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Articles on the Antietam Photos:
On October 20th 1862, the New York Times published a 1,388 word article on the Brady Gallery Antietam Photos exhibit.
Brady's Photographs
Picture of the Dead at Antietam.
New York Times, October 20, 1862
At first, the Times writer sets the scene of the New York City audience and explains the significance of what Brady did:
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.
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.
Of all objects of horror one would think the battlefield should stand preeminent, 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 loath 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.
Then, the writer moves to the Antietam battlefield:
It is a block, barren plain and above it bends an ashen sullen sky; there is no friendly shade or shelter from the noonday sun, or the midnight dews: coldly and unpityingly the stars will look down them and darkness will come with night to shut them in.
Finally, the writer views the photos from the eyes of a mother or wife, whose husband or son might be in one of them:
These pictures have a terrible distinctiveness. 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 recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the gaping trenches. For these trenches have a terror for a woman's heart, that goes far to outweigh all the others that hover over the battle-field.
Have heart poor mother; grieve not without hope; mourn not without consolation. This is not the last of your boy.
With pealing of trumpets and beating of drums, These trenches shall open -- the Son of Man comes.
And then is reserved for him the crown which only heroes and martyrs are permitted to wear -- a crown brighter than bays, greener and more lasting than laurel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The Antietam Photos
Thoughts of a Father and Doctor
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a noted Boston physician, author, and father of a Union Captain wounded at Antietam, in 1863 published his thoughts on the photos in an Atlantic Monthly article, "Doings of the Sunbeams." He brought to this article his experience visiting the Antietam battlefield looking for his wounded son:
"We ourselves were on the field upon the Sunday following the Wednesday when the battle took place."
Because of that visit, Dr. Holmes thought the photos were very realistic:
"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."
Dr. Holmes then states the reaction he and other shad to the photos:
Many people would not look at 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, stewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.
While stating what he considered a logical response to these photos, "... we buried them in recesses of our cabinet..." Dr. Holmes tried to find justification for the deaths in battle at Antietam. For him, there must be something that gives them meaning:
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. Where is the American, worthy of his privileges, who does not now recognize the fact, if never until now, that the disease of our nation was organic, not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and anodynes?
For Dr. Homes, that disease was slavery. Now that Lincoln, through the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, had made ending slavery the moral reason for the War, there was meaning in the photos of Antietam. Those "wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps" were now American martyrs. |