Confederate soldiers as they fell, near the centre of the battle-field of Gettysburg, 1863
Negative by Alexander Gardner
c. 1870-1890 stereoscopic card 8 cm x 17 cm
Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

The Horrors of War – Gettysburg, PA, July 1863
Taylor & Huntington, Hartford, Connecticut
c. 1890 stereoscopic card 9 cm x 18 cm
Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

Union Dead at Gettysburg, July 1863
The War Photograph & Exhibition Company, Hartford, Connecticut
c. 1890 stereoscopic card 10 cm x 17.5 cm
Special Collections and College Archives, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College 

The three stereoscopes portray the horrific aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg; the photographers focus on the gruesome corpses that litter the battlefield.(1) With hundreds of bodies fallen in the fields of Gettysburg, most soldiers were given quick burials in shallow graves, many without coffins or any sort of headstone.(2) After the Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of these graves were exhumed, and Union soldiers were trans- ported to the National Cemetery where they were reburied.(3) There are multiple accounts from the citizens of Gettysburg of the stench that surrounded the battlefields; the odor permeated the air for miles.(4) These photographs place the viewer incredibly close to the decomposing bodies, forcing them to confront the grizzly outcomes of war; the three-dimensional effect of the stereoscopes emphasizes the viewer’s proximity to the scene. The American Civil War was among the first wars to be photographed, so the pictures taken during the conflict had major ramifications on the home front. Most importantly, viewers could see, with a sense of immediacy and realism, what was happening on the battlefields for the first time through the seemingly veritable lens of photography.(5)

Civil War-era publications such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper were incredibly popular at the time, though the new photographs had a profoundly different effect on the viewer than lithographs and sketches. Because the Civil War was the first war to be photographed extensively throughout its duration, the Northern public was provided with “accurate” photographic news for the first time. However, the technology of the camera at the time, along with bulky and cumbersome equipment and a long exposure time, limited the photographers’ ability to capture conflict and the action of war.(6) Civil War photographers often depicted the daily lives of soldiers and the aftermath on the battlefields. In a way, these photographs, in writer Susan Sontag’s words, were “bringing the bodies back home,” in a much more profound and recognizable manner than contemporaneous lithographs.(7) Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner profoundly affected the discipline of war photography and played a critical role in morphing how Americans understood the war.

Originally employed by Mathew Brady, Gardner traveled the country with twenty other photographers dispatched by Brady to compile a photographic history of the war. Witnessing and photographing battles in Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam and the siege of Petersburg, many of Gardner’s photographs are venerated as the most well known images of the Civil War.(8) Stereoscopic cards were viewed with a holder that would transform the two-dimensional surfaces into a three-dimensional viewing experience.(9) It is also worth noting that these stereoscopes were not published until twenty-five years after they were originally taken. Although the original photographs would have been used as models for wood engravings published in the illustrated magazines, these stereo- scopes can be seen as functioning as a type of memorial; they allowed a continued contemplation of the dead bodies of soldiers and ruins of the war.(10) The Civil War photographers established a new precedent for photojournalism in all wars to follow and redefined how the American public participated in and understood war. 

1 Two of the three stereoscopes have published information written on the back of the cards, providing an interesting look into how they were presented to the public twenty-five years after they were taken. The back of The Horrors of War states: “A Union soldier killed by a shell at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. His arm was torn off, and can be seen on the ground near his musket, and entirely separated from his body. The shell also completely disemboweled the poor fellow, and killed him so quick that he never knew what struck him. Think of a battlefield covering nearly twenty-five square miles, and covered with thousands of dead, many of them mangled even worse than this one and you can have a faint idea of Gettysburg in the early days of July, 1863.” Union Dead at Gettysburg reads, “This group of dead was in ‘wheat-field.’ The burial details found many such groups on that terrible field. The work of burring the thousands of dead was a Herculean task in itself. The hot July sun made it imperative that the dead should be placed underground as soon as possible. In some cases a little mound of earth was piled over the bodies as they lay, and after the first rainstorms the hands and feet of the bodies could be seen sticking out from their covering of earth.” The top and middle stereoscopic cards seen here appear in the exhibition.

2 Michael Ruane, “After 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, a Grisly but Noble Enterprise to Honor the Fallen,” The Washington Post, September 13, 2013, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/local/after-1863-battle-of-gettysburg-a-grisly-but-noble-enterprise-to-honor-the-fallen/2013/09/12/769c47e6-163c-11e3-a2ec- b47e45e6f8ef_story.html.

3 Samuel Weaver reported, “In no instance was a body allowed to be removed which had any portion of the rebel clothing on it.” Ibid.

4 It is recorded that the men exhuming the bodies of these soldiers, usually black men such as Samuel Weaver, carried bottles of peppermint oil and pennyroyal to mask to smell. Ibid. 

5 According to historian Will Kaufman, “The Civil War was ‘the first war to be extensively photographed from start to finish.’” See Will Kaufman, The Civil War in American Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). See also Lucian Ciupei, “Censorship in the Crimean War Photography A Case Study: Carol Pop de Szathmari and Roger Fenton,” Journal of Media Research 1, no. 12 (2012): 61–67. In her article, Elizabeth Cahill states, “The creation of this vast treasury did something the opposing armies and their leaders could not: it defined, and perhaps even helped to unify, the nation via an unrehearsed and unscripted act of collective memory-making.” Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill, “Calling Cards of the Dead: Photography and the American Civil War,” Commonweal, January 10, 2014.

6 Cahill states, “To the cell-phone-camera artist of our time, it is difficult to comprehend the daunting challenges of cumbersome equipment, rough terrain, and complicated photographic processes that faced the battlefield photographer.” Ibid., 1.

7 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, New York: Picador, 2003), 63.
8 “Alexander Gardner PHOTOGRAPHER,” The Civil War Trust, n.d., http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/alexander-gardner.

html?referrer=https://www.google.com/.

9 Maura Lyons, “An Embodied Landscape: Wounded Trees at Gettysburg,” American Art 26, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 44-65.

10 Contemporaneous to these stereoscopes are many Union monuments that were also erected in the 1880s, as the next generation of American citizens honored the casualties of the war. These monuments include the 146th New York Infantry Monument, the 14th Connecticut Infantry Monument, the 118th Pennsylvania Infantry Monument, the 13th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Monument, and the 5th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Monument along with many others.