I’m David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I’m here with Peter Wood,
a distinguished faculty member from Duke University, who’s written a new book, Near Andersonville,
about Winslow Homer and the Civil War. Welcome, Peter. Thank you, this is an honor to be here.
You and I share a passion for Winslow Homer. He’s our greatest sea painter, you know,
the ocean and all its moods, and sailors in all their travails and he identified with
‘em, was a good sailor himself, spent his last 20 years living at Prout’s Neck up
in Maine looking out over the ocean, identified deeply with the sea. And you focused specifically
in this book on a painting, Near Andersonville. It was in a private family collection in New
Jersey and it was brought down from the attic when the patriarch died in 1960 and the family
gradually realized this was by a man named Homer, and this was the Winslow Homer and
they had this interesting painting on their hands, didn’t know what to do with it or
quite how it had gotten into the family. And I was able to do research back to an amazing
woman named Sarah Kellogg who went to the Sea Islands in South Carolina, around Port
Royal, during the Civil War to teach liberated African-American slaves who were living on
the Sea Islands growing cotton. So she actually was the first owner. And how do you think
the painting came into Kellogg’s hands? When she was in the Sea Islands the US Naval
boat that was at Port Royal was called the Kingfisher. And who do we know who was on
the Kingfisher? And who was on the Kingfisher but Winslow Homer’s younger brother, Arthur,
right? Not for very long, I’ve just been looking at the documents in your unbelievable
Archive and it’s quite clear, there he is onboard the Kingfisher and some of these teachers
actually would on the weekends and things would row out to the Kingfisher, fraternize
with the Naval boys who were fellow New Englanders. So it’s conceivable that Homer knew of Kellogg
and Kellogg knew of Homer. He may very well have given her the picture personally or sent
it through an intermediary. She was certainly one of the few people who would have had the
resources and the interest and understanding to say, “That’s an amazing picture, this
is, you know, these are the strong black women that I’ve been working with in the Sea Islands
and I want that picture on my wall.” But it took a long time to actually find the real
title of the painting. In 1987 the San Francisco museums decided to do an exhibit on Homer
and the Civil War, and they started digging and they found a tiny little clipping in an
old 1866 New York newspaper saying, “There’s some paintings on sale this week by a young
man named Winslow Homer and dah dah dah dah dah. One of them, the most interesting, is
of a woman at a cabin door called Near Andersonville.” And this was 1987, so the picture was made
in 1866, so for more than a hundred and twenty years the title was lost. So once we knew
that it was called Near Andersonville then we could see what’s going on in the painting.
And one of the things that’s going on is that there are Union soldiers who had been
trying to liberate Andersonville Prison, but they’re captured, defeated by Wheeler’s
cavalry and put in prison themselves. So from her perspective the people who were coming
to liberate her have now been captured. Thank you, Peter. Thank you.