them retains their impress, and a fresh sunbeam
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sun-Painting
and Sun-Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly 8
(July 1861).
These miracles are being worked all around us
so easily and so cheaply that most people have
ceased to think of them as marvels. There is a
photographer established in every considerable
village. . . .
But remember how few painted portraits
really give their subjects. . . . Then see what
faithful memorials of those whom we love and
would remember are put into our hands by the
new art, with the most trifling expenditure of
time and money.
This new art is old enough already to have
given us the portraits of infants who are now
growing into adolescence. By-and-by it will show
every aspect of life in the same individual, from
the earliest week to the last year of senility. We
are beginning to see what it will reveal. Children
grow into beauty and out of it. The first line in
the forehead, the first streak in the hair are
chronicled without malice, but without extenua-
tion. The footprints of thought, of passion, of
purpose are all treasured in these fossilized
shadows. Family-traits show themselves in early
infancy, die out, and reappear. Flitting moods
which have escaped one pencil of sunbeams are
caught by another. Each new picture gives us a
new aspect of our friend; we find he had not one
face, but many.
It is hardly too much to say, that those
whom we love no longer leave us in dying, as
they did of old. They remain with us just as they
appeared in life; they look down upon us from
our walls; they lie upon our tables; they rest upon
our bosoms; nay, if we will, we may wear their
portraits, like signet-rings, upon our fingers. Our
own eyes lose the images pictured on them.
Parents sometimes forget the faces of their own
children in a separation of a year or two. But the
unfading artificial retina which has looked upon
lays this on the living nerve as if it were radiated
from the breathing shape.
Fanny Fern [Sara Willis Parton], “Then and
Now,” New York Ledger, April 5, 1862.
There was a time when the presentation of one’s
“likeness” meant something. It was a sacred thing,
exchanged only between lovers or married people,
kept carefully from unsympathizing eyes, gazed
at in private as a treasure apart. But we have
changed all that now. People like their faces to
hang out at street doors, and in galleries, to lie on
everybody’s and anybody’s table in albums, and to
be hawked about promiscuously and vulgarly like
a fashion print, or a specimen of sea-weed, or a
The Civil War and Its Aftermath
stuck insect, for the gaze of the curious. Anybody
now who acknowledges to any sentiment on the
subject, or has an old-fashioned fastidiousness
about being made as common as a street lamp-
post, is gazed at with round-eyed wonder. I have
actually heard women express pleasure at being
paraded in these public show-cases. Fancy an
old-fashioned lover endorsing such desecration of
his Laura’s sacred picture! Fancy him carrying
3
round his own picture in his pocket, to be offered to
Tom, Dick and Harry, like a business card or a
concert ticket!
Photographs of Antietam
It is estimated that more than one million Civil War
photographs were taken during the four years of the
conflict. No event since the invention of photography
had played such a momentous role in American
life, and as a result the war prompted the most
extensive visual archive yet undertaken in the United
States. Cameras and collodion wet plates were not
sufficiently advanced to capture battlefield action,
145
but photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and
 Alexander Gardner trained their lenses on the
aftermath, the human detritus littering the fields of
Gettysburg and Antietam.
In the following two accounts of the pho-
tographs of the dead of Antietam presented by
Mathew Brady, one senses the struggle to deal
with horrific visual information of a type never
before seen. The reviewer of the New York Times
contrasts the experience of reading newspaper
lists of the fallen and actually seeing their lifeless
bodies. For the writer, the intensity of the visual
experience (“a terrible distinctness”) vies with
the perverse seductiveness of the imagery (“a
terrible fascination”). Oliver Wendell Holmes, who
had himself visited Antietam four days after the
battle, tries to imagine how these photographs
will be looked at, how they will be “used” in later
years. He clearly understands their power to teach,
which he contrasts with the more conventional
visual rhetoric of history paintings.
1850–1870
“Brady’s Photographs,” New York Times,
October 20, 1862.
The living that throng Broadway care little
perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy
they would jostle less carelessly down the great
thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were
a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field,
laid along the pavement. There would be a
gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of
way; conversation would be less lively, and the
general air of pedestrians more subdued. As
it is, the 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. The roll we read is being
called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips
are answering to it. Shadowy fingers point from
146
the page to a field where even imagination is
loth to follow. Each of these little names that the
printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling
over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the
tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It
is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain—
a dull, dead, remorseless weight that will fall
upon some heart, straining it to breaking. . . .
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. At the door of his gallery
hangs a little placard, “The Dead of Antietam.”
Crowds of people are constantly going up the
stairs; follow them, and you find them bending
over photographic views of that fearful battle-
field, taken immediately after the action. Of all
objects of horror one would think the battle-field
should stand preëminent, that it should bear
away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the
contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it
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. It seems
somewhat singular that the same sun that looked
down on the faces of the slain, blistering them,
blotting out from the bodies all semblance to
humanity, and hastening corruption, should have
thus caught their features upon canvas, and given
them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.
These poor subjects could not give the sun
sittings, and they are taken as they fell, their poor
hands clutching the grass around them in spasms
of Pain, or reaching out for a help which none
gave. Union soldier and Confederate, side by side,
here they lie, the red light of battle faded from
their eyes but their lips set as when they met in
the last fierce charge which loosed their souls and
sent them grappling with each other and battling
to the very gates of Heaven. The ground whereon
they lie is torn by shot and shell, the grass is
trampled down by the tread of hot, hurrying
feet, and little rivulets that can scarcely be of
water are trickling along the earth like tears over
a mother’s face. . . .
These pictures have a terrible distinctness.
By the aid of the magnifying-glass, the very
features of the slain may be distinguished. We
would scarce choose to be in the gallery, when
one of the women bending over them should
recognise a husband, a son, or a brother in the
still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the
gaping trenches.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the
Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (July 1863).
Let him who wishes to know what war is look at
this series of illustrations. These wrecks of
manhood thrown together in careless heaps or
ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but
yesterday. How dear to their little circles far away
most of them!—how little cared for here by the
tired party whose office it is to consign them to the
earth! An officer may here and there be
recognized; but for the rest—if enemies, they will
be counted, and that is all. “80 Rebels are buried
in this hole” was one of the epitaphs we read and
recorded. Many people would not look through
this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of
its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer,
that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul
sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting
the battlefield to look over these views, that all the
emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained
and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks,
came back to us, and we buried them in the
recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried
the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly
represented. Yet war and battles should have truth
for their delineator. . . . The honest sunshine
“Is Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best”;
and that gives us, even without the crimson
coloring which flows over the recent picture,
some conception of what a repulsive, brutal,
sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing
together of two frantic mobs to which we give the
name of armies. The end to be attained justifies
the means, we are willing to believe; but the sight
of these pictures is a commentary on civilization
such as a savage might well triumph to show
its missionaries. Yet through such martyrdom
must come our redemption. War is the surgery of
crime. Bad as it is in itself, it always implies that
something worse has gone before.
John Quincy Adams
The Civil War and Its Aftermath
Ward’s Freedman
The Ohio-born sculptor J. Q. A. Ward studied
with Henry Kirke Brown in Brooklyn, New York,
for more than five years before going out on his
own at age twenty-six in 1856. Two years later,
he executed a bust of the ardent abolitionist con-
gressman Joshua Giddings (Ohio), and four years
after that, perhaps as a response to President
3
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
(which freed enslaved people in states that had
seceded from the union), he began modeling his
Freedman (1863) in plaster, which debuted at the
National Academy of Design and was later trans-
lated into bronze and shown at the Paris Universal
Exposition of 1867. Ward’s statuette depicts a
heroic, seminude enslaved man who has broken
the manacles around his wrists; it became the first
American depiction of an African American exe-
cuted in bronze.
Ward conceived of his Freedman as a heroic
figure who was the author of his own fate. And as
the following review indicates, his work became
a critical sensation at a charged political moment,
a lightning bolt of illumination from a previously
147
unknown artist.