How Did Art Help Spin the Civil War?

In the late 1800s, a Georgian businessman retooled a giant painting of the Battle of Atlanta to portray the South winning. Learn the history of this epic cyclorama -- and where you can see it today -- in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/american-civil-war/atlanta-cyclorama.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Vogelbaum here. In eighteen sixty four, during the Civil War,
General William Sherman stomped through the United States South, marching
his Union army across Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean. He

(00:23):
demoralized the Confederation and wreaked havoc on their supply chain
in one of the most decisive campaigns of the war.
But in the late eighteen hundreds, a businessman from Georgia
wanted people to believe that Sherman had lost the Battle
of Atlanta, and he used a spectacular piece of artwork
to try to spin the story into a Confederate win.

(00:47):
His name was Paul Atkinson. Atkinson was something of a
marketing maven and the son of a Confederate soldier. He
purchased this artwork, a cyclorama called the Battle of Atlanta
in eighteen ninety one, and reinterpreted several scenes to then
promote the painting as a win for the Confederates. Cycloramas

(01:09):
were hugely popular in the eighteen hundreds. These massive pieces
of art were typically housed in big buildings so that
viewers could stand on platforms and be completely surrounded by it.
The painting's horizons were at eye level and skylines were
painted to achieve depth of field, while lower portions sometimes
incorporated physical figurines and other items as part of ground

(01:32):
floor dioramas. This helped to achieve an overall three dimensional effect.
Atkinson took out an advertisement in an Atlanta newspaper in
eighteen ninety two urging people to buy tickets to come
see the painting that proved the valor of the Confederate
soldiers in their victory. This historic battle was not a

(01:54):
Confederate victory, of course, A Sherman and the Union practically
burned Atlanta to the ground. To this day, our city's
seal features of Phoenix rising from the ashes. But Atkinson
got away with his ideological spin for decades with the
help of bitter Southerners clinging to the Lost Cause, which
is an ideology that permeated the South, saying that the

(02:17):
Civil War was fought to preserve its culture in general,
and not slavery in particular. The story of the Battle
of Atlanta cyclorama began when the American Panorama Company commissioned
a team of seventeen German and Austrian painters in Milwaukee
to create this massive painting as a tribute to Union veterans.

(02:39):
The painters traveled to Atlanta, made sketches of the landscape
where the center of the Battle of Atlanta took place,
and interviewed Union survivors. The cyclorama was painted in eighteen
eighty five and premiered in eighteen eighty six. It attracted
adoring crowds in Minneapolis and then Indianapolis. It is hugh

(03:00):
It measures forty nine feet tall by three hundred and
seventy one feet long, and weighs some ten thousand pounds
in metric that's about twenty by one hundred and thirteen
meters and over forty five hundred kilos. The painters were
instructed to take the battle on July twenty second of
eighteen sixty four and freeze it for history. This part

(03:23):
of the painting shows a fierce fight on the rail
line just outside of Atlanta that hadn't yet turned into
victory for the Union. The Union had set up a
trench line, but the Confederates had broken through. There were
skirmishes with bayonets flashing and horses mortally wounded. There were
heroic figures on both sides The painting was purposefully created

(03:46):
in a way that showed drama a fight yet to
be decided. But by eighteen ninety the entertainment value of
the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama had worn off in the North,
and the owners declared bankruptcy. In stepped Atkinson, whose four
brothers had fought in the Battle of Atlanta along with
their father. Atkinson had been too young to fight, but

(04:10):
in the painting he saw a way to memorialize his
family and the South. He bought the cyclorama at a
low price and moved it to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and began
to rewrite history. As we said, the original creators didn't
paint the battle in a way that showed a decisive win,
and Atkinson was able to use that to his advantage.

(04:32):
He hired his own team of painters to make a
few simple changes that turned the entire narrative around. In
one scene that depicts captured Confederates in gray being taken
prisoner by Union soldiers in blue, and a Union soldier
holding a crumpled Confederate flag, his team simply repainted the
soldier's uniforms. The imprisoned soldiers were now in Union blue

(04:56):
and being herded by Confederate rebels, and that Confederate a
flag in the hands of the Union was simply painted over.
Atkinson's skill as a promoter did the rest to spin
this new narrative. He moved the painting to Atlanta in
eighteen ninety two, upon which local newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution,
proclaimed it the only Confederate victory ever painted. However, some

(05:22):
Southerners embraced Atkinson's painting because it proved the South had
fought valiantly to preserve its way of life. The Cyclorama
became a monument to revered Confederate leaders, just like the
statues popping up around the South, but eventually crowds thinned
in Atlanta, just as they had in the North. On

(05:43):
November fifteenth of eighteen ninety two, in a last desperate
attempt to make some money, Atkinson ran another advertisement in
the newspaper, again proclaiming a Southern win, but his show
had gone bankrupt by the end of the year. For decades,
the Cyclorama continued to remain a symbol of the lost Cause,

(06:03):
but that was also part of its downfall. Many' souther
nurse did not embrace this ideology. Eventually Atkinson sold the
painting to Ernest Woodruff, another local businessman, who immediately resold
it for a small profit. The piece was finally moved
to Atlanta's Grant Park, where it remained until twenty fourteen.

(06:26):
But meanwhile, in nineteen thirty four, then Atlanta Mayor William
Hartsfield co opted the epic painting for his own use.
He commissioned historian and painter Wilburg Kurtz to restore the
painting to its original form as part of a branding
campaign for the city. Hartsfield's message was here's how we suffered,

(06:46):
Here's how we have risen from the ashes. The mayor
declared that the painting shows the valor of both sides,
the North and the South, and that it was time
to come together. A Kertz researched original drawings from the
eighteen eighth and discovered Atkinson's edits. He repainted the Union
soldiers back in command of the captured Confederates and returned

(07:07):
the captured Confederate flag, and just like that, the North
won the Battle of Atlanta again. Kurtz's work also included
creating plaster figurines like the ones that would have originally
been displayed with the work at ground level. I bring
this up because when the film Gone with the Wind
premiered in Atlanta, Mayor Hartsfield took actor Clark Gable on

(07:30):
a tour of the cyclorama, and soon after, at Gable's request,
there was a diaryma figurine of his character, a dying
reht Butler added to the scene at the base of
the painting. Anyway, in twenty fourteen, the Atlanta History Center
undertook another monumental restoration effort to bring the painting back

(07:52):
to display. For the article this episode is based on,
has Stuff Work spoke with Gordon Jones, the senior military
historian and curator at the Atlanta History Center. He said,
You've got this wonderful artifact, with this wonderful, rich, deep
history that can tell you a whole lot about the
nation's history and Atlanta's history and the history of race,

(08:14):
and those stories are not being told. Let's treat it
as an artifact and learn from it. We don't have
to make up stuff. Let's be honest and tell people
the truth. That's what they expect out of a museum.
The thirty five million dollar restoration campaign included moving the
painting from Grant Park to its own specially built rotunda

(08:35):
at the Atlanta History Center. The History Center used a
multitude of resources to interpret the painting in the context
of the battle itself, the Civil War as a whole,
the role of slavery within it, the reconstruction era, and
how the country was divided Today. The Battle of Atlanta
is one of only two cycloramas from that era on

(08:58):
display in North America. The other is the Battle of Gettysburg,
located in Pennsylvania. But the value of the Battle of
Atlanta cyclorama goes well beyond money and its pull on crowds.
The real value may be a lesson in how Americans
can interpret and freestyle with facts to satisfy their own

(09:19):
view of the world. Today's episode is based on the
article how Atlanta's cyclorama was used to spin the Civil
War on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Ray Glear.
Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts

(09:40):
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