Civil War Photography

by Haylee Cardinal

The Civil War was a time of many firsts for America. It started trends that have set the precedent for many practices we still follow during war today. Specifically, I will be discussing wartime photography. Wartime photography reshaped the Union public’s idea of death through propaganda, soldier identification, and war documentation, making death more public than it had ever been before.

During the Civil War, photographers followed the path of the war and took pictures of the aftermath of battles due to how long it took to take each photo, as cameras were not capable of capturing movement. The most used form of photography during the Civil War was stereography. “A stereograph is a combination of two photographs, usually placed side by side on cardstock, which creates a three-dimensional image when viewed with a stereoscope device.”¹ This relatively new technology allowed the public to view photos that better represented reality. “During the Civil War, photographers produced thousands of stereo views ranging from camp scenes to dead soldiers on the battlefield.”² Stereographs allowed for a new level of detail not attainable by normal photography at the time. “The stereographs of the dead fit within this category of the shocking and sensational, as viewers were able to see nameless bodies laid open for view.”³ Public viewers were forced to face the horrors of war in new and shockingly detailed ways that had never been introduced before. As Emily Godbey states in her work on Stereographs of the dead, people were “looking at images of the dead who were reduced by war’s horrors to nothing but spiritless bodies.”⁴ Although stereographs weren’t the only form used to photograph the war, there was no hiding from the horrors of the Civil War anymore, and how it would change everything we viewed about death and war.

Propaganda was a major part of the Civil War, and photography was used to shape the Union’s perception of the war. The photographs taken during the Civil War were horrific for public viewing, but they were used to force people to take sides and feel the hurt and loss of all the soldiers during the war. Newspapers were used to draw emotions from the public in hopes of recruiting soldiers and people to help the cause.

For example, a pro-union newspaper called Harper’s Weekly would feature images or illustrations of union soldiers who had been released from war camps. These photos would feature captions like “Rebel cruelty - our starved soldiers.”⁵ The photo depicted the horror that soldiers went through when caught by the Confederate army for the public to see. This can also be seen as propaganda because battlefield pictures were posed and done after the actual battle, due to how long it took to take the picture.

The sale of individual photos was another tool of propaganda. Individual photos were in high demand throughout the war and helped to divide the nation by bringing the idea of death into people’s hands. Photos like the ones in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War gave people a feel for the amount of death that was occurring on the battlefields in their own country. It was a unique situation as people were faced with a new reality of death and horror that they had never witnessed before. Pictures of soldiers lying dead, like the field where General Reynolds fell in Gettysburg, did not shy away from the horrors of death. The picture shows at least six bodies lying in what was the battlefield where they died.⁶ The public was forced to rethink all of their past beliefs about death and had to confront the pictures staring them in the eye. Photography played a large role in propaganda that was used during the Civil War, and how it affected public perceptions.

Photography was also used in large, as a new form of documentation during the Civil War. The Civil War was the first photographed war in history and allowed for extensive documentation that allowed the public more access to the horrors of war they had never witnessed before. There was a lack of official information and organization. More and more men were dying, but no one was able to identify soldiers and notify their families. Soldiers wanting to be able to be identified started to carry around photographs of family or friends that could help identify them if they were to die on the battlefield. Drew Faust wrote, “Soldiers endeavored to provide themselves with surrogates … Descriptions of battle’s aftermath often remark on the photographs found alongside soldiers’ corpses.”⁷ Photographs would be posted in newspapers featuring the soldiers and the picture they were found with to help their families identify them. An account from the war states that, “in the inside breast pocket of the blouse there would be a letter from friends, a photograph … with the name and regiment and home address.”⁸ The use of photographs as a way to identify soldiers allowed families to be able to find their loved ones in the middle of the bloodiest war.

Photography also played a large role in soldier identification during and after the war, as photos of family members were used to help identify the large number of unknown dead that the United States faced. Photos of wounded or dead soldiers were also posted directly into newspapers in hopes of identifying their families for burials. Most were either photographs or sketches that would be titled as “An Unknown Soldier” and were posted in newspapers like Harper’s Weekly to reach the most people as quickly as possible.⁹ These photos showed the public the significant amount of unknown dead across the country, and forced people to confront the War and how the death toll was continuously rising.

Photography is still being used to identify Civil War soldiers to this day. Kurt Luther, an assistant professor from Virginia Tech, created a facial recognition software that allows users to upload pictures and compare them to portraits of over 15,000 Civil War soldiers.¹⁰ People are able to upload more pictures of named Civil War soldiers to allow for more growth and identification. “Through the software platform, called Photo Sleuth, Luther seeks to uncover the mysteries of the nearly 4 million photographs of Civil War-era images that may exist in the historical record.”¹¹ The use of photography during the Civil War opened the door for new ways to identify fallen soldiers and allowed the public to be included in the process of identification that had never been accomplished before.

Photography reframed the public’s idea and knowledge of death through a new level of documentation that had never been done before. Taking photos was something accomplished off the battlefield due to the amount of time it took to capture each photo. As a result, a lot of the photos we have from the Civil War are not just of the battles but of the people and places where the Civil War took place. This gave the public a more thorough idea of the war and its effects on the country as a whole. The best example of photography used for documentation of the Civil War is Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Alexander Gardner collected what he considered to be the most impactful and important pictures of the Civil War and compiled them into a single book. The introduction to the book states, “During the four years of the war, almost every point of importance has been photographed, and the collection from which these views have been selected amounts to nearly three thousand.”¹² Pictures like “Quaker Guns, Centerville” allowed for everyone to see how the war changed to landscape and explain how lives were impacted by the war in that area.¹³ These pictures showed the destruction many fields faced as they became battlefields or places caught in the crossfire of the battles. It shows how many lives were directly impacted by the Civil War. Books like Gardner’s allowed the public an inside look into the war that forever changed how they viewed war and the death that surrounds it.

Photography is often overlooked when people discuss the Civil War and the aftermath; however, the effects it had on the public and their perceptions of death can not be dismissed. Drew Faust said, “We still live in the world of death the Civil War created,” and I could not sum up everything more perfectly myself. The Civil War set a new precedent for how death is handled during wars, and photography plays a large role in that. Photography brought the public into the war through propaganda, soldier identification, and war documentation that openly displayed the ugliest parts of the war. People were forced to confront death in new and uncomfortable ways that shaped and continue to shape how we perceive death today.

Alex Japha, “Civil War in 3D: Stereographs from the New-York ...,” The New York Historical, August 12, 2015, https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/civil-war-in-3d-stereographs-from-the-new-york-historical-society. ↩
“Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints - Stereographs,” Library of Congress, January 1, 1861, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/cwp/stereographs.html. ↩
Emily Godbey (2012) ‘Terrible Fascination’: Civil War Stereographs of the Dead, History of Photography, 36:3, 265-274, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.672225 ↩
Emily Godbey (2012) ‘Terrible Fascination’: Civil War Stereographs of the Dead, History of Photography, 36:3, 265-274, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.672225 ↩
Smithsonian Museum. 2012. “How Newspapers Reported the Civil War.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-newspapers-reported-the-civil-war-17280757/. ↩
Gardner, Alexander, and Alfred R Waud. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Virginia United States, 1866. [Washington: Philp & Solomons] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/01021785/. ↩
Faust, Drew G. 2008. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (National Book Award Finalist). New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Vintage eBooks. ↩
Moss, Annals, pp. 512, 487–88, 563, 475. See U.S. Christian Commission, Record of Letters Written for Soldiers, Army of the Potomac, 1865, RG 94 E 746, and U.S. Christian Commission, Abstracts of Letters Written for Sick and Wounded Soldiers, Army of the Potomac, 1864–65, RG 94 E745, NARA. ↩
“An Unknown Soldier.” Copied from a deathbed photograph and published in an effort to locate his survivors. Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868. ↩
Loeffler, Amy. 2019. “Researchers releases facial recognition software to identify Civil War soldiers.” Virginia Tech News. https://news.vt.edu/articles/2019/03/computer-science-civil-war-photo-sleuth.html. ↩
Loeffler, Amy. 2019. “Researcher releases facial recognition software to identify Civil War soldiers.” Virginia Tech News. https://news.vt.edu/articles/2019/03/computer-science-civil-war-photo-sleuth.html. ↩
Gardner, Alexander, and Alfred R Waud. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Virginia United States, 1866. [Washington: Philp & Solomons] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/01021785/. ↩
Gardner, Alexander, and Alfred R Waud. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. United States Virginia, 1866. [Washington: Philp & Solomons] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/01021785/. ↩

Page last updated 11:47 AM, June 29, 2026