This sketch of Custer's division retiring from Mount Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley on Oct. 7, 1864, is by Alfred Waud. 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 shutter speed of cameras was not fast enough to capture action, the public's only glimpse of battle came from 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 that those by any other artist the drama and the horror of this country's most devastating conflict.
A preview of an unprecedented exhibition at the Library, "American Treasures of the Library of Congress," will be available on the Library's World Wide Web site at //www.loc.gov in mid-March.
This permanent, rotating exhibition will open to the public in the Library's Jefferson Building on May 1. Because of preservation considerations, some of the items will be on view only briefly.
George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876), who lost his life at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, first became known for his military exploits during the Civil War. He began the war as a second lieutenant assigned to the Second U.S. Cavalry and served at the Battle of Bull Run. His efforts during the Peninsular campaign in the spring of 1862 convinced Gen. George McClellan, commanding Union forces in Virginia, to add him to his staff.
In the fall of 1864, by now a major general, Custer took over the Third Cavalry Division during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign in Virginia led by Gen. Philip Sheridan. Sheridan's men forced Confederate troops from the valley, which served the South as a major source of provisions, and proceeded to burn and destroy homes, farms and standing crops as they returned North. Custer so distinguished himself that his cavalrymen were given a prominent role in pursuing Gen. Robert E. Lee's decimated Confederate army as it retreated from Richmond in April 1865. It was Custer who received the Confederate flag of truce, which preceded Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on the morning of April 9.
