A PACK OF REBELS

As he shuffled through life, Charleston artist William Aiken Walker must have been inspired by card games, for he not only painted Poker Game Aboard a Mississippi Riverboat (1880), left, but during the Civil War he even made his own deck of cards. A Confederate map maker at the time, Walker painted miniature of four Southern heroes as kings in his patriotic pack. Three aces depict war scenes: diamonds, the firing on Fort Sumter; clubs, a Merrimac victory; hearts, the Merrimac versus the Monitor. Queens and jacks are anonymous contributors to the war effort. Walker’s quaint work is in the collection of Jay P. Altmayer of Mobile, Alabama.