NPG IN YOUR CLASSROOM
Volume 7, no. 1. Winter 2013
What’s Inside
Welcome to the Winter 2013 issue of NPG in Your Classroom! In this issue, we highlight our rich collection of
Civil War images. Find out how our gallery educators
use portraits to teach visiting school groups about
Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, and Civil War–era
inventors. Go behind the scenes with the curator of our
new exhibition, “Bound for Freedom’s Light: African
Americans and the Civil War.” Discover how Gordon, a
runaway slave turned Union soldier, became a powerful symbol of the urgency of abolition. And, as always,
get a taste of what’s coming up at the museum!
We welcome submissions from teachers, so please email our school and teacher program coordinator at
[email protected] if you have a story to share about
how you’ve used NPG in your classroom.
Upcoming Teacher Workshops
The African American Experience
During the Civil War
Presented with the National Museum
of African American History & Culture
Saturday, March 9, 2013
9:30 a.m.– 2:30 p.m.
Join educators from the National
Portrait Gallery and the National
Museum of African American History
& Culture for a workshop examining
the portrayal of African Americans
during the Civil War. Participants will
explore objects in the Portrait Gallery’s
and the African American History and
Culture Museum’s collections, collaborate to develop ways of incorporating
these images into their classroom lessons, and receive teaching resources.
Announcing NPG’s First Summer
Teacher Institute
“The Civil War in Lincoln’s Washington” Summer
Teacher Institute
Retrace Abraham Lincoln’s footsteps and explore midnineteenth-century Washington in “The Civil War in
Lincoln’s Washington” Summer Teacher Institute with
the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Join
colleagues in a four-day exploration of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the African American experience
during the Civil War, using the nation’s capital as a
backdrop. In addition to utilizing the extensive collection of portraits of Lincoln at the National Portrait
Gallery, participants will also visit and work with educators at President Lincoln’s Cottage and
Ford’s Theatre. The institute will be held
July 8–11, 2013. Core-subject teachers for
grades 4–12 may apply as individuals or
as part of a team. Priority will be given to
social studies and English/language-arts
teachers.
Institute participants will:
Gain expertise from museum
experts
Our Colored Troops by John R. Hamilton,
wood engraving, 1863. Published in Harper’s
Weekly, February 28, 1863
Upcoming Exhibition
Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2013
March 23, 2013, through February 23, 2014
This juried exhibition of portraits includes forty-eight
works created in traditional media like oil paintings,
drawings, and photographs, as well as more surprising
materials such as rice, glitter, thread, and video.
·
Learn to use portraiture in the
·classroom
Make interdisciplinary connec·tions
· Develop and share lesson ideas
A nonrefundable program fee of $100
per person is due upon acceptance into the teacher
institute. Participants are responsible for travel and
lodging costs.
Visit http://npg.si.edu/education/teachprog.html
to apply; the application deadline is April 1, 2013.
Please direct queries to [email protected] or
202.633.8503.
Field Notes from Our Gallery
Educators
Our gallery educators facilitate the Portrait Gallery’s
school programs, engaging and exciting young visitors
through the medium of portraiture while relaying pertinent historical, biographical, and cultural information
about images on display at NPG. In the following articles,
three of our gallery educators reflect on how they use portraits to draw students into meaningful discussions about
key figures and moments in the Civil War era.
An Unexpected View of Frederick Douglass
By Lisa Gervais
On their initial examination of our portrait of Frederick Douglass, students find it hard to imagine that
the polished-looking man in the painting is a former
slave. Indeed, many say that if not for his name gracing the frame, they would guess that he was a lawyer
or a businessman dressed in his best black suit. This
Douglass’s response to these prejudices may have been
what ultimately gave us the image that students see in
the museum. Although the artist of the oil painting is
not known, the portrait is believed to be based on the
frontispiece found in Douglass’s best-selling autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written
by Himself, published in 1845, in part to answer skepticism that such an articulate orator could have actually
been a slave himself. Much like many who read Douglass’s book in the 1840s and 1850s, students leave with
a vision of the man in the image as a powerful and
effective author and activist.
Ulysses S. Grant by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, oil on canvas, 1865
Frederick Douglass by an unidentified artist, oil on canvas, c. 1844
unexpected version of a familiar man helps modern
students to imagine how people during Douglass’s
time may have responded to him. Our students share
the surprise of many northern men and women who
encountered Douglass for the first time on the abolitionist lecture circuit in the 1840s. Many, with preconceived notions of how a former slave would look and
speak, did not expect to find an elegantly attired man
who so eloquently detailed his time in bondage and
his passion for ending the inhumane practice.
Small Details and Big Picture: Grant at Vicksburg
By Bevin Butler
Although I employ many of our portraits to initiate
conversations about sitters’ entire life stories, Ole Peter
Hansen Balling’s painting of Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg invites a different approach: that of using details
to hone in on one specific moment in history. I ask
students to analyze how each component of Balling’s
portrait tells the story of the Civil War general and
his crucial victory. Through questions that focus first
on looking and then on interpretation and analysis, I
invite students to consider elements such as clothing,
pose, objects, and setting.
Based on his uniform, can we tell which side he fought
for? Can we tell what his rank was? Why would a general
need the binoculars, shovel, and map we see in the lower
left corner? Why would gaining control of the river shown
on the map have been an important military victory 150
years ago?
Asking a few simple, pointed questions allows students
to tell me General Grant’s story, instead of the other
way around. It’s the days when I talk less and the students talk more that I know I’ve done my job right.
Puzzling Men of Progress
By Dawn Thomas
Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress (1862) is a symbolically rich group portrait that allows educators to
discuss significant scientific events in the era leading
up to the Civil War. The nineteen men portrayed in
the painting (twenty, if you count the portrait-withina-portrait of Benjamin Franklin that hangs in homage
on the wall) read as a collective “who’s who” of our
nation’s prominent inventors in the 1850s and 1860s.
While exploring Men of Progress, students can learn
how Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber, Samuel
Colt’s first automatic revolver, Samuel Morse’s telegraph, and Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper
all transformed the ways in which the Civil War was
fought.
When using portraits as a springboard to historical
content in this way, it’s important to begin by helping students to become close readers. In the classroom,
teachers can use the “puzzle” “learning-to–look” strategy to help students dissect this portrait and build
their critical thinking skills. Teachers can cut up a
high-resolution copy of the portrait into small puzzle
pieces. Working either individually or in small groups,
students carefully study their piece and then report on
what they see. After each student or small group has
shared, the class works as a group to put the puzzle
pieces together. Because students must observe their
own and then other pieces closely to complete this activity, the class will have a richer critical analysis of the
portrait—and of the role of science and technology in
the Civil War era.
Men of Progress by Christian Schussele, oil on canvas, 1862; gift of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust
Behind the Scenes of “Bound for
Freedom’s Light”
The third in a series of exhibitions marking the 150th
anniversary of the Civil War, “Bound for Freedom’s
Light: African Americans and the Civil War” opened at
the National Portrait Gallery on February 1. The installation uses vintage photographs and historic prints to
focus on the roles that individual African Americans
played during the course of the conflict. According to
Ann Shumard, NPG’s senior curator of photographs
and the exhibition curator, the starting point for the
show was the desire to “highlight the richness of NPG’s
own collection,” rather than borrow the majority of
works from other institutions.
The exhibition includes images of well-known individuals such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and
Sojourner Truth. Rather than highlighting their familiar
prewar abolitionist activities, however, the images and
accompanying label text in this installation draw attention to the sitters’ wartime efforts, such as Douglass’s
pressuring Lincoln on the question of emancipation,
Tubman serving as an army scout and spy, and Truth
assisting refugees from slavery and recruiting black
men to join the Union army. The exhibition draws its
title from the lyrics of a song that Truth performed at
recruiting meetings as a tribute to the First Michigan
Colored Regiment, in which she proclaimed,
We are going out of slavery, we are bound for
freedom’s light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans
can fight!
While these famous figures certainly merit a place in
the exhibition, Shumard felt that it was crucial to have
less recognizable names included as well. As she explains, “the focus here needs to be on the experience
of ordinary people, the less well-known figures who
both affected and were affected by the events of the
era.” Perhaps the most riveting image in the show is
that of Gordon, who escaped enslavement on a Louisiana plantation to join a black regiment and whose
scarred back became a powerful testament to the brutality of slavery. Also represented in a photographic
portrait is Robert Smalls, the South Carolina bondsman who freed himself and his family by seizing control of a Confederate ship and delivering it safely into
Union hands.
The NPG collection even turned out to contain a fascinating story that was unknown to our staff. While
sorting through some photographs for a different
Harriet Tubman by John G. Darby, wood engraving, c. 1868.
purpose, Shumard happened across a carte-de-visite
photograph of an African American man known as
Abraham. The portrait had been acquired some years
ago in an album of cartes de visite but had not been
individually researched. When Shumard investigated,
she discovered the amazing story of a slave who was
literally blown to freedom. Union soldiers tunneling
below Confederate defenses in the siege of Vicksburg
(1863) had detonated powerful explosives that buried
in debris seven enslaved workers used by Confederates
to dig countershafts, but lofted an eighth—identified
only as Abraham—clear across the Union lines, where
he recovered from his injuries and joined the Union
war effort.
Moving beyond these amazing biographies, Shumard
discovered that there were some facets of the African American experience that could not be told using conventional portraiture. To cover these aspects,
Lincoln in Richmond by Lambert Hollis, ink and wash drawing on paper, 1865;
Alan and Lois Fern Acquisition Fund
she turned to historic prints that portray a scene or
series of events. One of Shumard’s favorite pieces in
the show is a print called (in the parlance of the era),
Stampede among the Negroes in Virginia—Their Arrival
at Fortress Monroe. While researching this exhibition,
Shumard read a New York Times Magazine article about
the fugitive slaves who were granted protection as
“contraband of war” by General Benjamin F. Butler at
Union-held Fort Monroe in Virginia beginning in May
1861. The article mentioned that a print had appeared
in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in June of that year
showing vignettes of refugees from slavery arriving at
the fort. Shumard was delighted to discover that such
a print existed and was available for acquisition, as she
had been struggling with how to include the events
at Fort Monroe in the exhibition. “We have a carte de
visite of Butler in our collection, but that’s a poor way
to tell this particular story, with just a picture of a white
Union officer. And there were no formal portraits made
of the Fort Monroe ‘contrabands’ themselves.”
Similarly, the story of the July 1863 draft riots in New
York could only be told through periodicals, rather
than traditional portraiture, as the participants were
generally anonymous. This gruesome and littleknown chapter of the Civil War era, when antidraft
rioters looted and burned the Colored Orphan’s Asylum and attacked African Americans in their homes
and on the streets, is represented in the exhibition
by a wood engraving from an August 1863 issue of
Harper’s Weekly. “The image [in the engraving] of a
man being lynched is grim,” explains Shumard, “but
we needed to include it in order to convey the African
American experience more fully.”
There were just a few stories that Shumard was not
able to tell with images from the NPG collection, such
as the heroic performance of the 54th Massachusetts
Colored Regiment, the first black regiment to be
organized in a northern state. According to Shumard, “we have a carte de visite of the commander,
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, but that doesn’t capture
the experience of the African Americans who served
with him.” Shumard was able to secure a loan from a
private individual of a chromolithograph showing the
regiment’s storming of Fort Wagner, near Charleston,
South Carolina. Other loans to the exhibition include
a group portrait of emancipated slaves that was sold
to raise funds for their education; a print entitled
Come and Join Us Brothers that was used to recruit
black soldiers; and a reproduction of a photograph
of an unidentified slave/body servant in Confederate
uniform with a Confederate captain, which Shumard
included to broach the controversial and historically
inconclusive topic of black participation in the Confederate cause.
In putting together this exhibition, Shumard tried to
find a balance between the content she wanted to
include in order to paint as complete a picture as possible and the objects that were available. “Obviously
we can’t be encyclopedic in an exhibition of this size,”
she reflects, “and we can’t cover every aspect of the
African American experience. But I am pleased that
we were able to find such compelling representations
to flesh out this fascinating story.”
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Gordon
lifedates unknown
Mathew Brady Studio, after William D. McPherson and Mr. Oliver
Albumen silver print, 1863
Gordon
lifedates unknown
Although fugitives from slavery sought and received protection in Union camps
as early as May of 1861, the Confiscation Act of 1862 formally declared that slaves
seeking refuge behind Union lines were to be deemed captives of war and granted
their freedom. Many of these freed slaves, known as “contraband,” joined the Union
fight.
In March 1863, a man known only as Gordon escaped from slavery on a Louisiana
plantation and after a harrowing journey found safety among Union soldiers encamped at Baton Rouge. Before enlisting in a black regiment, he was examined by
military doctors, who discovered horrific scarring on his back—the result of a vicious
whipping by his former overseer. This photograph documenting Gordon’s condition
created a sensation when it reached the public and quickly became one of the most
powerful proofs of slavery’s brutality. As one journalist declared, “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000 and scattered over the States. It tells the
story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach, because it
tells the story to the eye.”
On Independence Day 1863, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, Harper’s Weekly featured several articles concerning recent action in the field
by black troops fighting for the Union cause, including an account of Gordon’s escape from bondage and his subsequent military service. Based on photographs, the
images accompanying the article documented Gordon’s metamorphosis from fugitive slave to U.S. soldier, punctuated by a view of his horribly scarred back.
Sergeant Gordon was reported to have fought bravely in the Union assault on Port
Hudson in July 1863, as part of General Benjamin F. Butler’s Louisiana Native Guards,
a regiment made up entirely of free black recruits. Nothing further is known about
his life.
Learning to Look
Suggested activity
• Describe Gordon’s pose in this photograph.
Why do you think the photographer posed him
in this way?
• What is the focal point of this photograph?
What do you think the photographer intended
you to notice first?
• Describe the expression on Gordon’s face.
What might he be thinking?
• What is your first reaction to this image? How
does it make you feel? What elements in the
photograph provoke your reaction?
• Why do you think this photograph was taken?
How might it have been used during the Civil
War?
This photograph was used by abolitionists to provide
compelling visual proof of slavery’s brutality. Imagine
that you are an abolitionist orator in 1863. Write a
speech in which you argue that ending slavery must
be a primary goal of the Civil War, incorporating this
photograph as evidence to support your point.
All images are from the National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution.