Open Thread Thursday: What is the Most Misinterpreted or Misunderstood Civil War Photograph?

(Source: Library of Congress)

I can spend hours getting lost in the thousands of photographs taken during the Civil War. The Library of Congress is a wonderful resource for these photographs. You can download high resolution copies to your desktop that reveal all kinds of details. There is a small subset of popular images that you will find in books, magazines, and websites, but spend enough time on the LOC site and you are bound to find something new.

Beginning with William Frassanito, a number of students of the war have attempted to match up Civil War photographs with the modern landscape. You can find a number of “Then and Now” comparisons at Garry Adelman’s Civil War Page on Facebook

Ken Burns made good use of these photographs in his Civil War docmentary for PBS. The photos, however, were often used to narrate events for which there was no visual image. This presents a number of interpretive challenges.

We now know that some of the most iconic scenes photoraphed were manipulated such as the Confederate sharpshooter in Gettysburg’s Devil’s Den.

Others are simply misunderstood as a result of misinformation or insufficient context such as the photograph of Andrew and Silas Chandler.

(Source: Encyclopedia Virginia)

Consider the famous photographs of Confederates taken in Frederick, Maryland in Septembrer 1862. Like many of you I had long believed that this photograph transported us back to the Maryland Campaign, just a few days before the battle of Antietam. These Confederate soldiers survived the brutal fighting around Richmond in the Seven Days’ Campaign, Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas before entering Maryland for a showdown with the Union army that might bring an end to the war and independence. 

It’s a stunning photograph. I love the fact that two of the soldiers are looking directly at the cameraman.

Looking at this photograph we know what awaited these men. At least we thought we knew.

Back in 2018, Paul Bolcik and Erik Davis discovered that the photograph was, in fact, taken in July 1864 as part of an invading force under the command of Confederate general Jubal Early. Rather than marching west out of Frederick in 1862 toward South Mountain, these soldiers were headed east to threaten Washington, D.C.

So many of our photographs of Confederates from the Eastern Theater in 1864 are set in the earthworks around Petersburg, Virginia. We don’t have many visual reminders of a defiant and threatening Army of Northern Virginia. But these men appear to be well armed and clothed. No one appears to be marching without shoes and if you look closely these men appear to be marching with confidence.

This is not the army that Lost Cause writers portrayed in the post-Gettysburg phase of the war.

It would be easy to exaggerate the threat that Jubal Early’s invading force posed to the defenses of the nation’s capital in 1864. We know that it would ultimately prove unsuccessful, but our understanding of this photograph is a reminder that the war was far from over. Lincoln himself doubted that he would be re-elected. The trajectory of a war that now included emancipation on the table could still be lost.

It still takes me a few seconds to register that this is a photograph from 1864 rather than 1862.

For this Open Thread Thursday I want to hear what you think is the most misunderstood or misinterpreted Civil War photograph.