I was wading into the North Anna river, trying not to get sucked downstream by the current. In my hand was a hundred-and-fifty-year-old photo by Timothy O’Sullivan of a group of Union soldiers bathing in the North Anna towards the end of the Civil War. I had been warned that the bridge O’Sullivan stood on for his picture was gone, and halfway across the water, I realized that there was no way I could achieve his vantage point and re-create the shot.
My journey had begun a week earlier in Washington, DC. Armed with a sheaf of large-format prints of two dozen original photographs of the Civil War, my plan was to take my own photos from exactly the same spots. The camera position, height, lens angle, and perspective all needed to be as close as possible to the original, to give a sense of how these historic sites have transformed.
The war began around twenty years after the birth of practical photography, so the medium was in its infancy. Photojournalism or documentary photography had yet to be conceived, and the photographers who took their cameras to the battlefields were the first of their kind.
Matthew Brady, the godfather of early American photography, produced his defining work during the war. He had teams of people working for him on location (photographers such as O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner), each with their own wagons, traveling darkrooms, wet-plates, processing kit, and staff. All of the photographs were captured on glass plates, and had to be processed immediately using a mobile darkroom. Later they would be viewed using stereoscopes, so that they appeared in 3D.
Civil War photographers were keen to include people in their photographs wherever possible, even to the extent of dragging bodies of dead soldiers into the shot. Typical exposures lasted one or two seconds, so “set-ups” were commonplace in order to avoid motion-blur in the photographs. I knew that my photographs would also be more engaging if there were modern-day people occupying the same spaces as the soldiers, so I would set up my tripod and click away as the scene developed in front of me, waiting for an ideal composition.
Some of the shots were trickier to re-create than others. Photographing the McLean House (photo, above) at Appomattox, Virginia, where Robert E Lee finally surrendered his Confederate army on 9 April 1865, was a struggle. The house was bought in 1891 by a firm which dismantled its eighty thousand bricks, planning to rebuild it in Washington, DC as a tourist attraction. The company went bust and never realiszd its vision and, in 1948, the house was reconstructed from its architectural drawings. It’s now in exactly the same place as the original, within one or two feet.
Brady invested over a hundred thousand dollars of his own money to produce some ten thousand plates during the war. He hoped that the government would purchase the entire archive, and when they refused he went bankrupt; $25,000 for the entire collection from the Library of Congress didn’t clear his debts, and by the end of his life Brady was blind and penniless. He died alone in the charity ward of a hospital in New York City.
Today, each glass negative has been scanned and stored at the Library of Congress in high resolution. They present a picture of the Civil War in razor-sharp detail, a peek into the war-torn America of a hundred and fifty years ago.
Sudley Springs Federal cavalry face children on the side of the Confederates at Sudley Springs Ford in Virginia in March of 1862. The first major land battle of the civil war took place around these springs.
Federal encampment on the Pamunkey River at Cumberland Landing in Virginia in May of 1862. The army of the Potomac, the major Union army in the Eastern theatre of the war, launched its offensive against the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia in 1862 by moving its forces to Cumberland Landing.
Brompton Oak
Wounded soldiers in a hospital set up at the plantation at Brompton after the battle of Spotsylvania, near Fredericksburg, Virginia in May of 1864. More than fifty thousand men lost limbs during the Civil War.
Evergreen Cemetery
The gateway to the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July of 1863. It was built nine years before the battle at Gettysburg, which lasted three days and resulted in fifty thousand casualties.
Arlington House
Federal General Samuel P Heintzelman and staff at Arlington House, Virginia, circa 1862. Arlington was the home of Confederate General Robert E Lee for thirty years prior to the Civil War, when he left for Richmond. Arlington House is now a permanent memorial to Robert E. Lee.
US Capitol
The execution of Confederate Captain Henry Wirz in Washington, DC on 10 November 1865. Wirz was in charge of Andersonville military prison, where thirteen thousand Union soldiers died. The iron dome of the Capitol building was constructed during the Civil War, and is currently being restored.
Ford’s theatre
The President's box at Ford's theatre, photographed at the time of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April of 1865 by the actor John Wilkes Booth, just five days after General Robert E. Lee's surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. The theater remained closed for over a hundred years until it reopened in 1968 as a national historic site and working theater.
Cary Street, Richmond
Burnt district in Richmond, Virginia in April of 1865. With the impending fall of Richmond, the retreating Confederate soldiers were ordered to set fire to warehouses and the armory. The fires burnt out of control, destroying large parts of the city.
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter with a Confederate flag, Charleston, South Carolina in April of 1861. The Civil War started on 12 April 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter and, after a 34-hour exchange of fire, Union Major Robert Anderson and his soldiers surrendered to General Beauregard and his Confederate forces.
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