After the Civil War Battle of Antietam (1862), Mathew Brady tacked a sign to the door of his New York City photo studio that read “The Dead of Antietam.” Inside, he exhibited the work his assistant, Alexander Gardner, made in the aftermath of the inconceivably bloody fighting at Antietam Creek.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, after seeing the exhibit, noted in The Atlantic Monthly: “It is not [for viewers] to bear witness to the fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their dread reality… The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries.”

BRADY’S PHOTOGRAPHS.; Pictures of the Dead at Antietam.
Published: 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 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 full upon some heart, straining it to breaking. There is nothing very terrible to us, however, in in the list, though our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead.

We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. The crape on the bell-pull tells there is death in the house, and in the close carriage that rolls away with muffled wheels you know there rides a woman to whom the world is very dark now. But you only see the mourners in the last of the long line of carriages — they ride very jollily and at their case, smoking cigars in a furtive and discursive manner, perhaps, and, were it not for the black gloves they wear, which the deceased was wise and liberal enough to furnish, it might be a wedding for all the world would know. It attracts your attention, but does not enlist your sympathy. But it is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold — you know whether it is a wedding or a funeral then, without looking at the color of gloves worn. Those who lose friends in battle know what battle-fields are, and our Marylanders, with their door-yards strewed with the dead and dying, and their houses turned into hospitals for the wounded, know what battle-fields are.

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 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 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 [???] the grass of around them in [???] 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 [???] set as when they met in the last fierce change which located their souls and sent them grappling with each other and battling to the very grass of Heaven. The ground whereon they lie is [???] by shot and shell, the grass is trampled down by the [???] of her, [???] feet, and little revulets that and scarcely be of [???] trickling along the earth like tears over a mother space. It is a block, barren plain and alone it bends an ashen [???] there is no friendly [???] or shelter from the noonday sun or the midnight [???] coldly and unpifyingly the stars will look down them and darkness will come with night to shut them in. But there is a poetry in the scene that no green holds or smiling landscapes can possese. Here lie men who have not hesitated to seal and lamp their convictions with their blood, — men who have lung themselves into the great gulf of the until own to teach world that there are truths [???] than life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than death. And if there be on earth one spot where the grass will grow greener than on another when the hunt, Summer comes, where the leaves of Antumn will shop more lightly which they fall like a benediction upon a work completed and promise fulfilled, it is these soldiers’ graves.

These is one side of the picture that the sun did not catch, one phase that has escaped photographic skill it is the background of widows and orphans, torn [???] the bosom of their natural protectors by the red [???] unless hand of Battle, and thrown upon the brotherhood of God. Homes have been made desolate, and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been [???] forever. All of this desolation imagination must paint — broken hearts cannot be photographed.

These pictures have a terrible distinctness. By the aid of the magnifying glass, the very ceatures 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 hear, that goes far to outweigh all the others that hover over the battle-field. How can a mother bear to know that the boy whose slumbers she has cradled, and whose head her boson pillowed until the roiling [???] called him forth — whose poor, pale face, could she reach it, should find the same pillow again — whose corpse should be strown with the rarest flowers that Spring brings or Summer leaves — when, but for the privilege of touching that corpse, of kissing one more the lips though white and cold, of smoothing back the hair from the brow and cleansing it of blood, [???], he would give all the [???] of the [???] have can this [???] bear to know that [???] trench, lastly due, made hands have [???] him. She would have hundred the [???] the [???] track, and after warming him by a spur, paid half forfeit, to the great disappointment and disgust of the crowd. He said that the horse had hutt his leg; but Prince — like other elderly animals — has his constitutional ailments and has been recently under the hands of Dr. DIXON, the veterinary surgeon; therefore Mr. MCMANN cannot be excused for causing so much expense and loss of time to the public, when he could have as well given notice in the morning papers that the match was off. An offer was made by Mr. SHAW, the proprietor of the track, to get up a trot, but the sporting men preferred to receive back their dollars, and left. Only two twenty-mile trots have ever been accomplished within the hour; the first, we believe, took place on the Union Course, in the Fall of 1848, and was performed by Trustee, son of thoroughbred Trustee — dam Fanny Pullen — in 59 minutes 35 1/2 seconds. The same feat was also done in 59 minutes 55 seconds, by Lady Fulton, in 1853, on the Centreville course.