Marketing The Dead of Antietam: Photographs of Death as a Cultural Commodity

Abstract

Marketing The Dead of AntietamPhotographs of Death as a Cultural Commodity A. Maggie Hazard (bio) In October 1862 photographer and entrepreneur Mathew Brady launched an exhibition of photographs taken by Alexander Gardner at the Battle of Antietam. The exhibition, held at Brady’s New York City gallery and titled The Dead at Antietam, was the first of its kind in America.1 Among the photographs was Gardner’s Dead of Stonewall Jackson’s Brigade by the Rail Fence on the Hagerstown Pike (Fig. 1). The powerful image presents a startling glimpse of the battle. The contorted bodies of three Confederate soldiers lie next to a rail fence. Two of the three soldiers’ faces are not visible. Their legs flail in various directions, as if barely connected to their torsos. The soldier on the left is so twisted that he appears to be headless, his legs jutting out toward the viewer as his upper body pushes against the fence. His left arm reaches up, frozen in time as if he is reaching for a weapon or raising a hand to beg for assistance. On the right side of the photograph, another soldier is even more knotted. One leg bends as if the man was interrupted while trying to rise, his arm fixed forever in a cradled position against the fence. His head is almost indistinguishable from the foliage into which he has fallen, and his lower leg blends into the figure beside him. He still wears his hat. In the center of the group lies the only soldier whose face we might recognize. The agony of death demonstrated in the soldier’s twisted expression means that any small relief the viewer might [End Page 9] experience in seeing a complete body is short lived, and that agony will remain with the viewer well after they leave the exhibition. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Alexander Gardner, Dead of Stonewall Jackson’s Brigade by the Rail Fence on the Hagers town Pike, Battle of Antietam, 1862. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs [LC-B811-559]) Gardner’s photograph was typical for the exhibition but was previously unknown to society. Even more, Brady’s exhibition of these photographs and the sale of them afterward is significant to the way the war was seen and known and to how it is understood even today. The Battle of Antietam resulted in the first sustained photographic rendering and display of the casualties of war, and the exhibition was the public’s first encounter with grisly photographic images of actual battlefield death. Promoted in newspapers like the New York Times, the exhibition, along with the conversion of several photographs into woodcut prints that were published in illustrated journals and photographic images that were advertised for sale to those at home, created a new kind of commodity—a marketing of the dead.2 This new way of visualizing, which captured the bodies of fallen soldiers contorted, maimed, and anything but heroic, was crucial to redefining the way people back home (in the North at least) understood [End Page 10] combat and the death that inevitably accompanied it. Although a few photographs of combat death had been created prior to this moment, they were restricted to far off wars that those in the US did not experience, such as the Second Opium War in China in the 1850s. Photographs of other conflicts, like the Crimean War and the Mexican-American War, did not include images of the dead. This meant that when the photographs from the Battle of Antietam went on view in New York City, citizens were seeing these graphic depictions of the dead for the first time. Not only that, photographs of those earlier conflicts were much more scattered in their scope and, more significantly, were not subject to an aggressive marketing campaign to distribute the photographs to the public in their place of origin (largely Europe).3 It is important to note that all the photographs of fallen combatants from the Civil War that are known to exist are of white soldiers. There are a few reasons for this. The clearest and most obvious of these with regard...