A Civil War Sketch Artist

Alfred Waud was recognized as the best of the Civil War sketch artists who drew the war for the nation's pictorial press. Waud could render a scene quickly and accurately, with an artist's eye for composition and a reporter's instinct for human interest.

At a time when the shutterspeed of cameras was not fast enough to capture action, the public's only glimpse of battle came from the sketch artists. Waud's apparent courage under fire and passion for the men he depicted drew him dangerously close to the fighting, and his drawings portray more intimately than those by any other artist the drama and horror of this country's most devastating conflict.

The first Waud sketch is of Custer's division retiring from Mount Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley on October 7, 1864. George Armstrong Custer (1839-76), who lost his life but achieved immortality at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876, first became known for his military exploits on behalf of the Union army during the Civil War.

He began the war as a second lieutenant assigned to the Second Cavalry and served at the First Battle of Bull Run, 1861. His efforts during the Peninsular campaign in the spring of 1862 convinced General George McClellan to add him to his staff, and by war's end Custer had become one of the most celebrated and decorated officers in the Northern army.

In the fall of 1864, now a colonel in the regular army and a major general of the volunteer corps, Custer took over the Third Cavalry Division in support of the Shenandoah Valley campaign led by General Philip Sheridan. During the campaign, Sheridan's men forced Confederate troops from the valley, which served the South as a major source of produce and provisions, and proceeded to burn and destroy homes, farms, and fields full of crops as they returned North.

Custer so distinguished himself during the campaign that his division was given a prominent role in pursuing General Robert E. Lee's Confederate army as it fled from Richmond in April 1865. It was Custer who received the Confederate flag of truce that led to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on the morning of April 9.