Richmond, Va. -- A newly placed howitzer at Seven Pines points toward Richmond and Confederate lines a mile away. Two Union soldiers rest, one stretched out on the ground beside the big gun, the other curled up on an ammunition box. Shovels and pickaxes in the dirt are ready for work to resume. In the background, a brigade marches in line of battle.
If you lived in New York City in the summer of 1862, this is what your Civil War looked like.
Photography had come of age just in time to move up the Peninsula to Richmond with Gen. George McClellan from May to July that year, helping to make the American Civil War the first fully visually documented war in history.
Mathew Brady was the name behind the images, even if James F. Gibson and George Barnard were the men behind the camera at Seven Pines, where that scene was documented near the end of June 150 years ago.
By the end of July, photos by Gibson and Barnard would be among those on display in Brady's gallery at Broadway and 10th Street. A reviewer for the New York Evening Post on July 22, 1862, exulted, "The wonderful series of pictures … are certainly foremost among the triumphs of photographic art. His artists have followed our army from Bull Run to Richmond."
On the outskirts of Richmond, photographers also documented the massing of wagons and cannons pulled by horses at Seven Pines (also known as Fair Oaks) in the weeks after the May 31-June 1 battle.
They showed a balloon ascent by Thaddeus Lowe to spy on Confederate earthworks that still line part of the approach road to Richmond International Airport.
They arranged officers for group portraits that looked as menacing as a picnic snapshot.
They photographed George Custer, fresh from West Point, with former classmate John Washington, then a Confederate who had been captured on the first day of fighting at Seven Pines.
Union troops would remain at Seven Pines until the Seven Days battles at the end of June, giving photographers ample time to practice their art and giving Mike Gorman ample material for a program on photography in the Civil War, hosted Sunday at the Henrico Theater.
Gorman, a ranger at Richmond National Battlefield Park, will be showing the photographs of the Peninsula campaign on a movie screen, making them larger than life. He'll be able to point out some of the remarkable details that have been discovered in the past decade, since the Library of Congress and National Archives scanned the negatives of Civil War photographs in their collections and put high-resolution copies online.
The glass-plate negatives were as large as 7 by 9 inches, producing far more detail than more-familiar 35 mm (1.4 inch) film. The smallest negatives, still about twice as large as 35 mm, were used to produce stereoscopic view cards for 3-D stereo viewers.
One discovery located the devil in the details of an iconic Brady image of Robert E. Lee at his home in Richmond soon after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Graffiti on a brick next to the back door became visible when the photo was greatly enlarged.
Gorman shared that detail in 2006 with Bob Zeller of Trinity, N.C., author of "The Blue and Gray in Black and White" and president of the Center for Civil War Photography. The same year, Gorman had led a Richmond tour for Zeller's photography conference and held up the enlargement while at the site. A man in the back suddenly recognized the word, "devil."
"Sure enough, it said 'devil,' " Gorman said. "You've got this secret hidden in the back of this image that we've all seen a zillion times."
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For Sunday's show, Gorman will focus on images from 1862, when the war still seemed imminently winnable.
"They're kind of learning their way," he said of the photographers. "One of the things that struck me is how tentative, how hesitant they are. They have to figure out what is going to sell, what do I want to document. Is it going to be lots of groups of officers or battlefield shots?
"They don't seem to know what to do to make a strong image. They're posing people. They're putting in slaves or former slaves into the picture, clearly to make a political point. No doubt, a lot of the photographers were abolitionists."
For a photo of Custer and his Confederate classmate, for instance, a second image by Gibson showed a black boy sitting in front of them. That image was later engraved in Harper's Weekly with the title "Both Sides and the Cause."
People in New York would have talked about slavery almost as an abstract concept, and these photos made it real, Gorman said.
Within a few weeks at Cumberland in New Kent County, Gibson photographed 23 solemn black people in front of a clapboard building, calling them a group of contrabands.
"This has definitely got a political point," Gorman said of the contrabands photo, because of the humanity and dignity it portrayed in the former slaves liberated by the Union Army. "Look at the faces." Photographers were telling their viewers, " 'The only reason they're free is we're here.' Wow."
For Megan Nelson, a Harvard lecturer who will talk about Civil War photography at Gettysburg this month, one of the reasons the photographs were important was the access they gave civilians to the battles and the experiences soldiers were having in camp.
The American Civil War was the first fully visually documented war in history, after the Crimean War became the first to be photographed, she said.
"(Oliver Wendell) Holmes argued that looking at photographs was an out-of-body experience, that you could actually feel yourself transported to battlefields like Seven Pines by looking at incredibly detailed photographic images of the landscape," she said.
"And the governments on both sides used photographs as propaganda tools and in the case of the Union Army's commissioned photographs of railroad bridges, evidence of army infrastructure that demanded funding."
In comparison with later Civil War photos, the Peninsula campaign images had a certain innocence.
"Not many of the photographers have encountered war yet," Gorman said. "They don't shoot Williamsburg (where Union soldiers caught up with retreating Confederates on May 5). They don't show the graves. Look at these photos (of officers at Yorktown). It's clean. They're sitting at tables. It's civilized. You've got servants back there, a coffee pot. Here's a nobleman from France, Prince de Joinville. They're playing dominos. Does this look like war to you? This is like a vacation. It's camp."
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But it wouldn't stay that way. Even at Seven Pines, some action began to creep into the scene. When Barnard put his camera on Union earthworks at the twin houses on Williamsburg Road to show a howitzer pointed at Confederate earthworks a mile away, he was putting himself at risk. The cannon had just arrived June 20, Gorman said.
"For all the cameraman knows, there's an attack massing over there in those woods. It could be Seven Pines Part 2. On June 25, shortly after this photograph was probably made, these troops are going to advance from there toward the lines at the airport and attack them, scaring the bejesus out of the Confederates who are about to shift their troops from there up north to the Chickahominy, so much so that it caused (Confederate President Jefferson) Davis to question whether this is a good idea right now.
"This was the tip of the spear."
During the Peninsula campaign, photographers thought they were documenting "the triumphal final movement of this great volunteer army into Richmond, which didn't happen," Gorman said. Afterward, the war got brutal. The bloodiest single day would come at Antietam on Sept. 17, and from that point on, battlefield images often included views of the dead to show the consequences of war.
"A few months later they're saying, 'Since we're going to be fighting for a while, let's talk about what this is,' " Gorman said. " 'I've seen this. I've been out here and I haven't shown you, and I think you need to see it.' "
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