On Sep­tem­ber 17, we mark the 150^th anniver­sary of the Bat­tle of Anti­etam (1862), fought in Mary­land near Sharps­burg and Anti­etam Creek between the armies of the Union Major Gen­eral George B. McClel­lan and Con­fed­er­ate Gen­eral Robert E. Lee. With over 23,000 casu­al­ties, the Bat­tle of Anti­etam is still con­sid­ered the blood­i­est single-day bat­tle in Amer­i­can his­tory. It was also the first Amer­i­can battle­field pho­tographed before those casu­al­ties were buried.

Found in the papers of George B. McClel­lan, Jr. (Class of 1886), a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor and one-time mayor of New York City, are some papers of his father, Gen­eral George B. McClel­lan (1826–1885). Pho­tographs com­prise the bulk of these papers, includ­ing sev­eral dozen pho­tos of the Bat­tle of Anti­etam, many of which depict dead sol­diers on the field or the makeshift tents and straw huts hous­ing the wounded. Anti­etam was the only bat­tle that McClel­lan fought from begin­ning to end, and it pro­duced mixed results for him. Despite being a tac­ti­cal draw—neither force was able to dec­i­mate the other, though Gen­eral Lee retreated back into Virginia—Antietam was con­sid­ered a turn­ing point of the war for the North, end­ing Lee’s first attempt to enter Union ter­ri­tory and giv­ing Pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lin­coln the con­fi­dence to announce a pre­lim­i­nary Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion on Sep­tem­ber 22, 1862. Nev­er­the­less, dis­ap­pointed with McClellan’s fail­ure to destroy Lee’s army, Lin­coln removed him from com­mand on Novem­ber 5, 1862.

The pho­tographs in McClellan’s papers were taken by Alexan­der Gard­ner, staff pho­tog­ra­pher to McClel­lan and, later, to other Union gen­er­als. As pho­tog­ra­phy became more widely avail­able in the 1830s and 1840s, war pho­tog­ra­phy was encour­aged in hopes that it would pro­vide a record of his­tor­i­cal events, begin­ning with daguerreo­types doc­u­ment­ing the Mexican-American War in 1847. At the time of the Bat­tle of Anti­etam, Gard­ner was work­ing for pho­tog­ra­pher Mathew Brady, whose stu­dio mark­ings are on the back of the pho­tographs; he would leave Brady’s stu­dio shortly there­after. Gardner’s pho­tographs of Anti­etam and the Civil War, which were dis­played in Brady’s New York gallery, sold as prints, and pub­lished as wood­cut engrav­ings in news­pa­pers through­out the coun­try, shocked their view­ers, many of whom saw these dev­as­tat­ing scenes of war for the first time.

Selec­tions from these pho­tographs will be on dis­play in an upcom­ing exhi­bi­tion of Amer­i­can his­tory in Firestone’s Main Gallery in Spring 2013. McClellan’s papers are among more than a hun­dred col­lec­tions in the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion that relate in whole or part to the Civil War. Other col­lec­tions include the Civil War Let­ters of Adam Badeau, John S. Cop­ley Civil War Let­ters, Roswell Lam­son Papers, and Amer­i­can Civil War Col­lec­tion. Bound man­u­scripts relat­ing to the Civil War, includ­ing diaries, let­ter books, order books, and drafts of mem­oirs and his­to­ries of the war, can also be found in Gen­eral Man­u­scripts col­lec­tions C0199 and C0938, acces­si­ble through the Main Cat­a­log. These are com­ple­mented by hold­ings of other divi­sions and col­lec­tions of the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, as well as the Scheide Library.

Click on each image to see larger photo. Not to be repro­duced with­out per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library: