MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This research examines two photographs from Alexander Gardner’s Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, “A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep” and “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” and the ways in which they portray battlefield death at Gettysburg. From the position of intermediary between the noncombatant home front and the battlefield, Gardner delivers visual representations of sudden deaths on the battlefield that negate the principles, ethics, and decorum of the Victorian Good Death, which consisted of a death within the home with mourners and proper burial to ensure delivery of the soul of the deceased to rest. Through his images and accompanying text, however, Gardner delivers to the noncombatants at home depictions of the sudden death on the battlefield that usurp the principles of the Good Death: bodies are left as they fall, unidentified, often unburied and exposed to the elements or buried in mass graves, and express depictions of agony and suffering. By negating the romanticized and ideal images and protocol of the Good Death, these images suggest Gardner’s preoccupation with the ethics and implications surrounding death on the battlefield, a preoccupation that monopolizes his photography of Antietam and Gettysburg and speaks to the collective trauma of a nation haunted by the tragedy of unfulfilled Good Deaths during battle. By examining the complexity of the Good Death versus sudden death during battle through Gardner’s work, we can gain a greater cultural understanding of the scope of the national trauma that resulted from the Civil War.