President Lincoln and General George McClellan, 1862. Alexander Gardner, Library of Congress.
Introduction
Pictures portray a sense of reality along with vivid details that connect personally with the public. Many people gain more tactile details from photos, in comparison to relying on forms of written accounts and their imagination. The Civil War is one of the first major events to have been recorded using this contemporary technology. Photography had just begun to sweep across the nation and rapidly popularize among the public. The Civil War was the first American war to be captured by the beginnings of photojournalism and the first to tell raw emotion through detailed images. Expert photographers such as Alexander Gardner and the studio of Mathew Brady took over 10,000 different photos of the Civil War. Each one detailed a story with genuine emotion behind it that can only be seen in the small details throughout the image. Publishing these photos throughout the entirety of the Civil War, produced images that detailed the real hardship of war as well as a sense of the condition of the battlefields and armies. Seeing these images brought the war to life in a realistic way that written accounts could not. This website will allow you to view select photos from the 10,000 that were taken and emmerse yourself in the culture of the Civil War. Glance at the pictures of soldiers in their camps, generals planning out their tactile movements, the harrowing, bloodfilled fields where thousands lie dead. Take a glimpse at what the Civil War was like through the eyes of the soldiers.
"(Photographs) possess a value far beyond that of any written description: for they offer to the eye the dreadful actualities that the pen of the most skillful writer could only produce with a remote degree of accuracy.”
- The New York Herald, Oct. 5, 1862.
About the Author
Kaileigh McNellis is a student at Dickinson College in Professor Pinsker's History 288 Civil War and Reconstruction class during the spring of 2020. She plans on majoring in History with a focus on a Pre-Law track. This site was created to inform others about her final research project on photography during the Civil War. It is intended for anyone who has an interest in the Civil War or history and is looking for a creative form of education.