"Portraits Torn to Shreds": Iconoclasm and the Destruction of Confederate Memory

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• “Portraits Torn to Shreds”Iconoclasm and the Destruction of Confederate Memory
• Matthew Fox-Amato (bio)

In July 1863, Jefferson Davis was stabbed. To understand the attack, one needs to begin earlier in the war, when Davis’s eldest brother, Joseph E. Davis, had moved belongings from the family’s Brierfield and Hurricane plantations to Owen B. Cox’s house near Clinton, Mississippi. The possessions were hidden in the attic of the main house and an outbuilding, and they might have remained safe, were it not for the actions of Alfred, a man Cox enslaved. Alfred had previously fled to the Union army; when the Union troops arrived at Cox’s house, he pointed them toward Davis’s concealed property. The troops promptly ruined and looted those possessions and many other household objects. They destroyed books from Jefferson Davis’s private library, which by one account numbered in the thousands. They ripped paintings with their bayonets, cut up carpets, damaged a walnut table, wrecked a piano, and stole curtains to use as blankets.¹ And, in particularly brutal fashion, they laid waste to Davis’s image. As one witness described, “among the evidences of petty malice a book was found containing Your Excellency’s likeness; this the soldiers [End Page 36] stabbed as often as they could find a piece of the paper large enough to receive the point of a knife.”²

The vision of Union troops knifing a small Jefferson Davis portrait might seem of minor significance in comparison to the many better-studied visual media of the Civil War—including engravings in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, battlefield images by Alexander Gardner, and photographs of fugitive enslaved people.³ But we would do well to view this incident as one part of a broader cultural phenomenon: the iconoclastic impulses of the Civil War. Such sources as diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers demonstrate that in households across the South, Northern soldiers and enslaved people engaged in different forms of iconoclasm, meaning the harming, destruction, theft, or appropriation of images and other visual objects.⁴ Union soldiers stole and sliced painted and photographic portraits as [End Page 37] well as book illustrations they encountered in Southern households. Enslaved people watched and enabled this iconoclasm, as Alfred’s actions demonstrate. But they also engaged in their own iconoclastic acts—by taking paintings from their masters’ houses, defacing those images, exchanging them, selling them, and hanging them on their cabin walls. At the end of the war, one Black woman even destroyed a bust of John Calhoun in the office of the Charleston Mercury. These acts direct our attention toward the causes, effects, and meanings of Civil War iconoclasm.

The history of iconoclasm is long and global—from the Roman destruction of statues depicting enemies of the state to English reformers’ attacks on religious images during the Reformation to the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas—yet scholars have only begun to grapple with its specific contours and ramifications in the Civil War.⁵ Most notably, art historian Jennifer [End Page 38] Van Horn has investigated enslaved people’s destruction and appropriation of their enslavers’ portraits, showing how iconoclasm served as an act of resistance.⁶ This article builds on such scholarship by broadening the scope to consider how a variety of wartime actors initiated and reacted to image destruction: it further explores enslaved people’s iconoclasm (and public responses to it) while offering the first thorough study of Union soldiers’ iconoclasm and Southern whites’ responses to it. What, it asks, were the motivations and meanings of iconoclasm for enslaved people and Northern soldiers? How, further, did Southern whites respond?

Addressing these questions reveals how throughout the war Union troops and enslaved people waged a rampant battle against images in Confederate homes. The meanings of this haphazard campaign of image destruction were surely many. Whereas Federal troops might have understood the destruction of a Confederate proponent’s portrait as a statement of physical dominance over the enemy, enslaved people could have viewed the ruination of a slaveholder’s likeness as an act of dissent against bondage and a marker of the downfall of a violent racial...