The eloquence of the mute witnesses

by DRM

Plate 36
A Har­vest of Death. Get­tys­burg, Penn­syl­va­nia.
July 1863
Pho­tographed by Tim­o­thy H. O’Sullivan

Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg—as all reluc­tant to expose their ghastly hor­rors to the light—came the sun­less morn, after the retreat by Lee’s bro­ken army. Through the shad­owy vapors, it was, indeed, a “har­vest of death” that was pre­sented; hun­dreds and hun­dreds of torn Union and rebel soldiers—although many of the for­mer were already interred—strewed the now quiet fight­ing ground, soaked by the rain, which for two days had drenched the coun­try with its fit­ful showers.

A bat­tle has been often the sub­ject of elab­o­rate descrip­tion; but it can be described in one sim­ple word, dev­il­ish! and the dis­torted dead recall the ancient leg­ends of men torn in pieces by the sav­age wan­ton­ness of fiends. Swept down with­out prepa­ra­tion, the shat­tered bod­ies fall in all con­ceiv­able posi­tions. The rebels rep­re­sented in the pho­to­graph are with­out shoes. These were always removed from the feet of the dead on account of the press­ing need of the sur­vivors. The pock­ets turned inside out also show that appro­pri­a­tion did not cease with the cov­er­ings of the feet. Around is scat­tered the lit­ter of the battle-field, accou­trements, ammu­ni­tion, rags, cups and can­teens, crack­ers, haver­sacks, &c., and let­ters that may tell the name of the owner, although the major­ity will surely be buried unknown by strangers, and in a strange land. Killed in the fran­tic efforts to break the steady lines of an army or patri­ots, whose hero­ism only excelled theirs in motive, they paid with life the price of their trea­son, and when the wicked strife was fin­ished, found name­less graves, far from home and kindred.

Such a pic­ture con­veys a use­ful moral: It shows the blank hor­ror and real­ity of war, in oppo­si­tion to its pageantry. Here are the dread­ful details! Let them aid in pre­vent­ing such another calamity falling upon the nation.

The photo and accom­pa­ny­ing cap­tion are from Gardner’s Pho­to­graphic Sketch Book of the War, a com­pi­la­tion of pho­tographs that was pub­lished after the­Civil War.

The tableau below shows a group of men out­side the pho­tog­ra­phers tent at Camp Win­field Scott in 1862.

These were the mute wit­nesses to an igno­ble carnage.