Upon the Altar of the Nation (29 page)

Though sensational, the
Inquirer’s
account was not fictitious. Two weeks after the fighting, Union Private Franklin Bullard was still in shock at the enormity of the collision. In a letter to his aunt he recounted his experience:

For surgeon Daniel Holt of the 121st New York Volunteers, the aftermath was equally grim as he prepared bodies for burial. In a letter to his wife he described the scene:

Largely because of McClellan’s failure to bring up his fresh reserves, neither side could claim victory in tactical terms. Five Federal drives were repulsed at horrendous costs, with no victorious outcome. Bitterly disappointed, Holt wrote to his wife: “I am loosing
[sic]
all confidence and respect for McClellan—a man who a year ago I verily believed to be an agent of God to put down the rebellion.... Well, I only feel sad and disgusted, and not only I but almost the entire army, for we all believed that we had the rebels in the tightest spot they ever were.”
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Holt might have been a surgeon, but his military assessment was correct.

In terms of morale, Lee’s audacity stood as the antithesis of McClellan’s caution. President Davis praised the Army of Northern Virginia for heroic deeds “which have covered our flag with imperishable fame.” But in strategic terms, Antietam represented a stunning Northern achievement, in spite of the North’s ineffective command. By forcing Lee to retreat south, the Union ensured that Virginia, and not Maryland or Washington, would remain the center of war in the eastern theater. Just as portentously, the retreat from Antietam meant that European nation-states would not rush to recognize the Confederacy. Most historians agree that Antietam was not only the bloodiest single day in American history but also the single most significant battle in the Civil War.

In the West, meanwhile, General Sherman was learning his second lesson—to abandon the West Point Code and take the war to civilians. In October 1862, while on duty in Memphis, Tennessee, Sherman sustained a series of guerrilla attacks on his gunboats. In retaliation, he destroyed the town of Randolph, Tennessee, and issued orders to expel ten families for every boat fired upon. When the next attack came, Sherman immediately expelled ten of the city’s residents and destroyed all houses, farms, and crops along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Mississippi south of Memphis. When a Memphis woman objected, Sherman replied that God Himself had destroyed entire populations for far lesser crimes. Until Confederate leaders returned to their true faith, he declared, the destruction would continue. Then, ominously, he added that she (and he) were seeing “how rapidly war corrupts the best feelings of the human heart.”
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B
esides being the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, Antietam also represented the first widely photographed in American history.
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The major catalysts in bringing photography to the battlefield would be the well-established New Yorker Mathew Brady and his younger Scottish partner, Alexander Gardner. They were joined initially by perhaps two hundred other photographers, mostly in the North. Having already achieved fame as “Lincoln’s Photographer,” Brady saw with the onset of war the potential to record history in the making.

Prior to the Civil War, no one thought of photography as a form of outdoor journalism but rather as an indoor medium for portraiture. Photographic portraits imitated the painter’s canvas and tended to romanticize subjects in the same way that painted portraits did. With the onset of war, soldiers of all ranks flocked to studios to have their portraits shot. With sidearm usually included, the poses were heroic and the visages clean—literally pictures of confidence and resolve. Portraits of generals and statesman also sold well and frequently appeared in woodcut reproductions in magazines and newspapers. When Gardner joined Brady, their portrait business boomed. Gardner ran a second studio in Washington and introduced Brady to the enlargement process. With the war’s commencement, the two soon made a fortune selling “Imperial Photographs” for as much as seven hundred dollars apiece.
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But if portraits provided Brady an income, the battlefields called to his muse and imbued him with a self-proclaimed destiny. That destiny would, in the end, bankrupt him, even while it brought him immortality. Brady saw earlier than most how the camera could offer at least an indirect sense of action: “I know well enough that I cannot take a photograph of a battle, but I can get a little glimpse of some corner somewhere that will be worth while. We are making history now, and every picture that we get will be valuable.”
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Mathew Brady’s portable lab in front of the trenches at Petersburg, Virginia. By 1864 Brady had battlefield photography down to a science.

Through 1861 and to the spring of 1862, Brady trained and outfitted twenty assistants. These trainees were eventually assigned to thirty-five theaters of the war and prepared “Brady” photographs wherever the war erupted. To each operative, Brady assigned a horse and wagon, which amounted to a movable darkroom. Though the most famous, Brady and Gardner were hardly alone as field photographers. By the war’s close, at least fifteen hundred photographers worked the war as field agents or portrait makers, generating well over a million images, the vast majority of which were portraits of soldiers. Hundreds of thousands survive to the present, making the pictures proprietors of the face of civil war in American memory.

As long as Gardner worked for Brady, his photographs, like every other Brady employee’s, were identified as taken by Mathew Brady. In fact, however, it was Gardner and his assistant, James Gibson, who rushed to Antietam the day after the battle in time to catch the carnage before the burials were complete. Gardner took the camera from the wagon and then removed the cap from the lens, all the while surveying the gruesome scenes to fix in collodion.

Using a wet-plate process that would take ten minutes to print and ten minutes to develop into negatives, Gardner managed to produce seventy images in four days. The herculean effort included fifty-five stereo negatives, or stereoviews, and eight large eight-by-ten-inch plates.
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With Lee moving the Army of Northern Virginia back to Virginia, most of the still-unburied bodies that Gardner was able to photograph were Confederates. Arguably, even if Yankee bodies were available, he would have less interest in “shooting” them for fear of censorship and the dampening effect such images might have on Northern morale.

Mathew Brady’s new photographic gallery at the corner of Fulton and Broadway in New York City. Thousands of horrified viewers lined up in 1862 to view Brady’s exhibition “The Dead of Antietam.”

Contrary to most modern presumptions, Civil War photographs were not reproduced in the penny press. But, though unable to reproduce Gardner’s photographs in the press as news, or what we would call photojournalism, Brady and Gardner could mount exhibits of the images at their studios in New York and Washington.

Gardner first exhibited “The Dead of Antietam” at Brady’s gallery in New York one month after the battle. Viewers lined up on the streets of New York and pressed up against the gallery windows to stare. For the most part, the viewers were limited to New Yorkers and Washington residents—significant in numbers to be sure, but still only a small slice of the American people. Ordinary people on farms throughout the Midwest and South would not have had access. Nor would soldiers in the field.

All who witnessed the exhibits left profoundly moved. These pictures captured what no other art form could: the individual soldier at war. Warrior generals might have battles named after them, but at their most elemental, wars are about individuals locked in mortal combat with other individuals. One lives to fight again, another does not. Throughout this civil war, killing remained up close and personal, and nothing could capture the horror of tens of thousands of individual dances with death like photographs of the dead.

 

The photographs gave the public their first look at war—and their
reactions
became news as reporters struggled to describe to the absent nation the simultaneous allure and horror that drew crowds to the viewing. For a public accustomed to romantic sketches and bloodless victories the sight could be profoundly unsettling. Viewers saw bloated bodies with missing limbs and bodies contorted in frozen distension, eyes overly wide open and mouths puckered out. Dead horses lay everywhere.

For Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who had been at the battlefield searching for his wounded son, the sight of Gardner’s photographs stirred painful memories. “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views,” he wrote, “that all emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene ... come back to us. We buried them in the recess of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.”
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Never again in the Civil War would photographs of the battlefield dead have the shocking power that those of Antietam brought. The reason had less to do with the fact that Antietam was America’s costliest single day of war than because it was the first to be widely photographed. A writer for the New York Times caught the pathos of the moment well as he walked by the studio and reflected on the long lines one late October day:

“Something very like” was still an imperfect representation of real battle. Although employing relatively new technology, photographers nevertheless remained artists, and photography an art form. The images and objects it captured were necessarily filtered through the eye of the artist-photographer. This meant that photography, no less than the more inexact arts, could be vulnerable to ideology—and distortion. The same prescient reporter went on in his account to point to the limits of art—even photographic art: “[There is] one phase that has escaped photographic skill. It is the background of widows and orphans, torn from the bosom of their natural protectors by the red remorseless hand of Battle.... Homes have been made desolate, and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All of this desolation imagination must paint—broken hearts cannot be photographed.”
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