The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

MRS. STUART’S PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY

  “If there were a collection of all the pictures made at Mrs. Stuart’s, celestial and terrestrial, there would be some funny revelations,” the photographer Charles Boyle said. “Many ‘spirits’ would be found to resemble mortals altogether too much, and many to appear too often; and if truth only would rise again, as the distinguished ‘medium’ pathetically observes, then ‘spirit photography’ à la Mr. Mumler sleeps the sleep that knows no waking.”

  With evidence mounting and negative newspaper reports beginning to pile thick on his desk, Mumler’s staunchest supporters abandoned him. Not only did William Guay shake the dust from his feet as he departed a city that had brought him nothing but misadventure and disappointment; even the dean of New England Spiritualism, H. F. Gardner, could no longer ignore his doubts. Mumler quietly withdrew from the public debates over spirit photography, offering not a word of defense as Boyle and other investigators declared victory.

  “I have neither the time nor desire to pursue the soulless, heartless, humanityless, tomb-robbing ghoul any further,” Boyle soon wrote, washing his hands of the spirit photography business, “but must leave it as I found it, crouching in all its degrading deformity by the graveside, feeding on the memories of the dead.”

  Hotbed of Spiritualism though it was, Boston was perhaps not the best place for Mumler to introduce spirit photography to the world. The city’s zealotry both in support of and opposition to novel spiritual pursuits had made his ghost pictures suspect from all sides. In the end, it was neither the skeptics nor the true believers who harassed him to the point of closing up shop, but a coalition of those with very different reasons to challenge his claims.

  “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter.” Alexander Gardner studio, attributed to Timothy O’Sullivan, 1863.

  CHAPTER 16

  Whose Bones Lie Bleaching

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE summer of 1863, with the ninety-seventh anniversary of American independence looming, Confederate troops began massing along the Pennsylvania border, making signs of a possible push into the North to demonstrate the reach of the rebellion. Their aim was to shock northerners into abandoning the war.

  As they had done after they heard of the fighting in Sharpsburg, Alexander Gardner and his assistants Timothy O’Sullivan and James Gibson, whom he had hired away from Brady at the first opportunity, loaded up their whatsit wagon and rode out from Washington to the village of Gettysburg. They did not arrive in time to see the battle itself, but the damage it had done to the surrounding farmland was everywhere apparent. Gardner made no notes on his general impressions of Gettysburg or the battlefield for which it would immediately become known, but another past associate of his former employer did.

  The landscape the photographers saw before they had unloaded their cameras can be found in an account written by Mathew Brady’s old collaborator in phrenology, Eliza Farnham. The former prison matron had spent more than a decade on the West Coast and had recently returned for a speaking tour of Spiritualist meetings in eastern cities. While in Philadelphia, Farnham had heard of the terrible fighting 130 miles away. She left the city immediately to see if she might be of service to the wounded.

  Two days later, she discovered that Gettysburg was a place beyond all human help.

  “The whole town, about 3000 inhabitants, is one vast hospital,” Farnham wrote, “all public and a great many private buildings full of sufferers . . . The road, for long distances, was in many places strewn with dead horses; the human dead having been all removed by this time. The earth in the roads and fields is ploughed to a mire by the army wheels and horses. Houses are occasionally riddled with bullets, cannon or shell, and the straggling wounded line the roads, and rest against the fences.”

  She wrote a letter to Andrew Jackson Davis’s Herald of Progress to inform her fellow Spiritualists of what she had seen, and to urgently request donations.

  Gettysburgh, July 7, 1863.

  Dear friends of the Herald, both readers and editors, lend me your ears, hearts, and means for a little while. We want all that you can spare that will minister to the physical comfort of thousands of suffering men, besides papers, pamphlets, and any other reading easy for feeble persons to handle. We want old, clean, soft cloths, whether cotton or linen, sour fruits, jellies, jams, &c. We are going this moment out to the field hospitals of the Second, Third, and Fifth Corps, where, as we understand, the condition is much worse than that we have seen in the hospitals of the town.

  In great haste,

  E. W. Farnham.

  When she reached the field hospitals, not even the otherworldly certainty of her faith prepared her for what she found. “There are miles of tents and acres of men lying on the open earth beneath the trees,” she wrote later that day. “Good God! What those quiet looking tents contained! What spectacles awaited us on the slopes of the rolling hills around us! It is absolutely inconceivable, unless you see it.

  “I never could have imagined anything to compare . . . Dead and dying, and wounded, in every condition you can conceive after two days in such a rain of missiles. Old veterans, who have seen all our battles, say that there never has been such firing anywhere for more than half an hour or so, as there was here for the greater part of nine hours. No wonder that men who were rushing upon and through and upon it should be torn to pieces in every way,” she wrote. “But the most horrible thing was to see these limbs lying, piled up like offal at the foot of a tree in front of the surgeon’s tent.”

  No amount of jellies and jams, she realized, would do these men any good.

  As Farnham worked herself to exhaustion among the tents of the dying, Gardner, Gibson, and O’Sullivan climbed down from their rolling photography studio and began hunting for vistas with which to tell the story of what had happened there. The corpses of Union men had been mostly gathered up, carted away by burial details charged with making a distinction between rebels and those loyal to the nation. In the pitted farmers’ fields, this left only Confederates to serve as the photographers’ subjects.

  Gardner had learned a thing or two since Antietam about how to turn such scenes as Farnham described into stories that would help his images capture a viewer’s imagination. He walked the woods and wheat fields with a prop rifle on his shoulder, ready to add it to any tableau that needed an extra telling detail.

  He found one such scene far from the cries of the field hospitals. The rocky outcropping at the base of two hills just south of Gettysburg was likely called Devil’s Den long before the battle made it hell on earth. A century before, Scotch-Irish and German settlers had told tales of “ghosts and hobgoblins seen there in the still hours of the night,” and even before their arrival it was a place the Susquehannock people considered close to the spirit world, not least of all, the archaeological record suggests, because many had fought and died there.

  Union forces had held the high ground, firing all but unmolested as the rebels tried to advance. Confederate corpses now crowded the surrounding fields. Gardner took several images, making notes for the stories he would write about each. To a dead horse still attached to a wrecked artillery wagon he gave the caption “Unfit for Service.” To a cluster of bloated bodies in an area enclosed by low walls of exposed rock, he attached the label “The Slaughter Pen.” When he found a man on his back with his insides torn out, probably gutted by hogs that had escaped their pens during the fighting, he decided the story of this image would be improved if the livestock went unmentioned, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination. Because so many of the men had died in summertime farm fields, he described the scene as a whole as a “harvest of death.”

  Forty yards from the largest boulders of Devil’s Den, Gardner saw a young soldier who had somehow retained the glow of youth despite lying in the sun for two days. He painstakingly took the dead man’s photograph from several angles. As he moved around the body, he considered it the way a painter might look upon a fruit bowl: an object like any other caught in the play of light and shadow
, frozen in time for a still life. He noted that the man’s cap and gun were “thrown behind him by the violence of the shock.”

  Beneath the body, Gardner saw a ragged blanket. He took pains to include this detail in the photo’s composition, supposing that it showed how the soldier had settled in here for a long engagement with the northerners. He imagined the rebel at close range with his Union counterpart, each man pulling tricks—a hat on a stick, a false misfire created with a gunpowder flash—to draw the other into fatal view. Gardner placed his prop gun carefully beside the body, angling it just so, to direct the eye of the viewer of the photograph he would make.

  After he had completed the image, Gardner composed a short narrative about it. In place of photographers finding the soldier unattended, forgotten by his comrades, he suggested there were others on the scene to take care of the fallen: “A burial party, searching for dead on the borders of the Gettysburg battle-field, found, in a secluded spot, a sharpshooter lying as he fell when struck by the bullet. His cap and gun were evidently thrown behind him by the violence of the shock, and the blanket, partly shown, indicates that he had selected this as a permanent position from which to annoy the enemy. How many skeletons of such men are bleaching to-day in out of the way places no one can tell. Now and then the visitor to a battle-field finds the bones of some man shot as this one was, but there are hundreds that will never be known of, and will moulder into nothingness among the rocks.”

  For all his efforts, Gardner worried that he hadn’t fully captured the spirit of the young man, neither in the images he had made nor in the story he had imagined about the soldier’s final moments. Moreover, the setting here was not ideal. The ragged landscape, a mud of halftones, made it difficult to pick out the body amid the other detritus of war.

  Gardner prepared to move on to find another body. But then he looked up the slope and noticed Devil’s Den looming above. It was unmistakably a much more photogenic setting: a craggy nook with nothing but daylight above. Seen from the right vantage point, the stones arranged around the boy would look at once like a cradle and a grave.

  Gardner and his crew dragged the body forty yards uphill—over ravaged crabgrass, fragments of shrapnel, a field plowed under by mortar fire—and began his work again. They positioned the dead boy’s youthful features so they fully faced the camera’s eye, his head tilted slightly against one wall of rock, his feet tucked up against another slab as if he were the oldest son outgrowing his childhood bed.

  Photographing a battlefield was not unlike posing ladies in their finery for a carte de visite: he used the same gentle touch to raise a chin toward the light and took the same care with the composition drawn by a drape of fabric. Only the props were different. To complete his image, Gardner placed his rifle at the scene’s focal point, its barrel pointed up toward the white sky, drawing the gaze of whoever saw this dramatic tableau from the blemished earth to the forgiving emptiness of heaven.

  With a new view of the same death, Gardner instructed his men to prepare more plates for exposure. Gibson used a two-lens camera ideal for producing highly marketable stereographs. O’Sullivan peered through a box with a single glass eye. The more aesthetically pleasing arrangement they had created inspired in their employer a grander vision of the soldier’s final moments, one that joined the indifference of the terrain to a world of love and family to which this soldier would never return. Abandoning the fiction of the burial party, the photographer gave himself a starring role in the drama: “The artist, in passing over the scene of the previous days’ engagements, found in a lonely place the covert of a rebel sharpshooter, and photographed the scene presented here,” he wrote. “The Confederate soldier had built up between two huge rocks, a stone wall, from the crevices of which he had directed his shots, and, in comparative security, picked off our officers.”

  Gardner took careful note of the physical details. The stone nearest the boy’s feet still seemed to echo with the noise of battle. The vegetation remained shadowed with fire. “The side of the rock on the left shows, by the little white spots, how our sharpshooters and infantry had endeavored to dislodge him,” he wrote. “The trees in the vicinity were splintered, and their branches cut off, while the front of the wall looked as if just recovering from an attack of geological small-pox.”

  This death could only been seen as a net gain to Gardner’s northern audience. But who could look upon a murdered child and not feel some sympathy? Gardner imagined the boy’s final moments in such a way that he became every lost son, every death that taught American fathers and mothers the evils of war. “The sharpshooter had evidently been wounded in the head by a fragment of shell which had exploded over him, and had laid down upon his blanket to await death. There was no means of judging how long he had lived after receiving his wound, but the disordered clothing shows that his sufferings must have been intense. Was he delirious with agony, or did death come slowly to his relief, while memories of home grew dearer as the field of carnage faded before him? What visions, of loved ones far away, may have hovered above his stony pillow! What familiar voices may he not have heard, like whispers beneath the roar of battle, as his eyes grew heavy in their long, last sleep!”

  GARDNER MADE SIXTY images on the battlefield of Gettysburg. Three quarters of them depicted death. Though it is not known how many he manipulated as he did the image that came to be titled The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, his desire to make stories of the casualties he found is well documented.

  He was not the only one carefully creating images by which the war would be remembered. With his lead battlefield correspondent now taking pictures for himself, Mathew Brady also journeyed to Gettysburg. By the time he arrived, more than a week after the fighting, most of the dead had been carted away.

  Brady and his assistants focused some of their work on Culp’s Hill, a wooded rise where the trees bore marks of furious shooting. A pockmarked forest could hardly tell a story, however—at least not one that could be captured on glass and sold to a public hungry for images of death.

  Finding a particularly alluring spot, a copse of thick oaks standing tall despite the war’s brief interference, Brady positioned his camera so that a single fallen tree would haunt the background of the photograph. Taken together, the erect and broken timber might suggest at once a steadfast Union and its sacrifice. He called for an assistant to lie down in front of the fallen tree, providing a human focal point to the image and driving the message home. When the photograph was produced for sale, he included a caption that lacked Gardner’s poetry, but perhaps was even more audacious in its regard for what photography could do to the line separating life and death. “In the middle ground a dead soldier,” he wrote.

  Gardner returned some months later, in time to hear Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg Address. After revisiting the spot where he had dragged a body and posed it like a boy sleeping, he would claim that neither the soldier’s bones nor his rifle had been removed. “The musket, rusted by many storms, still leaned against the rock, and the skeleton of the soldier lay undisturbed within the mouldering uniform, as did the cold form of the dead four months before,” Gardner later wrote. “None of those who went up and down the fields to bury the fallen, had found him. ‘Missing,’ was all that could have been known of him at home, and some mother may yet be patiently watching for the return of her boy, whose bones lie bleaching, unrecognized and alone, between the rocks at Gettysburg.”

  That either human or military remains could be found months after the area became a prime spot for treasure hunters is most unlikely. Yet if there was any truth in this at all—if Gardner did indeed revisit Devil’s Den in November—he might have noticed that it was by then even more crowded with the photogenic dead than it had been when he first rolled up in his whatsit wagon.

  A local photographer named Peter Weaver had apparently heard how popular images of the fallen of Gettysburg had become. He brought a dozen living Union soldiers with him and arranged them dramatically on the rocks, posing the
m amid strewn rifles and caps, as if they had all been freshly killed in the battle fought months before—as if this latecomer of a battlefield photographer had learned the tricks of the trade from the master.

  When the artist was satisfied that he had captured a few images he could sell to those eager to view death from the comfort of their parlors, the casualties of war populating his photograph rose from the rocks of Devil’s Den. They dusted themselves off, straightened their caps, and went off to fight another day.

  PART III

  Humbugged

  The burning of the American Museum, July 13, 1865.

  CHAPTER 17

  All Is Gone and Nothing Saved

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1865, the fighting had been over for months, but still the war’s fog lingered.

  Across the South, bodies rose from hastily dug graves and made their way home with the help of Adams Express. In the nation’s capital, Alexander Gardner trained his camera on John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators as they ascended the gallows at Washington’s Old Arsenal Prison. With all his experience photographing the dead, he was unprepared for the movements of the condemned as the trapdoors fell and they hung by the neck. The sway of their bodies gave some of his images an unfortunately blurred appearance. Signs of life, as ever, complicated the photographer’s art. In the afterlife, too, the battle lines drawn by conflict endured. Judge John Edmonds reported that he had recently been visited by both the president and his assassin. “Lincoln was kind and gentle to him, and manifested only sorrow and compassion for Booth,” Edmonds said, while the murderer shrugged off his own responsibility, claiming, “I only enacted my part in the great drama.” No matter that surrender and victory had been settled; in Summerland as in the earthly realm, the spirit of animosity hovered like a dark cloud.