Turning Points in Six Artifacts: A Civil War Exhibit in Galena

Exhibit Labels

1Welcome. When the war began in April 1861, Ulysses S. Grant was working in his family's leather goods store here in Galena. Three years later he commanded all the Union armies.

2Artifact A: Photograph from Antietam, 1862. On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate armies fought near Antietam Creek in Maryland. About 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing, more than on any other single day of the war. Lee's army, which had marched into the North, went back to Virginia. A month later, photographs taken on the battlefield by Alexander Gardner went on display at Mathew Brady's gallery in New York City. For the first time, many Northerners saw photographs of soldiers who had died in battle.

3Artifact B: Printed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1863. Five days after Antietam, President Lincoln announced that on January 1, 1863, enslaved people in areas still in rebellion would be "thenceforward, and forever free." The order could take effect only where Union armies reached. The final Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863, also announced that Black men would be accepted into the Union army and navy.

4Artifact C: Recruiting poster, 1863. Posters like this one, printed in Philadelphia, urged Black men to enlist with the words "Come and join us, brothers." By the end of the war, about 180,000 Black men had served in the Union army, roughly one in ten of its soldiers. At first they were paid less than white soldiers; in 1864 Congress made their pay equal.

5Artifact D: Wallpaper newspaper, Vicksburg, 1863. Vicksburg, Mississippi, stood on high bluffs above the Mississippi River. In May 1863 Grant's army surrounded the city. As the siege went on, food and paper ran short, so the city's newspaper, the Daily Citizen, was printed on the back of wallpaper. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863. Union soldiers found the paper's type and added a note of their own before printing a last issue. After Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered days later, the Union controlled the whole Mississippi River, cutting the Confederacy in two.

6Artifact E: Copy of the Gettysburg Address, 1863. On July 1–3, 1863, the same week Vicksburg fell, Union forces turned back Lee's second invasion of the North at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. That November, Lincoln spoke at the opening of a cemetery for Union soldiers there. His speech lasted about two minutes. He said the war was testing whether a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could last, and he called for "a new birth of freedom."

7Artifact F: Surrender terms, Appomattox, 1865. On April 9, 1865, with his army surrounded in Virginia, Lee met Grant at Appomattox Court House. Grant's terms let Confederate soldiers go home if they promised not to fight again, and let those who owned horses take them home for spring planting. Grant's military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, wrote out the final copy of the terms. Parker, a Seneca leader from New York, had lived in Galena before the war and become Grant's friend. His community, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, still lives in western New York today.