![]() ![]() The negatives produced stereo views that offered a 3-D photographic viewing experience-the closest thing Civil War America had to video. All 20 photos of the dead of Antietam were taken in stereo. Gardner used the four-by-ten-inch plates in his stereoscopic camera. The next morning, September 21, at 10 a.m., he was able to use the military telegraph to send brief news of his accomplishment to the Washington gallery as well as an urgent “soon as possible” request: “Send four by ten glass. Considering the primitive technology, he took photos at a furious pace that day and may have run out of glass plates. Gardner took glass plate negatives that had to be created and developed on the spot while still wet. The entire countryside reeked of death (Gardner would sometimes rearrange bodies to pair with a dramatic narrative of the photo). The next day, Gardner worked his way around the center part of the battlefield, taking photos as Union burial crews labored to inter the dead in long, shallow mass graves. They showed a sunken road, soon to be known as “Bloody Lane,” still partially packed with dead Confederates who fought there. That afternoon, Gardner took his first images. Lee withdrew his army into Virginia, leaving the battlefield in Union hands. On September 19, 1862, two days after the battle, Confederate Gen. The photographer who captured “The Dead of Antietam” was Alexander Gardner, a burly Scottish immigrant with a round face and a long beard who managed Brady’s Washington gallery. WATCH: Civil War Combat: Antietam on HISTORY Vault Alexander Gardner Photographs Two Days After Battle's EndĪ ditch, called 'Bloody Lane,' with bodies of dead Confederate soldiers awaiting burial after the Battle of Antietam, photographed by Alexander Gardner, September 19, 1862. Until Antietam, Brady’s men had no opportunity to take their cameras onto a battlefield still littered with dead. After the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia, in August 1862, Brady photographer Timothy O’Sullivan captured an image of horses killed during the fighting.īut the Union Army of the Potomac kept losing battles early in the war. Brady personally followed the Union Army into Virginia in July 1861 but had to flee back to Washington with no battlefield photos after the army was routed in the Battle of First Bull Run.ĭuring the Peninsula Campaign in June 1862, Brady photographer James Gibson had photographed a remarkable scene of vast suffering-wounded Union soldiers scattered on the ground of a makeshift field hospital at Savage Station, Virginia. At least two southern photographers took photographs of the damage wrought by the April 1861 bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which started the conflict. Some, such as “The Dead of Antietam,” brought the gruesome realities of warfare home to the American public.įrom the start, photographers were eager to capture dramatic images of the war. Together, they produced as many as 10,000 documentary images, or perhaps even more, from the camps, battlefield and home front. īrady and his photographers, as well as others, followed the armies to capture scenes from the battlefronts. ![]() The church was the location of some of the bloodiest fighting during the battle. Several dead Confederate artillery men lie outside Dunker Church after the Battle of Antietam. Although the technology did not yet exist to reproduce actual photographs in newspapers and news weeklies, the periodical published woodcut engravings of eight photos, including six showing the dead. Harper’s Weekly, the leading news weekly, devoted the center spread of its October 18, 1862, issue to images of the Antietam dead. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” ![]() Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” the Times reported. The reactions to the photographs reflected the intensity of their content. ![]() What for some had remained a distant, abstract war, was suddenly-and viscerally-brought to life. More than 22,700 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, missing or captured in the battle, which was fought in the fields and woods outside the small, western Maryland town of Sharpsburg. It is also the first battle where American war dead were photographed. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, is the bloodiest day in American history. Brady’s Broadway gallery in New York City.Ī small placard at the door advertised “The Dead of Antietam,” and, as The New York Times reported on October 20, “crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs,” drawn by the “terrible fascination” of seeing gruesome photographs of bloated, dead bodies of soldiers as they fell in combat on the battlefield of Antietam during the Civil War. In October 1862, a shocking and unique photo exhibition opened at Mathew B. ![]()
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