A Remote Reality

The Confederate officer’s hauntingly beautiful milk-white horse that had attracted Alpheus Williams’ eye as it lay dead on the Antietam battlefield was destined for a new kind of fame, unknown before in war. Williams could have had his wish for a photograph of it just three weeks later, when an exhibition opened at Matthew Brady’s “National Portrait Gallery,” at the corner of Broadway and 10th Street in New York City, announced by a small placard hanging at the door bearing the title, “The Dead of Antietam.”

The 45 photographs exhibited, with copies of stereoscopic views available for purchase at 50 cents apiece, were the first actual images taken of American dead on a battlefield, the first such photographs of the realistic horrors of war to be widely viewed anywhere in the world. Brady’s talented associate Alexander Gardner and another assistant had hurried to the battlefield and arrived in time to capture scenes that would become some of the most famous pictures of the Civil War.

Newspapers had sought to satisfy the insatiable thirst for details of the war with extra editions and assembly lines of engravers who worked overnight to produce woodcuts ready for the morning’s press based on pencil drawings dispatched by deft sketch artists accompanying the troops. But the immediacy of Gardner’s photographs was something completely different, as more than one contemporary observer recognized. At least a small door of conventional evasion had been forever shut. “We recognize the battle­field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one,” wrote a columnist in the New York Times after viewing the exhibition.

The dead of the battle­field 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 … Our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead … 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 dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.

In 1860 there were more than 4,000 newspapers in America, twice the number in Britain, and every large city had multiple competing dailies. There were 11 in New York, 12 in Philadelphia, 11 in Chicago, 10 in St. Louis. Total newspaper subscriptions averaged 2.3 per household in 1860, and, in all, American newspapers printed and sold a billion copies a year.

Three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter the New York Tribune began publishing an evening edition, which it continued throughout the war, to catch up with the arriving news of the day; the New York Herald countered with extras each afternoon at one thirty, three, and four o’clock. The more slapdash New York Express churned out so many extras that the wisecrack in newspaper circles was that no one had ever seen its regular edition. The taboo against Sunday editions fell almost as quickly, with the major papers in New York, Chicago, and even proper Boston ignoring the protests of clergymen and launching Sunday papers in the first two months of the war. New York railroads instituted special express trains to deliver the Sunday editions, met by crowds at each station.

Hordes thronging newspaper offices awaiting the latest editions and the telegraphed reports posted on a board outside became a fixture of life in the war. It became a kind of addiction in itself. Oliver Wendell Holmes told of a friend who would dodge through side streets on his way to pick up the noon extra, “afraid somebody will meet him and tell him the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper”; and of another acquaintance, “an eminent scholar” who admitted he had “fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot.” Dr. Holmes observed that the feeling of an entire nation bound together by rail lines and telegraph wires — ­“a network of iron nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body” — ­had altered the very sensation and perception of events.

Newspapers had as yet no way to publish photographs. But the invention of the glass negative plate a few years earlier had already created a huge mass market for portraits of famous figures, stereoscopic views of exotic scenery, and, beginning in 1859, carte de visite album cards that would provide a ubiquitous record of the war in the form of soldiers’ personal portraits distributed to friends, relatives, and sweethearts. The price of a portrait dropped from as much as $750 for a life-sized “Imperial” format image (a staggering $30,000 in today’s currency) to 25 cents (about $10). Gardner shrewdly anticipated the coming demand for portraits of war leaders and common soldiers alike by contracting with a commercial photographic supplier who could print copies by the thousands.

Though Gardner possessed a keen commercial acumen that his employer lacked — ­Brady resisted even hiring a bookkeeper, and the records of the business were in perpetual chaos — ­he shared with him an abiding conception of the photographer as artist, not mere technician. Growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, Gardner had worked as a jeweler’s apprentice, a bank manager, and a newspaper proprietor before turning to photography. He came to America intending to found a utopian community in Iowa based on the socialist teachings of Robert Owen, a plan forcibly abandoned when many of its members succumbed to tuberculosis. In America he forsook the Presbyterianism of his youth for the dreamy mysticism of Swedenborgianism, and with his flamboyant beard, insouciantly dressed in an artist’s smock, he could have passed for any Bohemian rebel against bourgeois convention.

The time required to set up and expose a shot, and the technical demands of the photographic process itself that remained very much in the fore at that time, reinforced Gardner’s tendency to think of his works as artistic compositions. It was inescapable that he and his fellow photographers of the dead in battle looked to classical models. A photographer who accompanied British troops in the late 1850s, an Italian-born Englishman named Felice Beato, was probably one of the first to take a picture of dead soldiers; a British officer recalled Signor Beato “in great excitement” coming upon a group of slain defenders of a fort in China grouped about a gun and declaring the scene “beautiful,” begging that the bodies not be moved until he could capture them in a photograph.

Many who viewed “The Dead of Antietam” remarked on the stark realism of the images. Dr. Holmes, himself a keen amateur photographer, wrote in The Atlantic that Gardner’s images had brought back all of the emotions and horrors he had experienced searching the battlefield himself for his wounded son. “Let he who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations,” he wrote. “The honest sunshine ‘Is Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best,’ ” laying bare “what a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing” war is.

But in fact Gardner’s images in telling ways honored artistic conventions of death, and the captions he wrote to accompany them reinforced this notion, describing the figures of the dead as if “cut in marble,” or “sleeping their last sleep,” or “calm and resigned … as though they had been caught in the act of prayer.” The caption he appended to the famously lifelike white horse was Is This Death?

Gardner insisted that while “verbal representations … may or may not have the merit of accuracy,” photographic depictions will be accepted “by posterity with an undoubting faith.” But for all their self-declared realism, there was much that Gardner’s images omitted. They captured none of the terrors of battle itself, only its aftermath, and even that in a carefully modulated manner. He never showed corpses decapitated or disemboweled or missing limbs, much less any that had been partially devoured by marauding pigs or dogs, an occurrence often remarked on by soldiers. Scarcely any of his photographs dwell on the wounded and their mutilations and agonies. And, as some remarkable detective work by the photographic historian William Frassanito discovered, in later battles (Gettysburg in particular) Gardner had clearly dragged corpses around the battlefield to pose them to his artistic satisfaction, always to conform to some idealized representation of death. One has to look closely at his images of dead soldiers at Antietam to notice one of the grimmer but unremarked­ on realities that his photographs did sometimes capture: the inside-out-pockets of the Confederate dead, showing that their corpses had been systematically looted.

And then, as the historian Mark Schantz observed, there is little evidence that people who viewed Gardner’s photographs were traumatized by them. Both the sensitive New York Times columnist who visited the exhibition and Dr. Holmes were swift to draw from them not a lesson of the madness or unsupportable cruelty of war but rather moral affirmations of patriotic resolve. “But there is poetry in the scene that no green fields or smiling landscapes can possess,” the Times writer insisted. “Here lie men who have not hesitated to seal and stamp their conviction with their blood — ­men who have flung themselves into the great gulf of the unknown to teach the world that there are truths dearer than life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than death.”

There were less pleasant hints that for more than a few visitors to Brady’s Gallery, part of the allure lay in the vicarious horror they were permitted to safely share by looking on these curated scenes of the dead. Some of Gardner’s captions bore more melodramatic titles, playing to sensationalism: “A Harvest of Death,” “Slaughter Pen,” “SILENCED FOREVER!” As the Times writer observed of the “crowds of people . . . constantly going up the stairs” to the exhibit hall, “there is a terrible fascination . . . that draws one near these pictures and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”

There was little to no appetite for the kinds of breathtakingly honest representations of the sheer bestiality of war that only a few of its participants ever attempted to put into words. With the possible exceptions of only Ambrose Bierce and Frank Wilkeson, no one wrote as graphically or realistically about war as John De Forest, a well-educated Union veteran from Connecticut who in 1867 published the novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, a romance set against the events of the war that includes some horrifyingly vivid battle and hospital scenes. Along with unsparing descriptions of brains leaking from bulging wounds and grotesquely ironic deaths on the battlefield, he portrays the sheer terror of the soldier’s inner experiences and the baseness that war drives men to as the trappings of civilization are stripped away, offering unsettling accounts of cowards and skulkers, drunk officers, venal surgeons remorselessly stealing the port, brandy, and peaches intended for their patients.

The book, unsurprisingly, was a flop. The Atlantic Monthly’s editor William Dean Howells praised it, and later urged De Forest to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace when it appeared in English translation in 1886. De Forest wrote back to Howells:

Let me tell you that nobody but he has written the whole truth about war and battle. I tried, and I told all I dared, and perhaps all I could. But there was one thing I did not dare tell, lest the world should infer that I was naturally a coward, and so could not know the feelings of a brave man. I actually did not dare state the extreme horror of battle, and the anguish with which the bravest soldiers struggle through it.

Excerpt adapted from A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind by Stephen Budiansky. Copyright © 2024 by Stephen Budiansky. Used with the permission of W.W. Norton. All rights reserved.

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