A Compelling Look into the Eyes of War

Photo Submitted

Portraits of Conflict

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — It’s one thing to understand that more than 20,000 Confederate and Union soldiers died at the Battle of Murfreesboro. It’s quite another to study an ambrotype portrait of 20-year-old private Frank B. Crosthwait, dressed in his Sunday best, looking somberly at the camera. In a tragically short time, he’ll be found on the battlefield, mortally wounded, still clutching the knotted pieces of handkerchief he used in a hopeless attempt to stop the bleeding from his injuries.

Private Crosthwait’s image is one of more than 250 portraits - many never before published - to be found in the highly anticipated Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Tennessee in the Civil War (hardback, $59.95), by Richard B. McCaslin, just published by the University of Arkansas Press. The eighth in the distinguished Portraits of Conflict series now joins previous volumes on South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas. This volume merges the personal and the public to provide a uniquely rich portrayal of Tennesseans - in uniforms both blue and gray - who fought and lost their lives in the Civil War.

Here is the story of a widow working as a Union spy to support herself and her children. Of a father emerging from his house to find his Confederate soldier son dying at his feet. Of a nine-year-old boy who attached himself to a Union regiment after his mother died. Their stories and faces, joined with personal remembrances from recovered letters and diaries and ample historical information on secession, famous battles, surrender and Reconstruction, make this new Portraits of Conflict a Civil War treasure.

Richard B. McCaslin is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Lee in the Shadow of Washington; Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas; and the South Carolina and North Carolina volumes in the Portraits of Conflict series. The series, edited by Carl Moneyhon and Bobby Roberts, has received much praise. The Journal of Southern History called the books “major contributions to Civil War history” and The Civil War News wrote that they were “destined to become collector’s items.”

Previous volumes have received awards from the Chicago Book Clinic, the American Association for State and Local History, the Arkansas Library Association, and the American Association of University Presses.