Rendering Reconciliation: Xanthus Smith at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition

In September 1862, the Philadelphia painter Xanthus Smith arrived in Port Royal, South Carolina where he served as a captain’s clerk in the Union Navy. During the war and Reconstruction, he exhibited and sold approximately twenty southern landscapes in Philadelphia which alluded to the context of emancipation in the Sea Islands—a place of early freedom. But, by the late 1860s, Smith began to phase these works out of his production as he met an increasing local demand for paintings of the Civil War’s major naval engagements, which ultimately cemented his reputation as the country’s premier Civil War marine painter. In advance of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, Smith created The Engagement Between the Pirate Alabama and the U.S.S. Kearsarge, as both the culmination of this body of work and a unique contribution to the approaching national celebration. Foregrounding Smith’s transition from landscape to naval engagement painting, this paper examines how he purposefully crafted his painting to conform to the Centennial culture of reunion. Although Civil War imagery was initially prohibited from the exhibition, Smith’s was among several battle scenes that were subsequently exhibited, including Peter F. Rothermel’s Battle of Gettysburg. However, unlike Rothermel’s hotly contested masterpiece, Smith’s painting generated little controversy. Accounting for this fact, I argue that Smith’s disembodied representation of mechanized warfare at sea accorded with the Centennial’s promotion of ascendant American industrial power while providing a commemorative image of the war that sublimated the conflict’s human cost and sociopolitical impact. Likewise, a comparison of Smith’s work with published battle accounts reveals how the artist geared his painting toward a reunited American viewing public. Drawing on the work of David Blight, I trace Smith’s oeuvre in relation to an evolving culture of Civil War remembrance, which elided the conflict’s complicated legacies while celebrating military heroism.