the sharpshooter
Posted to the Project on 26 Dec 05
The Civil War was the first American war where the aftermath of battles was photographed. For Christmas, I got a book on “Early Photography at Gettysburg.” It was written by William Frassanito, an expert on Civil War photography. The book is really fascinating. I started flipping through it last night at 9:30 and before I looked up and knew it, it was after 11:00.
Its good to sometimes stop and reflect upon the photographs from the Civil War. I’m guilty, I know, of sometimes getting too caught up in study of the tactics. To look at the photographs of the dead, however, is to know the true, terrible human cost of the Civil War.
The photograph from Gettysburg that’s always struck me is <a href=”http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cwpb/04300/04337v.jpg”>this one</a>. There’s a lot of photos from Gettysburg of the dead. Most are truly horrible to look at. They depict bodies killed four or five days before that had been left exposed to the elements of summer in south-central Pennsylvania. The bodies are bloated, grotesque. Most show the soldiers laid out in long rows awaiting quick burial. Almost all but a couple pictures show the Confederate dead. The soldiers seen will be buried as quickly as possible by their enemies; not only have they given their lives for their country, they also have given up their identities.
Anyway, you’ve probably seen the sharpshooter photograph somewhere. Its a very famous photograph. Maybe it was even in your history book in school. I think this photo is so powerful because it is so different than most of the other death studies. While the scenes showing long lines of men awaiting burial are powerful, there also is a certain anonymity to the pictures — the features of the individual soldiers are bloated beyond recognigiton. But the sharpshooter is different. His face is a bit swollen, but he looks as if he has just recently fallen. He is obviously young — perhaps barely old enough to shave. Frassanito discovered that the photographer, Alexander Gardner, actually moved this soldier about 70 yards and placed him in this position as a sharpshooter.
I’ve often wondered about this sharpshooter. Who was he? What state was he from (I imagine from where he was killed that he was either a Georgian or a Texan)? Did he die right away? I wonder about this because for the book, Frassanito actually interviewed a coronor to establish exactly when Gardner took his death study photos. Gardner himself dated his pictures as July 6 and 7. The coronor surmised the pictures were taken about five days after death due to the decomposition of the bodies. That is in line with when Gardner was on the battlefield; these men were killed in fighting that occurred on the night of July 2, 1863. But the book mentions that the coronor thought the sharpshooter picture was taken probably only two days after death. Indeed, if you compare him to the photos taken at say, Sharpsburg, only two days or so after the battle, the sharpshooter looks more like those bodies. So I wonder if he suffered horribly for days on the battlefield before meeting his end. Perhaps caught between the lines, no one could help him.
To quote Shakespeare, “There are few die well that die in battle.”
The poor Sharpshooter. Almost certainly he was buried without a name attached to him. What was his name? Did anyone see him fall and tell his parents or family of his fate? Did he have a wife? Did he have brothers or sisters? Why did he choose to fight? I wonder if somewhere in the South, his family was able to identify him through the picture.