![Mathew Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, Scene showing deserted camp and wounded soldier (Wounded Zouave), ca. 1860-ca. 1865 [Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-era Personalities and Scenes, 1921-1940]; Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860-1985, Record Group 111; National Archives & Records Administration, College Park, MD.](https://i0.wp.com/richardjpowell.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Brady_Wounded_Zouave_1861-65.png?resize=1000%2C761&ssl=1)
Reflecting on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment (1897), the trail-blazing African American art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray wrote in 1915: “It seems to me fitting and proper that in a paper concerning Emancipation and the Freed that we should pay liberal tribute to the Negro soldiers and sailors, whose work, whose sacrifices, and whose valor, so fully justified, and so strongly contributed to make secure, the Freedom which had been proclaimed by President Lincoln.”
This essay also explores devotion and allegiance on the parts of African Americans during the Civil War, but neither in the retrospective afterglow of Saint-Gaudens’ masterpiece, nor in the “glory” days of battle and sacrifice that surrounded the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth’s ill-fated assault on Fort Wagner. Rather, I’ve chosen to focus on a well known, but little discussed black-and-white photograph of two men – one black and one white, in a nearly deserted Civil War camp – taken in 1863 and usually attributed to the Mathew Brady National Photographic Art Gallery. I preface my discussion with the idea that appended to Murray’s praise for black soldiers and other celebrations of African American valor during and after the Civil War were more subliminal meditations on black loyalty in the pre- and post-Civil Rights eras – loyalties specifically directed towards embattled white Americans – and on a supreme faith in the United States of America from blacks who, because of historical injustices and systemic discrimination, had little or no reason to believe in American democracy…
“Wounded Zouave and the Cyrenian Paradigm,” in The Civil War in Art and Memory, ed., Kirk Savage (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2016), 65-80.
