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    General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley
    General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley
    General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley

    By Dr. Marshall Fishwick

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    About this ebook

    As award-winning popular culture author, scholar, and fellow Virginia native Dr. Marshall Fishwick himself states in his introductory pages, “This book is about a Southerner of the Reconstruction period whose work has been almost completely ignored to date. His name was Michael Miley, and his field was photography. The record of his life and of his work indicates that he deserves a distinctive place for both his scientific contributions and his aesthetic achievements in this field.”

    Michael Miley (1841-1918) was born in Rockingham County, Virginia, and while still young moved south onto a farm in Rockbridge County. Following his service in General Thomas J. Jackson’s “Stonewall Brigade” during the war, he began his photographic career. Portraiture would go on to comprise the majority of Michael Miley’s work, with his famous images of Robert E. Lee as popular then as they are now.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPapamoa Press
    Release dateMar 12, 2018
    ISBN9781789120479
    General Lee’s Photographer: The Life and Work of Michael Miley
    Author

    Dr. Marshall Fishwick

    Marshall William Fishwick (July 5, 1923 - May 22, 2006) was an American multi-disciplinary scholar, professor, writer, and editor who started the academic movement known as popular culture studies, and established the journal International Popular Culture. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, he was a graduate of Jefferson High School and held degrees from the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale University, and later received honorary degrees from Bombay University, and Dhaka University. He began his literary career while at sea with the Atlantic Fleet during World War II. His collected poems, The Face of Jang, were published in 1945. After the war, he earned a doctorate in American Studies at Yale University and began his teaching career at Washington and Lee University in 1949, retired as professor emeritus in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech in 2003. In an academic career of more than fifty years, Dr. Fishwick contributed articles on American studies and popular culture to papers and journals all over the world. Additionally, he wrote more than twenty books and edited a dozen in the fields of history, literature, education, theology, and communication. In 1970 he co-founded the Popular Culture Association with Ray B. Browne and Russel B. Nye, working to shape a new academic discipline that blurred the traditional distinctions between high and low culture, focusing on mass culture mediums like TV and the Internet, and cultural archetypes like comic book heroes. He received eight Fulbright Awards and numerous additional grants, which enabled him to introduce the popular culture discipline at home and abroad in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Korea. The Popular Culture Association presented him with the Life Achievement Award in Popular Culture in 1997 and a lifetime achievement award in 1998. He died in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2006, aged 82.

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      Book preview

      General Lee’s Photographer - Dr. Marshall Fishwick

      This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – papamoapress@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1954 under the same title.

      © Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      GENERAL LEE’S PHOTOGRAPHER

      The Life and Work of Michael Miley

      by

      DR. MARSHALL FISHWICK

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

      MICHAEL MILEY: HIS LIFE AND WORK 6

      LEE GROUP 27

      PEOPLE 41

      PLACES 55

      NOTE ON THE APPENDICES 69

      APPENDIX I—THE ROBERT E. LEE SERIES OF NEGATIVES 71

      SECTION ONE—Personal Negatives of Gen. R. E. Lee (1807-1870) 71

      SECTION TWO—Statues and Memorials 72

      SECTION THREE—Homes, Office and Personalia 73

      SECTION FOUR—Letters and Documents 74

      SECTION FIVE—The Lee Family 75

      APPENDIX II—THE MILEY COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL, PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVES 77

      The Miley Negatives Made in Color 77

      APPENDIX III—UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE. 79

      Michael Miley and Henry Mackey Miley, of Lexington, Virginia, Assignors to Miley Colour Photograph Company, of New York, N. Y. 79

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 84

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The Virginia Historical Society, which owns the Miley plates, and which assisted in my research and arranged for publication, made possible the appearance of this volume. The man most responsible was the Society’s late director, the Rev. Clayton Torrence. John Jennings and William Rachel have carried on, just as he knew they would.

      Many people in Lexington have supplied prints and information, especially Harrington Waddell, Mrs. Finley Waddell, and the late Dr. E. P. Tompkins. Milton Russell and other staff members of the Virginia State Library, which houses the negatives, were always courteous and helpful. So was Paul Vanderbilt at the Library of Congress, who helped with the history of photography, and Frank Scherschel, of Life magazine, who made suggestions about the choice of glass plates.

      Part of the Introduction appeared in American Quarterly, and is used with permission.

      MARSHALL W. FISHWICK

      Washington and Lee University

      Lexington, Virginia

      MICHAEL MILEY: HIS LIFE AND WORK

      FOR MANY Southerners and many aspects of Southern society, the Reconstruction era was, in Lanier’s poignant words, not so much a matter of living as of not dying. Returning to former homes that were now only blackened chimneys, and to a once proud and thriving section that was now humbled and desolate, the Confederate soldiers had a tremendous job of rehabilitation ahead of them. The presence of an army of occupation, division into military districts, and the use of power by a vindictive opposition party aggravated affairs. As a final blow, Southerners were subjected to statements such as this one, made in 1870 by President Hill of Harvard: The task for the North is to spread knowledge and culture over the regions that sit in darkness.

      The heroic efforts of such Southerners as William Gilmore Simms, Margaret Junkin Preston, John Esten Cooke, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Henry Timrod to revive Southern arts and letters, despite vast difficulties, have been acknowledged. In a quatrain Timrod expressed the South’s determination to build a new culture out of the ruins of the old:

      Take with thee all thy gloom

      And guilt, and all our griefs, save

      what the breast

      Without a wrong to some dear

      shadowy guest

      May not surrender even to the tomb.

      This book is about a Southerner of the Reconstruction period whose work has been almost completely ignored to date. His name was Michael Miley, and his field was photography. The record of his life and of his work indicates that he deserves a distinctive place for both his scientific contributions and his aesthetic achievements in this field. Miley spent his life in the small town of Lexington, Virginia. Yet isolation did not tarnish his skill, nor prohibit him from exercising it with his primitive photographic equipment. Only his Lee portraits have been widely viewed up to now; but the prints that follow indicate that his talents extended in many other directions than that of a portrait artist. It is time that Michael Miley’s story be told.

      Less than a year after General Robert E. Lee had ridden to the same town to take up his duties as president of war-torn Washington College, a young ex-Confederate soldier named Michael Miley entered Lexington, Virginia. He came to open a photographic studio.

      There was no show of affection for the shy young man, such as that which citizens had tendered the idolized Lee.{1}

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