Opinionator | Disunion: The Toys of War

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Just in time for Christmas 1866, a 30-year-old game creator named Milton Bradley ran an advertisement in Colman's Rural World, a St. Louis-based publication for farmers. Bradley, a lithographer living in Springfield, Mass., was already well known for inventing "The Checkered Game of Life" in 1860. His 1866 ad promoted his games and amusements as "moral, entertaining, wonderful, and instructive." Among these wonders was the Myriopticon, a toy panorama containing 22 scenes from the history of the "Rebellion" so recently concluded. The toy evidently caught on, at least for a time. The next year, another Bradley puff described the Myriopticon as "immensely popular with boys," especially those ages 7 to 12.

Given the subject – the bloody conflict that ended three-quarters of a million lives – the Myriopticon might seem an unusual choice for Christmas cheer. But Milton Bradley's picture story wrapped the grisly conflict in bright theatrical trappings fit for even the most refined middle-class parlor. In that colorful box were the tools and the script for a splendid game. It made the war dramatic, entertaining, and – above all – fun.

Made of cardboard, the elaborately decorated box – roughly a foot square – mimicked a proscenium stage, with heavy, draped curtains and patriotic bunting as well as a medieval king and queen, a harpist and a tambourine player on the sidelines. On stage, the hand-colored pictures glided past on a long scroll affixed to wooden dowels on either end that could be wound up with a crank or handle.

The complete kit included a broadside announcing the "Grand Artistic and Historical Exhibition," of the "Great Rebellion," a sheet of pretend tickets, and a script for the lucky little showman to follow as the pictures rolled by.

The instructions recommended that the "exhibition" take place in a darkened room, with parlor curtains drawn around the box and a candle light behind it to mimic the ambience of a real theater. The broadside played up the performance, too, "respectfully" requesting the audience to remain seated till the first scene rolled by.

The opening scene in the miniature epic represents Maj. Robert Anderson and his men entering Fort Sumter on Dec. 26, 1860, preparing to defend it against Confederate assault. The pictures move from combat to comic camp scenes, signal towers and mortars, and rebel prisoners under guard. (Bradley supposedly copied the lot from Harper's Weekly, though no one has yet done a systematic analysis.)

Among the crude but lively renditions, Winslow Homer's "Sharpshooter" (which ran in Harper's as "The Army of the Potomac" on Nov. 15, 1862) stands out, the original black and white enhanced by hand coloring in red and blue. Next is the Battle of Fredericksburg, which in turn shifts to a quieter scene (verifiably from a Harper's issue of Jan. 31, 1863) of contrabands just arriving at a Union camp.

The script is as lively as the drawings, mixing a sprightly tone, fast pace and broad humor appropriate for a target audience of prepubescent boys. A depiction of Union foragers attempting to capture some rambunctious hogs is labeled a "very pig-chew-resque scene," and the script styles Homer's dead-serious sharpshooter as the putative relative of a celebrated poet, because he is evidently a "very long fellow." In other sections, the "you are there" address lends immediacy, as when viewers are warned to "proceed very carefully" in approaching a party of soldiers around a campfire.

The Myriopticon was a juvenile variant on other educational amusements made for the middle-class Northern parlor. Adults and children alike peered into stereoscopes for stunningly illusionistic three-dimensional views of Civil War camps, weapons and even dead bodies strewn on battlefields. They also could play and sing war songs around the piano. Soon after the end of hostilities, they could (if affluent) page through Alexander Gardner's hefty two-volume "Photographic Sketchbook of the War," which, like the Myriopticon, presented a tightly scripted history scattered with surprising elisions, notably the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (Gardener's "Photographic Sketchbook," like Bradley's Myriopticon, dates from 1866.) The last scene in the "Photographic Sketchbook" shows the dedication of the monument at Bull Run; the last in the Myriopticon is the burning and evacuation of Richmond on the night of April 2, 1865.

Of course, no one would ever accuse Gardner or Bradley of engineering a cover-up by failing to include the assassination or glossing over the achievements of black soldiers in the Union Army. But such omissions clue us in to their shared agenda. Both Gardner and Bradley structured and shaped not just the story but also the memory of the war, all scaled down to manageable size, packaged and marketed for home entertainment and instruction. Book and toy alike stand witness to the ways in which the far-off conflict infiltrated and changed daily life, even after the war had ended. A miniature theater of war designed to play and replay the war over and over again, the Myriopticon enshrined and preserved its remembrance. As the instructions put it: "It is much better to have the lecture committed to memory than to read it, as then the facts are impressed upon the memory, and any other remarks can be mixed in, or the description varied to any extent, as long as the facts and dates are retained."

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But they were very particular facts. The Myriopticon told a thrilling saga of bravery, heroic sacrifice, Yankee ingenuity and inevitable triumph, with a few chuckles along the way. It recounted the war as an almost exclusively masculine field of action. And it was very modern in the way it mediated, commercialized and mass-produced the history and memory of the war for fun and profit.

Perhaps the Myriopticon's most modern quality is its proto-cinematic flow. Close-ups give way to distant views in seamless montage. There are lots of guns and explosions, and, just before the grand finale, the uplifting moment when "colored troops" enter Charleston, S.C., where it all began four years earlier. The final apocalyptic scene is a wide-angle view that shows the silhouettes of defeated troops fleeing Richmond as the city burns behind them. Put it in motion, and this scene could be the burning of Atlanta in the 1939 film "Gone With the Wind."

The Myriopticon still fascinates us today because it is almost a movie. In 1866, Bradley also advertised his model of the Zoetrope, a hollow drum which, when rapidly spun, gives the illusion of motion to pictures on the inner surface. It would be decades before storytelling technology finally caught up to create the motion picture as we know it. But the engagingly interactive Myriopticon deserves a place in the genealogy of the modern war movie, which, like its distant ancestor, brings the war home with gripping narrative, vivid imagery, and rousing action.

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Sarah Burns is a professor emeritus of art history at Indiana University. Daniel Greene is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. They are co-contributors to "Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North," a book that accompanies an exhibition in collaboration with the Terra Foundation for American Art, on view at the Newberry Library through March 24, 2014.

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Taking Note: Gay Marriage: Soon Available in Texas

Marriage-equality ventured into Texas on Wednesday as U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia issued a preliminary injunction against the state's amendment banning same-sex unions.

Judge Garcia's  opinion sounds a lot like recent rulings out of Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio and Utah, which characterized bans on same-sex marriage as discriminatory and counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.

"The important federalism concerns at issue here are nevertheless insufficient to save a state-law prohibition that denies the Plaintiffs their rights to due process and equal protection under the law, Judge Robert J. Shelby wrote in December when he struck down Utah's same-sex marriage ban.

Likewise, Judge Garcia wrote: "These Texas laws deny Plaintiffs access to the institution of marriage and its numerous rights, privileges, and responsibilities for the sole reason that Plaintiffs wish to be married to a person of the same sex. The Court finds this denial violates Plaintiffs' equal protection and due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

(Judge Garcia suspended his ruling until a higher court can hear the case.)

These decisions flow naturally and logically from last spring's Windsor decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down the core provision of the Defense of Marriage Act. They are no longer surprising (which isn't to say they are no longer important or meaningful).

Of course it's not only judges who are coming around quickly to marriage equality. It was only nine years ago, in 2005, that Texas voters approved the ban with an overwhelming 76 percent majority. Less than a decade later it's conceivable that roughly the same population would reject it. A 2013 poll commissioned by Equality Texas found that 52 percent of Texas voters supported recognizing same-sex marriages from other states. A slim plurality of 47.9 percent supported marriage equality in their own state.

Granted, 47.9 percent isn't what you'd call a mandate, but the pace of progress is remarkable, and can't be attributed entirely to demographic shifts (meaning that younger, more tolerant Texans are crowding out the older traditionalists). Despite what social science tells us about confirmation bias and what conventional wisdom tells us about old dogs and new tricks, people are realizing that there is no good reason to deny gay couples the right to marry, and changing their minds.

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Opinionator | Private Lives: Remembering My Mother’s Obsession

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

Of all the troubling events from my childhood, one of the most enduring remains the afternoon I visited a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. It was 1978 and I was 9 years old, escorted to Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh by my mother, who, compelled by a lifelong objective of raising her son's awareness of injustice in the world, no doubt considered this to be a well-suited occasion.

The injustice, in this particular instance, was the framing of a 21-year-old black man named Stanton Story for the killing of a white Pittsburgh police officer. At the time of our visit, three years had passed since Mr. Story's trial, in which, despite having apparently been in North Carolina on the day of the shooting, he was found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Almost three years later, however, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted Mr. Story a new trial (on the grounds that prejudicial evidence had been introduced at the first one) and, having recently declared the death penalty unconstitutional, set aside his death sentence. It was during the run-up to this second trial that the Socialist Workers Party, of which my mother was a dedicated member, began advocating on Mr. Story's behalf.

My mother's substantial commitment, bordering on mania, had made Mr. Story the predominant subject of our household for months. I was acutely aware of the effort she had been expending, at all hours, on meetings, rallies, protests. "Do you dream of freedom?" she had written in one of her many letters to Mr. Story. Then, for fear that the guards would suspect this question to be a coded invitation to attempt escape, she had frantically whited it out.

What I recall about that afternoon visit, several hours long, is mostly a feeling of dismay. Mr. Story was so pleasant, so courteous, diffident even, that the prospect of his spending the rest of his life in prison was not something I could fathom. I was also bored. The conversation between my mother and Mr. Story, which I was expected to sit through silently, revolved mainly around the particulars of a forthcoming carwash that would raise funds for his legal team. The visit ended abruptly with his being led away, but before the door closed behind him, he turned to wave a melancholy goodbye to my mother, who, standing beside me, gripping my hand, was cursing the guards under her breath and sobbing uncontrollably.

At the new trial, Mr. Story was again found guilty by an all-white jury, and since the death penalty had been reinstated, sentenced a second time to the electric chair — a sentence that on appeal would once more be reduced to life in prison. My mother, mercifully, spared me the details, informing me only that he had "lost." What are we going to do now, I remember asking, because surely, given Mr. Story's innocence, and given my mother's unflagging determination, there was always something more to be done. But no, my mother said, this was it, there was nothing else we could do. So after that, we never mentioned his name again.

But I never forgot him. Over the years, that final image of Mr. Story, looking back at us, would pop into my head at the most inopportune moments. Here I am playing basketball, I would think, and Stanton Story is still in prison. Here I am sitting on my new couch from Crate and Barrel, and Stanton Story is still in prison. Thus my mother's goal to raise my awareness of injustice in the world had been achieved. Achieved so effectively, in fact, that 30 years after that visit it occurred to me that I could contact Mr. Story, perhaps hear his account of the injustice done to him and, as with other wrongful convictions, help free him. If this sounds like a childish thought, that's because it is.

After a series of unsuccessful phone calls and Internet searches, I finally learned that Mr. Story was now incarcerated at a supermax prison 50 miles south of Pittsburgh. In addition, I found a Twitter account, ostensibly set up for Mr. Story, listing a few unsettling tweets, including "HELP HELP HELP HELP PLEASE HELP."

"Dear Mr. Story," I wrote, "I'm not sure if you'll remember me, but years ago I came to visit you one afternoon with my mother …"

One week later came a reply. No, he did not remember me. He remembered my mother, though, "a very good and dear friend," whom he thought of often. He still had a photograph in his cell of the two of them, taken at one of her many visits. His grammar was occasionally off, but all things considered he wrote with elegance and optimism. "I guess you can say that I'm constantly trying to make the best out of a bad situation" was a refrain he would repeat in nearly every letter to me. He was still hoping for a new trial. He thought the prospects were good. We made plans for me to visit. He was excited to get started, to tell me his story. "I don't want to get too far ahead of myself," he wrote.

In the meantime, I began to research his case. One of the first websites that I came across, though, was a memorial for slain police officers, which had dedicated a page to Patrick Wallace, the officer who had allegedly been killed by Mr. Story. Up to this point, I had never given much thought to Mr. Wallace. In fact, I had never given any thought to him. It occurred to me as I read that not only did I know very little about Mr. Wallace, but I also knew very little about any of the details of the case.

I soon discovered some troubling things. I learned, for instance, that at his second trial, Mr. Story admitted he had lied about his alibi of being in North Carolina. He had been in Pittsburgh, at the scene of the shooting, but he insisted that it was his companion, a man named Richard Davis, who had fired the fatal shot. Moreover, I found that he had a long history with crime, beginning as a teenager. When he was 21, he was convicted on multiple counts of armed robbery and sent to Western Penitentiary. In prison, his behavior was so exemplary that he was granted a three-day furlough, but during those three days he robbed two banks and fled to North Carolina. A month later he returned to Pittsburgh, where he may or may not have shot and killed Patrick Wallace.

All of this I was just beginning to process as I made my way from New York City to Waynesburg, Penn., to visit Mr. Story.

I had made the mistake of skipping breakfast, partly out of poor planning, but mostly out of anxiety, so that by the time I arrived I was famished. He was waiting for me when I walked in, sitting patiently at a table in the visitor's room. He had gray in his beard. He was 57 years old now.

We broke the ice by having a good laugh at the expense of the Socialist Workers Party, whose members, Mr. Story said, had disapproved when he told them that when he got out of prison he would buy a house. "We don't believe in private property," they had counseled. He spoke highly of my mother, however, and seemed to bear no ill will that she had fallen out of touch. For the next six hours we talked about his childhood, his life in prison, the improprieties in his two trials, the details of the crime.

I was plagued by a sinking feeling that even if he were innocent — which he might very well be — there would be no way to prove it. His conviction appeared to hinge largely on the testimony of Mr. Wallace's partner, whose identifications of the two men at the scene were somewhat marred by ambiguities. No bullets had been found, which meant no gun could be connected to the crime. There seemed to be no hard evidence to prove either innocence or guilt. Still, he had been sentenced twice to the electric chair.

Unable to feed myself, I fed Mr. Story. Fish sandwiches and green tea from the vending machine. I was surprised at how high his spirits remained. He described how years ago he had been shackled and transferred across the country by bus. "I looked out the window the entire time," he said. "It was the best week of my life."

When our visit was over, we promised to keep in touch. We parted with hopes and expectations. I was aware that he was smiling at me when he went back to his cell.

But the hopes and expectations were soon replaced by the monumental task that lay before me, as it had once lain before my mother. I visited with members of his family, who offered little in the way of assistance. I contacted his old lawyers, who never returned my calls. I spoke with legal experts who agreed that Mr. Story had some legitimate arguments in his favor but said that countless men and women suffered from inadequate counsel and an unfair trial.

Meanwhile, Mr. Story and I wrote letters back and forth, going over the same thin material. I thought of letting my mother know that I had reconnected with Mr. Story, but as she was nearing 80 years old, I did not want her to have to contemplate those grave and ponderous issues of hopelessness and the passage of time.

A year passed. Our letters became shorter. We began to write mostly about the Steelers. The space between sending and receiving letters grew longer. How long can a correspondence like this go on? Not long. Eventually I took so many months to respond that he never wrote back. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, it came as a relief.

Recently, while helping to organize some of my mother's things, I found a large envelope that was labeled "Stanton Story Letters." The envelope was thick, and I had the urge to open it and read what she had written to him — but I refrained. My mother had not been able to figure out how to keep up a correspondence with a man imprisoned for life. Thirty years later, neither could I.

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Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the short-story collection "Brief Encounters With the Enemy" and the memoir "When Skateboards Will Be Free."

A version of this article appears in print on 02/02/2014, on page SR7 of the National edition with the headline: Remembering My Mother's Obsession .

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