Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War ed. by J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher (review)

The Civil War was the first widely captured media event in American history. Photographers with portable darkrooms followed after the armies almost as soon as the first shells had exploded over Fort Sumter. The process of capturing an image was delicate, and any movement during the exposure blurred the photograph, so Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and many other pioneers of photojournalism usually recorded the aftermath of battle rather than the actual fighting. These thousands of images have long fascinated students of the Civil War. Ken Burns brilliantly utilized pictures of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians to fascinate viewers in his documentary The Civil War (1990). Academics also have pored through photographs to put a human face on the nation’s largest and bloodiest war. As J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher remind readers of this volume, “It is impossible to imagine the study of the Civil War—by students, enthusiasts, or professionals—without this extraordinary photographic evidence” (p. 2).

And yet many people who study the war rarely turn their full attention to the images they so often use. Photographs of the armies, the battlefields, and the landscapes have become props for the topic at hand. “[W]e seldom take the photograph as our subject,” Gallman and Gallagher write of historians, “and we almost never share personal reflections that stray beyond our normal academic writing” (p. 2). That rather startling observation is the premise for this fascinating volume. The editors asked many of their friends and colleagues to select a photograph taken during the Civil War and reflect on it: “Did they have a photograph that they have always loved? Did a particular image lure them into a deeper engagement with the Civil War? Is there a picture that they regularly turn to in the classroom?” (p. 2). The editors have organized the answers to those questions into sections on leaders, soldiers, civilians, victims, and places. The twenty-seven essays are reflections on the meaning and power of the photograph, rather than a detailed history of the war. “This is not a book to be read directly from beginning to end,” Gallman and Gallagher acknowledge. “We hope readers will flip from picture to picture and essay to essay as the mood strikes” (p. 2).

The mood might strike many readers often, because the volume offers powerful insights into history and historians. A few examples must suffice, but each of the essays might be discussed. Susan Eva O’Donovan considers an 1862 image of five African Americans crossing a river in a wagon beside a group of Union soldiers. A teenage boy, mounted on horseback, is on the right-hand side of the image, the wagon between him and the soldiers. He is glancing at the photographer, even though his horse faces the people who are the focal point of the picture. O’Donovan uses the sidelong look to discuss the shifting boundaries for former slaves. They lived “in societies in which power [was] stacked steeply against them” and yet looked to a “future of their own imagining” (pp. 144, 147).

James Marten explains the influence on his career of an image of a dead Confederate soldier outside Petersburg, Virginia. As a young boy, Marten flipped through a coffee-table book of Civil War photographs while waiting for his piano lessons. The image tempered his then youthful pastime of “drawing elaborate pictures of Civil War battles, the bloodier the better” (p. 156). Amid the grandeur of the Civil War centennial, the dead soldier reminded Marten that all wars have very real costs. Even today, the picture conveys “the truest of all truisms: that the war to which one had dedicated a professional life—and much of a preprofessional childhood—was littered with similar rumpled, bloody bodies. And that each of those...