“Truthful as the Record of Heaven”: The Battle of Antietam and the Birth of Photojournalism

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Civil War was a little more than a year old first days of September 1862, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee knew South could not win a prolonged struggle against manpower and industrial might of Union. He hoped for a decisive victory that would lift South's spirits, weaken North's will to fight, and bring European recognition of Confederacy--and, with that recognition, a halt to war. Lee planned to invade Maryland, strike Pennsylvania, and ultimately move on Washington, D.C. Union commander George McClellan marched his army across Potomac from Washington to meet Lee's challenge. The two armies arrived on either side of Antietam Creek northern Maryland on afternoon of September 15. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia numbered about 40,000 men. McClellan's Army of Potomac totaled more than twice that number, about 87,000. A skirmish occurred on afternoon of September 16, but it was a prelude to climactic battle, which commenced at dawn on September 17,1862. (1) More than 6,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died that day farm fields outside Sharpsburg, making it single bloodiest day American military history. More soldiers died that day than died combat all other wars fought by America nineteenth century combined: War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and Indian wars. Beyond statistics was indescribable carnage. Words are inadequate to portray scene, wrote one soldier. Another, charge of a burial party, described dead in every state of mutilation, sans arms, sans legs, heads, and intestines, and greater number than on any field we have seen before. It was said that a person could walk a mile or more atop bodies without touching ground. (2) An estimated 5,000 people watched fighting from a hill a safe distance away. Edwin Forbes of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported that battle took place on open ground and was fully visible from hillside, which was black with spectators. No battle of war, I think, was witnessed by so many people, he reported. It is possible photographers Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson were among them. The two men, employees of Mathew Brady, had been following Union army for about two weeks, primarily photographing soldiers their camps. When exactly they arrived at Antietam is uncertain, but they were on field with their equipment day after battle; no other American battlefield had been photographed so soon after fighting. The pair exposed seventy glass negatives within five days of battle. Their images include landmarks of field, hastily dug graves, and corpses of horses and men. A union surgeon described bodies stretched along, 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. (3) Gardner and Gibson's photographs were first of dead soldiers on American soil. They would be displayed Brady's New York studio a few weeks later, presenting public with a previously unseen, shocking aspect of war. That two men had managed to take photographs at all under conditions was a technological and psychological feat. But it is not technical expertise that is ultimately Gardner's accomplishment, wrote his biographer Mark Katz. [R]ather it is extending power of photographic image affecting public awareness. The photographic coverage of Civil War by Gardner and others sent authentic images of horrors of battlefield directly to public for first time. This, Katz contended, was the birth of photojournalism as we now know it. (4) The American public already thirsted for visual news of war, and illustrated newspapers did their best to supply it, but Gardner's photographs, because they could not be reproduced print, remained accessible only to a limited number of people. …