October passed and with each nightfall, a full day closer to winter. In a New York City gallery, Matthew Brady displayed an exhibition of photographs entitled: “The Dead of Antietam.”
The photos were the most graphic depictions of war ever shown, the way war was remembered by those who had been there; a war beyond comprehension.
Some viewers commented that the photographs seemed to breathe by themselves despite their representation of the breathless. Collapsed noses, mutilated limbs, and the gaping mouths of what must have once been men, made the public gasp. For the first time in American history, Brady had displayed haunting documentary photographs of war. They were, arguably, worse than the imagination could conjure. A viewer could try to turn away, but would never be able to forget the black and white images that hung starkly alone on the gallery walls screaming out in ranges far beyond human hearing. The exhibition spoke clearly: the war was chewing up the youth of the North as well as the South, chewing unmercifully, and then disgorging those future laborers and lovers, regardless of sentiment, like so much fill on the side of a road. Well-worn men, with orifices like leather who had slept in bogs for months along with all that crawled and bit, were now in the autumn light, stiff and twisted like spent corn stalks plowed into the earth. The fields and earth were fertilized by their blood and their bones, its soil irreverent of their loves and passions, their beloveds, their motivations and their personal epiphanies.
The war had come clearly into focus in the Brady exhibition, captured by an apparatus that for the first time depicted the terror of war itself: the camera. Brady’s exhibition exposed yet another truth. The North’s window of opportunity had closed during the Spring of 1862 when it was reported that McClellan chose to have his troops sleep in the hills around the Southern capital for three months while contemplating his troop numbers. That October, with Autumn finding its fingers into the woods and fields of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and over the mountains to Tennessee and beyond, the black and white images of Brady’s battalions echoed the coming crack and curl of winter and the pangs of hungry Rebels and cold, isolated Federals.