Perhaps Brady guessed as much. As he later explained, pictures were events to him. Overcoming the objections of the military, Brady wheedled permission from General Scott to go to Bull Run with two wagons, as he later recalled, which he would use as portable darkrooms. Dressed in a long white linen dust coat and wearing a flat straw hat atop his curly head and carrying extra pairs of spectacles to aid his failing eyesight, Brady planned to photograph the landscape as it looked before the battle.
And when the army moved, before dawn, he moved too; he’d gotten as far as Blackburn’s Ford, near Manassas, where he first witnessed a battle, and on July 18 and again on July 21, he soon abandoned his camera and helped the surgeons tend the wounded. Journalist Henry Villard thought Brady one of the most humane and energetic men on the field. But in the smoke and commotion, Brady lost his bearings and, according to one biographer, was likely caught up in the confusion of the Union panic. Presumably, he then wandered, alone and bewildered, near the creek, until a regiment of New York Fire Department Zouaves (named for a band of North African fighters), arrayed in flowing pants and red shirts, found him and his negatives. Along with the copy filed by Stedman and Villard, along with the sketches of the artists, along with the eyewitness accounts, Brady’s assistants would soon portray a silent world of frayed landscape and broken trees.
Though shaken by the panic, the killing, the stench of the bodies, and the sound of whinnying and terrified horses, Brady continued to cover the war. “I felt that I had to go,” he reminisced years later. “After that I had men in all parts of the army, like a rich newspaper.” (Secretary of War Stanton allowed Brady to send his photographers to the front as long as Brady covered the expenses of his crew—he estimated them at more than $100,000—which eventually would bankrupt him.) Wearing signature dust coats, like Brady, his assistants (who took many of the pictures ascribed to him) rode out to the field with their mobile darkrooms, called “whatisit wagons,” loaded with cameras, tripods, lenses, and bottles of chemicals. Considered combatants, they trekked through slimy mud to distant, dangerous locations. There were other photographers, but only Brady’s operators had the moving darkrooms equipped to handle glass plates and so Brady seemed to hold a monopoly in the field.
“In every glade and by the roadsides of the camp, may be seen all kinds of covered carts and portable sheds,” noted a correspondent. Whether for “the mighty tribe of cameraists,” or for the newspapers, or for the makers of guns and boats and uniforms, or for the “manufacturers of Metallic air-tight coffins and embalmers of the dead,” war was more than religion or rhetoric or representation; it was fast becoming business.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN by Alexander Gardner, who managed Brady’s Washington studio, shock the viewer even today with their graphic depictions of the unburied dead and the mortally wounded. Joining McClellan’s staff, the Scottish-born Gardner and his assistant James Gibson photographed the burial crews and the corpses strewn on the rolling fields near Antietam Creek, not far from Sharpsburg, Maryland. McClellan’s men had fought the Confederate general Robert E. Lee for two days there in September 1862, in a battle that resulted in more than 26,000 casualties, making it the single bloodiest day in the war.
“The hills were black with spectators,” said the illustrator Edwin Forbes. War spectators had not yet learned what war was, what it would cost—or, if they had, they hardly believed the evidence of their own eyes. A young officer at Antietam said, “There were men in every state of mutilation, sans arms, sans legs, heads, and intestines, and in greater number than on any field we have seen before.” When the thick smoke cleared, George Templeton Strong, come to inspect the battlefield for himself, witnessed, like the others, “dead horses, swollen, with their limbs protruding stiffly at strange angles, and the ground at their noses blackened with hemorrhage.”
Gardner showed those images to the men and women who hadn’t been at Antietam; he wanted to make sure they saw what he had seen and that they would not forget. For four days in late September, he and an assistant took pictures of the field, chronicling the dead and dying. The seventy resulting photographs, a mélange of historical document, sensationalistic detail, and commercial ingenuity, were displayed in October at Brady’s studio in New York. “The Dead of Antietam,” as the exhibit was called, dumbfounded the spectator who had scanned the morning newspaper before his morning coffee for bulletins of war: it was as if there was a funeral next door, said a reporter for The New York Times, as he looked into the “pale faces of the dead.” The photographs then appeared as a series of woodcuts in Harper’s Weekly: rows of dead bodies as far as the eye could see, the dead crumpled on the battlefield, the dead shoeless and in rags.
The newspaperman Frank Leslie had been disgusted by the callous indifference of the battlefield tourists, as he called them, sketched by his artist Frank Schell. No more: the picnic was over, and the cry of “On to Richmond” was bullying, dangerous propaganda at its worst. Gardner’s photographs told the viewer how odd and grotesque that “the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.”
So it was.
IN RICHMOND, CONFEDERATE orators had applauded the victory at Manassas (as the South referred to Bull Run) in which their soldiers had so nobly fought. But Mary Chesnut, whose husband had been at the battlefield, looked out of her window at the jubilant crowds and wondered why the army hadn’t chased those Yankees right into Washington and taken their city. Robert Hunter, secretary of state of the Confederate States of America, crossly replied, “Don’t ask awkward questions.”
The question wasn’t just awkward; it was nagging. “Why did we not follow the flying foe across the Potomac?” If the decision not to follow, in retrospect, seems apt—the troops were exhausted, disorganized, low on ammunition, and would likely have met Union reserves—the question is one that will occur again and again in the annals of the Civil War, as similar questions do in any war. Earlier, on July 29, 1861, just weeks after the Confederate victory at Manassas, William Russell had disparagingly told readers of the usually sympathetic London Times that “On this day of the week the Confederates could have marched into the capital of the United States. They took no immediate steps to follow up their unexpected success. To this moment their movements have betrayed no fixity of purpose or settled plan to pursue an aggressive war.” Even the soldiers dressed in gray or butternut brown wondered why they had not hounded the blue troops. “There is no legitimate excuse for our not following,” decided one of them. “It is customary to say that ‘Providence did not intend that we should win,’ but I do not subscribe in the least to that doctrine. Providence did not care a row of pins about it. If it did it was a very unintelligent Providence not to bring the business to a close—the close it wanted—in less than four years of most terrible & bloody war.”
Perhaps beyond good military reasoning, beyond luck, and beyond the inevitable fog of war, thick and fast as it had come, is another possibility: no one could quite countenance the destruction of the Union capital, which until recently had been theirs too. And though the numbers of casualties multiplied beyond what could—what can—be imagined, and though the vehemence of the men on the battlefield grew hotter and more ferocious with time and more blood, and though the women in Southern or Northern drawing rooms braced for the bad news that seemed to rain on them, and the politicians in Washington and Richmond bickered among themselves, so too did another quieter feeling stir, one that had been dormant these past years of war-mongering and invective and vitriol. That was an aversion to killing one’s own countrymen. Even as late as 1863, on the eve of battle, the Federals and the Confederates, at Stones River, Tennessee, went back and forth, one group singing “Yankee Doodle,” the other replying with “Dixie,” until one of the army bands changed the tune and began “Home Sweet Home.” In moments, “Thousands
of Yankees and Rebs, who tomorrow would kill each other,” wrote the historian James McPherson, “were singing the familiar words together.”
Although Stones River took place a year and a half after Manassas, the sentiment was doubtless long-standing. These countrymen in Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania, countrymen from the backwoods of Missouri and Maine, had been rocked to sleep with stories about Washington or Jefferson; they had heard the same tales about Bunker Hill and Yorktown, the valor of Patrick Henry, and the flintiness of John Quincy Adams. Though they called their battles by different names—Confederates generally designating by towns, such as Manassas, and Federals referring to nearby streams or rivers, such as Bull Run—they spoke the same language, shared the same history. To be sure, families were dividing. The sons of John Crittenden, whose last-minute proposals to save the Union had failed, joined different sides: his eldest, George, joined the Confederate forces, and Thomas, the Union. Were they ambivalent about what they pledged to do—kill each other? Would they be reluctant?
If so, with reluctance came, almost in direct proportion, viciousness, brutality, rage. Regardless of sentiment—likely because of it—the two sides would indeed fight and fight hard. The sentiment of brotherhood and nationhood bred a sense of betrayal and with that, fury. And sentimentality masked the violence that women and men could not admit. There were 900 killed and 2,700 wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas. And though higher and more stunning numbers of casualties were to come—at Stones River, of the 81,000 engaged, one-third were casualties (27 percent on the Confederate side, 29 percent on the Union)—the figures from the Battle of Bull Run stupefied both the North and the South.
Stonewall Jackson was not stupefied. He foresaw and welcomed death, and he appraised the Confederate victory at Bull Run as a warning. To this soldier, who had admired the courage with which John Brown faced the gallows, the Battle of Bull Run/Manassas had created a dangerous delusion. “The South was proud, jubilant, self-satisfied; it saw final success of easy attainment,” Stonewall Jackson had reportedly said. “The North, mortified by defeat and stunned by ridicule, pulled itself together, raised armies, stirred up its people, and prepared for war in earnest.”
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BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
War in earnest: so it was. Corpses lay bloated by the hot sun, soldiers stepping over them, the wounded and the dying, thirsty and in pain, moans echoing through villages and towns, South and North.
Why was the war being fought? To some Northerners, the justification for men fallen on the battlefield was the abolition of slavery. “Either slavery is essential to a community, or it must be fatal to it,—there is no middle ground,” declared Thomas Higginson in 1861. “Never, in modern days, has there been a conflict in which the contending principles were so clearly antagonistic.” He was wrong. The contending principles were not clearly antagonistic, not to everyone.
Lincoln had promised to protect slavery where it existed; that had been the Republican platform. Now that a war was under way, Lincoln was vowing to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery—as John Crittenden reminded his Senate colleagues after the disaster at Bull Run. The war was “not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any . . . purpose of overthrowing or interfering with rights or established institutions of those States,” he said. The war was a war for the Union.
Yet some men embraced John Quincy Adams’s argument about slavery: that in case of war, military emancipation of slaves was constitutional and proper: “From the instant your slave-holding states become a theater of war—civil, servile, or foreign,” Adams had declared in 1836, “—from that instant the war powers of the Constitution extend interference with the institution of slavery in every way that it can be interfered with.” Lincoln did not seize on Adams’s idea, which would have been politically disastrous both for himself and the Union cause—and ultimately for abolition.
Major General Benjamin Butler seemed, at least superficially, to agree with Adams. Slightly corpulent and very smart and the son of a widow who had run one of the boardinghouses for the Lowell mills, Butler was a superb lawyer who had championed the factory workers, arguing for a ten-hour day, a blunt Massachusetts Democrat, and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860, where he’d backed his friend Jefferson Davis and voted for him more than fifty times. (Butler was subsequently hanged in effigy in Lowell.) After Sumter, though, the heavy-lidded man who had scorned abolitionists and was scorned in turn as disreputable underwent such a transformation that his brash and bold Unionism alarmed Winfield Scott, who urged Lincoln to restrain him a bit.
In actuality, Butler was a reed in the political wind, although a tough one. There were always rumors circulating around him about underhanded deals, though nothing was ever proved. The theatrical but perspicacious General P. G. T. Beauregard would call Benjamin Butler “the Beast,” for while Major General Butler was military governor of Union-occupied Louisiana in 1862, he arrested the mayor of New Orleans, executed a man for pulling down the Stars and Stripes, imprisoned others (whom he released if bribed), and was said to have filled a coffin with stolen silver spoons. Worse, after his soldiers suffered ill-treatment at the hands of New Orleans women—they had presumably poured the contents of the chamber pot on the heads of Union men—Butler issued General Order No. 28, which promised to treat all females who harassed his troops as “women of the town plying their avocation.”
In 1861, Butler was commander of Fortress Monroe, the federal stronghold in Virginia strategically located on the James River, when three black field hands, the “property” of the secessionist colonel Charles Mallory, took refuge there. Butler fed and clothed the three men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, and put them to work. The North could seize the South’s labor force, he reckoned, and apply John Quincy Adams’s injunction about abolishing slavery during wartime; and those slaves who had been picking cotton, digging trenches, and sustaining the Confederacy could just as well work for the North. “Shall they [Confederates] be allowed the use of this property against the United States,” Butler asked, “and we not be allowed its use in aid of the United States?”
The question was direct enough, the consequences far-reaching. Butler felt that he was under no obligation to return fugitives to their masters. As far as he was concerned, the Fugitive Slave Act “did not affect a foreign country,” which Virginia had, for the moment, become by seceding from the Union—and, moreover, the Fugitive Slave Law could not affect a foreign country at war with the United States. “Our troops could not act as a marshal’s posse in catching runaway negroes to return them to their masters who were fighting us at the same time,” he reasoned. (Unionists, of course, did not recognize the right of any state to secede, so Butler could not really have regarded Virginia as a foreign country; but Virginia was surely the enemy.) However, said Butler, if Colonel Mallory would come to Fortress Monroe and swear the oath of allegiance, Butler would hand over Baker, Mallory, and Townsend. (Butler probably knew that Colonel Mallory wouldn’t show up.) Until that time, which never came, Butler considered the field hands to be “contraband of war”—a phrase he likely coined.
The abolitionist Wendell Phillips called the phrase a “bad one,” for the term validated the claim that the runaways were possessions. Neither Butler nor the federal government had freed them. Yet Butler had pushed forward an important issue, which, as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper acknowledged, “increased the dilemma of the Secessionists to a remarkable degree, since it is at once equally hostile to both Abolitionism and Secession.”
In a matter of days, black men and women were rushing to Fortress Monroe, “$60,000 worth of them,” Butler estimated without emotion. Having asked for instructions from Washington and having initially received none—though Secretary of War Cameron would cautiously approve his actions in August—Butler continued to employ the black men and women flocking to the fort. Whatever else to do with those hungry, ill-clad, homeless persons e
ager for freedom?
And what to do with their children? Calculating though he might have been, and never before remotely considered an abolitionist, Butler said he wouldn’t take able-bodied men and women into his service and ignore their children. And what to do with them in the long term? To Butler “the slave question” had become a “stumbling-block” in the prosecution of the war, and it was a humanitarian issue: evident, unassailable, and poignant.
Congress both confronted and evaded the issue when it passed the first Confiscation Act of 1861, which authorized the federal government to seize the property of anyone directly rebelling against the government. The act began to chip away at the institution of slavery. But by codifying the idea of the fugitive as contraband, it also sustained the idea that people are property. And it protected slavery in the border states, which were not directly rebelling against the government. The thirty-two-year-old abolitionist lawyer Edward L. Pierce (formerly the private secretary of Salmon Chase) who had enlisted with the 3rd Massachusetts Volunteer Militia drily explained to readers of The Atlantic Monthly after he witnessed what had happened at Fortress Monroe, “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen, but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”
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