Common soldiers covered buildings with inscriptions, drawings and rants in many of the places they passed through—yet relatively little research has been devoted to these first-person accounts.
High on a wooden beam in the attic of Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s stately home in present-day Arlington, Va., is an inscription that appears to have been signed by John Chapman, Company K, 25th Pennsylvania, dated 1862. There’s a problem, though: The 25th Pennsylvania’s muster roll lists no such person. A search of the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors database shows the 28th Pennsylvania Infantry did have a Corporal John Chapman, and it passed through Northern Virginia en route to Antietam. Sure enough, inspection reveals that what initially looked like “25” is in fact “28”—although it’s still unclear why Chapman visited the Lee home. Does all this matter? For a small but growing number of scholars, the answer is yes.
Like participants in other wars (including World War II’s famous “Kilroy”), Civil War soldiers on both sides left behind graffiti in homes, churches, hospitals and caves— whenever and wherever they could make their mark. They used whatever implements they had on hand, primarily charcoal, pencil and knife blades. Not surprisingly, the most common inscriptions were their own names, the most basic form of self-expression. Regimental details and dates were common too, as were pictures, including battlefield scenes, political images and bawdy material.
Say the word “graffiti” today, and the connotation is rarely positive. Modern-day graffiti is seen as underground art at best and a public nuisance at worst. Yet whether it’s a Latin inscription in a Roman ruin or a Native American pictograph, historians see graffiti as a vital primary source that shows how humans lived, worked and fought. Residents of Pompeii, for example, had written all over the city’s walls long before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius preserved them in ash. In the late 19th century, researchers began documenting Pompeii’s graffiti, recognizing its significance.
Today 19th-century graffiti is only beginning to get the same level of attention, at a point when untold amounts of it may already have been lost. The lack of scholarship on the topic can be traced to the similar lack of study, until recently, about common soldiers in general. “Some might feel that it’s just not as sexy to research the common soldier,” says Brandon Bies, site manager for Arlington House, a unit of the National Park Service. “But that’s the story we should be telling.”
Graffiti reflects an immediacy not seen in other artifacts. Compared to a diary entry or letter to a loved one, a scribble on the wall is fragmentary, capturing a man’s thoughts and impulses at a single moment in time. High-ranking officers rarely wrote on walls—though one notable exception, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, signed his name in what is now known as the Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Va. But common soldiers knew they weren’t likely to make it into the history books. They sometimes acted on a primal instinct to make their mark on the world, perhaps before leaving it forever.
“It was really the grunts who were out there marking time,” says Edie Wallace, a historian with Paula S. Reed & Associates, a preservation firm in Hagerstown, Md., who has researched Civil War graffiti in the Catoctin Mountain region. “The graffiti is there because it was a boring moment, a moment of waiting for something to happen.”
Katherine Reed, whose master’s thesis at the University of Manchester (U.K.) focused on American Civil War graffiti, summarizes the three primary reasons why soldiers wrote on walls: First, the inscriptions marked soldiers’ presence in unfamiliar territory. Second, it gave them opportunities to connect with others. Third, the graffiti was ultimately an invasive act. “They changed the atmosphere of a space and staked a claim to it,” Reed explains. “Graffiti communicated in multiple ways to different audiences: texts that displayed regimental loyalties and camaraderie also worked as vandalism and provocation.”
Graffiti tends to be unfiltered, Reed says. A soldier writing a letter might put a positive spin on the events of the day or puff himself up. A soldier writing on a wall is venting. It was a social act too, in that one scrawled message typically begat many others. “I should not have written on the walls of the house of God,” confessed a soldier at the historic Morgan’s Chapel in Bunker Hill, W.Va. “I would not have done so if it had not already been marked up.”
At the same time, graffiti authors tended to avoid certain subjects—typically religion, death, family and slavery, Reed notes. “As public documents, open to being mocked or amended by others,” she writes, “there is little vulnerability on show.” This is not universally true, however; at Morgan’s Chapel, being in a “house of God” inspired several soldiers to make prayer requests.
At the Graffiti House, a man is shown kicking a figure who has been interpreted to portray Confederate President Jefferson Davis and who is accompanied by the slogan: “President J. Davis…good on the Boots.” Another item depicts a portly W.C. Fields type standing near a horse’s rear end, saying that he “smells a rebel.” A pointed message found at Andrew Johnson’s house in Greeneville, Tenn., says, “Shame on you Andy” and “Andy you best skedaddle.” Although drawings like these are often crude and the sentiments expressed fairly basic, the soldiers were clearly informed and literate; they knew their leaders as well as their enemies.
“A lot of graffiti is very political,” says Wallace. “Some were really telling a story. Whether it’s vandalism or whether it’s art, it’s preserving the memory of these people.”
At Arlington House in the fall of 2011, workers stripping paint off the walls were not sure what they were seeing at first. On one wall of a bedroom were several scribbles. One showed a capital letter “A,” complete with serifs, as if someone were printing carefully. Nearby, a drawing came into view depicting a modest-looking building with smoke pouring from the chimney, possibly the slave quarters on the property. The National Park Service now believes those drawings are almost certainly pre-Civil War graffiti, drawn by one or more of Lee’s three sons.
“These aren’t just any boys,” says Brandon Bies, who is overseeing a complete restoration of Arlington House that has revealed several instances of previously unseen 19th- and 20th-century graffiti. “Lee’s sons all went on to become officers in the Confederate Army, and we potentially have their doodlings. It helps us understand people from 150-plus years ago and makes them more real.”
Bies and his colleagues are now considering which graffiti should be visible to visitors and which should stay covered. It’s a challenge commonly faced by site managers who discover historic graffiti. How much is enough? “For the restoration, we did not strip [paint from] every single wall in the house,” Bies explains. “We were primarily stripping exterior walls, or walls that became exterior walls, to correct issues with moisture damage. There are still a lot of walls that haven’t been stripped, so there may be more graffiti on the original plaster underneath. It’s similar to archaeology, where they will not excavate the entire site, to protect the resource. We’ve left a good bit of the graffiti in the house covered up.”
At Blenheim, an 1859 Virginia farmhouse now owned by the city of Fairfax, much of the graffiti that covered the walls has been exposed. It includes numerous pictures, including several ships, a hot air balloon and even a crude image of a naked, pregnant woman. (Sexual and reproductive themes have been commonly seen in graffiti since ancient times.) Most of the writing is in the attic, now off-limits to visitors because that part of the house is fragile. To accommodate visitors, the site’s small museum includes a partial reconstruction of the attic, complete with high-resolution photographic reproductions of the attic graffiti.
To date, Andrea Loewenwarter, historic resources specialist for Fairfax City, and other historians have identified 115 of those who left marks on Blenheim. For example, August Doring, an 18-year-old Bavarian immigrant, was stationed near Fairfax Court House with his unit, Company G of the 58th New York Infantry, in the spring of 1862. Doring wrote his name, regiment and occupation—bugler—in large script in the second-floor hallway. Henry Van Ewyck, of Company A, 26th Wisconsin Volunteers, signed in strikingly elegant script. Researchers determined that Van Ewyck fell ill in Fairfax and deserted, but rejoined his unit and fought at Gettysburg. Five generations of Van Ewyck descendants have since visited Blenheim to see his signature.
Elsewhere, there’s ongoing research at sites in the Fredericksburg, Va., region that are known to have graffiti. On the “Mysteries and Conundrums” blog, which is written by NPS historians but is not an official government vehicle, several graffiti writers have been identified and profiled. As one historian commented on a newly identified soldier, “A face in the crowd now has his story told. Could he ever have imagined?”
Despite recent research, Civil War graffiti remains at risk, subject to all the forces that threaten old buildings. Sometimes markings are buried under layers of paint, or they’re damaged or destroyed during renovations. As years pass, the need for preservation becomes more urgent. Morgan’s Chapel in West Virginia, which is covered in both Union and Confederate graffiti, needs $65,000 worth of stabilization and repair work, for example. The Rt. Rev. W. Michie Klusmeyer, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia, which owns the chapel, is working with the Berkeley County Historical Society on a plan to preserve the building and the graffiti.
Without additional scholarship, more graffiti may soon disappear for good. “[T]here is no central record of the graffiti,” Reed writes. “In part this is because some of the most complex and interesting graffiti sites have only been uncovered, or brought into public ownership, in the last fifteen years.” To raise awareness, several Virginia sites have banded together to create the Northern Virginia Civil War Graffiti Trail, which includes Blenheim, the Graffiti House, the Ben Lomond Historic Site in Manassas, the Mount Zion Historic Park in Aldie and the Old Court House in Winchester. “Each piece of graffiti tells a story,” Loewenwarter says. “When we’re looking at the graffiti of an individual, we can look at the war from that person out.”
Kim A. O’Connell is a frequent contributor whose passions are history and preservation. Check out her website: greenquill.com.
Originally published in the December 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.