[Unidentified Civil War veterans of Grand Army of the Republic E.W. Pierce Post #8, Middleborough, Massachusetts]

Archive record

1 photograph : albumen print ; sheet 25 x 34 cm, mount 34 x 41 cm.

About this photograph

The photograph shows unidentified Civil War veterans belonging to the E.W. Pierce Post #8 in Middleborough, Massachusetts, taken a quarter-century after the war ended.

The Grand Army of the Republic was the fraternal organisation of Union veterans, founded in 1866. Its local posts ran reunions and memorial observances for decades following the war, and members wore distinctive uniforms and badges to encampments and parades.

By 1890, the conflict had receded into middle age for these survivors. The visual record of the war itself consists overwhelmingly of portraits, camp scenes, fortifications and the dead after battles, since exposure times ruled out action photographs entirely. Soldiers on both sides commonly sat for cartes de visite or tintypes before leaving, to leave an image with family.

This later portrait belongs to a different era of Civil War photography. The men appear not in wartime dress but in the regalia of their veterans' organisation, marking them as members of a post that kept the memory of the Union cause alive in a Massachusetts town long after Appomattox.

Compiled from the catalogue record and reference notes on the formats and events involved. The archive record above is the primary source.

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