Category Archives: History

June 17, 2012

Watch your Step

By daseger

We have a little two-story apartment attached to our house, with its own entrance, foundation, and address; it was built on to the main house about a century ago by the doctor that was living here at the time, a time when it was customary for physicians to have home offices rather than the consolidated office-park variety. For quite awhile we’ve had the perfect tenant, who recently informed us that she is leaving:  causing fear and trepidation and then excitement about possible redecoration schemes.  Actually, we quickly found a new tenant, so there won’t be much time to do anything over there, but a few things do need attention in the interim:  first and foremost, the stairs.

This apartment is absolutely adorable if I do say so myself, but it is small.  Everything is smaller-scaled than normal; it’s not quite a dollhouse, but more of a ship’s cabin.  It works (I think; I’ve never lived there, though there have been times that I wanted to rent out the main house and stay in the apartment) because there are so many built-in shelves and cupboards:  in the basement, on the main floor with its tiny little kitchen and floor-to-ceiling bookcases, along and over the stairway going up to the second floor, and in the two tiny bedrooms and bathroom.  Everywhere there are little cupboards and shelves:  for storing medicine, I wonder?  It does remind me of a ship’s cabin, and when I first outfitted it for a tenant I put a rope bannister along the curving stairs, just for that effect.  Now these same stairs need some kind of runner, as the present one is very well-worn.  Given my nautical ideas, I quickly found some stairs in a beach house decorated by Jonathan Adler that might serve as inspiration, but then I was off on a mission.

Numbers:  Lots of people have numbered their stair risers, which is a cute and easy idea, but it might have the effect of making my little stairway seem even more diminutive:  after all, there are only so many stairs.

Courtesy The Design Files and Lover Mother.

Lots of bookcase/staircases out there:  these were my two favorites, in a private home and a public library.

Courtesy Book Patrol.

I came across lots of decoration, on both treads and risers, including these two Victorian staircases embellished with a simple diamond pattern and one of Orla Kiely’s distinctive prints.

Courtesy Old House Web; photograph by Jake Curtis for Living Etc.

Ultimately I am the most inspired by an old photograph of the staircase in an old (very old) Salem house, the Narbonne house, built in the mid 1670s on Essex Street, where it still stands.  This staircase is pretty similar to my apartment’s (give or take a couple of centuries) and the “yankee runner” would look just right.

The Narbonne House exterior and staircase, HABS, Library of Congress.

APPENDIX:  I was also thinking about stairs this past week while I was preparing some lectures on Elizabethan religion for my summer graduate class.  After the practice of Catholicism was made illegal, “priests’ holes” (or -hides) were carved out in Catholic homes, to hide the priest when the royal searchers came calling.  Harvington Hall manor house has four such holes created by the Jesuit/master builder Nicholas Owen, and one of them is below the stairs in the main hall:  here it is, complete with hiding priest.

Courtesy Curious Britain.


9 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Design, History, Home

June 13, 2012

Tending the Garden (not)

By daseger

Usually I like it when my personal and professional lives intersect, but not now. I am working on two courses this summer and several writing projects, all of which involve Renaissance gardening texts in one way or another. So I’m reading about what I should be doing in the garden, and not doing it, for lack of time and energy. Like many scholars before and around me, I’m pretty dedicated to restoring gardening to the Renaissance art (and science) it once was, and I’ve got lots of evidence to support my view. Depending on their status and wealth, sixteenth-century people saw gardening as a way to reclaim paradise lost, glory in God’s creation, and, of course, feed themselves; it was serious business all around.  In England, there was an intensifying and rather democratic demand for gardening advice, resulting in about 20 titles published in the sixteenth century alone, with more to come in the next century.

Looking over these texts today, the practical passages seem to be speaking to me, particularly those offering weeding advice, since I am not out back weeding.  Obviously I would prefer to read about it!  Here is Thomas Tusser giving me instructions for June, in verse, in his A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry (1557; later expanded to Five Hundreth Pointes of  Good Husbandrie): in June get thy wedehoke, they knife and thy glove:  and wede out such wede, as the corne doth not love.  Slack no time thy weding, for darth nor for cheape:  thy corne shall reward it, or ever thou reape.  Well, I am slacking.  Tusser’s contemporary Thomas Hill, author of The Gardener’s Labyrinth (1577), does not agree with the former’s technique:  In this plucking up, and purging of the Garden beds of weeds and stones, the same about the plants aught rather to be exercised with the hand, than with an Iron instrument, for fear of feebling the young plants yet small and tender of growth. He want me to dig in and get my hands dirty, but as my rather overgrown garden is full of well-established plants, I think I can go for the iron–I really like this “skrapple” in William Lawson’s New Orchard and Garden (1618).

I’m skipping over to two slightly less practical garden writers of the seventeenth century:  John Parkinson, King James I’s apothecary and a gardener himself, and the more famous Francis Bacon, who included a charming little essay on gardens among his Essays (1625).  Parkinson’s books are appealing because they demonstrate his own interests and expertise, cultivated on his estate near present-day Covent Garden.  London was an emerging metropolis in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it still had patches of undeveloped land and urban gardens, as illustrated by Ralph Agas’s contemporary map of the city.

North of the Strand was Mr. Parkinson’s garden at Long Acre, where he cultivated the English flowers that are the subject of his two major works, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (Park-in-Sun’s Terrestrial Paradise, 1629), and Theatrum Botanicum (The Botanical Theatre or Theatre of Plants, 1640). Parkinson’s books gave plant-specific advice, from an upper-middle-class urban perspective, thus they are perfect for a suburban gardener such as myself. In their own time, Parkinson’s books were no doubt popular because of the inclusion of woodcut illustrations, like the mallows below.

Francis Bacon’s little essay on gardens is part of his major collection, Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625). This was a definite sideline for him, and I can’t imagine it receiving much attention at the time of its publication given the horticultural competition, but centuries after there are some lavishly-presented editions of the essay, which offers more inspiration than advice.

Bacon’s Essay on Gardens, 1625, 1902 & 1905 ( Illuminated Manuscript on Vellum by Alberto Sangorski, courtesy Book Aesthete).

Enough reading and writing: time to get out there, among the weeds and spent flowers:  it’s mid-June, and duty calls. Everything is satisfactory in the shade border in the foreground (thanks to the very tidy Lady’s Mantle), but the central garden is not getting its close-up until I clean it up, one way or another.  Not this morning, however, as it is raining, and all of my experts tell me that the best time to pull weeds is two days after the rain.


5 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History

June 11, 2012

Unnatural History

By daseger

I have no idea what I was searching for, but somehow I came upon some images from Henry Louis Stephens’ Comic Natural History of the Human Race this past weekend and was immediately captivated: anything anthropomorphic always has that effect on me. This book represents both actual people (mostly from the Philadelphia area where Stephens lived and worked) and stereotypes in the guises of those birds, insects, animals and fish that match up with their natures. I imagine that Stephens got away with his particularly unflattering caricatures by using general types (a sanctimonious religious moralist, for example, is depicted as a blood-sucking vampire; there are several rats) rather than specific people. Published in 1851 by Samuel Robinson of Philadelphia, the book is also an early example of color lithography, with plates by Louis Rosenthal and Peter Kraemer.

Here are some of the images, beginning with the only name in the book that I recognized:  P.T. Barnum, portrayed by Stephens as a “Hum-Bug”. The “Stool Pigeon”, the “Woodpecker” (William P. Gihon, an engraver), the “Bird of Paradise”, and the “Taylor Bird” (Mary Cecilia Taylor, an opera singer) follow. On the title page, Stephens presents himself as the hen that hatched this egg, thus mitigating any hurt feelings that might have ensued.

Henry Louis Stephens, The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (Philadelphia: Samuel Robinson, 1851), accessed via Internet Archive.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 10, 2012

Our Ship Comes In

By daseger

Yesterday the Friendship of Salem, a reproduction 1797 three-masted East Indiaman, returned after an absence of many months. It was a beautiful, breezy day, so I went down to Derby Wharf to wait for it, and promptly fell asleep (right in the midst a crowd of people, pretty embarrassing).  When I woke up, the ship was almost upon the wharf (a startling sight to wake up to, actually), so I missed its approach. It rounded the wharf and glided to its berth, negotiating a graceful turnaround along the way so it could back in–its accompanying little pilot boats doing much of the work.  And then The Friendship was home.

For a geographical overview and some historical context, here are two bird’s-eye views of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site by National Park Service illustrator Fred Freeman:  where once there were many busy wharves, now there is only the long Derby and the much shorter Hatch’s and Central wharves. Imagine not one Friendship, but many.

More harbor views, both romantic and realistic:  the scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Custom House office, from an interesting article entitled “The Salem of Hawthorne” by Julian Hawthorne in The Century Magazine (1884) , an illustration from an article on post-fire Salem in The New England Magazine (1914), and an undated advertisement for coal, which I found among other papers in the third-floor eaves of my house last week. Mr. Phillips lived in the house in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when Salem’s wharves were housing less glorious goods than those brought in by The Friendship many years before.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem

June 8, 2012

My Renaissance Crush

By daseger

I check in with the clever blog My Daguerrotype Boyfriend (“where early photography meets extreme hotness”) on a regular basis, but I must admit that nineteenth-century men just don’t do it for me; I prefer to go back several centuries, to the Renaissance. This summer I’m teaching a course on the connections between art, science, and technology in Renaissance Europe, which has given me the opportunity to become reacquainted with my long-time Renaissance crush:  Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose formal name was Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi (1449-1494). Ghirlandaio, meaning “garland-maker”, was a nickname, and a reference to the garland-like jewelry made by his goldsmith father, with whom he trained. Since he is my crush, I’m simply going to call him Domenico from now on.

I have a crush on Domenico for a number of reasons.  I think he’s a great painter, and he must have been an effective teacher as well, as he ran one of the most important workshops in Florence and counted Michelangelo among his students.  Above all, though, I admire him because he’s such Renaissance man:  putting himself in the picture (literally, and several times) and striving to represent humanity above everything else, even beauty.  And on top of all this, he was very handsome, at least the way he depicted himself!

Such a Renaissance statement:  putting yourself in the picture, staring posterity in the eye:  here is Domenico in his 1488 painting Adoration of the Magi, cropped and in its entirety.

Collection of the Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence.

And here his a few years earlier, in Adoration of the Shepherds (1483-85; the Sassetti Chapel in the basilica of Santa Trinita, Florence), right in the thick of things, looking more thoughtful, less clean-shaven, and absolutely overwhelmed by the sight of the baby Jesus.

We also see Domenico on one of the St. Francis frescoes that surround the Shepherds altarpiece above in the Sassetti Chapel:  The Resurrection of the Boy.  He is on the extreme right, in the company of men who would no doubt be instantly recognizable to contemporaries.

In The Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, a fresco in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Domenico has apparently placed himself in the company of his own relatives. This would be his last self-portrait, as he died four years later from a “pestilential fever”.  That year, 1494, was a terrible one for Florence, as the invading French King Charles VIII’s army entered the city, effectively ending its role as the center of Renaissance patronage.

But Domenico lives on, obviously.  Despite my crush, my very favorite Ghirlandaio painting does not feature the artist at all, but rather an old man.  The man depicted in An Old Man and his Grandson (circa 1490; The Louvre) is far from beautiful; viewed objectively, and apart from his setting, he could even be called repulsive.  But Domenico has made him beautiful as he gazes with obvious wonder and adoration at his young grandson, a perfect Renaissance specimen.  No better expression of Renaissance humanism can be found, in my opinion, which was confirmed by the choice of this painting for the cover of the catalog of the recent exhibition of Renaissance portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Renaissance Portrait:  from Donatello to Bellini). 

10 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Culture, History

June 6, 2012

The Splashy Thames

By daseger

Watching from afar, the highlight of this past weekend’s Diamond Jubilee celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign for me was the spectacular 1000-boat flotilla, floating theater on the Thames.  All the “color” commentary, on the television and in print, referred to the precedent of Charles II’s 1662 river pageant, organized to celebrate his marriage to the Portuguese royal princess Catherine of Braganza. The historical narratives of this particular pageant do indeed describe a spectacle.  The very detailed diarist John Evelyn wrote: “His Majesty and the Queen came in an antique-shaped open vessel, covered with a canopy of cloth of gold, made in the form of a cupola, supported by high Corinthian pillars, wreathed with flowers, festoons and garlands” and his contemporary Samuel Pepys observed that you could not see the water, as there were so many barges and boats.  But for visual inspiration, Canelleto’s panoramic painting The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day (1746) cannot be beat.  It is in the permanent collection of the Lobkowicz Collection of the Czech Republic, and was loaned to the National Maritime Museum in Britain for its timely exhibition Royal River: Power, Pageantry and the Thames, on view until September. A mural was reproduced on the side of the London Bridge tube station to advertise the exhibition.

The Lord Mayor’s river pageants seem to precede those of royalty, but the Tudor and Stuart monarchs definitely used the river as the backdrop for their public displays of royal majesty, including coronations and funerals. They were experts at this sort of thing:  a procession, was great, but a floating procession, even better. Anne Boleyn had a coronation flotilla as well as one that accompanied her to her execution; river pageants also marked the beginning of her daughter Elizabeth’s reign in 1558 and its end in 1603. There was a three-day river pageant, including a staged fight by several ocean-going vessels, in May of 1610 to celebrate King James I’s proclamation of his eldest son Henry Frederick as the Prince of Wales. The pageant for King Charles II and his new queen Catherine in August of 1662 consisted of barges representing the twelve livery companies (guilds) of London as well as masques on the water; Catherine’s court painter, Dirk Stoop, captured the event for all posterity in an engraving entitled Aqua Triumphalis.

Dirk Stoop, Aqua Triumphalis, 1662. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the industrial revolution and intensive urbanization generated a “great stink” emanating from the river, the Thames continued to be the setting for municipal and national celebrations, while simultaneously serving as the “highway” that it had always been.  I think that the seventeenth-century map below illustrates this last function very well.  I couldn’t resist the pageantry of the Lord Mayor’s barge gliding by Windsor Castle in the 1813 aquatint, and then there is an image of perhaps the last national Thames pageant before the twentieth century, Lord Nelson’s grand maritime funeral procession in 1806, by Daniel Turner.

London. Part of the County of Middlesex, 1662 Lithograph, Crace Collection of Maps of London, British Library; The City of London State Barge Passing up the Thames by Windsor Castle, 1813 Aquatint, British Library; Daniel Turner, The Procession of Barges attending Lord Nelson’s Funeral, 1806, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

The last Diamond Jubilee, that of Queen Victoria in 1897, seems to have featured only a terra firma procession; perhaps the Thames was still too stinky, though it had been several decades since the installation of London’s sewage system. “Henry VIII” made an appearance on the river upon the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the beginning of his reign in 2009, and then there was the smiling Queen Elizabeth II on the water this past weekend.

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession passing over the Thames in 1897; “King Henry” in 2009; and the Spirit of Chartwell bearing the royal family down the river this past weekend.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 4, 2012

An Adaptable Artist

By daseger

I am indeed surrounded by the former homes of Salem painters from a century ago, with Frank Benson’s and Philip Little’s houses across the street and the home of a particularly prolific painter, Isaac Henry Caliga (1857-1944) nearly next door. I continue to wonder what Salem’s pre-war (World War I), pre-fire creative community was like. Of all the Salem artists that I’ve written about here, Caliga is the most difficult to categorize and pin down:  his works encompass everything from Sargent-like portraits to pastel drawings to illustrations for turn-of-the-century romance novels.  Unlike Benson and Little, he did not come from a wealthy New England family, but rather from a Midwestern family of German immigrants (apparently his unusual last name was a latinized version of the family name “Steifel”).  He did not summer in the Maine or New Hampshire, but rather on Cape Cod, in the company of the earliest members of an emerging artists’ colony in Provincetown.  To my knowledge, he never painted a maritime scene, unless you count the outer Cape dunes.

Caliga was born in Indiana and trained in New York and Munich.  By the later 1880s he was in Boston, and after the turn of the century he was residing in Salem, in a stately Italianate house at the eastern end of Chestnut Street. What drew him here I do not know, but I found several juried art exhibitions in which he was presenting and Benson was judging, perhaps the latter was the link. There are scattered references to his activities over the next few decades–references to restoration work and a centennial celebration Hawthorne portrait in the Collections of the Essex Institute, brief summaries of his career in The New England Magazine and Who’s Who in America, pictures of his pewter collection in American Homes and Gardens, trial records for the successful defense of his copyrighted Guardian Angel illustration (which seems to have been extremely popular–hence the copyright infringement–but which I cannot find), mentions of his participation in Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art, and a notice of his 1924 marriage to Provincetown printmaker Elizabeth Howland. He was clearly no dilettante, but a working artist who sought “serious” commissions while simultaneously engaging in illustration work—lots of illustration work.

First, the serious paintings:  society portraits and a few genre paintings.

Portrait of John J. Enneking, 1884 (Vose Galleries, Boston); Portrait of  Thomas Allen, 1885 (Walker–Cunningham Fine Art); Portrait of Mrs. William Kesson Vanderbilt (Simpson Galleries); The Pink Kimono, 1910–1915 (Brock & Co.); The Politicians, n.d. (Sotheby’s).

Then there are the illustrations, rendered for books that were hardly classics but probably pretty popular:  early examples of “women’s fiction” catering to an audience that was quite different from his society patrons.  He seems to have been working full-time for Little, Brown in Boston during the first decade of the twentieth century, turning out illustrations for such provocative titles as The Awakening of the Duchess by Fannie Charles (1903), A Detached Pirate:  the Romance of Gay Vandeleur by Helen Milecete (1903), The Effendi:  a Romance of the Soudan by Florence Brooks Whitehouse (1904), A Woman’s Will by Anne Warner (1904), and The Castle of Doubt by John Whitson (1907). A middle-aged divorcée is romanced!  Romance in the desert!  Romance on the high seas! Caliga’s name is always featured very prominently on the title pages and in accompanying advertising:  I do wonder if his artistic reputation suffered a bit because of this rampant commercialism?

Evidently not.  Caliga’s obituary in The New York Times (18 October 1944) focuses exclusively on his portraits:  Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Isaac Henry Caliga, widely-known as a portrait painter and the oldest member of the art colony here, died yesterday on Cape Cod after a week’s illness.  His age was 88.  Born in Auburn, Indiana, he studied in Europe and formerly lived in Salem. Among his portraits are those of the late President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Governor Alexander Rice, which now hangs in the State House, Boston, and James B. Colgate, financier, which is in the New York Chamber of Commerce.  Two images of Caliga’s Massachusetts life, his Salem house and the Cape Cod dunes, are below.

Truro Dunes, 1890.  Boston Art Club.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 2, 2012

The Little Studio

By daseger

As the Salem Arts Festival is happening this rainy weekend, I thought I’d offer up a few artistic posts.  I have long been interested in a Salem artist named Philip Little (1854-1942), whose house is located diagonally across the street from ours, so I was very pleased to come across an article about his Salem studio in an old journal called Art and Progress.  Entitled “An Artist’s Studio in Old Salem”, the article was published in November 1914; it contains a brief description of the studio and two great images of the artist in his milieu.

This first view of Little-in-context is amazing, as he stands (and presumably paints) on the deck of his studio, the ruins of a post-fire Salem are in the background, including the twin towers of St. Joseph’s Church.  The article text makes this very point:  On the water-front in old Salem is the studio of  Philip Little, well known as a painter of outdoor pictures.  This is near the historic Derby Wharf and not far from the House of the Seven Gables.  It is a simple concrete structure about 30 x 40 feet and about 20 feet to the ridgepole.  The walls are concrete and the reddish roof is of a fire-proof material….The [interior] walls of the studio are tinted a warm gray.  The furniture consists of a large working easel, a palette stand, and a few chairs. On the polished floor there are a few rugs. Fortunately this studio was just outside the zone destroyed by the great fire of the past summer.

The interior view, just as described:

Though I couldn’t find the exact painting that is on view here, Little’s views of Salem’s old wharves, which must have been painted from the vantage point of this studio, are among his most popular. Certainly Salem Harbor, the 1913 painting below was conceived in the studio, and I like to imagine that the etching Harbor View (1927) was as well (although it looks rather more Maine-ish to me).  Little was no starving artist:  his family’s textile wealth enabled him (as well as his brother Arthur, an architect) to pursue his passion for art:  he began his education at MIT but wound up at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Nevertheless, he led a long life characterized not only by creativity but also by public service (the Salem School Board, the Massachusetts Militia) and generosity.  Like his fellow impressionist and Chestnut Street neighbor Frank W. Benson, Little summered in Maine and while he was up north he let his Harbor studio to a succession of artists, including up-and-coming Connecticut printmaker Philip Kappel.  The little studio of Philip Little lives on as a private home, little changed except for the addition of a small second story, which no doubt provides an even better view of Salem Harbor.

Salem Harbor (1913) and Harbor View, possibly Salem (1927; from a 2009 sale at Skinner Auctioneers & Appraisers); the Little Studio on Salem Harbor today (in the middle, with the outbuildings of the House of the Seven Gables in the background).

9 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

May 31, 2012

A Charitable Correspondence

By daseger

Upon the occasion of  Walt Whitman’s birthday, an exchange of letters between the poet, then tending the Civil War wounded in a Washington military hospital (where he first went to search for his missing brother, then remained) and Lucia Russell Briggs of Salem, the wife of George Briggs, the pastor of the First Church.

Letter from Lucia Jane Russell Briggs to Walt Whitman, 21 April 1864

I have been very much interested in your hospital work, of which I have heard through my brother, Dr. Russell of Boston. I inclose seventy–five dollars, which I have collected among a few friends in Salem, and which I hope may be of some little service to our brave boys, who surely should not suffer while we have the power to help them. You have our warmest sympathy in your generous work, and though sad to witness so much suffering, it is indeed a privilege to be able to do something to alleviate it.

I hope to be able to send you an addition to this contribution, and thought of waiting for a larger sum, but I see that you are having numbers of sick sent in to Washington daily, so you will be in immediate want of money.

Very Gratefully Your Friend,

Mrs. George W. Briggs, April 21. Salem, Mass.

To which Whitman replied a mere few days later (as if he didn’t have enough to do!):

Letter from Walt Whitman to Lucia Jane Russell Briggs, 26 April 1864

Your generous remittance of $75 for the wounded & sick was duly received by letter of 21st & is most acceptable. So much good may be done with it. A little I find may go a great ways. It is perhaps like having a store of medicines—the difficulty is not so much in getting the medicines, it is not so important about having a great store, as it is important to apply them by rare perception, honest personal investigation, true love, & if possible the inspiration & tact we in other fields call genius.

The hospitals here are again full, as nearly all last week trains were arriving off & on from front with sick. Very many of these however will be transferred north as soon as practicable.

Unfortunately large numbers are irreparably injured in these jolting railroad & ambulance journeys, numbers dying on the road.—Of these come in lately, diarrhea, rheumatism & the old camp fevers are most prevalent. The wrecks in these forms of so many hundreds of dear young American men come in lately, are terrible, & make one’s heart ache.

Numerically the sick are the last four or five weeks becoming alarmingly greater, & in quality the cases grow more intense. I have noticed a steady deepening of this intensity of the cases of sickness, the year & a half I have been with the soldiers. Hospital accommodations here are being extensively added to. Large tents are being put up, & others got ready.

My friend, you must accept the men’s thanks, through me. I shall remain here among the soldiers in hospital through the summer, with short excursions down in field, & what help you can send me for the wounded & sick I need hardly say how gladly I shall receive it & apply it personally to them.

Walt Whitman

Source: Francis B. Dedmond, “‘Here Among Soldiers in Hospital’: An Unpublished Letter from Walt Whitman to Lucia Jane Russell Briggs” New England Quarterly 59 (December 1986): 547–48, via The Walt Whitman Archive.

3rd Edition of Leaves of Grass

 Walt Whitman, 31 May 1819-26 March 1892


3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

May 28, 2012

Remembering the 54th Regiment

By daseger

Last year on Memorial Day, I wrote about Civil War remembrance in general; this year I’m following up with a specific focus on the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry Regiment, of Glory fame, and several Salem connections.  Thanks to the film, the story of the 54th is pretty well-known:  formed by Massachusetts Governor John Andrew after the Emancipation Proclamation in December of 1862, it was the first military unit consisting of black soldiers to be raised in the North during the Civil War. Governor Andrew chose Robert Gould Shaw, from a distinguished Boston family, to lead the Regiment, which formed a heroic storming column in an effort to take the Confederate stronghold at Fort Wagner in South Carolina, losing nearly half its soldiers in the process, including Colonel Shaw. Shaw and the 54th Regiment were immortalized long before Glory, most prominently on the bronze bas-relief monument of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (completed in 1897), located across from the State House on Boston Common.

Recruitment broadside for the 54th, Massachusetts Historical Society; the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and a plaster casting at the National Gallery of Art.

Less well-known, in varying degrees, is the involvement of three Salem men with the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment: Willard Peele Phillips, a prominent Salem businessman (who happened to live in my house at the time, or I live in his now) served on Governor Andrew’s recruiting committee for the regiment, Luis Fenollosa Emilio was a young captain in the Regiment, and later served as acting commander after he became the only officer to survive Fort Wagner, and Francis H. Fletcher, a clerk in a Salem printing office, enlisted in the Regiment and fought until the end of the war. Those are the bare facts, but the involvement of these three men runs deeper.  Phillips raised money, not only men, for the Regiment, Emilio later became the historian of the Regiment with the 1891 publication of The Brave Black Regiment.  The History of the 54th Massachusetts, 1863-65, and Fletcher protested the army’s unequal (or nonexistent!) pay system while still in service.

Transcription: You take a far more liberal view of things than you could in my situation. Just one year ago to day our regt was received in Boston with almost an ovation, and at 5 P. M. it will be one year since we were safely on board transport clear of Battery Wharf and bound to this Department: in that one year no man of our regiment has received a cent of monthly pay all through the glaring perfidy of the U.S. Gov’t.

Capts. Tomlinson and Emilio (center) with Lt. Speer, all of Company C of the Massachusetts 54th, May 1863, Library of Congress, Letter of Francis H. Fletcher to Jacob C. Safford, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The heavy losses sustained by the 54th at Fort Wagner in July of 1863 (272 men were killed, wounded or captured, out of the 600 men who participated in the assault), along with young Colonel Shaw’s heroic death, captured some “glory” for the depleted regiment even in its own time. Harpers Weekly and Currier & Ives prints were disseminated to a national audience, engaged in this terrible war to a degree that doesn’t seem possible today.

Casualty List for the Mass. 54th after Fort Wagner, National Archives & Records Administration, Harpers and Currier & Ives lithographs of the Regiment, Library of Congress, tattered remains of the 54th Regiment’s flags displayed c. 1894, Massachusetts Historical Society.


4 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem