 1864), and "Union and liberty! And union and slavery!" (Martin W. Siebert, 1864). Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/us-civil-war-print/