A New Look at Old Abe’s Color Guard By Tyler Phillips, Kenneth E. Byrd and Xukai Zou

ne of the best-known images of the Civil War is that of of 1861, Chief Sky sold Old Abe to Daniel McCann, a French-Canadian the 8th Wisconsin Infantry Color Guard with its live eagle employee of Hudson’s Bay Company during a trading expedition. Chief mascot, Old Abe, taken shortly after the fall of Vicks- Sky received a bushel of corn in exchange for the eagle. burg, Miss., in July 1863. Although this image is widely Later that year, McCann sold Old Abe to Capt. John E. Perkins for familiar, the identities of the soldiers within the image are $2.50. Perkins had recruited volunteers from Wisconsin’s Eau Claire and uncertain. The original glass plate negative made by an Chippewa Counties to fight for the Union. They called themselves the unknown photographer resides at The Old Court House “Eau Claire Badgers.” These men adopted Old Abe, named by Perkins after Museum in Vicksburg. President , as their mascot. The company’s quartermaster A copy print of the photograph, part of the A.G. constructed an ornate wooden perch for him. Weissert Collection in the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, In early September 1861, the Eau Claire Badgers traveled to the state features inscribed notes of some of the soldier’s identities. capital in Madison, and mustered into federal service as Company C of These inscriptions have become the de facto identifica- the 8th Wisconsin Infantry. After a few weeks of basic training at tions of the men in the image, though by an unknown author in what Camp Randall in Madison, the 8th left for the war’s Western appears to be a modern hand printing. We recently performed Theater. By this time, the 8th had become known as “The Oclassic and cutting-edge photo sleuthing techniques on this image Eagle Regiment.” According to a wartime account, the to gain insights about the true identities of the members of the enemy referred to Old Abe as “Yankee Buzzard.” color guard and the reliability of previous identifications. The Eagle Company had a volunteer “eagle Old Abe has a rich and unusual history. Chief Sky of the bearer,” who carried the perch to which Old Abe Ojibwa Native American tribe captured Old Abe within was tethered. This eagle bearer was charged with present-day Chequamegon National Forest. In the spring protecting and caring for Old Abe and would bring

MI Spring 2019 60 Researchers combine classic and cutting-edge techniques to reexamine the identities of soldiers in an iconic image

the eagle into battle alongside the color guard. Old Abe survived these forays and the war. The man who introduced him to the regiment, however, did not. Capt. Perkins suffered a mortal wound in the side at the Battle of Farmington, Miss., part of the , in May 1862. After the dawn of peace, Old Abe became an honorary Wisconsinite and American icon. He lived in a special room inside the Wisconsin Capi- tol. Popular at veterans’ reunion and other events, his photographs raised funds for various charitable causes. His death in 1881 was widely mourned, and taxidermists stuffed his body for display as a war relic. A 1904 fire in the Capitol consumed his remains. His likeness adorns many historical structures throughout Wisconsin and serves as the logo for the equipment manufacturer Case Corporation, as well as the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. The image of Old Abe with the Color Guard pictures eight soldiers standing at parade rest in two rows of four. In the front row on the far left, a private holds the shield-shaped perch with Old Abe resting on top. Also in the front row, a sergeant holds the national colors, flanked on either side by a corporal. All the men wear broad-brimmed hats. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum print contains inscriptions on the

A.G. Weissert Collection, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison, Wis.

View of the front and back of the print, and the mount to which it is attached.

Spring 2019 MI 61 back identifying six of the eight soldiers. They are, from left to right: Soldier No. 3 Edward Homiston, an unknown soldier, Ambrose Armitage, Martin Diker- SUPPORTS CLAIM shield (or Dickerschied), David McLain, George Reily [sic], Adolph Pitsch, and another unknown soldier. Next, we considered the soldier third from the left, identified as We set out to verify Ambrose Armitage (1839-1880) of Rubicon, Wis. Armitage taught school the widely accepted iden- before he enlisted and kept a detailed diary of his daily activities during the war. An annotated edition of this diary appeared in 2006 by Alden Carter Old Abe’s likeness tifications. As noted in can be found on previous issues of MI, as Brother to the Eagle: The the insignia of the even museum holdings Civil War Journal of Sgt. Army’s can sometimes be mis- Ambrose Armitage, 8th 101st identified, and inscrip- Wisconsin Infantry. Armit- Airborne tions cannot be taken age noted that he was a Division part of the color guard, and and the at face value. We used equipment traditional techniques, spent most of his time with manufacturer as well as biometric and Company C. On March Case Corporation. computational analyses. 8, 1863, he wrote: “I have We began our photo heretofore been in the third sleuthing by gathering rank of the color guard on reference images, military the right of the state colors. To day I was placed service records and contemporary accounts for each of the soldiers named in the front rank on the right of the US flag. on the back of the image. Sergt Briggs Co ‘C’ is color bearer.” Here are our findings. Later, during the , Armitage stated that he was still part of the color guard. He also mentioned “Briggs” several times as the flag bearer, and “Homaston” (Homiston) as the eagle bearer. Unfortunately, he did not identify other color guard members. Soldier No. 1: Eagle Bearer Thus, by his own account, Armitage stood to the right of the national SUPPORTS CLAIM colors, a position supported by the photo’s inscription. The man’s chevrons match Armitage’s rank of corporal (later sergeant) in 1863. Finally, identi- First, we considered the leftmost soldier, the eagle bearer, identified in fied wartime portraits of Armitage from the aforementioned annotated the inscription as Edward Homiston (1837-1915) of Eau Claire. The 1865 edition of his diary and Ancestry.com show a similarly clean-shaven, square- book, History of ‘Old Abe’ the War Eagle of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteers jawed man, leading us to identify him as Armitage.

Soldier No. 5: National Flag Bearer CHALLENGES CLAIM Armitage’s diary supported two identifications from the inscription— of Homiston, and Armitage himself. But it called into question a third

by Joseph O. Barrett, identifies Homiston (or Homaston) as the eagle bearer in the Color Guard photo. Having established identification. While this, we moved on to Armitage named “Sgt. the visual evidence of Briggs” as the flag the man’s uniform and bearer, the photo in- facial features. The scription indicates that soldier wears a sack coat the fifth soldier, the flag without chevrons, con- bearer, is David McLain sistent with Homiston’s (1837-1921) of Gil- rank of private. We manton, Wis. While then compared the soldier’s face with two identified reference photos—a period accounts name wartime view from the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and a postwar view McLain as a former from Ancestry.com—and found strong similarities. Thus, all the evidence eagle bearer, there is no supports the inscription’s claim of Homiston as the soldier. evidence he carried a

MI Spring 2019 62 flag. Furthermore, unlike the flag bearer in the photo, McLain never held To test this theory, we compared the facial features of the flag bearer the rank of sergeant. with those of several other candidate soldiers who served in the Color The evidence favoring “Sgt. Briggs” is stronger. Myron A. Briggs (1838- Guard. We performed a range of tests using traditional biometric and state- 1923) of Eau Claire served as a sergeant in Company C. In the 1929 book of-the-art deep learning techniques. History, Tradition and Adventure in the Chippewa Valley by William W. The traditional biometric techniques involve two main steps. First, as Bartlett, the photo of Old Abe and the Color Guard is reproduced. Bartlett a preparatory step, we increased the contrast of the images using a process credits the image to the daughter of Briggs, who identified her father as known as “contrast equalization.” Then, we applied hundreds of Gabor the fifth, flag-bearing soldier. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate any filters, which are commonly used by researchers to reveal minute features in photographs of Briggs to compare facial features. images. These traditional techniques yielded interesting results that motivated us to apply a deep learning method called FaceNet, developed by Google for Soldier No. 6: Regimental Flag Bearer large-scale face recognition and verification. FaceNet analyzes visual imagery CHALLENGES CLAIM using a “convolutional neural network,” which extracts facial features from images for easy comparison. The method has been proven extremely ac- The mount inscription identifies the soldier holding the regimental flag curate. as “George Reily,” likely a reference to Cpl. George William Riley (1838- A detailed, scientific description of our methods can be viewed at 1905) of Eau Claire. The soldier’s rank insignia, if any, is obfuscated by the https://cs.iupui.edu/~xzou/CivilWarFacialAnalysis.pdf Our analysis using these techniques found that Riley’s wartime portrait had a 20 percent lower facial similarity than Quick’s 1905 portrait. We con- cluded that the inscription naming the sixth man as George Riley is likely incorrect. Civil War researcher Scott Fink later reinforced this result. He observed that Quick and the sixth man share a similar expression produced by a facial muscle located between the eyes at the brow line known as the corrugator supercilii. Reference photos of George Riley lacked this distinc- tive expression, suggesting he was not the flag bearer.

Soldier No. 7 SUPPORTS CLAIM men standing in front The inscription identifies this man as Adolph Pitsch (about 1830- of him, but one war- 1878) of Chippewa Falls, Wis. In the 1890 book, The Eagle Regiment, 8th time reference photo Wisconsin Infantry, author John M. Williams noted that Pitsch was given of Riley is available through the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. A comparison of these photos casts doubt on the Riley identification. One of our team, Dr. Kenneth Byrd, raised a doubt during his initial research that the sixth man may not be Riley after surfacing Walter Quick, a circa 1905 image of circa 1905. another member of the Color Guard, Corp. Walter Quick (1836- 1913). Byrd uncovered this fact in a 1918 orders to carry Old Abe edition of the Wisconsin in the event Edward Birnamwood News, as Homiston was killed. well as family history It is reasonable to infer and obituary informa- that Pitsch belonged tion, all provided by Jason Quick, a direct descendant of Corp. Quick. to the Color Guard. Byrd approached a colleague, Dr. Xukai Zou, and asked if there might Two pieces of evidence be a technical way to validate the identity of the regimental flag bearer. support this identity. Zou, an associate professor in the Department of Computer & Information The soldier wears the Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), of- chevrons on his sleeves, fered ideas about how to apply modern technology to tackle the problem. A which rank Pitsch held. preliminary study and extensive experiments (conducted by Tyler Phillips, Moreover, a wartime portrait of Pitsch from the Wisconsin Veterans Mu- a PhD student at IUPUI) followed to determine if Quick, and not Riley, seum resembles him. We concluded that the identification is correct. might be the man holding the regimental flag.

Spring 2019 MI 63 Remaining Soldiers (No. 2, No. 4 and No. 8) Adventure in the Chippewa Valley; Carter, Brother to the Eagle: The Civil War Journal of Sgt. Ambrose Armitage, 8th Wisconsin Infantry; Williams, The Eagle Regiment, 8th Wis. Infty. INCONCLUSIVE Vols.: A Sketch of Its Marches, Battles and Campaigns, from 1861 to 1865; Kazemi and Sul- livan, “One millisecond face alignment with an ensemble of regression trees,” 2014 IEEE These men remain unidentified. The second soldier, whose rank is ob- Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Guo and Huang, “Human scured, may be Cpl. Lucas B. Lathrop (1836-1929), mentioned in Armit- age estimation using bio-inspired features,” 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision age’s diary as a member of the Color Guard. His distinctive, clean-shaven and Pattern Recognition; Spizhevoi and Bovyrin, “Estimating human age using bio- inspired features and the ranking method,” Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis 25.3 (2015); Pizer, Amburn, Austin, Cromartie, Geselowitz, Greer and Zimmerman, Adap- tive histogram equalization and its variations, Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing, v.39 n.3; Schroff, Kalenichenko and Philbin, “FaceNet: A unified embedding for face recognition and clustering,” 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Huang, Ramesh, Berg, Learned and Miller, “Labeled faces in the wild: A database for studying face recognition in unconstrained environments,” Technical Report 07-49; Wolf, Hassner and Maoz, “Face recognition in unconstrained videos with matched background similarity,” CVPR 2011; Birnamwood News, Jan. 16, 1918; Quick Family History book; Shawano County Journal, Oct. 2, 1913; Scott Fink email to Kenneth E. Byrd, July 18, 2018; Neumann, Chan, Boyle, Wang, and Westbury, “Measures of empathy: self-report, behavioral, and neuroscientific approaches;” Boyle, et al., Elsevier Science & Technology 2014. face bears some similarities to two postwar reference photos of Lathrop from the Wisconsin Historical Society. The fourth soldier’s face is barely Soldier photo credits visible due to Armitage and shadows. Without hints provided by historical Wisconsin Veterans Museum: Edward Homiston, David McLain, George W. Reily and evidence, identifying this man may not be possible. The facial features of Adolph Pitsch. the eighth soldier, a corporal, are hidden behind shadows and an impressive Armitage Family: Ambrose Armitage. full beard, making a visual comparison difficult. Jason Quick: Walter Quick Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank the following individuals for their time, Summary assistance, suggestions, and input: Dr. Kurt Luther, Assistant Professor of Computer Our research supports the identifications of five of the eight soldiers Science, Virginia Tech Research Center-Arlington; Samantha Wolf, Reference Archivist at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum; Lisa Marine, Image Reproduction & Licensing Man- pictured in the Old Abe and Color Guard at Vicksburg photo and chal- ager at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Theodore P. Savas of Savas Beatie LLC Publish- lenges two previous identifications. Our analysis of the national flag bearer’s ing; Scott T. Fink, Olney, Md.; Alden Carter, Wisconsinite Author of 2006 publication of identity provides a proof-of-concept that these methods can be used to Ambrose Armitage’s Diary; Jason Quick, Denver, Colo., and great-great-grandson of Cpl. challenge assumptions and illuminate new possibilities. Our future work Walter Quick. plans involve gathering a more complete collection of images of likely Note: This work was partially supported by an IUPUI School of Science Near the candidates within the group portrait. With this collection, we hope to Miss grant and an NSF Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure grant (NSF perform a comprehensive, comparative experiment to further validate our #1839746). identifications and also identify as many of the other soldiers pictured in the photograph as possible. Authors Tyler Phillips is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer & Information Science References: Zeitlin, Old Abe The War Eagle: A True Story of the Civil War and Reconstruc- at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). tion; McLain, “The Story of Old Abe.”The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1925); Barrett, History of “Old Abe,” the Live War Eagle of the Eighth Regiment Wisconsin Kenneth E. Byrd is Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology Volunteers, Eau Claire Leader, March 27, 1914; McLain, David (1976). "That ‘war eagle’ at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis. had quite a record.” Eau Claire Leader Telegram, American Local History Network- Xukai Zou is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science Wisconsin Local History Network-Eau Claire County; Bartlett, History, Tradition and at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

Old Abe: a visual record

In death.

Wisconsin Historical Society. Wisconsin Historical Society. The Liljenquist Family Collection The Liljenquist Family Collection Ronald S. Coddington at the . at the Library of Congress. Collection.

MI Spring 2019 64