Gardner’s exact whereabouts in the days leading up to the battle are murky, but it is clear that Gardner arrived on the battlefield late on the afternoon of July 5, possibly after he had stopped in Emmitsburg, Md., on July 4 to check on the welfare of his son attending a boarding school there. Soon, Gardner and a few of his photographers were following the Army of the Potomac in June as it chased the Army of Northern Virginia’s movement toward the Potomac River. It is one of the Civil War’s most iconic, poignant photographs. He also took with him photographers O’Sullivan, James Gibson, William Pywell, David Knox, John Reekie, and W. That prompted Gardner to leave Brady, and in the spring of 1863, he opened his own gallery in Washington with his brother James. Those images of battlefield dead shocked the nation, but Brady got the fame, not Gardner. In September 1862, Brady assigned Gardner to take images of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam. When the war began, Gardner had been managing Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C., gallery. And now, the story of the image continues, with the great possibility that the soldier in the image has been identified.īefore that hypothesis is explained, a bit of background on Gardner and the battle situation at Devil’s Den will be helpful. In his study of the “sharpshooter” photographs, Frassanito identified the body in its first location and estimated the body was moved 40 yards (later revised to 72 yards) to the stone barricade. In 1975, photographic historian William Frassanito published his groundbreaking book on Gettysburg photographs titled Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. The fact that the corpse was photographed in two separate locations went unnoticed for nearly a century until Frederick Ray, an illustrator for Civil War Times, wrote the short article, “The Case of the Rearranged Corpse” in the October 1961 issue of this magazine. ![]() Gardner and Sullivan took two plates of the Confederate at the wall, one of which was a stereoview. Gardner and his assistant, Timothy O’Sullivan, actually staged that dramatic scene by moving the dead soldier, who was not a sharpshooter but a common foot soldier, from another location in Devil’s Den to the barricade to create a dramatic tableaux, complete with carefully dressed accessories that included the musket, accoutrements, and uniform items. ![]() ![]() But first a bit of history on the image with one of the most intriguing Civil War photography backstories. Photographer Alexander Gardner took the arresting image on July 6, 1863, and when he published it for public consumption, he titled it “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter” to convey that the soldier was a marksman who had been picking off Union soldiers on Little Round Top, seen in the distance, before a shell fragment fired by a Union cannon snuffed out his life.Īn overarching question about the image had long intrigued me: Just who was the unfortunate Confederate casualty? The desire to answer that set me on a research quest to find a name, and I am confident I have been successful. A cap is next to his head, where it landed after the soldier fell dead. ![]() A musket leans against the wall in the background, and an open cartridge box lies at his side. But relics of war intrude on the scene so there is no mistaking he is a casualty of ferocious combat. His head rests on a knapsack, and his rumpled uniform coat makes it almost appear as if he is asleep under a blanket. Behind the Barricade: The Devil’s Den ‘sharpshooter’ identity revealed CloseĪ Confederate soldier, his youthful face turned toward the viewer, lies behind a stone wall built between two boulders in Gettysburg’s notorious Devil’s Den.
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