Abraham Lincoln by John Tinney McCutcheon

One hundred fifty years ago today, an assassin shot Abraham Lincoln as he was watching a play in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Carried across the street, Abe died early the next morning. His shooter likewise fell with a bullet to the head eleven days later.

The Civil War had effectively come to a close only a few days before the president was shot, when General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General U.S. Grant's Union Army at Appomattox. The war had begun a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. The official end to the insurrection came a little less than a month after his death. This season, we are busy observing the sesquicentennial of the end of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans perished so that millions more might be free.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. He was the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, their daughter Sarah Lincoln, born in 1807, being the first. The Lincolns were what might be described, perhaps in a condescending manner, as poor. The conditions of their lives became the subject of John T. McCutcheon's cartoon of February 12, 1929, shown above.

Abe Lincoln--nicknamed "Honest Abe" and "The Railsplitter" and "The Great Emancipator"--was born in Kentucky but spent his formative years in Indiana. His mother died there and lies buried in Indiana soil. John Tinney McCutcheon, the cartoonist, was also a Hoosier. He came into the world on a farm near South Raub on May 6, 1870, about halfway through Reconstruction and only three months after the Fifteenth Amendment, the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments, was ratified. His father, John Barr McCutcheon, had fought in the Civil War. The younger McCutcheon, known as the dean of American cartoonists for his longevity, died on June 10, 1949.

John T. McCutcheon drew his cartoon in observance of Abe Lincoln's birth. His commentary is thick with irony. Lincoln rose up from his humble origins to be one of our greatest presidents and one of the greatest men in American history. In this anniversary week of the surrender at Appomattox and the death of the president, I would rather celebrate his life than mourn his death, a life that began in a backwoods Kentucky cabin and against any odds made by poverty or disadvantage, which proved to be of no great significance at all.

Abraham Lincoln's life began with unlimited potential, as all lives do. The irony in the cartoon is that the Lincolns' new baby--despite his birth into humility and poverty--would go on to preside over a nation at war against a great moral evil, the defining moral issue of the nineteenth century in America. There is an added irony in that McCutcheon's cartoon--without his intent or awareness--also touches on the great moral issue of our day, an issue with more than a few parallels to slavery.


In February 1862, at about the time of Abe's fifty-third birthday, The Atlantic Monthly printed Julia Ward Howe's lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The first stanza and the first refrain end with the same words: "His truth is marching on." Abraham Lincoln carried the banner of truth. He has fallen, but we can take up that banner and carry it forward, and those after us can do the same. With or without us, truth will, nonetheless, march on.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James E. Taylor (1839-1901)

James Earl Taylor was born on December 12, 1839, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His widowed mother moved her family to Indiana when he was young. Taylor graduated from the University of Notre Dame at age sixteen. At eighteen, he painted a panorama of the Revolutionary War, which was exhibited throughout the western states, what we now call the Midwest. Taylor returned to the city of his birth, but in 1860, he relocated to New York City to study art. When the Civil War came, he enlisted in the 10th New York Volunteers of National Zouaves, one of the units known for its colorful and exotic uniforms. Taylor served two years and rose to the rank of sergeant. Rather than reenlist, he was persuaded to apply for a position as a special artist, what we would call a combat artist. Thus James E. Taylor went to work for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Assigned to Philip Sheridan's army, Taylor took part in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, then campaigns in eastern Virginia and the Carolinas, finally to arrive on horseback in the Confederate capital of Richmond at the close of the war. Afterwards, Taylor drew pictures of the American South and West, where he earned the title "The Indian Artist." He continued with Leslie's until 1883, thereafter working as a freelance artist. Taylor also created illustrations for Frank Leslie's Boys' and Girls' Weekly for children. James E. Taylor died on June 22, 1901, in New York City.

James E. Taylor was the subject of an article in American Heritage in 1980 (“War Correspondent: 1864" by Oliver Jensen, American Heritage, Vol. 31, No. 5 [August–September 1980]: 48–64.) His book, With Sheridan Up the Shenandoah Valley in 1864: Leaves from a Special Artist's Sketch Book and Diary, was not published until 1989, and then only in a rare edition. Taylor also illustrated Colonel Richard Irving Dodge's memoir Our Wild Indians: Thirty-three Years' Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West (1882).

A drawing by James E. Taylor of the Florence Prison Stockade, a Confederate prison camp located near Florence, South Carolina. Note the date--1897--indicating that the artist recreated this scene more than thirty years after the fact.

"Heroic Death of Walter Kennedy," drawn by Taylor (1874), an image from his own scrapbooks, held by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. 

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

William Momberger (1829-1895)

William Momberger was born on June 7, 1829, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He studied painting and lithography in his homeland before emigrating to the United States in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe. Settling in New York City, he set up a lithography firm, Coughey and Momberger, as early as 1852. His partner was John Coughey (or Caughey), a wood engraver.

Throughout the 1850s and '60s, Momberger created lithographs and engravings for books, newspapers, banknotes, and other documents. He illustrated Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (1856) and the Gallery of American Landscape Artists. He may have been in Indiana as early as 1855 when his illustrations appeared in the book New Purchase, or Early Years in the Far West by Robert Carlton (New Albany, Indiana: Nunemacher, 1855). Momberger also created images from the Civil War and traveled in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Extant lithographs place him in Fort Wayne, Evansville, and Vincennes, Indiana.

Momberger lived in Morrisania, New York, where he was counted in the 1860 census as an artist and in the 1870 census as a portrait painter. He was still active as late as 1888 and died on April 9, 1895. Momberger was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for providing that information.) The obituary of a "retired illustrator" named William H. Momberger of Newark, New Jersey, appeared in the New York Times on December 12, 1933. That William Momberger may very well have been the son of the artist in question here, as he was born in New York in about 1851. 

A descendant of William Momberger has collected images and compiled a bibliography on the artist's works. You can see them at this website:

http://www.myspace.com/williammomberger/blog

You can find more information on William Momberger in:

• Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography, Vol. 4, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske
• Pioneer Painters of Indiana by Wilbur D. Peat (1954)
• The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, edited by George C. Groce and David H. Wallace (1957)

Beldad y la Bestia, illustrated by William Momberger (New York: D. Appleton Co, 1864), from the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

Lithographs of Evansville (top) and near Fort Wayne (bottom), made by William Momberger and dating from the 1860s.

The landing of troops on Roanoke Island, 1862, a Civil War lithograph by Momberger.  

A poor reproduction of Momberger's depiction of the historic duel between the Merrimack and the Monitor of March 8 and 9, 1862 (from the New York Times). That battle took place 150 years ago this year. Although the two ships fought to a standstill, both were lost before the year was out, the Merrimack--the C.S.S. Virginia--on May 11, and the Monitor on December 31.

Thanks to Anonymous for providing the date of death and the place of burial for William Momberger.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Cassilly Adams (1843-1921)

This month marks the 136th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, or as the victors called it, the Battle of the Greasy Grass. On June 25, 1876, a sizable force of American Indians camped near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana met and crushed the United States Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer, killing him and 267 of his officers, men, and scouts. The popular image of the battle at Little Bighorn comes from a lithograph made by the German-American artist F. Otto Becker (1854-1945) and mass produced in 1896 by the Anheuser-Busch Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Becker's image, entitled "Custer's Last Fight," is justifiably famous. Lost and almost forgotten today is the work that preceded and inspired it. Also called "Custer's Last Fight," it was painted by Cassilly Adams, an Ohio artist laid to rest in an Indiana cemetery.

Cassilly Adams was born on July 18, 1843, in Zanesville, Ohio. His father was a Massachusetts-born lawyer, descended from President John Adams. As a young man, Cassilly Adams served in the United States Navy during the Civil War, first as a Master's Mate, then as an Acting Ensign in the Mississippi Squadron, aboard the U.S.S. Osage. He studied at the Boston Academy of Art and the Cincinnati Art School and made his living as a landscape artist, designer, and engraver. By 1880, Adams was living in St. Louis. In 1884-1885, he painted a monumental canvas--16 1/2 feet by 9 1/2 feet--depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn. (There were also two end panels depicting Custer as a small boy and in death.) The idea was for the painting to be a traveling exhibition and subject of a lecture for paying customers. That venture fell through, and the painting went to a St. Louis saloonkeeper, and, upon his death, to the Anheuser-Busch Company. Otto Becker was brought in to turn Adams' painting into a popular lithograph. In his book One for a Man, Two for a Horse, author Gerald Carson called Adams' work "the most popular exemplar of American saloon art." It was also used to sell patent medicine. Unfortunately, Cassilly Adams' original painting, "Custer's Last Fight," is no longer with us. Anheuser-Busch presented it to the Seventh Cavalry, which proceeded to lose it despite its immense size. The painting was rediscovered, lost again, found again, restored during the Great Depression, and finally put on display at the officer's club at Fort Bliss, Texas. On June 13, 1946, almost seventy years to the day after the Battle of Little Bighorn, the painting was destroyed by fire.

Little is known otherwise of Cassilly Adams. He worked in Cincinnati and Toledo as a designer and engraver and painted numerous scenes of Indian life. The 1920 census found him in Marion County, Indiana. At age seventy-seven, he was occupied as a farmer. He died the following year, on May 8, 1921, in Traders Point and--like Custer and his men--sought the high ground, for Cassilly Adams now lies buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, located at the highest point in Indianapolis.

An adaptation of Cassilly Adams' painting "Custer's Last Fight," here used to advertise M.A. Simmons Liver Medicine. The original painting is now lost. Images of it can be hard to find. 

Instead we have Otto Becker's lithograph, also adapted from Adams' original painting. This image, from 1896, is often attributed to Adams. Robert Taft discussed images of the battle in the pages of the Kansas Historical Quarterly in November 1946 (Vol. 14, No. 4) and in his book, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West: 1850-1900 (1953). You can read Taft's article and see other images on the website of the Kansas State Historical Society, here.

Three images of Indian life by Cassilly Adams.

Postscript (July 15, 2012): "Custer's Last Fight" by Cassilly Adams, an image from Dr. Robert Taft's Artists and Illustrators of the Old West: 1850-1900 (1953). This version is from a restoration made in 1938. I wonder if there is an extant image of the original painting or of its two flanking panels.

Postscript (Feb. 5, 2015): Author Myron J. Smith, Jr., has cited this article in his new book, Civil War Biographies from the Western Waters: 956 Confederate and Union Naval and Military Personnel, Contractors, Politicians, Officials, Steamboat Pilots, and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2015). Mr. Smith has given an interesting account of Cassilly Adams' military career during the Civil War. You can see a preview of Mr. Smith's book on Google Books.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Civil War

At 4:30 in the morning, on April 12, 1861--one hundred and fifty years ago today--Confederate artillery commenced its bombardment of Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. Thirty-three hours later, the Union garrison at the fort surrendered. The next day, April 15, 1861--four years to the day before he died from an assassin's bullet--President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops to put down the insurrection. Thus was ushered in our great Civil War, perhaps the most profound event in American history.

In 1861, Indiana was in its forty-fifth year as a state. Its population was 1,350,428, fifth among the states. Initially, Indiana planned on filling the ranks of six regiments, about 4,600 men in all. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican war, was to serve as adjutant general and was charged with raising the needed number. So many men answered the call that some had to be turned away. By the end of the war, though, 197,141 Hoosiers had served in the Union cause, second among the states. Another 100,000 filled the ranks of the state militia. Over 25,000 of these men lost their lives. Not counted among that number is the nation's commander-in-chief, who--though he was born in Kentucky and elected from Illinois--spent his formative years in what is now Spencer County, Indiana.

The men who went to war came from all walks of life, art included. Some drew and painted scenes in their own diaries, letters, and sketchbooks. Others created works for publication. Lew Wallace (1827-1905) of Brookville and Crawfordsville was--in addition to being a lawyer, military officer, governor of New Mexico, minister to the Ottoman Empire, and author of the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century--an artist and illustrator. James Farrington Gookins (1840-1904) of Terre Haute and Indianapolis, who served with Wallace for a time, drew sketches for woodcuts published in Harper's. And Adolph G. Metzner (1834-1918) of Indianapolis kept a sketchbook of the things he witnessed during his war years. (I have written about him in a previous entry, and his work is subject of a newly published book.) Countless artists who came after them have depicted scenes of the Civil War. In any case, we commemorate the men and women who served and died during those four years that rent a nation and the century and a half since that have mended it.

The weekly newspaper was a fairly new thing in America when the Civil War began. Rapid communication by telegraph and rapid transport by train allowed publishers to stay on top of current events and to get the news out to a nation of readers in pretty short order. Photography could not yet be reproduced in the mass media. Instead, newspapers and magazines relied on line art, cut on blocks of wood and assembled into printing plates. Most woodcuts were the work of two artists, the sketch artist who submitted his work from the field and the engraver who transferred the sketch to wooden blocks, worked in a painstaking way for the production of the final image. 

Above is a woodcut from the June 22, 1861, issue of Harper's Weekly, captioned: "The Eleventh Indiana Volunteers Swearing to Remember Buena Vista, at Indianapolis, May, 1861--Sketched by Mr. James F. Gookins." Gookins was a Hoosier, a mostly self-taught artist, and a student of law at Wabash College when war broke out. He served for a time with Lew Wallace and the Eleventh Indiana Volunteer Regiment, a unit of Zouaves which saw service very early in the war. The story accompanying Gookins' drawing in Harper's:

Remember Buena Vista

On page 388 we publish a picture of a most striking scene, which occurred at Indianapolis, in the inclosure [sic] surrounding the State Capitol, a few days since. The artist from whose sketch our picture was made, Mr. James F. Gookins, of Company I, 11th Regiment Indiana Volunteers (Zouaves), writes us as follows concerning it:

The Regiment was presented by the ladies of Indiana with a splendid stand of colors, after receiving which the whole Regiment, kneeling, with uplifted right hands, took an oath before God that, with His help, they would not only avenge themselves of the insults cast at the flag of the nation, but furthermore of the contumely and wrong received by the Indiana troops at the hands of Jeff Davis during the war with Mexico. To keep this oath more continually before them they have adopted the motto "Remember Buena Vista!" as their warcry.

Another image from Harper's. The caption reads: "At Romney, Va., June 11th, 1861,--The Eleventh Indiana Zouaves, Colonel Lewis Wallace, crossing, on the double quick, the bridge over the Potomac." The artist is unknown.

The story of the Civil War is of course incomplete without Abe Lincoln. His election to the presidency was--in the minds of the secessionists--the event that precipitated the South's withdrawal from the Union. Even then, a legend had begun to build about him and his life. John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) drew from that legend, just as so many cartoonists  have, before and since. From John McCutcheon's Book.

As a child, Franklin Booth (1874-1948) learned to draw by imitating woodcut illustrations from books and other publications. By the time Booth began working professionally as an artist, Abraham Lincoln had reached the status of an icon in American art, history, and popular imagination. This drawing, though it has the appearance of a woodcut, was actually done with a pen. It's a decoration for an unknown use. Like Lincoln, Booth grew up on an Indiana farm, in the artist's case, in Hamilton County, northeast of Indianapolis. He was perhaps the most accomplished Indiana illustrator of his time. His drawing of Lincoln here only hints at his really astonishing technique and enormous body of work.   

There are of course other illustrations by Indiana artists on the topic of the Civil War. Unfortunately, many of them are protected from usage on the Internet. If anyone has pictures to offer, please send them to me at:

info@hoosiercartoonists.com

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley

Adolph G. Metzner (1834-1918)

The most recent issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (Winter 2011), the magazine of the Indiana Historical Society, features an article about Adolph G. Metzner, a German-born artist who served on the side of the Union during the Civil War. The cover and most of the contents of this issue commemorate the sesquicentennial of Indiana's involvement in the Civil War.

Born in 1834, Metzner enlisted in Indianapolis in 1861 and served in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. Along the way, he drew and painted pictures of what he witnessed. Traces displays several pieces of artwork in full color, from a burlesque camp scene to one of the most gruesome images I have ever seen published in an American magazine. The images are drawn from the same sources used in the publication of a book called Blood Shed in This War: Civil War Illustrations by Captain Adolph Metzner, 32nd Indiana by the author of the article in Traces, Michael A. Peake.

Metzner returned to Indianapolis after the war and worked as a pharmacist. He later gave up pharmacy for research and industry in the field of ceramics. He died in New Jersey in 1918 but is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

The name of the article, by the way, is "Adolph G. Metzner: Entrepreneur, Soldier, and Artist." And rather than steal any thunder from the book, the magazine, the article, or the author, I will simply refer you to them, each one as you like.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Wilbur George Kurtz (1882-1967)

On January 19, 1861, Georgia became the fifth state to secede from the Union, joining South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and eventually six others to form the Confederate States of America. Although South Carolina seceded in 1860 and hostilities would not begin until April 1861, this month--January 2011--marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Indiana Illustrators offers an artist for the occasion.

Although he was born, reared, and educated in the heart of the Midwest, Wilbur George Kurtz, Sr., was an artist almost entirely identified with the South, especially his adopted home state of Georgia. He was born on February 28, 1882, in Oakland, Illinois, and grew up in Greencastle, Indiana. He attended DePauw University in Greencastle and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under John H. Vanderpoel and Charles F. Brown. Kurtz began his art career in Chicago as a draftsman, engraver, and illustrator specializing in architectural renderings. He also lived in Indianapolis for a time.

Kurtz first saw Atlanta in 1903 and was captivated by the city. In 1911, he married a native southerner, Annie Laurie Fuller, and moved to Atlanta the following year. His home was next to a Civil War battlefield, and he became steeped in the history of Atlanta and the conflict that rent a nation. He painted a number of murals, including murals for the Georgia exhibits at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. During the Great Depression, Kurtz assisted in the creation of a depiction of the Battle of Atlanta at the Grant Park Cyclorama.

In addition to writing books (Atlanta and the Old South and Historic Atlanta: A Brief History of Atlanta and Its Landmarks) and magazine articles on the history of Atlanta and the Civil War, Kurtz was technical advisor and historian on the films Gone with the Wind (1939), Song of the South (1946), and The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). He was a friend of Margaret Mitchell and a specialist on the Andrews Raid, the inspiration for The General (1926), starring Buster Keaton, and the Walt Disney film, The Great Locomotive Chase. His first wife was in fact the daughter of William Fuller, the conductor on board "The General" when it was taken.

Kurtz painted a number of pictures of the Old South, including preproduction paintings for Gone with the Wind, and illustrated Maum Nancy by Susan Merrick Heywood (1937). Married twice and father of five children, Wilbur George Kurtz, Sr., died in Atlanta on February 18, 1967, ten days short of his eighty-fifth birthday.

A photograph of Wilbur Kurtz and a preproduction painting for Gone with the Wind (1939). Kurtz was friends with Margaret Mitchell, author of the book from which the movie was adapted. He served as technical advisor and historian on that and other movies about his adopted South.

Kurtz specialized in architectural and historical subjects. He combined the two in this painting of Collier's Store in old Atlanta.

Once again, Kurtz's interests in history and architecture are on display in this print depicting the history of Atlanta.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley