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 Abraham Lincoln, 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 Siege of Corinth, 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 Siege of Vicksburg, 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.