Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  The “Sunken Road” at Antietam. This photographic print on stereo card reveals the horror of the Civil War in a way that no other medium could convey to contemporary viewers. The Antietam photographs taken by Alexander Gardner and James Gibson were exhibited a month later at Mathew Brady’s studio in New York City.

  Soon fighting broke out among other units, rapidly intensifying the engagement to the level of a battle. Battles, unlike skirmishes, involved units of tens of thousands rather than thousands. This meant, necessarily, casualties in tens of thousands rather than thousands. Rare was the commander who could simultaneously envision and assess fights across multiple fronts—each of which would have constituted a full-fledged battle a year earlier—and calmly deploy his legions. At Antietam, Northern commanders once again proved that they lacked that imperturbable vision.

  Still the battle roared. Another battle raged just south of West Woods along a wagon-rutted old road known as Sunken Lane, but forever after remembered as Bloody Lane. There, two of Sumner’s divisions had marched south to attack Lee’s center. The rebels set their defensives in the hollow of the sunken lane where they were virtually impregnable. Wave after wave of General O. O. Howard’s famed Irish Brigade sought to breach the lines, leaving behind what the historian James McPherson describes as “a carpet of blue-clad corpses strewn across the fields northeast of the sunken road and a carpet of butternut and gray-clad corpses in the appropriately named Blood Lane.”4 Before the fighting around the road concluded, three thousand Union soldiers and twenty-five hundred Confederate soldiers lay stacked in rows, dead or waiting to die.

  Despite heavy losses, McClellan’s brave infantry continued to pound Confederate positions furiously, and by midafternoon were well on their way to winning a battle of annihilation that could end the war. But as the critical moment to throw all into the wager arrived, McClellan once again lost his nerve, holding back nearly two full corps of reserves—over twenty thousand men—for fear of a Confederate counterattack.

  One member of McClellan’s reserve force was Sergeant Major Charles Ward of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. In a letter to his brother, written under live fire while the battle was raging, he described the frustration of hearing shattering gunfire, with needy comrades gone before, and simply jotting letters and “waiting for our time.”5 Ward was not alone in his frustration. When informed of McClellan’s timidity, Lincoln reportedly remarked: “He is an admirable engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for a stationary engine.”6

  By midafternoon, Union General Ambrose Burnside finally crossed Antietam Creek over a stone bridge that has since borne his name and threatened to overwhelm Lee’s right flank. All appeared lost for the Southern contingent until, at the last moment, A. P. Hill’s division reached the battlefield from Harpers Ferry. Though exhausted by the forced march, Hill’s soldiers delivered a crushing counterattack that caught Burnside totally by surprise and saved the Army of Northern Virginia.

  With no conclusive victory, Lee withdrew his army to Virginia, believing that he could yet strike Northern targets and terrify Northerners as far north as Philadelphia. In his wake, he left behind the worst wreckage of human lives in one day that America would ever see. Antietam implicitly rewrote the rules for acceptable losses in war, and no one protested. Twelve thousand four hundred Federals were killed and wounded alongside 11,724 Confederates for a total of 24,000 casualties in little more than twelve hours.7

  Immediately after the battle, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer described rebel dead in characteristically lurid detail:So sultry had been the atmosphere that decomposition had been making rapid progress. All countenances had swollen beyond point of possible recognition. Features had become one dark purplish mass of putridity.... Here lay a Rebel, still living, with introverted eye, but with warm, pulsating heart. His brain was oozing slowly, by a disgorging process, from a bullet hole on either side of the head.8

  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:Now about the fight which occurred the 17 day of September 1862 which will be put down in history as the bloodiest battle of the war. Where thousands yielded up their lives to his holy cause. My wound was slight. I was in the hospital 2 days and then rejoined my reg I was lame for several days after a piece of shell struck me in the thigh. But thank god I am now safe and well. How I escaped the many bullets that showerd down upon me god only knows the bullets came a whining by my face and cutting down right and left poor fellows following thick and fast around me. You cannot realize the horrors of a battle field to see the dead and wounded some with arms and legs off and cut up in every shape. It is awful the 15th reg is now a mere corporals guard to what it was before the fight.9

  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:I have seen, stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads. Every house, for miles around, is a hospital and I have seen arms, legs, feet and hands lying in piles rotting in the blazing heat of a Southern sky unburied and uncared for, and still the knife went steadily in its work adding to the putrid mess.

  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.”10 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.”11

  CHAPTER 17

  “BROKEN HEARTS CANNOT BE PHOTOGRAPHED”

  Besides being the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, Antietam also represented the first widely photographed in American history.1 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 othe
r 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.2

  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.”3

  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.4 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.”5

  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:[T]he dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.... Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.6

  “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.”7

  Gardner left Brady soon after Antietam and created his own business out of a Washington, D.C., studio two blocks away from Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. The two remained amicable, but their differences in approach and philosophy overrode their partnership.8

  Photography’s origins in portraiture meant that the intellectual meaning and interpretation it brought to the war were perceived by the public less as “news” or current events than as historical preservation. In American memory, Brady’s and Gardner’s Civil War photographs stand as the epitome of war art and photojournalism. But they were not widely viewed at the time.9

  For photographers no less than other artists, Civil War images focused primar
ily on the patriotic and the promotional. That meant that if patriotism required it, the camera had to “lie.” When publishing his battlefield photographs, Gardner composed deceptive captions using the same corpses to represent Confederate soldiers desolated by defeat or Union soldiers heroic in self-denying victory. On occasion photographs could be doctored. When photographing the “Devil’s Den” at Gettysburg a year later, Gardner’s assistant Timothy O’Sullivan planted a dead body from another location on the scene and placed a rifle in his hand to represent “Dead Confederate soldier at sharpshooter’s position in Devil’s Den.”10

  Northern photographers showed a decided preference for Confederate over Union corpses. Similarly, Brady shot photographs of emaciated Northern and Southern prisoners of war, but only the Northern prisoners were exhibited publicly. Photographs of the Confederate prisoners of war suffering in the Union prisons would not be available to Northern (or Southern) viewers until after the war.11 Clearly in photography as everywhere, realism and criticism were subordinated to patriotism and the “imagination” of art. Photographs that might conjure self-censure were simply dismissed.

  Like photography, paintings would endure and shape America’s Civil War memory more than they informed contemporary news. With few public spaces to exhibit them, their production was slow and uneven. Artists accustomed to painting landscapes adjusted with difficulty to capturing scenes of war. No artistic renderings of note would appear until after the great battles of 1862 and 1863.12