How a forensic artist attempted to re-create the face of a Black Civil War soldier

Belle Montgomery

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An 1890 illustration depicts members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. (Kurz & Allison LOC)

By Danny Freedman
Dec. 28, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. EST
It was an unusual request for the FBI. The military’s National Museum of Health and Medicine was, in 2018, hoping the FBI would divine a face from an anonymous skull that likely belonged to an African American soldier — a skull that had been punched through by a 1-inch iron ball from a Confederate howitzer.

The soldier is thought to have been a member of one of the Civil War’s first Black regiments, an iconic infantry whose hard-fought loss near Charleston, S.C., was depicted in the Oscar-winning 1989 film “Glory.” “I desperately wanted to do it,” says then-FBI forensic artist Lisa Bailey, who retired in 2019. “I said: ‘I’ll do it at home, I don’t care.’ ”
A mostly self-taught artist and former Russian linguist for the Navy, Bailey had approximated dozens of faces from unidentified skulls during her 18 years at the FBI. In sculptures and sketches, she rebuilt likenesses from only anthropological inference — ancestry, sex, age — and a chassis of bone.
“My whole career I’ve ...
Rest of Article with more pics...How a forensic artist attempted to re-create the face of a Black Civil War soldier - The Washington Post

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Great little article. I love reconstructions like that. The irony of an article about accurately recreating the soldier's appearance using that lithograph if the battle is inescapable. The veterans were still alive when those were printed. Did anybody object to their gross inaccuracy, or had memory set in and everybody agreed that the romanticized version was good enough?
 
Great little article. I love reconstructions like that. The irony of an article about accurately recreating the soldier's appearance using that lithograph if the battle is inescapable. The veterans were still alive when those were printed. Did anybody object to their gross inaccuracy, or had memory set in and everybody agreed that the romanticized version was good enough?
Well at least they’re attacking from the correct side of the fort unlike the movie Glory haha
 
Well at least they’re attacking from the correct side of the fort unlike the movie Glory haha

It's funny... when I remember those scenes from Glory, I realize that I mentally reverse it so that I seem to "remember" it with the sea on the correct side. (Memory is an odd thing-- it's not really a literal recording/transcription...)
 
It's funny... when I remember those scenes from Glory, I realize that I mentally reverse it so that I seem to "remember" it with the sea on the correct side. (Memory is an odd thing-- it's not really a literal recording/transcription...)
Didn't the movie win an Academy award for the matte scene of the navy shelling the fort?
 
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Didn't the movie win an Academy award for the matte scene of the navy shelling the fort?
It likely wasn't for that particular effect. Glory won three Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actor (Denzel Washington of course), Best Sound (I forget his name, but believe he's sitting at the console in my photo below), and Best Cinematography (Freddie Francis, seen above at far right wearing the red-and-white checked shirt).

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