On April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called up 75,000 militiamen to
put down an insurrection of Southern states. Mathew B. Brady secured permission
from Lincoln to follow the troops in what was expected to be a short and
glorious war; he saw only the first engagement, however, and lost his wagons and
equipment in the tumult of defeat. Deciding to forgo further action himself,
Brady instead financed a corps of field photographers who, together with those
employed by the Union military command and by Alexander Gardner, made the first
extended photographic coverage of a war.
The terrible contest
proceeded erratically; just as the soldiers learned to fight this war in the
field, so the photographers improvised their reports. Because the battlefields
were too chaotic and dangerous for the painstaking wet-plate procedures to be
carried out, photographers could depict only strategic sites, camp scenes, preparations
for or retreat from action, and, on rare occasions, the grisly aftermath of
battle.
The war photographers worked
with collodion-on-glass (wet-plate) negatives, which required delicate and
laborious procedures even in the studio. When the photographer was ready for
action, a sheet of glass was cleaned, coated with collodion, partially dried,
dipped carefully into a bath containing nitrate of silver, then exposed in the
camera for several seconds and processed in the field darkroom tent—all before
the silver collodion mixture had dried. Given the danger of their situation and
the technical difficulty of their task, front-line photographers rarely if ever
attempted action scenes.
Although it is still popularly believed that
Brady produced most of the surviving Civil War photographs, he actually made few
field photographs during the long war. Instead, he focused his energies on
acquiring and publishing (over his own imprint) negatives made by his
ever-expanding team of operators, including Gardner (his Washington gallery
director), Timothy O'Sullivan, and numerous others.
At
the outbreak of the war, Gardner had been appointed to General George
McClellan's staff with the honorary rank of captain. Initially, he and a small
corps of photographers copied maps and charts for the Secret Service, which were
distributed as photographic prints to both field and division commanders. For
two years, while he retained his position as manager of Brady's Washington,
D.C., studio, Gardner worked as a field photographer. He left Brady in November
1862 and established his own business, taking with him many of Brady's most
experienced staff.
Timothy O'Sullivan was one of the many photographers
who began their careers as apprentices to Brady. When the early events of the
Civil War suggested no immediate resolution of the conflict, O'Sullivan
abandoned the Washington, D.C., gallery for four years in the field. He worked
constantly, producing outstanding views of bridges, encampments, hospitals, and
battlefields which he sent back to Washington, first to Brady and then to
Alexander Gardner, whose studio he joined officially in the winter of 1862–63.
At the end of the Civil War, Gardner published a two-volume opus, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865–66). The
publication, which includes 100 albumen silver prints, is egalitarian. Deeply
offended by Brady's habit of obscuring the names of the field operators behind
the deceptive credit "Brady," Gardner specifically identified each of the eleven
photographers in the publication. The Sketch Book still serves as a
salutary model for photographic volumes, as does Photographic Views of
Sherman's Campaign (1866) by George N. Barnard. Produced with the support of William
Tecumseh Sherman, this volume documents the progress of the general's famous and
brutal campaign from Tennessee to Georgia in 1864 and 1865.
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